Sea Dreams: On Adam Blum’s “How to Surf the Oceanic Feeling”

ABSTRACT

This essay is a series of short meditations on Adam Blum’s “How to surf the oceanic feeling.” Working in identification with Blum, and through the heaping up of associations to theory and literature, it considers (among other things) the “unintended story” of the group implicit in Blum’s poetic paper.

This article refers to:

How to Surf the Oceanic Feeling

View responses to this article:

Shaka Waves: Reply to González and Hartman

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ It is impossible to take any description of the “native” by a Western explorer/colonizer with innocence, or at face value. Still, this description by Anderson strikes me as less tinged by the more usual possessive air of making the other exotic, and more by a genuine sense of awe and envy of the man’s actual pleasure.

² To the contrary: my own gratitude spurred me to listen to everything invoked in the essay. I strongly recommend it.

³ In mathematics epsilon (ε) is used to indicate an arbitrarily small positive value.

⁴ Full of pity rather than miserable.

⁵ Not all will (can ever) be included in this us. Any notion of we marks a place of (typically unconscious) exclusion. Any writing, any speaking, is backed by this chorus of invisible voices which locate a position in the social order from which “we” speak. Impossible to think we can ever be fully conscious of the complexity of this location – and never without the help of others. Still, we could not fully live without these contingencies of the collective.

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Notes on contributors

Francisco J. González

Francisco J. González, MD, is Personal & Supervising Analyst, Community Psychoanalysis Supervising Analyst, and Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC). He is on the faculty of PINC and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis.