I had decided in my confused little eight-year-old mind to commit suicide.
So I started walking.
The dark thick woods beautifully mirrored my anguished despairing mood. The light was growing dimmer and I was determined to descend into the final darkness.
Then, suddenly, a shaft of sunlight broke through the thick canopy of leaves and landed on a single yellow ladyslipper growing at the base of a magnificently tall tree.
I was stunned, thrown into an eternal moment of wonder, and held captive by the sight.
I then turned around and went back to the school, and that turning around was the turning around of my life.
I had chosen, for all time, life over death.
Riker, John Hanwell. Exploring the Life of the Soul: Philosophical Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology, 2017 (Kindle location 1901-1905)
now, that turning around,
called by whom?
is the point
These experiences with nature have saved my self and sustained it for a lifetime.
Kohut does not talk about nature and self, nor does he inquire into the great question of what the self must be in order for it to be not only sustained by a relation to nature but brought into being by it.
And, yet, it is clear that our selves are deeply connected to nature.
When nature is disturbed we are disturbed.
(ibid, Kindle location 1921-1924)
How are we to understand nature as perhaps the first and most significant of all selfobjects?
While Kohut is silent on this question, his great predecessor in self psychology, Ralph Waldo Emerson, does speak, and does so with the kind of brilliant writing which itself enlivens the soul in a way that Kohut’s writing rarely does.
(ibid Kindle location 1927-1929)
Then Thoreau
Before leaving Emerson to return to the present, we need to hear Thoreau’s reverberations with these Emersonian themes. His most famous statement is, of course, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (1854, p. 8) by which he means that humans do not act from their selves but from social impositions, especially those of economic society. It is not by chance that the first chapter of Walden is entitled “Economy” and reveals how alively one can live with little labor and almost no money. “I found that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living” (1854, pp. 65– 66).
Thoreau went to Walden with the question that is at the heart of this book: how can one attain the greatest amount of life in one’s soul. “I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. . . . Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” (1854, p. 86).
I think that living from the self is what it means to live deeply, for it is the marrow of who we are, the core, the final ground. When we live out of the self, life becomes simpler and we are not so tempted by the myriads of distractions that our contemporary world provides. How easy it is to lose ourselves in distractions which are always multiple while the erotic loves of the self tend to be few.
And, finally in Walking, Thoreau says, “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest . . . in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (1861, pp. 644– 45). The young often interpret the wild as the anti-social, the anti-sober, or the unpredictable, but the wild for Thoreau is simply each individual being being itself and not trying to be something else. To live from one’s spontaneous erotic self rather than social codes or economic pressures is to be wild. One of the great critiques of classical psychoanalysis is that its aim is to normalize persons. This is not true of self psychology, whose aim is to release the “wild” singularity of a person. In self psychology is the preservation of the world.
(ibid Kindle location 2058-2074)
以上說明回到自然
see also
Arvo Part Spiegel Im Spiegel
