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This seems to be a schizoid, already established, view of an already established alphabet which is then transformed into a depressive (whole object) view. Words can be seen and read as a whole, but it is difficult to believe that they are formed like that. The subject is itself a formless void:1 maybe it will evolve in visual images, in noises, perhaps musical patterns; muscular patterns – dance movements; Balinesque eye-dance patterns, tongue-stammer movements; mental detritus from which dreams are made, when awake. Perhaps ‘being awake’ is made out of the mental detritus, is simply the state out of which it is possible to rationalize and say, ‘I had a dream’.
Certain pairs which appear to represent conflicting elements can be formulated: Love and Hate, conscious and unconscious, emotion and intellectual ability. Whether this pairing is significant of more than an underlying sense of conflict, I doubt; it is convenient to ignore all significance other than its signification of conflict. Emotions appear to have the power to suppress thought and vice versa. The experience appears to be painful, unsuccessful, ‘remembered’ and
[Milton, ‘Light’, Line 12: “… Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream, / Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun, / Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice / Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest / The rising world of waters dark and deep, / Won from the void and formless infinite”. Ed.]
‘forgotten’ – what Freud described as a repressed memory. It is only one example of the painfulness of mental life. It seems to be painful itself owing to its function of linking pain with awareness of pain, and to be painful by virtue of its defective, inadequate operation in almost every (except the rarest) of its instances.
It can be a substitute for action, a prelude to action, and instrument for obliterating awareness of past action.
Instantaneous avoidance of sensuous pain provides a model for an ideal. Freud pointed out the advantages flowi