benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

While running the length of the Bosphorus River on the Asian bank of Istanbul, I listened to a discussion on art, living, and death on Late Night Live.
The guests were psychoanalysts who were speaking at the Freud Conference in Melbourne and they introduced an electrifying concept called ‘Creative Living’.
This concept starts with the familiar Freudian insight that there are dimensions to our actions that escape our awareness. It also encompasses the more obscure concept of the Unheimliche, or when rendered in english, the Uncanny. Literally speaking, the Unheimliche is that which we aer not at home with, that which is strange to us, that which makes us uncomfortable for example or arouse our hatred and loathing. By tracing an etymology of the world Freud discovered that the various meanings of and associations with the Unheimliche gradually merge with those of the direct opposite of the word, the Heimliche, the familiar. The point is that that which utterly disturbs must have some kind of hidden life within us.
The analysts partly divined the practice of ‘Creative Living’ from artists that they had treated. To live a Creative Life is to continually confront these mysteries about the self, not to pin them down so as to uncover and absolute and final truth, but the opposite, to allow the self to continually grow and change through navigating the uncomfortable limits of our awareness.
It excited me because it seems to liberate psychoanalysis from what Michel Foucault identifies as its oppressive traits. Foucault identified a set of discursive practices that had emerged in late antiquity and continued through Christian ascetic practices and beyond into the Victorian ‘repression’ of sexuality and nineteenth and twentieth century psychology. What unites all of these different accounts of the human being is that there appears something like a ’self’, and this self has a ‘true nature’ which is often characterised as sinful, errant or pathological. Finally, these errors can be corrected through the application of certain techniques through an authority or specialist of some kind.
Whereas the psychoanalyst may genuinely believe that she liberating human beings by bringing them in touch with their ‘true’ nature, Foucault feels that psychoanalysts were oppressing their patients when they scrutinised the minutia of their thoughts to find the ‘truth’ of their sexual desires.
Foucault instead looks to the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome. From these writers he discovers a kind of asceticism, a way of regulating one’s behaviour and pursuing a virtuous life that did not require the uncovering of a ‘truth’ about the self. For many of the ancients, this is achieved through a process called ‘Self Writing’ in which one kept journals to reflect on one’s own actions and possibly to modify them.
It seems to me that there is a lot of overlap between Creative Living and Self Writing. The analysts on Late Night Live were suggesting that when we keep the past alive and confront that which disturbs us, such as our own deaths for instance, by seeking the limits of our self understanding, we have an opportunity to remake the self again and again.
As such, the Freud’s concept of the self—as a puzzling stranger whose inner motivations can only be interpreted by an analyst—is transformd into a style of life that frees the individual to continually grow and change. I feel electrified by this possible being wandering soundlessly just over the edge of this horizon.

I watched La jetée recently and was captivated. Oddly enough, the experience closed a time loop that I’d been caught in since some time in the late nineties.

We used to visit a comic store down an old arcade in the suburbs, myself and mike, and maybe some others on occasion. I had little interest in comics, more of a fascination in Mike as some kind of brooding teenager par excellance.

Phil, who ran the store, would talk for ages to us. He was, apparently, a University science drop out. It seems peculiar that he would want to spend so much time with people of our age, not peculiar in that sense. Just odd.

He insisted that we watch this magnificent film, told in photos, about time travel, upon which the Terry Gilliam film Twelve Monkeys was based. This is La jetée.

La jetée depicts a man sent to the past in order to save the future. The realness of his world is never firmly established, he could be mad. In any case his obsession with the past, and of a woman in it, eventually has him killed.

So, I’ve been returning to this moment, in which I am advised to see this film, in which my interest is aroused over and over for probably a decade, and I’ve come close to watching the film many, many times, and have returned to this moment over and over, but have been stopped by some sort of deep-seated reluctance and dread, like Freud, who for years could not bring himself to visit Rome, a city that held such fascination to him.

Anyway, the loop has been closed, along with its more recent sub-loop, in which my brother also advises me to watch this eery and sad piece.

As for the myriad others, I live in them still.