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The Psychopathy of Everyday Life

 

I hyper-cathect, but it’s what connects us,

Your craving for love, my excess of it that spills out onto you –

Your distance, or mystery, makes the perfect cathexis.

 

I watch you, then hide! This behavior perplexes.

It’s masochistic, the need to see and evade you too.

I attach too hard, but that’s just what connects us.

 

I think it’s your eyes, those dark green hexes,

Your green-black eyes crack my red heart blue –

Iris flecked with mysteries, the perfect cathexes.

 

Freud’s word was Besetzung; Strachey called it cathexis.

It’s a thing that pulls passion right out of you, catches you,

Till you stick, you cathect. It’s the force that perfects us,

 

Till our wires cross fiery and dumb desires vex us –

We go too far, kiss when we shouldn’t. I look at you

Across our great distance, my curdling cathexis –

 

Oh this crushing love is not the fun sex is.

It’s tragic, really, it’s our life-force that wrecks us.

I hyper-cathect, but that is what connects us.

Your mystery and distance make a hopeless cathexis.




Michael Seth Stewart

levelheaded: The Psychopathy of Everyday Life

 

The first words of this poem tell us much of what we need about its speaker. First, the poem begins with a hearty “I.” There’s no mistaking the speaker’s put the emotional ball in his own court. Though the poem is addressed to a particular “you,” the speaker defines their relationship. Second, the verb “hyper-cathect” grants the speaker an erudition that works in tandem with his self-consciousness. How does one cathect? The speaker knows he’s using a big word, framing it with references to Freud and his translator Strachey, but he also knows he’s “hyper” cathecting. His feelings and language supersede reality. He participates in a tradition of Wordworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

 

Speaking of “spontaneous overflows,” it’s clear this is a speaker who trips over his own emotions. There is dramatic irony in the sexiness of a line like “Your craving for love, my excess of it that spills out onto you.” It’s as if the speaker brimming so full of “cathexis,” he can help his Freudian, pornographic slips. That’s not to say the speaker doesn’t recognize sexual attraction is a large part of this repeated “cathexis.” He does admit “this crushing love is not the fun sex is.” But he isn’t willing to equate the two, so they come at us more subtly intermingled.

 

Tellingly, this speaker constrains this spontaneous overflow in a villanelle (though the poem bends the rules a bit). As a form, the villanelle allows for only two end rhymes. This limit forces the poem to turn back on itself, to reconsider territory it’s already covered. Because the primary end-rhyme, “cathexis” (“perfect cathexis,” “curdling cathexis,” and finally “hopeless cathexis”) is such an uncommon word, it emphasizes the speaker’s cerebral reconsideration of an intuitive feeling. “Cathexis” explicitly says what the poem does. The poem’s form also emphasizes the emotional limit the speaker feels toward the subject of his amor. We know he’s only observing from afar since he tells us “I watch you, then hide!” And there is no movement closer to this “you.” In the end, we hear resignation in “Your mystery and distance make a hopeless cathexis.”

 

So what of the title? “Psychopathy,” by definition, refers to an aberration from normal psychological function. So, “The Psychopathy of Everyday Life” is a technical impossibility, an oxymoron. It points out that our definitions of normal and abnormal are troubled. It purposefully undermines the idea of its own “cathexis,” even directing us to Freud’s and Strachey’s mutual invention of that word. “Cathexis,” an exaggerated feeling of love-lust we feel in the early stages of a relationship, is only separated from “real” love because it’s been named. And “psychopathy” only exists because we can find it in DSM-5 (or can we?).

 

Ultimately, this is a love poem that’s conscious of its own fruitlessness. The speaker considers his obsessive desire for the poem’s “you” without any plan to act. As readers we know the language is dripping with “love” and “passion” and “desire,” so those broad words – almost antipoetic in their Hallmark card approach to love – characterize the speaker as someone battling language to say what he means. What he comes up with is “cathexis,” a good word but just as insufficient as all the others.

 

 

-The Editors