The Lack of Catharsis is Killing Ufology

Freud’s conception of “release” described by psychiatry as catharsis or abreaction is noted in a New York Review of Books review by Bill McKibben, February 9^th, 2017 issue, of David Sax’s new book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter [Public Affairs, $25.99]

The book and review promote the idea that there is a return to things analog by young people (millennials); i.e., vinyl LPs, paper notebooks, board games, et cetera.

In a nod to the expensive magazine The Economist [$150 for a year subscription], a deputy editor of the magazine offers that it’s a desire to show off that allows the magazine its present attention by the younger crowd but more importantly, writes Sax, a magazine “has ‘finishability,’ a defined beginning, middle, and end.” It doesn’t spool on forever in the manner of the Web” the reviewer (McKibben) points out. [Page 4]

The Economist deputy editor says “We sell the feeling of being smarter when you get to the end … It’s the catharsis of finishing.” [ibid]

And that’s it!

UFOs (flying saucers) go on forever, with no explanation, no denouement.

The phenomenon remains open-ended, all of it: Roswell, in particular, and every other UFO story or report.

Nothing is resolved or has been resolved, nothing.

Human beings, according the psychiatry and some philosophical musings, need a terminus, an orgasm as it were, to feel fulfilled.

Musicians and composers know that musical selections have to resolve with chords (or codas) that terminate their pieces, and there’s a “science” for that.

Playwrights who succeed end their plays to provide attendees to their effort a resolution, but not always, as with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but that’s a syndrome of the modern era, as Jung noted in The Undiscovered Self and Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

And UFOs, especially in the modern era, seemed amenable to explanation, but that hasn’t turned out to be.

We are now at a point where many, as I have recently noted here, have forsaken interest in the phenomenon, whereas the rest of us have become like the “druids” in Charles Ives’ splendid musical essay, The Unanswered Question who receive no response from the gods for their increasingly frenzied queries.

The psychical frustration of no answer(s) to the UFO mystery have taken their toll and only the psychopathic remnant of the phenomenon will continue to seek answers, knowing, in their unconscious, that an explanation is not forthcoming, even with their fantasy of “disclosure.”

N.B. Image at top from https://freudscases.wikispaces.com/Catharsis

RR