John Steppling

"Even the sympathetic curiosity of the wisest discerner of men does not suffice to divine how this or that woman gets along with the solution of this enigma and the enigma of this solution; what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions must awaken thereby in the poor unhinged soul; and forsooth, how the ultimate philosophy and scepticism of the woman casts anchor at this point! Afterwards the same profound silence as before: and often even a silence to herself, a shutting of her eyes to herself. Young wives on that account make great efforts to appear superficial and thoughtless; the most ingenious of them simulate a kind of impudence. Wives easily feel their husbands as a question-mark to their … [Read more...]

"In Roman Catholic mythology, there exists a figure which has always moved me; namely the child in limbo, the unbaptised child who.can neither go to Heaven, nor to Hell, nor to Purgatory. This child wanders back and forth in all eternity between Heaven and Hell. Since it is not baptised it cannot go to heaven, and having died at birth, it had no opportunity to sin, so it cannot go to Hell. The figure of the child in limbo was, even for conservative Catholics, too much to swallow, and it has therefore been omitted from most Catholic churches. And yet the following book deals with the part of our psyche which could be represented by the unbaptized child in limbo; unbaptized meaning that part … [Read more...]

“From ancient times the saying comes, There is no death; there is no life. Indeed, the skies are cloudless And the river waters clear.” Yoshimoto (Samurai 1185 -1333. Zen Death Poems, Yoal Hoffman, tr) "What makes the patient with a character disorder a patient at all? In fact, this, as well as the related question — when is analysis terminated? — reveal the inner limits of psychoanalysis. The theory of the individual becomes a theory of society. The psychoanalytic theory of narcissism is entangled in the same web. Narcissism is a character disorder, often surfacing with such vague symptoms as "emptiness" and "futility." Moreover, the narcissistic patient is often not dysfunctional … [Read more...]

"There is a world elsewhere." Shakespeare (Coriolanus) " but the beauty is not the madness Tho my errors and wrecks lie about me. and I cannot make it cohere" Ezra Pound (Canto 116) "One of the arguments put forward in propaganda for colonizing Ireland in 1594, Virginia in 1612 (and on many similar occasions), was that 'the rank multitude' might be exported, 'the matter of sedition . . . removed out of the City." Christopher Hill (Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England ) If I were granted the opportunity to direct another Shakespeare play, it would be Coriolanus. I have long meditated on this late and somewhat problematic (in the … [Read more...]

“Yes, the sun surely is the symbol of the center of consciousness, it is the principle of consciousness because it is light. When you understand a thing, you say: “I see”—and in order to see you need light. The essence of understanding, of cognition, has always been symbolized by the all-seeing of the sun, the wisdom or omniscience of the sun that moves over the earth and sees everything in its light.” Carl Jung (Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939) "Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him "by flesh and blood", so total that they bring to his … [Read more...]

"..in what follows I argue that a great deal will be attained if we can begin to raise (or even to see) the question of Greek Bronze as a question. " Babette Babich (Greek Bronze: Holding a Mirror to Life) “Of course, the fairy-tale world, especially as a magical one, no longer belongs to the present. How can it mirror our wish projections against a background that has long since disappeared? Or, to put it a better way: How can the fairy tale mirror our wish-projections other than in a totally obsolete way? Real kings no longer even exist. The atavistic and simultaneously feudal-transcendental world from which the fairy tale stems and to which it seems to be tied has most certainly … [Read more...]

"Of course, for the person exercising bad faith, it is still a matter covering up an unpleasant truth, or of presenting some pleasant error as the truth. In appearance therefore, bad faith has the structure of a lie. But what changes everything is that in bad faith it is from myself that I am concealing the truth." Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness) "The Oedipus myth, so fundamental to the psychoanalytic conception of the human dilemma , is an endlessly twisting labyrinth revolving around the question of whether it is better to know or not to know, better to be known or not to be known. If Oedipus had known that the man with whom he entered into battle on the road from Delphi was … [Read more...]

"Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments as soon as they are written.” Friedrich Schlegel (Philosophical Fragments) "Then one day you wake up and your seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway.You begin to notice the black doorway is always there. At the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass." Anne Carson (lecture 'Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind', London Review of Books) “Only a word book makes it possible to hold the student responsible…because it provides them with a reliable tool for … [Read more...]