| For some it never comes, that's the problem. edit: apart from "being aware" being kinda unrelated to anything I wrote, since you can still be unaware or aware as "your own person" or as someone who "gets meaning and truth from the outside". > that's why we expect the people we fall in love with to give our life meaning Surely that doesn't describe infants. In that comment I just see things about either getting meaning from others, or trying to be different from others, which is claimed to be our main "limiting factor in life". "Imitating someone" and "trying to be different from someone" are two sides of the same coin, and while necessary for early development, not all there is. Come to think of it: > The emergence of the stranger and his externalization stands in direct relationship to the degree of impairment of that which is most personal - namely, a person's identity. But how can inner development take place in children if everything that makes up their individuality is rejected and made foreign? Then identity is reduced to adaptation to those external circumstances that insure a child's psychic survival. Children do everything to fulfil their parents' expectations, and the way they do this is to identify with their parents, but then the child's individuality is replaced by a foreign element. That is why the 18th Century English poet Edward Young wrote: "We are born as originals, die as copies". > An identity that develops in this manner is not oriented to its own needs but to the will of an authority. [..] > I want to emphasize that the "stranger" in us is bred by a culture that won't accept the spontaneous expression of children's aliveness and vitality. This aspect of a culture gives rise to violent behavior and is responsible for the development of deficient identities. Personalities formed by the processes producing the inner stranger were never able to develop trust as an underlying component of their personality. Instead, they take on a "false identity" that makes them idealize repressive authorities in the hope that they will be rescued by the very people who are their tormentors. -- Arno Gruen, "The Need to Punish - The Political Consequences of Identifying with the Aggressor" And that's what I hear when I read that "we" expect people we fall in love with to give our meaning life, as if it relieves us from the pain of pointlessly seeking to be different, which just limits us. As if uniqueness, unpredictability, wasn't what makes us human, but what keeps us from reaching our full potential. I would never ever put that sort of onus on someone, much less someone I loved. I would not want to be with someone whose life had no meaning if I was run over by a bus, either. |