Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card, Pamela Colman Smith’s Two of Swords from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, in front of a wooden shelf with various items on it including a shell, dried herbs, a piece of pottery, glass bottles and a silver tray. In the image, a person is dressed in gray and seated on a gray seat in front of a body of water with their back to it. A backwards crescent moon hangs in the upper right hand corner. The person is holding two swords facing in opposite directions and is wearing a blindfold and yellow shoes.
The recent Offerings have been a bit headier than I like them to be. Lacking in poetics and affect. I think it’s because I’ve been feeling so much. And while I’ve written a lot over the years from a place of strong feelings, I’ve also learned that when I get going from that hard place I can spill over more than I feel safe to.
On top of all the feeling I’ve been doing, I’ve been really busy with studies—readings for the narrative therapy training I’m in, finishing the last of my continuing education to renew my social work license, and slowly moving through the inaugural issue of a new leftist psychoanalysis magazine called Parapraxis.
I did not know what the word Parapraxis was about when I subscribed to the magazine. Like probably the majority of therapists and therapy-adjacent people who’ve been mostly trained in behavioral therapies I know very little about Freud, and psychoanalysis for that matter. The editors write that parapraxis is a term Freud gave to “a mistake whose meaning absolutely eludes us: we go scrambling slapstick style to repress or cover the embarrassment.”
But Freud, they continue, was "the very first person who articulated a theory of how and why we make mistakes—and that mistakes are meaningful. Rather than something sorely and solely in need of correction and discipline, errors were, for Freud, compromises between a desire and a limit.”
This language makes me think immediately of Lewis Hyde’s work on trickster, who sometimes comes in the form of mistakes, missteps and folly, things that are easy to discount as meaningless, but that Hyde argues ultimately make the world.
Hyde draws a lot on characters from old stories, which is something I’m sorely missing with all the academic reading I’ve been doing. For me, old stories feel like they come from and speak to a place of raw feeling, to the extent that such a place exists. When I tap into those currents, I’m able to think and write from that place, typically without having to reveal too much that I’d rather keep private.
This balance of academic and emotional inquiry—for want of better terms—is one I’ve been doing for years and which I think forms the basis of these Offerings. I felt instantly validated by the editors’ of Parapraxis, who write in their letter that “it’s one of the most difficult critical tasks to give equal weight to both social critique and psychoanalytic insight.” They describe the magazine itself as “deeply ambivalent,” and then quote Marxist theorist Stuart Hall who said that one must “live with the tension of the two vocabularies.”
Anyway, all that’s to say this is another sort of heady Offering and I really appreciate those of you who are here reading and riding the waves of both social critique and psychic insight which are the waves that I’m riding, myself. An essay each week means that some weeks I’m deep in philosophy and others I’m deep in a folktale. Trying to braid these things together is for sure a hard task, and I appreciate this permission to do ambivalent work, which refuses to be one or the other.
So I wrote last week about this distinction I’m trying to unpack, between frameworks for understanding reality that center questions of functioning as opposed to frameworks that center meaning. This is important to me because I’ve spent a long time immersed in a field that understands humans and human behavior in terms of the former, in terms of functioning. And while that’s visible in my work, my loyalties have grown increasingly in the direction of meaning.
In their book Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, Jill Freedman and Gene Combs—who I’m training with this year—talk about different metaphors that have been used to think about therapy.
Cybernetics—defined by Oxford Languages as “the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things”—inspires a metaphor of systems to understand reality. Many therapies past and present rely on a systems way of thinking as a basis for therapeutic work; an individual exists inside a family system, which exists inside larger systems, and so on.
Freedman and Combs write that earlier systems perspectives viewed therapists as “separate from and able to control families…[who] can make detached, objective assessments of what is wrong, and fix problems in a way analogous to the way a mechanic fixes a malfunctioning engine” (1996).