Courageous Living

Aykut Aydoğdu

Our civilization enormously underestimates the importance of sexuality, but just because of the repressions imposed upon it, sexuality breaks through into every conceivable field where it does not belong, and uses such an indirect mode of expression that we may expect to meet it all of a sudden practically everywhere. Thus the very idea of an intimate understanding of the human psyche, which is actually a very pure and beautiful thing, becomes besmirched and perversely distorted by the intrusion of an indirect sexual meaning. A direct and spontaneous expression of sexuality is a natural occurrence and, as such, never ugly or repulsive. It is “moral” repression that makes sexuality on the one hand dirty and hypocritical, and on the other shameless and blatant. This secondary significance, or rather the misuse which the repressed and suborned sexuality makes of the highest psychic functions, gives certain of our opponents an opportunity to sniff out the prurient eroticism of the confessional in psychoanalysis.

~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 295

Both of my father’s parents were teachers with college degrees. Most of his siblings graduated from college too. Only one of my father’s brothers never attended a university, the eldest, because the money was lacking. He worked in the oil fields of west Texas until the 1930s when his father needed help running his primitive telephone company. He stayed a…