Ah. Yes.

Ah. Yes.


The best love letter I ever received was one word. Back in the days when people actually put pen to paper, and between the salutation “Dear Lycia” and the “Love, …” was scrawled in large, very large, letters, the single word, “YES.” It answered no asked question and therefore answered every possible question, evincing an openness to infinite possibility.

In an Angels and Airways song, Lifeline, the refrain goes:
"We all make mistakes.
Here's your Lifeline.
If you want it I want to."

But it sounds to me like singer Tom DeLonge is really singing:
We all make mistakes.
Here's all I’ve learned.
If you want, I want to.
For me, If you want, I want to, is ‘yes,’ where ‘yes’ is the giving oneself over to the other (or to the experience) in a leap of faith, the leap of faith required to open oneself to the experience of the other in the therapeutic dyad.

I am reminded of the 1981 paper by Michael Eigen The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion. (IJPsa., 62:413-433) [see also blog post of 2-14-09]: “For Winnicott, … creativity permeates psychic life and is involved in the very birth of self and other...” and, “Winnicott assumes life is primarily creative and in infancy this creativity unfolds …” Eigen elaborates Winnicott’s infant: “while the infant is living through creative experiencing, he neither holds on to anything, nor withholds himself.”[italics added, to emphasize the 'yes' of it] …“The true self feeling involves a sense of all out [italics added] personal aliveness …This connects with Bion's insistence that truth is necessary for wholeness and emotional growth….For Winnicott, the true self feeling is essentially undefensive...” [italics added].

Even Bob Hicok’s Confessions of a Nature Lover celebrates the ‘yes’ when he ends his poem:

"...that’s why we say
of real estate, location, location,
location, and of speech,
locution, locution, locution,
and of love, yes, yes, yes,
I am on my knees, will you have me,
world?"