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‘When you love you should not say God is in my heart, but rather, I am in the heart of God’
‘This self-obsession … it's a waste of living’
Only Lovers Left Alive, . Directed by J. Jarmusch, USA.
Mature relating, it seems to me, has as a central principle, what Benjamin calls ‘the specific matter of recognizing the other as an equivalent centre of being’ (1999, p. 201). It appears not to be characterised by defensive manipulation, power or object use, instead demanding the reclamation of our projections placed upon others in order to come face to face with our own vulnerabilities and limitations. It is a process of co-mutual, conscious, imaginal1 construction that predicates itself on the tensions and interrelationship between a person's sense of separate being and inextricable interdependence with another separate being.
Healthy relating is an expansive, enlivening and ecstatic (as in, to stand by oneself, to be outside of one's egocentric self) experience, which, should it be integrated well enough, may facilitate what Milner calls ‘more of the me in the not-me and more of the not-me in the me’ (1950, pp. 154-155). Similarly, Levinas states: ‘… our relations with others are better as difference than as unity … The very value of love is in the impossibility of reducing the other to myself, of coinciding in sameness’ (Levinas and Kearney 1986, p. 22). Furthermore, genuine relationship attempts to develop, hold, integrate and enact numerous other nuanced ideas, some of which might ask the questions: How can we be separate from another, not fused with them, without being detached? How can we be firm, grounded in our being, expressive of needs, wants and desires without this expression being emotionally violent, excessively demanding or wounding if unmet? How can we hold the other in mind, give of our self, without that being self-effacing or becoming a