on sadness

Is there a way out? I found many interesting things to read recently (I'll put a list later) but one unique one (on art and disengagement) associated post-modernism and melancholy using Kristeva, Lacan, Freud.. I am always thrilled and fascinated by these things but also saddened as I think how useful these will be to analyze some people (my sister who started psychology used to get extremely high marks in her classes because she was always able - for her own mnemonic device - to put a name to every "abnormality" - says something - we all have such names!) but anyway I love reading these things but always feel slightly sick after - because there isn't much of a way out once you're in. Psychoanalysis is that wonderful destabilizer that refuses to be integrated in the start - that refuses to let you climb out of it once you're there - (or at least I haven't read enough to see how to build something from within that project). But at any rate, I find this an itneresting thesis. And I find it interesting also when I am concerned about people who are close to me and about the problems that I think people have - if pschoanalysis is something that helps you to identify an area which might open up to therapy for the other person, but where would such a therpay begin and take place? Because even if we are reducible to those elements to abstract causes, the rebuilding of us doesn't really happen at that level - and someone - perhaps Kristeva - pointed out that the love and hatred present made the process of discovery risky to the analysand.... and I see this - people who never get out and continue to be bitter. You can't be fixated on your parents or your family forever - and even if your relationships with your parents are still not what you are comfortable with, then need communicative action or something... but anyway... the academics or practictioners have hte advantage in writing of being detached - or is it an escape that is actually not advantageous? I don't know. I don't know enough about these things. But I have ethical questions in my life and this parallels with the need to write about it in my proposal. But I shouldn't be so fixated on the importance of doing a good proposal either - there's the rub - the fixations - identifying these things may be sufficient to loosen the hold on them if we don't become attached to the identification process.

But moving to someone like Aquinas, what does Aquinas have to offer? why do I really want to do a PhD in Aquinas? I identified all the "unimportant" reasons earlier - that it is easier, that these are the people who I can work with, that for what I think I want to do later on it seemed to be the most practical. But there must be something more - and I have to stop pleading ignorant. I DO think it is possible to do an interesting parallel reading of Aquinas with things from psychoanalysis - the "loss" and the "wound" and those things compare favourably with the "present evil" the "loss" being painful, with the "desire for unity".

But if I think that Aquinas is psychologically very acute and penetrating, on the other hand I don't think he leaves himself in the lurch, as it were.

one of the biggest challenges I've had in trying to write this proposal was I want to propose something that I don't know how to say in a positive way is "normative"; "teleological" having a happy ending, and not just an artificial one, but a real resolution - but as soon as I get into any of htese languages, I don't seem to be sufficiently post-modern. Of course I haven't read enough material - perhaps Gadamer or others would be helpful in this respect - because surely something must be possible. But how to present this in a way that is not Hegel, that is not Aristotle, that is not simplistic or naive or too savvy, becoming a sheer stream of elegantly-expressed consciousness....

What about the ethics of writing? Now I am torn between different philosophy ethics - and finally the sheer one might say lack of ethics that is just sophistry - that wants to advertise what I am doing to get money - and am constricted by the very nature of what is being proposed.

But this is seeing in the NEGATIVE way - seeing in the positive way would be quite different.

But through all of this something is happening - this is not just sheer crisis or powerlessness - I am reading and the material itself is daunting - the subject is daunting - and it should be.

what does Aquinas have to offer? religion? do i know what that means? If i did, I probably would be able to tell it to people in a way that they think would merit some help in writing it out.