Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/602

Back from lunch. I thought I was tired, and while I ate I let my mind rest. The result is that I now have an improvement on 601. There was a contradiction I kept worrying at in 601. Which is that compulsive people, (to take one example) often have acute sensitivity in limited ways. (One could indeed say that acute limited sensitivity satisfies society best because it allows excellent understanding within a category but prevents the wider understanding which is at the heart of concerted confident rebellion. (Understanding concerted confident rebellion as having its horrible under-echo which bursts through at times of chaotic insecure sentiments of crappiness.) But that too is necessary in order to have ventilation and to be able to express one of the two sides of the eternal opposite.)

So, to return to the compulsive with his acute limited sensitivity—of course the compulsive is the society builder, and in his vein he builds, builds builds, improves, modifies and adapts, but it is a very narrow vein and it is at the cost of his own life and lerve. But if he is sensitive it means that he can accept, he can allow certain things to enter, more than that his reflexes and reactions to acceptable material are very “enterable.”

So that when I speak of the compulsive suffering from a malfunction of the entering faculties what I mean is not an overall dimming, but rather a “hunching,” a location of too much in too little. So the rest of the compulsive remains comparatively rigid and constipated. But the compulsive expresses a noble faculty of man in his very crippling—it is “sensitivity.” Just as the hysteric in his or her inability to make (except partially and intensely) expresses sensuality and creativity by inference. So the phallic narcissist implies the mystic and mighty taker, the dependent the giver and locator (for a dependent person always gives in his or her deeply restricted but intense way, be it loyalty, love, submission, whatever).

So to restate it, the compulsive cannot enter or be entered except narrowly and intensely (his expertization); the hysteric cannot make except narrowly and intensely (his “scene”); the warrior-entertainer cannot take except narrowly and intensely (egotistically); the mystic-and/or-dependent cannot give except narrowly and intensely (vision) and or (faith).