By: Don’t Ask (Combover 4) « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

Don’t Ask (Combover 4) « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 16:34:38 +0000

[...] I’m not against secrecy. States, like people, need it, a hoard: a cushion where people can work out ideas and fail at an aim without the whole structure of [...]

By: ashtor

ashtor — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:40:14 +0000

In the post following this one, you explain that what was compelling about the “secret” is that, “The event of the secret, its meaning and force, is, paradoxically, how it’s shared. That was the animating revelation for me.”
I have been thinking a little about this paradox and stumbled upon a comment Freud makes about “secrets.” He writes:
“When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them…I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore” (Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria, 77-8).
At least in its nascent form, psychoanalysis seemed to be mostly about locating the hidden pain and revealing it, presuming (and proclaiming) that revelation could engender cure. However, if, the event of the secret is in its “sharing” than can we understand the analytic enterprise as a staging and re-staging of events created by the very staging itself, in which case “secrets” are nowhere without their dialogic debut or are everywhere and therefore not really secrets at all?

Comments on: Secrecy, a Hoard (med.L. secretia, a royal treasury)

By: Don’t Ask (Combover 4) « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

By: ashtor