What does the introduction of the unconscious achieve? It restores my continuity, which in "Did I do this?" cracked. I am I again - enrichended by an unconscious dimension.

But now we see something else, too: My nervousness, my confusion did not refer to the gap of my forgetting as such. It referred to the "I don't realize myself! Did I do this?" It referred to the crack which opened up a gap in the cohesion of my very identity.

Freud would say to me: If you take the unconcious motives into account, then you will realize yourself again. The price is though what he calls a "narcissistic trauma": I have to admit that I am not totally conscious and in control of myself. On the other hand I can count again on a "meaningful cohesion", now everything is interconnected again, the gap has been restored and I have an intact identity again. Everything fits.

In the late '70s the swiss artist Klaudia Schifferle published a collection titled "Um des Reimes willen könnt ich einen killen: "For the sake of rhyme I would commit a crime"

Freud restores the rhyme of existence. By the way does he leave any corpse behind? I come back to the "immediate experience". Baggage and pass control. How would I describe myself there? A man without backpack. A somnambulist wandering through the airport facilities. An Other than the one waiting in the docking station and noticing a gap on his shoulder. It is that Other whom Freud kills for the sake of the "universal determinism" as he puts it, so that everything remains interconnected.

A gap on my shoulder. When do I get confused? When I have got stuck in an identity of place and time, in an identity of myself, in this case, say, "traveller" and I recognize that I am not confined in it. When I try to defend it by all means, for example when I resort to the coup of the unconscious, I betray the man without backpack.

What about familiarizing with the idea that we are not defined by one identity, that we are not confined in one identity? Some time ago I read in Facebook the poem of a woman speaking about her experience of depression. It ends up as follows:

Sometimes depression means

Ignoring every phone call for an entire month.

Because yes, they have the right number

But you're not the person they're looking for, not any more.

If we look carefully we will see that, at least in situations where we are not uninvolved, or just functional, we are never the same. As the last verses suggest, depression would be not an affection of the person involved, but the transition onto another "person", as she puts it. In a case of ambivalence, the Yes and the No are being expressed by different selves opposed to one another. When such a woman has a yes-and-no stance toward her husband, I may ask her to describe the woman saying yes and the woman saying no. She always describes two different persons!

Let me demonstrate it with reference to a painting of Frida Kahlo.

The Mexican artist, who had a car accident at the age of 17, underwent numerous surgeries all throughout her life.

Hara Papatheodorou, a Greek painter, discusses this painting titled Tree of Hope, Keep Firm

in a lecture:

[It] was painted after an operation in New York. The artist executed this portrait of the double Fridas for her patron Eduardo Morillo Safa. I quote parts of her letter to him:

"I have almost finished your first painting, which is of course nothing but the result of the damned operation: I am sitting –on the edge of an abyss – with my leather corset in one hand. In the background, I am lying on a hospital trolley – facing away at the landscape – with part of my back uncovered, so you can see the scars from the incisions which those surgeons sons of bitches landed me with" (Kahlo, p.68, Taschen).

The bared, violated sick body on the left contrasts with the forceful upright figure of Kahlo on the right, holding a red banner with a popular song “Tree of hope, keep firm”, to give herself courage.

The background landscape [...] is divided in two; the maimed body is assigned to the sun, which in Aztec mythology is fed by sacrificial human blood. On the other hand, the strong, optimistic Frida is assigned to the moon, the symbol of womanhood, represented by the god Tezcatlipoca, the black one and the opponent of the white god Huitzilopochtli, who is the sun god.

If we recognize that fixation on an identity is violating our volatile nature, if we open up for a life and for a death where the I would not occupy an immigrant-free national territory, if we open up for such a life and for such a death, then Freud's cause becomes irrelevant. Then the obsession with coherence, with ultimate knowledge of the self and the world, with the annoying gaps, is not an issue, and the construct of an unconscious, the invocation of an internal, a psychic world is needless. Of course in this case there is also no need for an interpretation as connection and "meaningful cohesion". One can live, and live better without an internal world. Without psyche!

All this needs further discussion.

Psyche, as conceived of in Modern Times, allready in the era of the english associationists Locke and Hume, afterwards in Ribot's and Charcot's psychologie nouvelle and its Freudian shaping as psychic apparatus, this psyche abides a place "beyond immediate experience". In philosophy a place beyond experience is called "trancendent". The first name for the trancendent is "God". Psychology, as far as it establishes a new form of the trancendent, is theology. Two relevant characteristics of this psychologized theology are following:

1. Identity: A transcendent image of the self and the others which becomes normative and dictates behaviour. It has to care about its preservation, its consolidation against threats, its demarcation vis a vis other ones. It feeds an "I/You must", "I want/I reject", "I am afraid/I hope" etc. It brings forth the longing, the claim for another better self, parent, partner, child, life, world, that would not question this transcendent image, but would suit it, would make the world in the "image and semblance" of it.

2. Thoughts, feelings, images, wishes become objects of interpretation which translocates them "beyond immediate experience" to the transcendent place of the unconscious and suggest that "in reality" I am someone else than what "immediate experience" witnesses. For example in the case of my backpack it tells me that I am an impenitent good-timer who wants all his life to be on vacation, and at the same time a socially suppressed being who doesn't allow himself such nonsense. What it would tell me in case it focused on the sexual symbolisms implied above, I don't dare even to think about...

The suction of the transcendent translocates us, and our new place has the form of a court. It instils guilt in us, a debt to an instance which does not belong to life's immanence and usurps life, it neutralizes life's gravity center and renders it its satellite. In this court we are not only the accused ones but also the prosecutors, against ourselves and against the others, who owe us, too. This is the reason why an interpretation allegedly revealing the true intentions, in psychotherapy by a specialist as well as in everyday life by anyone, skids more or less emphatically towards accusation. The transcendent, here in the form of the psychic, the psyche, entering the scene by means of interpretation, becomes source of innumerable nonsensical dilemmas, conflicts, misery and suffering.

I mentioned the longing, the claim for another better self, parent, partner, child, life, world. Accordingly the relationship with my wife is often not a relationship with the "immediate experience" of her, but with a woman who transcends her, a woman like whom I want my wife to be. Inevitably there will follow criticisms, complains and accusations, conflicts, wounds that one will inflict upon the other. The same happens in the relationship with parents, kids, others, with life and the world.

Some years ago I came upon a "chamber music theatre" by the Korean componist Younghi Pagh-Paan called "Mondschatten" [Moon Shadows]. The Libretto is based on Sophocle's tragedy "Oedipus Coloneus" and contains an interstitial poem by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. It is Antigone speaking to her father Oedipus:

[Father!]

Judge Gods,

Kill them.

Indifferent are they to men.

These Gods strike us

Wound upon wound.

Wounded from wanderings

Wounded from crying

Wounded from dreaming

Wounded all over is your soul.

Breathe through your wounds!

Let your wounds blossom!

Your wounded head isn't yet

Nobody's face,

Sun and moon,

Light's and shadow's

Friendly change

Don't mirror in there.

Your soul is

just a burden.

Till death

You are going to suffer it.

Cut your soul off.

As mentioned, what is said about Gods is also valid for a modern form of transcendence, the psychologized psyche and the sufferings it brings along.

Now, in the middle of the poem, a turn occurs: "Breathe through your wounds! / Let your wounds blossom!" It feels like an echo from a note by the writer Elias Canetti: "A wound that becomes lung and through which you are breathing". And also an echo from an exhortation by the poet Paul Celan: "Go into your most own pass - and free yourself!"

It would be a relapse into the transcendent to present a rule, a method about how such things happen. Let's say only that it happens the same way in which the visibility changes "when the wind turns", as a greek singer says: "Cities you saw from the ship's watchtower / as the wind turns". Or as the tangible transparency the air acquires when a cathartic storm is over. It can happen now and then, even as a glimpse, in the course of psychoanalysis.

How is it when one "judges" and "kills" gods, that is the transcendent which insists on determining and wounding his life? We hear it as the poem continues. It is what Antigone's father is not yet: "Your wounded head isn't yet / Nobody's face, / Sun and moon, / Light's and shadow's / Friendly change / Don't mirror in there."

At the head of one freed from the possession of the transcendent mirrors the friendly change of sun and moon, light and shadow. What does "friendly change" mean here? It means that sun and moon, light and shadow are not opposites, they do not combat and do not invalidate one another; none of them insists in its presence when its time is over, none of them postpones its appearance when its time has come. When all this mirrors in a head, then this does not intervene on its own in the flow of things, it does not intend to impose its own guidelines, it does not leave traces behind, for example it is not proud as a peacock on the anniversaries of its birthdays and its inevitable death does not weigh it down. It becomes a face of "nobody".

I forget my backpack, the outcome is any possible one and life goes on. It is not despoiled by the instance of an Id, or a Superego, which would reproach me in the name of unconscious wishes and social imperatives.

The immanence of life. There is a long tradition testifying it.

- About a wise man from the Far East the saying goes: "When he is hungry, he eats and when he is sleepy, he goes to sleep." And another one, upon the question of a newcomer student about the right way, asks him whether he has eaten. Upon the affirmative answer of the student he responds and his response illuminates the disciple: "Then go clean your plate."

- According to the pre-socratic thinker Parmenides everything that is not happening in the field of direct interrelation between mind and beings is being declared as the source of illusion and confusion.

- The 17th century mystic Angelus Silesius writes in a couplet: "The rose is without 'why'; it blooms simply because it blooms. / It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it." The German philosopher Martin Heidegger comments on these words:

Sure we would think very shortsighted if we assumed that the meaning of the saying of Angelus Silesius exhausts itself by simply naming the difference between the ways in which rose and man are what they are. The tenance of the saying -and on it depends everything- says rather that man, in the deepest depths of his essence, is only true when in his way is like the rose - without why.

- The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in a note:

It is essential for our research that by it we do not want to learn anything new. We want to understand something that is already open in front of our eyes. Because it seems that this is, which in a way we do not understand.

And elsewhere:

For us the most important aspects of things are hidden because of their simplicity and their everydayness.

- But also the work of art, of any art, belongs to the immanence of life being essentially handiwork, work of a craftsman.

- And all this could be summoned under a title of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard: "abîmes superficiels", "superficial abysses".

Freud's "immediate experience", if it would be left in its immediacy, would end up in the vicinity of that tradition.

We return to the poem. The last verses say: "Your soul is / just a burden. / Till death / You are going to suffer it. / Cut your soul off."

Then psychoanalysis would be psychoanalysis, with the "psych-" stroken through; with the psyche wayfaring towards its deletion - a course heading precisely to an abode in the immanence of life, the "immediate experience" and its "superficial abysses".

"Mind the Gap!" The gap between the subway car and the pier is a fact of immediate experience.

Not so with the gaps that worry Freud. Let us recall his words:

[The hypothesis of the Unconscious] is necessary because the information provided by consciousness is riddled with gaps to a high degree; [...] All these conscious acts remain incoherent and incomprehensible [...]

These gaps are therefore not like the ones in subway stations. They appear where one perceives things on the canvas of connection and understanding. Wherein the "and" between connection and understanding is exactly not conjunctive, but explanatory: to understand means to connect. Only when connecting and understanding constitute a structural element in the layout of my existence, the absence of the backpack on my shoulder will be conceived of as a gap. Existential gap, and therefore a threatening one, ready to devour the existence into its darkness.

Forms of absence, for example dreams revoked in awakening (where do they come from?), past and future (how did it happen? what is going to happen?), forgetting (where did it go?) and remembrance of the forgotten (where has it been?), death (where do the dead go?), these and other forms of absence, in the framework of connection and understanding, are highly prone to be immediately conceived of as gaps.

Where does the sun go when it disappears in the West? The answer is given in various ancient texts by Homer, Hesiod, the poets Stesichorus, Mimnermos and others: In the evening the Sun God, Helios, hides in a large gold cup which during the night is carried bythe waves of the Ocean (the river encircling the earth, Horizon) from West to East. There he rises up again.

But just a moment! Is this myth actually an answer? The question, to which it is supposed to respond, "Where does the sun go when it disappears in the West? ", is never being asked! But if there is no question, then the disappearance of the sun in the West leaves no gap and the myth is not some primitive explanation, not the answer to a Why?, but the narrative, the tale of the world!

How can we follow this? Something so alien to our modern way of thinking? Is it really so alien? I recall a saying of Pablo Picasso: Je ne cherche pas, je trouve. (I don't search, I find.) In that case the tale of the world would not be secondary response to a relevant question, but primary, "immediate" experience! Even in the way of a tale! Its word would be a talking of the "superficial abysses".

In such a representation of the world nothing is interrogated, nothing needs to provide reasons, to justify its existence. That is why all is quiet. This atmosphere is found in many occasions throughout our tradition. Johann Sebastian Bach for example is not a composer creating by inspiration and agony. The composer calls the piano to unfold its potentialities, and the piano is unfolding itself. This music is a tale of the piano! The German novelist Peter Handke writes in the "Essay on fatigue":

Those still lives with flowers from the seventeenth century, mainly from the Netherlands, where on the flowers is sitting, as if it were real, here a bug, here a snail, there a bee, there a butterfly, and even though none may have any idea about the presence of the other, for the moment, in my moment, all are neighbouring to one another.

We are talking about a world indifferent to connections and understanding, and therefore without doubts and gaps. In all this wealth there is a quiteness, a comfort. It is the absence of gaps, the absence of struggle, of questions, of thinking which considers and combines and explains, whereas in scientific research for example, each explanation brings forth a multiplication of questions. Franz Kafka calls it the "spiritual world": "The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us from hope and gives us certainty."

Therefore in psychoanalysis of the stroken-through psyche there would be no longer the strain for interpretation as connection of gaps and restoration of a "meaningful cohesion", for overcoming the analysant's resistance. There would take place a baptism of things that usually tire and torture, in that "spiritual world". Then the Whys and the Becauses would not remit someone into concern and confusion but would float in the breeze of a belle indifférence and could even become a lullaby: why and why .... because .... good night.

We are no more talking about the individual symptom that has to be interpreted, connected. First of all we are talking about the abandonment of this name and its diffusion in the "spiritual world". There is no more need for thought. What is needed, is a peculiar kind of attention. The poet Paul Celan describes this attention by using a word of Malebranche, as the "natural prayer of the soul." This attention differs from scientific accuracy. Accuracy seeks certainty. Certainty is the business of the scientist. It is himself that it refers to. It satisfies his own quest, which is unambiguousness, computability, predictability, controllability and verifiability of his propositions. Attention, on the other hand, is not the business of the attending one. It is dedicated to that which it attends. Attention is selfless. That's why, as opposed to accuracy, it can be reverent. It can expand across …, towards the Other.

We could demonstrate this by the view things acquire when seen under the microscope. Household dust.

And now this same dust at magnification of X22million.

At the kaleidoscope now revealed, where there was a uniform gray tuft, so many things become discernible: long hairs, cat fur, twisted synthetic, woollen fibres, serrated insect scales, a pollen grain, plant and insect remains.

Watch the difference between a foto of the sun

and the sun in a painting by Van Gogh!