dioramaorama wrote:
I think it's one thing to tell your story and another thing entirely to be your story.
The people who can never revert from the latter to the former, if they have a story that hellish (and maybe even not so hellish) are lost forever, it seems to me, doomed to intractable loneliness. As well as pathologies of all kinds.
This reminds me of the discussion of Wittgenstein and being trapped in language. The stripper "becomes used to describing herself to herself in a certain way", you're saying, she feels "as though there is some final truth about [herself] in those descriptions--a truth which cannot be violated."* If I understand correctly, AA says that this, for one reason, is wrong because if she begins to change over time she either won't recognize it because the change-language is not part of her vocabulary, or she will recognize it and feel that she is betraying herself. (her victimhood?)
I think where I get confused is that I thought that speaking at AA was like psychotherapy, specifically, the release of repressed or suppressed psychological material by "interfacing", to use an IJ term, with the therapist. And another reinforcement of the confusion, a thought-experiment attempted: imagining a person with a childhood that horrible who has no language for it, no "self-indulgent" or self-pitying language, no language, no ability to release suppressed material. A person that becomes, in essence, much like Hal is in the beginning of the book, trapped "in here". Would they be better off if they could at least express it all in a self-pitying way? I think so, even though it pushes people away. It's better than nothing, I think. But then there's the problem above. There are people where the abuse is documented but all we get is word salad, or a developmentally delayed level of language. This double-trap of the experience and the lack of language to wrestle with it stems from the stress of the abuse itself. (I've worked with schizophrenics like this--addicts among them--"dual-diagnosis"-- who could never function in an AA meeting.) See the movie "Caspar Hauser," for instance.
*Frank Deluxe, A Master's Thesis Proposal: Wittgenstein, Foucault, Language, and the Self (online)