I encountered that quote in a book I'm reading, "The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients" by Irvin Yalom. Context:
Occasionally individuals can recognize what they desire only when it is taken away from them. I’ve sometimes found it useful in working with individuals confused about their feelings about another to imagine (or to role-play) a telephone conversation in which the other breaks off the relationship. What do they feel then? Sadness? Hurt? Relief? Elation? Can we then find a way to allow these feelings to inform their proactive behavior and decisions? Sometimes I’ve galvanized patients caught in a decisional dilemma by citing a line from Camus’s The Fall that has always affected me deeply: “Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn’t want, after all.”
Posts
35 comments:
Sort of like feminism.
Radiolab in May had a story about using Virtual Reality in therapy where the individual becomes their own therapist. It was quite interesting: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/more-or-less-human/. It is 41 minutes 20 seconds in.
Does that apply to the driving need to give advice.
I would be reluctant to use any Camus quote, especially as a therapy tool. His pessimism (and his double meaning) infuses everything. I see on google that some sites sell this quote against a shining cloud background as an inspirational motivation poster. Camus must be rolling in his grave.
Your velvet prose of purple tint
In France you would be famous
Like all the belly-button lint
From Kierkegaard and Camus
"A man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so attached to anything as he is to his suffering." -Gurdjieff
"You never know what you have until it’s gone, and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything." -- S. Wright
He seems to refer to the circular nature of attempts to do an impossible thing over and over until one day you stop, temporarily. That impossible usually arises from a grown child's feeling responsable to fix broken parents' family drama they grew up, with by reliving it right this time.
Or as the Freewheelin Bob Dylan would plead, " Honey, just allow me one more chance to get along with you."
We all want most what we can't have.
"A man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering."
"[T]he hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn’t want, after all."
Those quotes are both bullshit.
So....the old "How can i miss you if you won't go away" theory?
I’ve sometimes found it useful in working with individuals confused about their feelings about another to imagine (or to role-play) a telephone conversation in which the other breaks off the relationship. What do they feel then?
If someone is torn between two choices, pull out a coin, say "Decide with a coin toss. Heads, you choose A, tails you choose B." Flip the coin and then, without letting them see the coin, ask what they're hoping for.
I'm so miserable without you that it's almost like you're still here.
I'm so miserable without you that it's almost like you're still here.
Better off with the blues
"True love can sometimes fade, but money stays green forever."
-- C. Grant
The great tragic truth of life: You might not get what you want.
The great tragicomic truth of life: You might not really want what you thought you wanted.
The great comic truth of life: Life goes on, with you or without you.
This seems to be one of those ideas that are so stupid you must be highly educated to believe them.
Let's just make a list, a long, long list, of all the things that I don't want, after all, and see how many of them I find it at all difficult to give up, shall we?
A question I have is why France had so many very good writers post World War II?
Because really I can't think of comparable writers here and now.
I have a theory about what happened. I'll start by noting but skipping trying to explain why the great majority of writers are left-wing and just accept it as the reality.
First off the left-wing writers of the post-war world believed in a much more complicated world than left-wing writers today, or at least the ones I've read. How did they acquire this sophisticated vision? Or actually vision is not the right word, the real question is why so many of them were skeptical about people and how people function, and by people I mean people like themselves.
I suspect that these writers were no more sophisticated than writers today when they were younger, and that like almost all of the left at the time they were wildly enthusiastic about either the National Socialists in Germany or the Communists in the Soviet Union or in many cases both. And that like the writers of today their thinking was dominated by simple good versus evil plots and they expected utopia shorter after the evil people were eliminated.
But then World War II happened and though certainly a lot of people got eliminated, somehow it just didn't work out.
They experienced self-doubt. A lot of them found it necessary to search out and destroy everything they had written before and in the first years of the war. A lot of them found it necessary to erase their own memory of what they had done. But although people can do this, it's a complicated, imperfect process that leaves traces.
This is what I think the play "Waiting for Godot" by Jean Paul Sartre was really about. It's about the mental confusion or side effects of erasing your own past. And in writing it, Jean Paul was writing about his own experience, but of course he was giving voice to the experience of a lot of left-wing intellectuals.
So the life experience of writers of the post-War was significantly more complicated than writers today, and in particular it's complicated in the sense that the writers had done questionable things and were at some level still aware of it. Thus the more complicated texts and the complicated subjects they attempted to explore.
I always assumed that Waiting for Godot was a prank on the audience, but so is socialism.
Think of all those poor wretches groaning under the yoke of Trump's oppression. They'll never be free.
Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn’t want, after all.
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
I was curious, so I googled a full text of The Fall.
I can't find the quote. Clearly a translational thing. This is what I found:
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest thing in the world.
That has a very different meaning.
Waiting for Godot is not by Sartre.
Thanks for the correction, Two-eyed Jack. It was Samuel Beckett, and although Irish, he lived in Paris for most of his adult life including the period in question. He was also a member of the French Resistance.
My father was a clinical therapist. He once told me that most of his clients' misery was because they thought they wanted something which they really didn't want.
The quote makes me think of several clients determined to fight tooth and nail in their divorce cases.
I imagine a situation in which a person is quite happily and contentedly married to a loving spouse whom they very much love in return, and with children too. This person then finds themselves in their work life having to interact closely for a sustained period of time with someone to whom they are incredibly sexually attracted, maybe even more so than they ever were physically attracted to their spouse. And this sexual attraction is mutually felt, so an affair is in the offing. The person knows that an affair would devastate their spouse and destroy their family, which they are loathe to do. Yet, walking away from the affair is very hard to do.
"I was curious, so I googled a full text of The Fall.
I can't find the quote. Clearly a translational thing. This is what I found:
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest thing in the world.
That has a very different meaning."
The character was a former pick-up artist talking about easy pussy and scoring out of habit when he wasn't really interested.
Like Ritmo and the obese girl alone at the bar after midnight, except that the Camus character was successful.
Also, the misquote is readily available on "Hang in there, Baby" type motivational posters like the one on the therapist's office wall where he probably got the quote.
"I imagine a situation in which a person is quite happily and contentedly married to a loving spouse whom they very much love in return, and with children too. This person then finds themselves in their work life having to interact closely for a sustained period of time with someone to whom they are incredibly sexually attracted, maybe even more so than they ever were physically attracted to their spouse. And this sexual attraction is mutually felt, so an affair is in the offing. The person knows that an affair would devastate their spouse and destroy their family, which they are loathe to do. Yet, walking away from the affair is very hard to do."
I was thinking of sending this post on to an acquaintance in just such a situation.
Remember that wherever you go, there you are.
--Unknown
Oh, my common one with a light in her head
And a coat so old ... and a suffering so fine
Take a walk with me
Oh my common one, my illuminated one
My storytime one, my treasure in the sunset
Take a walk with me and I will show you
It ain't why why why why
It just is.
V Morrison said that. I take it to mean that suffering comes from asking too much and not accepting that some things cannot be explained. And that if you are so blessed to walk towards the sun with one you love, that you remind her that there ain't no why, it just is.
There is nothing that is hard to give up, when you care about someone.
Nothing at all, Poor Camus did not understand love. Talented little guy, and he pulled off that look that some people have of not looking like complete idiots when they are smoking cigarettes while wearing trendy clothes, but still, the poor little guy did not understand love.
I know hundreds of people who would give up anything at all to make their families happier.
So true.
I first read read "The Fall" in high school, in the the 1970s.
rcommal - thanks, I read it in high school too. or maybe freshman year in college which is basically the same thing.
Post a Comment