The MoneyLender

1. The MoneyLender

2. Moneylender • Provides us with a quick fix a panacea (healing potion) for whatever is ailing us • But we never read the fine print - their is a price to pay for buying a “spirit” • Its interest is exorbitant

3. Leonard Shares • As in the way of an addiction, I came to need more wine to give me the ecstatic high. Now I needed three glasses of wine for that incomparable moment... And the time of ecstasy decreased; the hangovers more painful. The interest payments became higher... The debt of guilt mounted so high I could no longer comprehend its infinite progression!

4. Moneylender, Carol, and the Ideal • Addiction to cocaine - to relationships and to the ego ideal • Sacrificed creativity for her lover(s) ideal relationship - in her head • Paying with paralizing guilt • If we are to begin transforming we have sever our relationship with the moneylender

5. Moneylender & The Addictive Cycle • Addictive cycle – denial that one is in the grips of an addiction and resentment that someone else did it and someone else better help • Addiction to the ideal relationship,we become obsessed to the “potential” in the other and believe we can save them • In the beginning the relationship has a creative energy that is like a drug intense and exciting

6. Moneylender: (AKA) Saviour Ideal • Despite the crazy energy of addiction the idealized saviour inside may even start to indulge in our lovers addiction just keep them or save them • We have to see that saving the other is an illusion • Moneylenders are involved in our relationships – we live off the high of our idealism and relationships potential but we give ourselves away in the meantime

8. Hickey Believed the Projected Dream Held By His Lover • It was the same old story... Evelyn was stubborn as hell... It kept piling up [guilt).. God, can you picture all I made her suffer, and all the guilt she made me feel, and how I hated myself! If only she hadn’t been so damned good - if she’d been the same kind of wife I was a husband. • This was their vicious circle. Hickey believed that killing his love he would free her from the misery of loving him - while shedding his guilt -

9. How the Moneylender Works • Cycle inflation and deflation “I can save you by myself” • Drug inflates creativity • Relationship meets an internal ideal - inflation - • Deflation “guilt and humiliation of being dependent” and the crash of our ideals: • Leading to hopeless depression / emptiness

10. Moneylender: Psycho-Dynamics • In addictions we experience the temptation to make ourselves into objects. • We are tempted to play either “the guilty one” [taking all the blame, absolute guilt] or its opposite... • “The self justified guiltless one”

11. A Healing Fiction: Story of Michael: Deepening the Phenomenological Inquest • Came from addictive background (grandfather alcoholic, father work-alcoholic, mother hysteric) • These dynamics scared Michael (fragile ego); feelings of abandonment, but left him with a desire to rescue and take care of his mother • A bind in the psyche revolved around Michaels anger for his mother and his Dad’s defence of her (breeding ground of guilt and confusion) • Early use of drugs - grand feeling, cocaine was a seizing of a rebel energy (getting away from possessive mother), driving stolen car - seduction of the demon lover

12. Allure of Women & Drug Indulgence • Most powerful drug of all • LSD marijuana - escape from reality, from fears, emotions • Freedom from possession • Being high was a career (music was secondary) • Marijuana padded the guilt • Becomes injured (real habit now)

13. White Lady • Cocaine eclipses the “hearing of the music” • http://alcoholism.about.com/b/2006/10/05/clapton-claims-cocaine-is-an-anti-drug-song.htm

14. Personifying the White Lady • The White lady, the one woman who never says no. I could always depend on it, or so I thought... Its a romantic drug...Snorting made me feel erotic and eventually compulsively erotic. So having sex with many women became part of my addiction... I knew I didn’t want to be doing this, but I knew I couldn’t stop doing it. I didn’t think I could go through withdrawal... To get of the would be fatal... I was afraid that I’d explode and go crazy and die, that my body would burst out of my skin.

15. Healing Dreams • Judge provoking woman was inner figure that had formed developmentally from his up bringing • This inner form was piggy backed by the moneylender - (“Pile on” debt becoming guilt)

16. Core Addiction: Love • Separation threw him into a “dark abyss” • Projecting his capacity for love onto his wife and on women rather than seeing the love in himself and taking responsibility for it • “I never learned to be truly independent as a man (become our own authority)

17. Heidegger and the Idea of Schuld • We think we can pay off our debt to the Moneylender, thereby becoming free of guilt as though we were objects that could be completed • But, since as Heidegger proposes, we are not the source of our own being,and no total control,we cannot be perfect • Thus, our real guilt may stem from (not being) or remaining committed to actualize our potential at the core of our being. • Living an objectified existence keeps us in a “purgatory of guilt” on earth - that can never be eschewed - which keeps us from becoming human

18. Conclusions • Making bargains with the ego /moneylender is an attempt to cover the nothingness–or gap in our being • In addiction we avoid facing the nothingness – (open place that is also dark face of wholeness) and because we become objects early in our development we lose the mystery of who we are and the creative potential to mould the mystery that we are. • Ultimately we must face the ego and its death