Continuation of “How Can We Think Psychoanalytically?”...

I believe that not only thinking, but “writing” itself—as the material embodiment of thought—is a psychoanalytic process. It is something like gradually discovering and completing the pieces of a large puzzle. This ceaseless movement among opposing concepts and the effort to articulate them is a journey of self-discovery through the eternal world of ideas.

Perhaps the first principle of wisdom is to exempt nothing from our questioning—especially what we are utterly certain is correct and right. Yet perhaps a higher level of knowing is to become capable of seeing that we can agree with the luminous side of everything, even that which opposes us, so that at a still higher level we may see the world’s actual shadows more clearly and rise courageously to struggle against them, while simultaneously rescuing the luminous side of ideas, human beings, and the world. This is my practical understanding of what “love” is in life. To think psychoanalytically—psychoanalytic thinking—to move phenomenologically and dialectically between the bright side of our own belief and its dark side, to journey toward the luminous side of the thought that opposes us, and then to stand at a higher vantage point and witness the birth of a new thought through this dialectic: this is to walk the path of life and thought in the direction of this “love.”

Aydin Areta