What a Difference an ‘e’ Makes

Psychoanalytic truths are based on observations

made by psychoanalysts in the pursuit of prying into

how you mount your armies of defense against

deep-seated fear-and-shame-induced self-views –

conscious revelations of which (made too soon)

will always be intolerable news because to know them

would abuse your psyche too sadistically to think

you could go on: ergo you must refuse to see they’re

there – the barest light suggestion they’ve a part

in why you are the way you are can, psychoanalytically,

be thought to be almost as dangerous a threat as not

to let them in at all. The mind’s a monstrous tug-of-war

you cannot win. Sin is real: it is the central noun

and verb of you: you’re made of it, and it is what

you can’t not do. Defenses are attempts to keep

from murdering the Self (with all its horrible realities) –

a Self which couldn’t otherwise abide its own existence –

unless, that is, it manages to find its weary way

to psychoanalytic help. Freud – adding ‘e’ to which

would make it freude, German word for joy – said

you can learn to turn your mountainously angry urge

to kill into a moderately gray much smaller hill:

replace your murderous ferocities with far more

tractable anxieties, and while this won’t exactly bring

you joy, it is a better self-preserving ploy than you had

undertaken in your inward/outward life before. The worst

that you’ll now face will not be that your thoughts will

overcome you with extremity, but that they’ll bore.

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