Bendrix’s experience, refracted through the language of psychoanalysis, has something to add to all this. It is what the psychoanalyst André Green calls (as I quoted earlier) ‘the permanent dialectic between misrecognition and recognition in psychic work’, the attempt at satisfaction without turning into someone too unacceptable to oneself, or into something unacceptable to the ego. ‘Occultation’ – André Green’s word for the way in which we obscure ourselves – which means ‘hiding’, also has ‘occult’ in it, which might suggest the mystifying of experience, the adding of mystery to experience by
...more
