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- Part 1 - My feelings around RT's text on incest
- Part 2 - The first paragraph of the text. How Freud considered child sexual abuse to be one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women until he buckled under the heavy pressure from his colleagues.
- Part 3 - Carl Jung. Concrete and symbolic levels of incest. Actual incest as a real trauma and a terrific blow to the psychic structure. Thoughts and questions about RT's system and movement.
- Part 4 - Stein's book Incest and Human Love. RT's (mis)interpretation(?) of Malinowski.
- Part 5 - Sexual addictions as unconscious and perverse attempts to seek rebirth of the personality; RT's ideas on rebirth and on the orgy as the precursor of rebirth
- Part 6 - RT's text on incest [translation ≠ endorsement]. The dangers of taking symbolism literally.
- Part 7 - Words and meanings; final thoughts.
Part 1
Please bear in mind that I am the sort of person who "calls a spade a spade", i.e. someone who likes to speak frankly and directly, so please forgive me if I come across as blunt or unpleasant as I try to make sense of this material.
Personally, as a facilitator, my needs for communication, support and empathy in the process of trying to make sense of this text are yet to be met, which is partly why I am talking to myself here. The responses I got from those with whom I have spoken - consisting mostly of comments along the lines of, “well, it was the 60s, the height of the sexual revolution”, “maybe there were some crazy ideas going around at that time”, “let us focus on the positive side”, and “RT is not here to clarify what he meant so any comments would be mere speculation and pointless subjective interpretation” -, have left me feeling alone and wondering if I am really the only facilitator who is struggling to come to terms with this.
In my attempt to make sense of some of the highly controversial statements included in these writings (e.g. "The desire for incest is natural and is the key to paradise") and to lessen the unease and discomfort from cognitive dissonance, all sorts of things went through my head. My question was, and still is, how to interpret such statements - literally? metaphorically? psychoanalytically? I wanted to believe that RT was using the term incest not to refer to genital sex between a parent and a child but rather to some obscure psychological theory unknown to me. That perhaps he was using the word incest to refer to the love/sex dichotomy as Teresa Tendero says in her blogpost (1) in Spanish.
But enough of my own process. By now you must be getting curious about the text, so let me focus on that instead.
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