Monday, April 30, 2007

"Transition"

Transition
Let us now turn to psychological facts. At night all leaping fountains speak with a louder tone; my soul, too is a leaping fountain says Zarathustra. Into the night life seems to be exiled --these are the famous words from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--into the night life seems to be exiled what once ruled during the day. This sentence contains the entire modern psychology. Its great idea is the stratification of the psyche, the geological principle. The soul has its origin and is built in strata, and what we learned before in the organic field apropos of the construction of the big brain from the anatomic-evolutionary standpoint of banished aeons, is revealed by psychosis as a still-existing reality. We carry the ancient peoples in our souls and when the later acquired reason is relaxed, as in the dream or in drunkenness, they emerge with their rites, their prelogical mentality, and grant us an hour of mystic participation.

When the logical superstructure is loosened, when the scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states, opens the frontiers of consciousness about which there is always a struggle, then there appears the old, the unconscious, in the magical transmutation and identification of the "I" in the early experience of the everywhere and the eternal. The hereditary partimony of the middle brain lies still deeper and is eager for expression: if the covering is destroyed in the psychosis there emerges, driven upward by the primal instincts, from out the primitive-schizoid substructure, the gigantic archaic instinctive "I" unfolding itself limitlessly through the tattered psychological subject.


Quoted in "Plexus" the 2nd volume of the Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller

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