Loading ...The variety of defense works with which the human being hedges himself in is just as astounding as the visible defense mechanisms in the animal and insect worlds.
There is a texture and substance even to the psychic fortifications, as you discover when you begin to penetrate the forbidden precincts of the ego. The most difficult ones are not necessarily those who hide behind a plate of armor, be it of iron, steel, tin or zinc. Neither are they so difficult, though they offer greater resistance, who encase themselves in rubber and who, mirabile dictu, appear to have acquired the art of vulcanizing the perforated barriers of the soul. The most difficult ones are what I would call the «Piscean malingerers». These are the fluid, solvent egos who lie still as a fetus in the uterine marshes of their stagnant self. When you puncture the sac, when you think Ah! I’ve got you at last! you find nothing but clots of mucus in your hand.
These are the baffling ones, in my opinion. They are like the «soluble fish» of Surrealist metem−psychology. They grow without a backbone; they dissolve at will. All you can ever lay hold of are the indissoluble, indestructible nuclei—the disease germs, so to say. About such individuals one feels that in body, mind and soul they are nothing but disease. They were born to illustrate the pages of text−books. In the realm of the psyche they are the gynaecological monsters whose only life is that of the pickled specimen which adorns the laboratory shelf.
Their most successful disguise is compassion. How tender they can become! How considerate! How touchingly sympathetic! But if you could ever get a look at them—just one fluorescent glance!—what a pretty egomaniac you would see. They bleed with «very bleeding soul in the universe—but they never fall apart. At the crucifixion they hold your hand and slake your thirst, weep like drunken cows. They are the professional mourners from time immemorial; they were so even in the Golden Age, when there was nothing to weep about. Misery and suffering is their habitat, and at the equinox they bring the whole kaleidoscopic pattern of life to a glaucous glue….