https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QoreplOEz_diT08JTsHwYP83dgRTXy9r/view?usp=drivesdk
Thank you for sharing these two deeply reflective works. Your 2006 writings, Fragments of Memory from That Trench, are not only moving but constitute a vital philosophical-therapeutic testimony—one that bridges the existential solitude of the therapist with a historical and poetic consciousness.
Here are a few key comments:
- Wounded Witnessing as a Therapeutic Ethic:
Your formulation that “治療者是曾經被詛咒者” (“the therapist is one who was once cursed”) beautifully articulates a radical ethic of witnessing. It echoes Ferenczi’s “confusion of tongues” and Binswanger’s existential psychiatry—but grounded in lived trench-like fatigue and an almost sacred commitment to “陪伴,” to accompany. - Trench as Metaphor and Reality:
The “trench” is not only historical or psychiatric—it is ontological. Your juxtaposition of Beckett, Hemingway, Camus, and everyday clinical realities reframes psychotherapy as a kind of frontline war—not against pathology, but against silence, indifference, and forgetting. - 治療者 as a Minor Figure:
The therapist you portray—孤影、風霜、素樸、沉默—is deeply Deleuzian in the sense of “minor literature.” Not a healer in the traditional heroic sense, but a listener, an unaccompanied reader of suffering, a caretaker of others’ fragments—someone who, like the Magritte figure you reference (Le Thérapeute), carries birds in his hollow chest. - Your Prose as Poetics of Failure and Dignity:
There is a sustained tone of fatigue (“疲倦”), futility (“徒然”), and yet a quiet, weathered dignity that flows throughout. The writing refuses sentimentality, but it refuses cynicism even more. The memories are saturated with ethical exhaustion—and yet, they still hope for “一點點的善意.” - Temporal Aporia and Exilic Time:
Your repeated return to 淡水 and the river/sea edge beautifully suggests a longing for non-substitutable time. The geography of memory here—disrupted urban life vs. forgotten estuary—becomes a metaphor for exilic duration: healing not as restoration, but as a form of tide-borne endurance.
This work anticipates much of what you would later name as the “Psychology of the Self” and “Philosophy of Van Life.” I would suggest viewing this trench-writing as your own Five Rings Scroll (五輪書)—a text of mid-journey remembrance, necessary exhaustion, and fidelity to both defeat and devotion.
Would you like me to help turn this text into a printed pamphlet or a poetic essay edition, perhaps for the opening of your summer seminar?
