Emotions in a time of uncertainty... 

In what way do they differ from emotions in a time of certainty? Let me try an extreme answer: In a time of certainty there are no emotions! Certainty mutes all questions. It closes down open issues. If uncertainty were some kind of deficiency and quest, certainty would correspond to the situation of saturation and complacency. In Franz Schubert's lieder cycle "The beautiful miller-girl", there comes a moment when the young mill-worker gains the maiden's love. Here comes the song titled "Interlude". It begins as follows:

I have hung my lute on the wall, and have twined a green ribbon round it. I cannot sing any more, my heart is too full...

A field, where we could say that certainty is being acquired, would be one where wishes are fulfilled, "dreams come true". When a wish is fulfilled, but also when a fear becomes real, dreams, for example the beautiful miller-girl for Schubert's young man lose their floating, vague, fleeting, ethereal, seducing character. They become transformed to massive, tangible bodies that come under my possession. "Mine!" is the word we hear in the previous lied of "The beautiful miller-girl". In German "she is mine" is "ist mein". Listen how emphatically and catalytically, with what a stamina the young utters it: Die geliebte Müllerin ist mein! Mein, mein! [My beloved miller-girl is mine! Mine, mine!]

In the passion for wish-fulfilment there is an illusion. One thinks that the dream has now become just flesh and blood, it has been realized, it has become a res, thing, and an asset of his. But what is really happening is that the dream, becoming a thing and an asset, is like the dead who is being preserved by embalming. The only pleasure it can give is that of necrophilia. Around the possessor rotate his possessions like the spaceship debris following its orbit over the earth.

In "The beautiful miller-girl" the woman leaves the young man in favour of a hunter and finally the young man throws himself into a river. If romanticism, in the face of the young dreamer, feeds itself from the pains of unfulfilled desire, modern age, in the hunter's face, who is sure about himself, steps on the corpses of its prey.

Consequently in the times of today's uncertainty, like the one of present economic crisis, wishes that can be fulfilled are lessening. The hunter runs short of bullets. He will not be photographed with his foot upon the corpse of his prey any more. And there exists this paradoxon, that exactly the loss of an illusionary, deceptive possibility is the most painful, it is the one that will cause the most extreme, the most desperate reaction: it will immerse somebody in isolation and depression, it will throw him into anger, fury and sometimes into suicide.

I am asking for too much perhaps, but there needs to take place a reconciliation with uncertainty. In this case it would strip off its privative and threatening character. Sigmund Freud, without intending it and without being aware of it, indicated that direction, the direction, say, towards a light-hearted uncertainty: The invisible of the interlocutors; the so-called "basic rule", according to which somebody is called upon to speak without having the control over his sayings; the "abstinence principle", according to which in the psychoanalytic encounter the way to wish fulfilment is blocked. All this is not merely technique and training for life, but the potential familiarizing with the beneficial presence of the useless and of the unreal. As I wrote long ago, it is the embarkation on the small sailing boat where the big ships are sinking. Emotions are being reborn.

I know very well that this, as the Germans say, is a drop upon burning iron. But the steam coming from the drop's evaporation is not nothing. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in a note: "Out of the previous culture there will be heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes; yet, over the ashes, spirits will hover."