Lecture Nine 1 "I am nothing" B: I'm a grown woman an attractive woman I have a real nice date A: Do you have any (at same time as) B: good looking guy for a date tonight and I somehow I'm feeling that I'm a nothing (smiling sigh) A: Uhhuh B: And I know nobody's a nothing But I am. It's like everybody else is somebody or something and somewhere along the line I muffed up
Suicidal persons recurrently say about themselves such things as "I'm nothing" or "I've got nothing." The question I'm going to address is, can we describe how they're able, properly, to so speak? Is there some way we can go about constructing the procedure whereby 'nothing' is a possible product?
We might first ask what would the relevance of such a procedure be for the persons involved? Maybe for suicidal persons it is said of them, and they know it is said of them, that they and the project are irrational. If there were procedures available so that they could report how they arrived at the conclusion "I am nothing" or "I have nothing", and the person they were talking to could go through the procedure again and find that their conclusion was correct, then that might provide that at least this part of their project is logical and not irrational.
Or, for example, if to arrive at this conclusion one uses materials that are properly to be considered in producing an activity, and handles them properly, then another claim that is raised against persons who are suicidal can be undercut. The claim has been put by Menninger who says about neurotic or psychotic persons in general and about suicidal persons in particular, that they lack a loyalty to reality. (Which suggests that 'reality' is, for this society, a special category. Some scientists and philosophers might say that whatever is, is 'real', and the category 'reality ' encom-[131]