Language-based image-making, image-based language:  We can  compare psychoanalytic work to the connect-the-dots games in children's books, where, if you connect the dots, you construct a picture. This is what the human mind does when it constructs a constellation out of the billions of stars in a black sky. A particular star, dot, word, resonates with other starts, dots, words -- we create patterns. Sometimes other people recognize the patterns with us, sometimes they don't. Psychoa...

PATHWAYS ON THE JOURNEY

“Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination”

“Ancora imparo” – Michelangelo, said when he was in his 90’s

“Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon” – Zen saying

La Noche Oscura Del Alma (The Dark Night of the Soul) --St John ...

LISTENING TO:  THE MIRACLE WITHIN LANGUAGE

Psychoanalysis is a narrative seeking narratives – “tell me a story”.

Language is a miracle.

Freud recognized what poets knew, that language carries wildness and relatedness, and communicates as much as there is… both conscious and unconscious is-ness.

Language can savagely or ecstatically represent the disorganized, fragmented states of mi...

THE GARDEN OF EDEN, THE FLAMING SWORD, THE GARDEN

OF EDEN

Does each human being have to eventually deal with a realization that

the very fact of being born begins with one’s self-becoming, one’s own

birth, traumatizing, injuring, the beloved mother? Does the physical

harm the baby causes the mother in labor, the mother giving birth,

become something th...

Updated Reviews

01/08/2013

My two volumes of poetry, Mad Crazy Love:  Love Poems and Mad Songs, and Ladder of Words, both published in 2011, were reviewed by noted psychohistorian Howard F. Stein, in the psychohistory journal Clio's Psyche, Volume 19, Number 3, December 2012, in an essay called "Poetry and Psychohistory". He says, "The two recent books of poetry by Molofsky would, for my taste, make for wonderful preparation for a psych...

Self and Existence

11/03/2012

I've been having a merry time reading Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, Liveright Publishing, New York, 2012.  As I've wandered, and engaged with, and surrendered to his guided tour through Western philosophy's approach to Being and Nothingness, I've wished that I had the sort of mind that could live up to, and keep up with his, and yet, I am grateful for the vastly entertaining Magical Mystery Tour he conducts. Tow...

THE EVIL IMPULSE

08/27/2012

Evil impulses are inherent in human nature, as are good impulses.

In Hebrew, the evil impulse is called yetzer ra, and the good impulse is called yetzer tov.  Acknowledging the existence of both impulses is essential to Jewish thought – as it is to Freudian psychoanalysis.  Freud postulated two drives inherent to human nature, eros and thanatos, a sexual drive and an aggressive drive. 

CREATIVITY

08/02/2012

When people are creative, in the myriad creative endeavors human beings have discovered and undertaken, they are affirming Existence.  Creativity is an act of saying amen to the Created World, and to personal existence. To participate in a creative act is to say Yes – yes, the universe should have been created, and yes, I should have been engendered, and born, yes, I should have come into the world. 

Creat...

Search For Self

07/01/2012

SEARCH FOR SELF:  WINNICOTT, “ELEANOR RIGBY”, SUFISM, THE IN GATHERING OF SPARKS, TRICKSTER AND THE FOOL IN THE TAROT DECK

The concept of self seems so simple, so obvious – until we stop taking “self” for granted and start thinking about it.

In “Ego distortion in terms of true and false self,” The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: St...

Poetry and Imagination

07/02/2012

“Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination”

“Ancora imparo” – Michelangelo, said when he was in his 90’s

“Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon” – Zen saying

"La Noche Oscura Del Alma" ("The Dark Night of the Sou...