[Xmca-l] Re: The Ego and the Interpersonality

[HENRY SHONERD]

David writes: 

> "The "First Time Fails" is--to me--a simple description of the necessary time lag between
> the presence of choices in the environment and the emergence of true,
> informed free will in the chooser: free will as the (hopefully not too
> tardy) recognition of necessity.”

Which circles around back to Hamlet, right? Ontogenetically. Hamlet’s self. So it is in REPAIR that Hamlet gets it right, that is, what’s necessary. 
With his father’s ghost as Arjuna. Hamlet finally frees himself by repairing the world. First in word, then in deed. 

And I think there’s a logogenetic, poetic, aspect worth noting. The syntax of the following sentence seems archaic, even Germanic, to the modern ear, but there is something NECESSARY in the order of words that puts the verb at the end of the Ghost’s rage-filled grief in describing his murder at the hands of his brother, Claudius:

“Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand, of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatched…Cut off…”

The audience knows that the former king was killed, so the action is already primed in their individual and collective minds, but a complete sentence reqluires the verb, and we get first the Latinate “dispatched”, with the Anglo-saxon “cut off” to nail the coffin. One can imagine Kyd putting the verb earlier on, in a Clive Custler style. But Shakespeare chose the poetic route, rather than the pornographic. (This may be a stretch.)

Which brings me back to something else David said:

"Both Vygotsky and Halliday see free will as the key
problem to be explained and both set about explaining it by stating
that external options in the social situation of development are what bring
about the activity of choosing (lines of development) and at last the
initernalization of systems of choices (neoformations).”

Arguably, Shakespeare just internalized more systems of choice than Kyd.  What’s amazing is how Vygotsky was able to cram so much internailzing into so few years. Certainlly that would have to do with his interpersonality. 

Henry