individual impulses felt as compulsion traverses collective
We could say that something courses through the collective and is picked up and expressed in different mediums by different individuals, and that that expression constellates a kind of subcollective around it, a style of music or a school of painting or a branch of science, to articulate back to the collective this impulse that came, originally, from or through the collective. This something, this impulse, this idea, hasn’t a will so much as a force—a force so strong that it’s felt by individuals (individual scientists or artists or thinkers) as a compulsion, as something they must express.
Western thought has taken that expression to be personal … It’s not that there isn’t deep personal originality and courage in what we do individually; it’s that what we work with as individuals is an impulse or wave or force that courses through the collective we belong to.
Talents, you remember, used to be referred to as gifts.
Until therapy finds better ways to think about the collective and to differentiate among collective and individual impulses and forces and to look at how they interact, how can it fully address the world or the individual? Because if what I’m saying has any validity, then therapy is only treating a part of the individual, and therapy is not even sure which part. How that individual expresses or denies, acts out or resists, a collective impulse—isn’t even on the table for consideration.