By Weston Hogan

My first real girlfriend fucked a friend of mine in my own car 50 feet from where I was.  I found them there, and then, in an act of grace, sadness and regret, held her in the grass for a long while, letting the chiggers feast on our uncovered legs.  The moment I decided to leave, I knew I didn’t love her anymore.  I didn’t say goodbye, but drove 130 miles back home, in the middle of the night.

In my first near death experience, I woke up crying with an IV pumping nutrients back into me.  I had gone into an alcoholic coma, the first time I had ever really had alcohol, and through second-hand reports, expelled a lot of bile that was festering in me about my life and my choices.  Since that night I haven’t been afraid.  I learned joy then.
        
Laughing together comfortably for the first time in ten years, my brother and I drank beers and ate mushrooms.  The past arose in conversation, and for the first time, at 20, I learned that our mother was raped when I was four.  I immediately sensed that this event had shaped the course of my development, and had seen in my life since multiple refractions of this incident in other women close to me.  That crime had placed itself over me 16 years before I had ever learned of it, and I’ll never know how to explain my gratitude, debt, and love to my mother for her survival and overcoming of it.  I nearly threw myself in front of a tram on the way home, but instead I survived too. 
        
These are some of my moments.  Moments of tension and resolution, or an opening up to a new conundrum.  All are different, but there’s something absolutely singular about the unity of the few situations in your life that truly change its course.  For me there’s something unmistakable and profound about the hardest and the most intense seconds.  During these seconds, the body is absolutely in control and instincts overcome any relationship you have to the social.  You are absolutely outside the experience, because it isn’t you yet.  That moment hasn’t been incorporated yet.  That moment—which you intuitively know immediately, will be a driving moment from the inside: a true turning point that forces your character in a new direction—becomes the author of your future self.  Consequences don’t apply themselves automatically, every orientation must be re-examined in light of new information.
        
The roller coaster image is applicable here; you find yourself a hundred feet lower than the second before, but your stomach hasn’t yet had a chance to catch up with the rest of you.  The same happens in these moments.  Your psyche is following its expected course, and all of a sudden you plummet.  You recognize, at the sensual level, that a change has occurred, but it’s still the previous you looking the moment in the face, just for an instant, and the pain of your ego shifting, hard, in a matter of seconds, is devastating.
        
The comparison to therapy emerges.  New unconscious information is brought to the fore, and a huge and simultaneous shift must be made to compromise.  The self makes a major leap in an instant, as the contradictions become too much.  There is, in that instant, a moment of absolute uncertainty as to the condition of your own identity.
        
This formula holds, for me, in the socio-political realm.  Moments of crisis are legion in history.  It’s an absolute break, founded on a new reality that is either emergent from actual history, or made known through revelation.  In the former category I would place the French Revolution, and in the latter, Darwin’s discovery of evolution by means of natural selection.  We can see that the moment of Darwin hasn’t been absorbed appropriately by a society waiting for its unconscious to catch up to its knowledge.  Meanwhile the French Revolution, as a symbolic event in the first stage of human emancipation, stands as a reality absorbed, though it took five republics and five constitutions, the terror, Napoleon and an unprecedented revision of what terms freedom can be thought in.  Only after all these compromises were attempted could the emergent unconscious event (man must be made free) be mediated through reality (the beginning of the battle for human rights in effective legal terms).
        
Crisis in life, crisis in thought, and crisis in history are all a means of therapy, if we have the means to harness the potential of the event.  The 9/11 bombings could have forced us to see the contradictions of the north’s rhetoric of freedom versus its domination of the poor south.  Alternately, we could have come to some recognition of how little value Abrahamic monotheism gives to life, which conflicts not only with itself, but secular society’s convictions concerning humanity.  Instead national magazine headlines reading “why do they hate us?” demonstrate an absolute inability to engage with a real event as though it contained real significance.  “Terrorism” is not a value for anyone, period.  Terrorism is a means (however cowardly and distasteful) of defending other values; it is not an end in itself.  For this and other reasons, a “war on terror” is a war on nothing, or maybe just a war on desperation.
        
For now, this moment and many others remain shrouded in unconscious mystery for most.  For the same reasons that an individual tries to protect himself from psychic conflict, a nation of individuals, when forced to reconcile a conviction with an emergent unconscious idea (“America can do no wrong,” vs. “someone has a complaint”) must either repress the new information, or enact a new identity out of a synthesis of the two ideas, sometimes rejecting one completely.  My assertion is that America is absolutely unprepared, at this point, to shift its identity, for complex and entangled reasons of power, habit and economics. 
        
A fluid identity, one prepared to reconcile, compromise, and synthesize information (conscious and unconscious) requires less psychical expenditure to make those shifts.  In a sense, when one has nothing to lose, one can always afford to change.  When I woke up in the hospital, I felt I had nothing to lose.  The change was irresistible.  I realized that all of my social phobias didn’t correspond with reality; I could talk to strangers, I could speak my mind, and I could feel however I wanted, and the world would continue.  I learned a new freedom of self.
        
With my girlfriend, I had had plenty of opportunities, obvious to me in hind sight after the reconciliation between conscious and unconscious information, to discern the direction of the relationship.  I could not afford, economically, to lose the energy she was offering me and so I refused to see the evidence that showed I was in danger of it.  Equally, the instant when it finally appeared before me, unveiled, that I did not love her and could get nothing from her again, I had nothing to lose and was able to reconcile all of those feelings, through an admittedly slow process.
        
The case with my mother is different, as it deals with an emergent reality from revelation, rather than through history.  A moment in my mother’s past, which had defined her in some ways, which had surely cost her a lot of libidinal energy to organize and come to terms with, was affecting who she was without my knowing it.  Her character, which was a part of my organization as a child, bringing me through to adulthood, was affected by an event outside of my knowledge.  One could compare this to the posited creation of the universe by a supreme being.  The moment of Darwin (like many other scientific clashes with religion before and after it) did not change the nature of the universe.  It changed our understanding of how our world developed into what it is.  This latent fact eternally put at odds religion and natural history.  How could we reconcile the geological record with the biblical 6,000 years as the age of the earth?  The question has been answered libidinally, with those who have something to gain psychically from religion unable to concede the date, and those who gain no benefit from religion absolutely prepared to accept the new information and integrate it into a new understanding. 
        
If I believed at the time of my learning of my mother’s rape that I had grown up in an ideal situation, with an ideal family, in an ideal place, and that nothing bad ever happened to good people, I could have potentially repressed the new knowledge of what had happened.  But I did not have that prejudice to lose.  I had accepted the unfairness of the universe, or perhaps the a-fairness of the universe, and was prepared to learn the truth, however brutal it might have been, and to integrate that into a new identity that included the new information.  It’s still not easy to hear painful information, but in my situation, free of psychic dependence on any certain fact, I was able to change my understanding to correspond to the facts.
        
It’s true one can point to education for a chance to change the interpretive skills of the public.  I don’t think this is the real solution.  Intelligence, while it may be lacking in most communities, is not what stands in the way of a more understanding society.  Rather, economic expectancy, whether physical or libidinal, forces facts not to connect.  It keeps identity static.  It does not allow for a real shift, and so the new facts either present themselves in a mutated fashion, or they are ignored outright.
        
The reason we can’t change the general population’s mind about religion, about war, about anything, is that people depend on these things as sources of libidinal satisfaction in one way or another.  Economically, crisis will maintain itself, instead of synthesizing itself into a new flexible identity.  The freer that information can pass between conscious and unconscious spaces, the more fluid the identity, the more true the response to perceived reality.

I have a feeling we have a lot of critical moments coming.  I don’t think we can collectively spare what we have enough to accept a new identity.  The greatest hope is that mankind can suspend its libidinal dependencies to adapt to material reality.