Thanatos, perhaps?

I just saw A Dangerous Method, a film about Sigmund Freud’s relationship with
his protégé, Carl Jung, and Jung’s affair with his patient, Sabrina Spielrein. The
implication of the title is that the analytic method, where intimate feelings, fantasies
and memories are revealed in the confines of an individual consulting room, is
dangerous.

I agree. The power differential catalyzed by the classical analytic relationship is
dangerous for more complex reasons than the ones preferred by Hollywood. If you
set up a frame that invites a person to develop powerful feelings toward you, you
have another person’s heart and soul in your hands. The dangers of misreading,
misinterpretation, manipulation, and playing the roles the person unconsciously
assigns to you, are powerful. For understandable reasons, psychoanalysis has
moved away from this power dynamic and into more interpersonal realms, but I
believe it has lost some of its potency in the process.

But this post isn’t about psychoanalysis and its discontents. It’s about that
unseen yet immensely powerful force – a force that, with all its dangers,
surrounds us.

You experienced it the last time you fell in love.

Osama bin Laden took advantage of That Force when he changed the world using
nothing more than a few flying lessons, boxcutters, and an understanding of the
psychological dynamics of his people and ours. Hitler used similar psychological
weapons to bring the world to its knees. Jesus used it when he presented himself
in a way that divided the world into those who revered him, those who wanted him
dead, and those who wrote his story in a way that allowed him to live on for 2000
years. Pick a random page in a Shakespearean tragedy, or read about the conflicts in
the US Congress or the Middle East, and you’ll discover it.

We confront That Force every day as we struggle to deal with people who need
us, love us, criticize us, envy us, partner with us, want to kill us or destroy our way
of life. In the political arena, realistic assessments of facts are often lost under a
barrage of passion and manipulation of that passion. We need to give words to that
powerful energy source and try to understand it, because if we don’t, humankind
may self-destruct while each side struggles to win abstract debating points about
the pros and cons of their God, their politics, their math, or their way of thinking,
believing, and living their lives, meanwhile building literal or metaphorical “bombs”
directed toward those who dare disagree.

These days we talk a lot about ways of harnessing old and new sources of energy.

Freud made an attempt by labeling the force of sexuality “libido.” I believe there is
a different, powerful and dangerous energy source surrounding all of us that has
yet to be harnessed as fuel. Could it be used for evil as well as for good? Given that
I’m making the analogy with the H-bomb, the answer is yes; what I’m proposing is
indeed a dangerous method. I’m proposing that we discover, label, and examine
That Force the way Newton discovered, labeled and examined the force of gravity, in
the process harnessing it to do useful, and sometimes dangerous, work.