Sublime

Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.

René Girard, a Frenchman who was a professor of literature and history in the United States, had his first insight about the nature of desire in the late 1950s.

Collective murder, or the single victim mechanism, has everything to do with the origin of the texts that do not represent it and cannot represent it precisely because they are based on it, because the victim mechanism is their generating principle. These texts are the myths.

If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations.

Hellinger believes that the mechanism behind these repetitions is unconscious loyalty, and views unconscious loyalty as the cause of much suffering in families. Unable to identify the source of their symptoms as belonging to an earlier generation, people often assume that the source of their problem is their own life experience, and are left