Deadline

Between now and December 6, I have to cough up the first draft of my thesis. I have about seven sources summarized, and three or four more sources waiting to be read. I have to dig up several more articles and make time to read them. I have to begin writing, narrow my topic, complete my lit review, and somewhere in there, figure out how to contribute some sort of "new thought" to the topic. Being that the awareness of death has been an obsession of humanity since the first glimmers of consciousness, I feel rather intimidated about producing original thought on the subject.

My main question, as it has been refined recently, is something like this: how does the awareness of death impact and shape our intimate relating with our love objects? ("Object," in the psychoanalytic sense, meaning "other" or "person" as opposed to a physical, inanimate object.)

And here lies the underlying reason for my mental block to sitting down and writing: I'm scared shitless about the topic. I picked the topic because I'm scared shitless about it. Now I have to produce something. Anything, really, so long as I get some words down on paper. It's just a rough draft, I tell myself.

A classmate of mine had an inspiring suggestion yesterday. She's decided to try to get down all her own thinking about her topic, what interests her about it, why she chose it, what her ideas are, unclouded by "expert" opinions. Then after she's got 10 or 15 pages, she'll go back and add in sources that support and negate her own ideas. I think there's some serious wisdom in this, and it excites me to think about. I think I've been bogged down in incorporating the historical and current "thinking" about the topic and in the process have become out of touch with what the hell I think about it.

So I'm going to try to do some freewrites over the next few days, and see what comes out. And then I'm going to schedule a trip to the library at the SF Psychoanalytic Institute and gather more sources, read them, and then start putting some structure to the thing.

Now I'm all fired up, and shit. Let me at it!