21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

our inspiration and our response. The grace that is received and the grace that is ours to give. So, spirit, properly brought within the bounds of soul, is a welcome and essential part of us.

The Two Questions

Two questions were introduced at the start of this work. The first concerned the satisfaction of my own desire. The second was about how I might rationalise that satisfaction or accommodate it with the needs of the wider world in which we live. The first question was described as the central concern of psychoanalysis whilst the second is the concern of Marxism, or socialism generally. We are now in a position to go back to these initial questions and summarise where the argument of this work has brought us.

Psychoanalysis associates with the individual, Marxism with collectives. Psychoanalysis is the way to attend to pleasure and Marxism the way to attend to needs. But psychoanalysis suggests that we have abdicated our ecstasy when just infants. Happiness is something we feel we must be constantly seeking, so that desire and ecstasy can be recovered.

The recovery of ecstasy is really just a myth. It might describe something of the playfulness and delight that can be achieved when we are able to forget ourselves for a while in pleasure — in particular, when we greet the world with awe and recognise its true beauty. But more generally, the loss and recovery of ecstasy are just secular versions of the fall and redemption

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