Quotes & Notes from The Unsayable

The Unsayable by Annie S. Rogers. 2006. Random House.

When I take notes for my private use I have a couple of conventions which I’ll use here.

##/ the page number followed by the quote without quote marks.

[My comments are between brackets.]

298/ The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically breaks down the door, to be heard. The only way to hear it, to invite it into the room, is to stop imposing something over it—mostly in the form of your own ideas—and instead listen for the unsayable, which is everywhere, in speech, in enactments, in dreams, and in the body.

[I feel these are the topic sentences for the entire work.]

108/ [Psychoanalytical theorist Jacques] Lacan describes savior as knowledge based on the experience, and in a psychoanalytical psychotherapy this knowledge comes from the unconscious.

117-118/ When we experience something that takes us beyond the here and now of reality, something that pushes us beyond the limits of what keeps the organism in balance, this is what Lacan calls jouissance. Jouissance is not pleasure, or within what Freud called “the limits of pleasure,” but rather an excess that takes us into a state of being out of control, where the next limit for the organism is felt to be death.

139/ What is it like to know something, unconsciously, something beyond words, and respond nevertheless because it’s all too real? A person might then say things, or do things, that are at odds with her or his morality and self-regard.

285/ When words function as symbols, a new world comes to light—a world of concepts, ideals, positions in society, the value of symbolic exchanges, etc.—and as a result, the fullness of what is actually there falls away. The child with a neurotic structure will come to mistake the symbolic world for the real.

293/ If we don’t understand how we are predators to one another through language—how our speaking sounds and resounds through the unconscious and determines our actions—we will certainly destroy one another and our fragile little planet.

296/ The world I am entering requires a kind of courage I find compelling …

297/ [Freudian School of Quebec has 60% success rate with “untreatable” psychotic young adults.]

This! This is what I was experiencing this week! An incredibly uncomfortable, not pleasurable but not unpleasant either feeling. A very difficult feeling to be with... I didn't know what to do with myself...

Need to read that book...

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I started this book and never finished it. Makes me want to finish it now. Have you read her other book, it's called A Shining Affliction. I found it to be good and I learned a lot from this author. Thanks for sharing this with us. You picked out some good quotes.

Ah, jouissance. I used to apply Lacanian theory to sexual masochism in academic writing.

It unnerves me at times the parallels I see between the world of bdsm and the world of therapy.

Lol! Have you seen some of my recent posts? BDSM sorta randomly came up in my session last week. Yeah...

I might add that the feeling seems somewhat addictive...

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Again, mistook the 'quote' button for the 'edit' button



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Thanks for the exchanges. Here's another that somehow missed my crib sheet:

297/ [Becoming an analyst is] a long route through your own unconscious, and the courage that's required to experience anxiety and anguist as you face your own life failures—before you sit behind a couch and pretend to be an analyst with someone else's suffering.
What does that entail and how long does it take? ... In the end you authorize yourself as an analyst, but you do not do this alone.

[This last bit, "in the end you authorize yourself ... but you do not do this alone" is a beginning of a formula, because this is what we do with any skill. Some are born in their authority, some are mentored through it, some find it by resisting their training and mentors, and some are forever suspended not quite sure and feeling as a imposter. This is particularly difficult, I know, for any authority I claim through self-teaching.

[I have not read her other book, plan to, but not right away. I want to practice this type of listening to the stammers, silences, and the language of the body in space for the unsayable for a while.]

Revu2

This elation out of control is what led me to find PsychCentral in the first place. Even this morning, I awoke remembering I need to refresh my list of calm down routines and avoiders. When I'm feeling upbeat I cannot listen to rapid dance music. It seems to lock in my mental loop and ramp up my mental revolutions per moment.

Years ago I watched the German Movie Lola which is very fast paced and has a lot of running, even four screens at once (4 x the pace). Yikes, took days to settle down.

Revu2

Your many responses encouraged me to dig into the chapters on children who repetitively abused other children. Not a fun section, and one I'd skipped before. I skimmed it for her reflective paragraphs.

221/ Speech is premised on giving up the promise of complete satisfaction, facing into the irrevocable loss involved in having to use language, which can never be entirely understood.

222/ Desire is not for the object, or for a person you can have, keep, possess, someone who will understand your completely. ... Desire is for something always out of reach, but you live for it.

255/ [A client's envy of a foster sibling who receives the foster mother's love is] what Augustine called "the invidia"—a moment when we're captured by an illusion.

256/ We create a world in what Lacan calls the Imaginary, a world of images and imagoes (ideas about images), to survive.

Revu2

I have been feeling something that I would describe like that too, it's good to hear someone else attempt to describe it, though I don't know if we feel the same thing. For me it's like emotion felt in a physical way, it could be a good feeling, but when the level is intense it's uncomfortable.

Thanks for the quotes Revu, thought provoking. I might try that book. Something I'd quite like to say to my T is 'will you quit going on about the f - ing unconscious, I don't give an F about it, I want to talk about conscious things'. I don't quite know why.

For me I think that because I've been depressed all my life, and that is my 'normal', healthy emotion, particularly pleasurable emotion is uncomfortable and unbearable. It goes a long way toward explaining why I would fight myself to get better:
Q: Don't you want to feel better?
A: No, not really. I want to *be* better, but I don't want to feel better.
I'm getting to be able to tolerate it though. Even starting to like it.

The Unsayable was such a powerful book to me. It helped me to understand how a trauma that my mother went through in her childhood ended up effecting me deeply.

Hi CrimsonBlues,

Yes, this questions of inter generational echoes of trauma is huge! Ellen's story in the book was gripping, especially they way 3 generations of young women/girls acted around the age of 16.

If you have more curiosity about this, check out a family constellation workshop in your area. This rippling effect is exactly what it's designed to address. Very moving, touching, and transformative things can happen.

Revu2

Hi,

I just had an interesting morning. I had anticipated returning to a long frustrating activity but with better inner and outer skills, I hope. I've been going after this for 2 years since a perfect storm upturned everything. I felt so ready as I slept that I awoke feeling too eager.

I actually stopped myself because I was feeling too good. This is a first. This is huge. A big sign that I'm deep along my path to wellness.

I was thinking all day about a Jung story. He had a client that loved to walk in the Alps. The experience filled him with rapturous emotional and physical feelings of awe and elation—jouissance. Jung warned him to always walk, then, with a companion. The man ignored this and in about a year while walking alone walked off a cliff.

Though I've avoided actual cliffs, I've had disastrous things happen in the past when in a state jouissance.

That I actually could stop myself because I was feeling too good? Son of a gun ...
Revu2

Found a review on Goodreads that has the best quote from literature about the mute growth of grief and its insistence in being responded to:

This is from Julene Weaver's review of the book:
"Blake thinks about his grief and how it grows the same way a child does. 'To begin with, neither can speak, although both are adept at making their presence known—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. The message may not be clear, but the depth of feeling, the passion, is never in doubt./ As it grows, and ages, grief develops a voice of its own, a voice that needs an attentive, patient ear to express its messages clearly. And if it is ignored, the voice will eventually demand attention, until one day you turn around to find yourself looking it squarely in the face./ There is no choice in this progression. The progression happens whether you permit it or not. The choice comes in how you respond.' One of the best personifications of grief I have ever read."

I agree with her assessment.

Revu2

This is the Tarot Fool!!! Deepens the meaning. I know that's not why you posted this but...thanks.

The first quote, about the unconscious breaking down the door to be heard and not imposing your ideas on it, I'm going to use the concept in my therapy session tomorrow.

I remember that movie. Here i think it was even titled, "run, lola, run!"

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting.

Yes, that was the title, 1998. From the IMBD
"A young woman in Germany has twenty minutes to find and bring 100,000 Deutschmarks to her boyfriend before he robs a supermarket." Tom Tykwer was the director/writer.

Seriously? I've been also meditating on The Wheel of Fortune (reversed).

Say more about the Fool card, because in retrospect, when calmer parts prevail, the recent manic mistakes and losses feel shamefully foolish. Now, of course, I see I wasn't in my right mind. And had I known in advance I could forget myself and act so fecklessly I wouldn't have. We're part of helping the culture better communicate mental lapses, but for now I find I get so frustrated just trying to share that I've stopped talking about it.

This reminds me of a Carol Shield quote from Unless, if I can find it ... found it:

"It happens that I’m going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I’ve heard of people finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I’ve never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believe these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."

Revu2

^ i love that quote. happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head.