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A Modern Understanding.
of I, ie, purely subject, only symbolically spoken of as objects, That extia bodily things, just in so far as they are mune and not I, are independent need not, however, mean that they are as independent as a pan objectivist would have them From the humanistic point of view they too are symbolic 1epresentations of pure subjectivity Only, the mental and the bodily constitute one type of symbolic representation and the independent thing acother To this distinction we shall very
soon turn
19
Most people get upset when their bank balance, very definitely mine to everyone of them, fails Put some people there always are who, not necessarily of defective constitution, bear the loss quietly To bear the loss that way means they can stand aside, they can dissociate themselves, from the things they call mine The same is true of physical injury and mental unhappiness Most people identify themselves with their bodies and minds, so much so that they get puiturbed when these are threatened. But there are some, again, who can calmly bear physical pain and some mental discomfort too They are not necessarily of defective sensibility: it is not true that they do not have these pains and discomforts. They do have these and yet they can stand aside, i. e dissociate themselves from these To have these pains and discomforts means that so far they identify themselves with them, and to bear them calmly means that they so far dissociate themselves from them Simultaneous presence of identification and dissociation is no anomaly here The relation is precisely like one between distinguished form and the given complex from out of which the form is distinguished We have already seen that when the form is distinguished out what remains over is not a distinct matter. What remains over is the same old homogeneous fusion that was started with Similarly, when these people distinguish themselves, say, from mental states, they do indeed realize themselves as centres of pure subjectivity, and yet, at the same time, what remain over are the same old mental states exactly as they were experienced before the dissociation If there was no contradic
