freud's last session / the ape of thoth / 倉頡造字 / the mind-body connection

This is a post I started writing two months ago that I just finished originally I wanted to do more research but sometimes you just gotta let gooooo….anyway spoilers ahead…

I saw “Freud’s Last Session” today and left the theater with a crooked back. The state of having a crooked back, for me, is usually a psychosomatic sign that I’m running away from something, that I am expending a great deal of energy to ignore the signals my body is screaming at me.

I live in a relatively quiet neighborhood where movies like “The Taste of Things” and “Freud’s Last Session” often screen for less than a week, and start with my walking into an empty movie theater. Today was no different–I walked in, then back out, and then back in a couple seconds after x, y, and z moviegoers entered the theater. Thank goodness for humans–I don’t know that I’d have enjoyed watching a movie about Freud in the dark.

The film is based on Mark St. Germain’s play of the same name, which is based on yet another book relating to debates about the existence of the Divine that I can’t recall at the moment. Something something the debate isn’t particularly unique in its presentation–I’ve heard many of the points brought up between C.S. Lewis, Freud’s apparent last patient in the film, and Freud in various debates throughout my life (i.e., Reddit; Twitter; friends perhaps a bit too obsessed with playing devil’s advocate, engaging in yet another conversation about the toilets we all have upstairs as a means to run away from themselves; Christian apologists). But there were some interesting symbols/patterns I noticed in the film that I want to dump here and perhaps I’ll read “Freud’s Last Session” and write another thing sometime in the future anyway…Freud is the atheist, Lewis is the Christian apologist.

Freud’s desk is littered with figurines of gods, goddesses, and saints from various cultural traditions–for the purposes of this post, the Ape of Thoth and Saint Dymphna are most relevant here.

the ape of thoth

Per Claire Nakti’s insanely insightful video re: why people copy, Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, is typically seen with another figurine, termed the Ape of Thoth, who “ensures that all things that are put into writing are misunderstood by many people.” The act of putting embodied knowledge into writing also ensures that it will be misunderstood, because the spirit/essence of embodied knowledge cannot be conveyed via writing.

In a nutshell, reading the written form of another’s embodied knowledge does not give you the same embodied knowledge (e.g., reading the Bible every day doesn’t make you a devout Christian if you don’t embody Christ consciousness, collecting figurines of gods/goddesses/saints doesn’t make you an expert on why the everyday human worships the Divine).

I took this to mean that both Freud and Lewis, in this particular debate re: the existence of the Divine, are apes. I doubt that atheists and Christian apologists have an embodied understanding of the Divine when self-proclaimed devout Christians largely reveal themselves to be ape-ing as well…

…and I imagine someone with an embodied understanding of the Divine would see no reason to engage in a debate re: its existence.

I’m reminded of 倉頡造字 (Cangjie creates characters), a story I learned in Chinese school of how Chinese characters of yore came to be. I imagine there are various versions of this story roaming around on the Internet but for the purposes of this post, I’m going to summarize the story.

Long ago, a man named Cangjie decided that he wanted to create a written language that captured the essence of all natural things in this world. He looked at the moon when coming up with a character for the moon, the sun when coming up with a character for the sun and when he had looked at all things with his four eyes and come up with a character for each, he began to teach this language to the masses. Thereafter, the heavens rained crops, as the spirits anticipated humans would spend less time tilling the land. Many spirits came down from the heavens and began to wail, as they began to fear that with a written language, humans would dismiss the existence of spirits/the divine.

[insert big brain meme here]

saint dymphna

Saint Dymphna is highlighted during the film, when the pair find themselves in a Catholic church. In the film, Freud corrects a member of the clergy who mistakes Saint Dymphna for the patron saint of nuns. A quick Google search showed me the following: Saint Dymphna is the patron saint of the mentally ill; victims of domestic abuse and incest; and runaways.

At a rather uncomfortable point in the film, a scene of Freud psychoanalyzing his daughter, Anna Freud, ends with Freud saying that it is “too painful” for him to continue. Anna, who is shown to be extremely dependent on her father, begs him to continue his analysis, to save her from the demons of her mind. Some number of scenes preceding/succeeding this interaction, Lewis and Freud debate the nature of psychoanalysis, how making sense of the chaos that characterizes the subconscious is sexual in nature.

Something something if the subconscious is the ocean, the canal that penetrates the ocean to understand and direct its energy is the psychoanalyst. Something something this is why another name for enmeshment is emotional incest–your chaos is your responsibility to direct.

[insert big brain meme here yet again]

the mind-body connection

A not insignificant part of me is inclined to believe that Freud wasn’t actually as god-less/dependent on a mixture of whiskey and morphine to alleviate pain from a recent oral surgery to remove tumors as he was portrayed to be. In “Healing Back Pain,” Sarno indicates that Freud believed in psychosomatic conditions by way of “sometimes suppressed emotions result in hysteria because the energy needs to be discharged somewhere” instead of “your back hurts because you want to shirk your responsibilities.” Freud, however, did not believe that the mind-body connection was relevant to internal organs so maybe he was insanely dependent on whiskey+morphine idk none of this is organized in any capacity.

Any big brain meme p. 2 a la this scene from It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (again I don’t own the below):

내 간이며 쓸개며 아주 근양 다 썩어 문드러졌는데….

Anyway, happy Friday. 😀