CLOSE AS INJURY

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Doctor of Philosophy, Julie Reshet, says that there is no person who would be completely self-sufficient, would not need support, would not be traumatized by the people closest to him and would not be in a dominant relationship. Why is a self-sufficient, independent and untrained person a stupid myth?

The mother of a boy with serious genetic disabilities shared her story. After learning that her son would not be able to speak and would never become independent, she began to lead an isolated lifestyle, avoiding other parents and not allowing her son to communicate with peers. It was unbearable for her to listen to the stories of parents about the success of their children and to see her child next to "normal" children, one of which he will never become. In addition, it seemed to her that her son would not be able to socialize and would always be an outcast. After coping with the shock of seclusion, she decided to try to lead a more social lifestyle. Now she is happy with this decision, because her son has made friends. Without holding back tears, she says that his best friend - a boy without genetic abnormalities - invites her son to pull his hair and pretends that he likes it, because his best friend is amused by it. One day she saw a friend of her son's, thinking that he was alone with him, took a napkin and wiped the saliva from his face, remembering that his mother usually does this.

I am sure that an example of such a friendship is intuitively associated with the epithet "real". It's strange that when it comes to a relationship between two people without genetic abnormalities, this intuition does not work. Positive psychology, as the ideal of relationships, promotes communication between self-sufficient individuals, which does not cause them discomfort. The only problem is that the self-sufficient person is a myth. Even in the absence of genetic abnormalities, any person is a collection of all sorts of other types of abnormalities. For example, does a boy have obvious oddities when he has chosen someone as his best friend to wipe saliva off his face? Since a self-sufficient person is an invention, there is no such relationship, the participants of which would be completely self-sufficient.

Recently, more and more tests have been found on the network offering to check whether the respondent is in a dominant relationship. The most advanced of the tests, following current emancipatory tendencies, recommend leaving the relationship if the text is in the affirmative. The catch here is that many of the questions from these tests can also be considered a test of whether you are in a relationship at all. Moreover, not only close relationships, but even any fruitful dialogue can be considered a dominant relationship, because each of its participants substantiates their position, thus trying to "impose" it on the interlocutor. If the interlocutor is open to dialogue, he can listen to the arguments of the other and change his position, thus becoming a victim of "domination".

The term "dominant relationship" is also suitable to describe the friendship of these boys. Moreover, each of the friends can be considered as the one who dominates. A boy with genetic disabilities, being dependent, needs the support of a friend and cannot answer him in kind - being friends with such a child inevitably means being used by him. Whereas his best friend is forced to treat him as less independent than he himself and, accordingly, as his guardian.

Another prescription of positive psychology is connected with the prescription to avoid dominant relationships - to avoid any traumatic situations, including relationships that involve traumatization. But is a close relationship possible, where the participants do not traumatize each other?

In his essay "Emma" Lyotard develops an extraordinary philosophical image of the child.

He interprets childhood as an initial susceptibility and predisposition to suffering and trauma. Childhood, according to Lyotard, does not end with the onset of adulthood; it persists into adulthood as a vulnerability. Thus, childhood is a constitutive part of adult life, manifesting itself in situations where the adult feels defenseless and open to trauma.

The inner child in Lyotard's philosophy is radically different from the concept of the inner child proposed by positive psychology. The latter calls on the adult to heal his inner child, while the inner child in Lyotard's philosophy is essentially incurable, moreover, it symbolizes something opposite to any healing and therapy; he is the very trauma, the presence of which is a condition of any close relationship. According to Lyotard, love is possible only when adults have recourse to the original enduring, in other words, "love exists only insofar as adults accept themselves as children." Intimacy manifests itself as defenselessness in front of another and, accordingly, openness to traumatization.

Not only is the experience of close relationships necessarily traumatic, the process of acquiring any other important life experience also has this property. According to Freud, traumatization is inevitable in the process of development. Drawing a parallel between physical and mental trauma, he argued that "mental trauma or the memory of it acts like a foreign body, which, after penetrating inside, remains an active factor for a long time." Thus, trauma is the result of the presence of a foreign body that cannot be accumulated by the body. In the case of psychological trauma, the analogue of a foreign body is a new experience, because it is by definition different from the old, that is, the experience already present in the individual, and therefore is alien to it, which means that it cannot merge painlessly with it into a single whole.

Surprisingly, traumatic experiences tend to be remembered with regret as something that could have been avoided. At the same time, it is overlooked that if, starting from early childhood, a person had not been regularly traumatized by the new environment, he would not even have learned to walk.

I don’t know who benefits from and why the myth about the possibility of a self-sufficient, independent and unharmed personality is so widespread. I have not yet met a person who would be completely self-sufficient, would not need support, would not be traumatized by the people closest to him and would not be in a dominant relationship.

No, do not even hope, I am for equality, but for the equality of people, understood as a mess of deviations, oddities, trauma, lack of independence and inferiority, and not for the equality of self-sufficient individuals untrained by each other. Simply because the latter is a stupid and therefore dangerous myth.