[Shaahayda Rizvi]

#4447

Hello Stephen,

Thank you for your reminder emails  that brought me back to this profound topic of which I know very little but would love to explore.

As I came across the following lines,  ” As Jung himself put it, “The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.” (CW12:¶93) Hence the tendency shared by each of these primordial impulses to “become terrific, horrifying, and destructive,” as Campbell observed in Inner Reaches (xv).”  Like you, my thoughts went right to ” Kirtimukha” while reading Dr. Norland’s essay where he explores the ultimate identity between love and the death drive, and that which can destroy itself is truly alive.  And later I looked at the lives of those who loved and suffered for that love in recent times — Oscar Wilde’s name  is second to none in searching for that ” paradoxical and irrepressible sexual energy of Love, the self-generating and self-consuming power of life, bubbling up to human consciousness in the metaphysical boiler of the death drive (todestrieb)”.

Shaheda