Why not gamble and 'play the system' quite seriously in this sense. Let us talk about marriage as something real, a conjunction between people or between people and the opposites of themselves. In this sense we are internally polygamous to quite a remarkable extent. What we leave out, significantly, is our secret and secreted marriage to ourselves. So, the internal constellation looks somewhat like this:

The usual state of affairs here is that Self haltingly gropes through the family world both inside and outside his mind and then stumbles into the world outside the family. The world outside the family, he finds, tries to make itself as much like the family world he has known before as it can, just as the family world tried to make itself as much like the world outside as it could. There seems to be no worthwhile difference between the two unless Self, the person, can invent such a difference.

If the person realizes this, that in fact the essence of being a boring person is not to have gone beyond, in imagination at least, the limited horizons of one's family and to repeat or collude with repetitions of this restrictive system outside the family; that, in short, to be a boring person is to be a family person, a person who finds the primacy of their existence in the mirror reflection rather than in the mirrored. Then the person may go back to where he started and try to meet himself, court himself and marry himself.

Of course when the person returns to his Self his line of vision is distorted by serial refractions through others, firstly outside and then inside his family, and all the time through the others inside as well as outside his mind (a sense of difference if not a defining awareness is always there). Finally, however, when this project has been accomplished, Self meets himself in a deserted inner world - all the others have shrivelled up with the irradiation effects of his spirit and he wanders alone in the wasteland, finding sustenance in the stone he sucks and the ash ingested by the pores of his skin.

Then, if he wants an oasis, he will form one between the mounds of his sand with the tears he secretes. Then he might invite another to come to him for sustenance and to sustain him.

But he will always remain in his desert because this is his freedom.
If one day he no longer needs his freedom then this is his freedom also.
But in any case the desert remains.

If we attempt to look at the expression of love as a social fact, one social reaction becomes dominant in the whole field of responses : the reaction of hatred. The appearance of love is subversive to any good social ordering of our lives. Far more than being statistically abnormal, love is dangerous, it might even spread through the aseptic shield that we each get each other to erect around us. What we are socially conditioned to need and expect is not love but security. Security means the full and repeatedly reinforced affirmation of the family. A man marries a woman whom he will never leave and because she knows that he will never leave her she will never leave him. She accepts the conditionality of her situation because there is a social bribe built into it in the sense that her husband can only opt out of the conditional system if he, as the apparent initiator of the whole scene, accepts guilt that may be lethal or nearly lethal to him. So he suffers, this poor man, at least until at last the penny drops and he sees through the megalomania that he has been so well instructed in and sees his own pay-off in terms of the capacity to feel endlessly guilty and lacerate himself with this alien guilt.

Once a man in his late thirties, married with four children, told me this story. One night, not having taken alcohol or any other drug, he awakened at 3 a.m. He had been in a dreamless sleep until he suddenly awakened to a startling realization about what he thought to be the meaning of his whole life. At first it seemed very gentle, a gradual silting-up of the blood in the small vessels at the extremities of his body. It started under his finger-nails and toenails and in the lobes of his ears and the tip of his nose. Then it spread as an ominous clotting through all the major blood vessels of his body. At each moment he felt he might cancel out the experience by disappearing - flying off from his finger-tips, dropping off from the tip of his nose. The capillaries in his brain filled with coagulating blood and one by one his cortical neurones died - just enough were left for a consciousness of his heart. Then his coronary arteries clotted up until his heart stopped, died, and then burst into a huge galactic ejaculation that spread throughout the cosmos. In that moment of universal dissemination he experienced a melting away of every bit of anger and resentment to anyone that he had ever experienced. It was all pure love and beyond love compassion, until he told his wife of the experience later in the morning. He had been through at last a death and rebirth experience, he knew at last the meaning of compassion; there need no longer be any problems that really mattered between them.

But how she hated him for that. And how right she was. The social collective exists after all, and as long as we need it to exist as a collective we will need families that define love as subversive to security and normality. And we also need that all bluffs be called.

The tragedy in this case was nothing less than the fate of being married, of having one's relationship defined not in an interior way which would allow the possibility of indiscrete personal revelation, but from the outside in a manner that proscribes the utterance of truth - or else 'it all breaks up'.

Only, even if it does, it never does.

In an almost naive way it always seems strange and ironic to me that people cannot dare speak their truth, however distorted their perspective in this respect, in the relationship of marriage in any sense of the latter term, whether legally confirmed or based more straightforwardly on agreement and understanding between two people who want to love together with or without other people such as children coming into the menage. Yet people will rather go to the heavily stereotyped, complex figure called the psycho-therapist whom one pays by the hour - who has the full nature of the prostitute (being all things for any one) often without the honesty of realizing his vocation, but to whom one can trust one's experiences, although not too optimistically, on the level of death and rebirth.

With regard to 'problems' such as narcissism and homosexuality, it seems to me that psycho-analytic theory is overburdened with puritanical doubts about these states.

We can, I think, reduce this complex region to one very simple statement that need no longer be implied but rather directly stated.

One can no longer think of loving another person until one can love oneself enough. Love of oneself here means a full realization of one's body - both its outside folds and creases and fullness, darkness and light zones - but also the full experience of the insides of one's body - one has to know the fluctuations of one's bowel musculature, the sound of ureteral dripping into one's bladder, the blood in each ventricle of one's heart. Then, with a quasi-objectivity, having studied one's body like a physiologist, one can break down the compartmentalization of it into a gesture that means self-love. One has to get fully enough into the full erectile-ejaculatory sense of one's clitoris or penis.

Before one can love another one has to love oneself enough. Before one can love another of the opposite sex one has to be able to love another other of the same sex 'enough'. Whether one overtly lives out one's homosexuality or not is indifferent - but it is certain that one has to recognize its inruptions into one's fantasies³ and dreams - even into the fantasies a man has with the woman he loves, but even more because of the prevalent supression of the full sexuality of woman, between the woman and the man that she loves.

In fact narcissism and homosexuality are no more diseases or fixated states of development than are phenomena such as holding down a steady job, duly providing for one's family, or, in general, being a pillar of society.

The real problem for the therapist is when people sink
and drown in the latter state.
The real problem for the therapist is being a therapist.
The real problem is being.