The MoneyLender
Moneylender
Provides us with a quick fix a panacea (healing potion) for
whatever is ailing us
But we never read the fine print - their is a price to pay for
buying a “spirit”
Its interest is exorbitant
Leonard Shares
As in the way of an addiction, I came to need more
wine to give me the ecstatic high. Now I needed three
glasses of wine for that incomparable moment... And
the time of ecstasy decreased; the hangovers more
painful. The interest payments became higher... The
debt of guilt mounted so high I could no longer
comprehend its infinite progression!
Moneylender, Carol, and
the Ideal
Addiction to cocaine - to relationships and to the ego ideal
Sacrificed creativity for her lover(s) ideal relationship - in her
head
Paying with paralizing guilt
If we are to begin transforming we have sever our
relationship with the moneylender
Moneylender &
The Addictive Cycle
Addictive cycle – denial that one is in the grips of an
addiction and resentment that someone else did it and
someone else better help
Addiction to the ideal relationship,we become obsessed
to the “potential” in the other and believe we can save
them
In the beginning the relationship has a creative energy
that is like a drug intense and exciting
Moneylender: (AKA)
Saviour Ideal
Despite the crazy energy of addiction the idealized
saviour inside may even start to indulge in our lovers
addiction just keep them or save them
We have to see that saving the other is an illusion
Moneylenders are involved in our relationships – we live
off the high of our idealism and relationships potential but
we give ourselves away in the meantime
Hickey Believed the Projected Dream
Held By His Lover
It was the same old story... Evelyn was stubborn as hell... It
kept piling up [guilt).. God, can you picture all I made her
suffer, and all the guilt she made me feel, and how I hated
myself! If only she hadn’t been so damned good - if she’d
been the same kind of wife I was a husband.
This was their vicious circle. Hickey believed that killing his
love he would free her from the misery of loving him - while
shedding his guilt -
How the Moneylender Works
Cycle inflation and deflation “I can save you by myself”
Drug inflates creativity
Relationship meets an internal ideal - inflation Deflation “guilt and humiliation of being dependent” and the crash of our
ideals:
Leading to hopeless depression / emptiness
Moneylender: PsychoDynamics
In addictions we experience the temptation to make
ourselves into objects.
We are tempted to play either “the guilty one” [taking all
the blame, absolute guilt] or its opposite...
“The self justified guiltless one”
A Healing Fiction: Story of Michael:
Deepening the Phenomenological
Inquest
Came from addictive background (grandfather alcoholic, father work-alcoholic,
mother hysteric)
These dynamics scared Michael (fragile ego); feelings of abandonment, but
left him with a desire to rescue and take care of his mother
A bind in the psyche revolved around Michaels anger for his mother and his
Dad’s defence of her (breeding ground of guilt and confusion)
Early use of drugs - grand feeling, cocaine was a seizing of a rebel energy
(getting away from possessive mother), driving stolen car - seduction of the
demon lover
Allure of Women & Drug
Indulgence
Most powerful drug of all
LSD marijuana - escape from reality, from fears, emotions
Freedom from possession
Being high was a career (music was secondary)
Marijuana padded the guilt
Becomes injured (real habit now)
White Lady
Cocaine eclipses the
“hearing of the music”
http://alcoholism.abou
t.com/b/2006/10/05/cl
apton-claims-cocaineis-an-anti-drugsong.htm
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Personifying the White Lady
The White lady, the one woman who never says no. I could
always depend on it, or so I thought... Its a romantic
drug...Snorting made me feel erotic and eventually compulsively
erotic. So having sex with many women became part of my
addiction... I knew I didn’t want to be doing this, but I knew I
couldn’t stop doing it. I didn’t think I could go through
withdrawal... To get of the would be fatal... I was afraid that I’d
explode and go crazy and die, that my body would burst out of
my skin.
Healing Dreams
Judge provoking woman was inner figure that had
formed developmentally from his up bringing
This inner form was piggy backed by the
moneylender - (“Pile on” debt becoming guilt)
Core Addiction: Love
Separation threw him into a “dark abyss”
Projecting his capacity for love onto his wife and on women
rather than seeing the love in himself and taking responsibility
for it
“I never learned to be truly independent as a man (become
our own authority)
Heidegger and the Idea of
Schuld
We think we can pay off our debt to the Moneylender, thereby becoming free of guilt
as though we were objects that could be completed
But, since as Heidegger proposes, we are not the source of our own being,and no
total control,we cannot be perfect
Thus, our real guilt may stem from (not being) or remaining committed to actualize our
potential at the core of our being.
Living an objectified existence keeps us in a “purgatory of guilt” on earth - that can
never be eschewed - which keeps us from becoming human
Conclusions
•
Making bargains with the ego
/moneylender is an attempt to cover
the nothingness–or gap in our being
•
In addiction we avoid facing the
nothingness – (open place that is
also dark face of wholeness) and
because we become objects early in
our development we lose the mystery
of who we are and the creative
potential to mould the mystery that
we are.
•
Ultimately we must face the ego and
its death