by Doc Cuddy, Editor

Ed. Note:
A staffer who shall remain nameless recently returned from a research trip to Germany and Switzerland. This particular writer at times presents himself as a closet-dilettante posing as a scholar and at other times as a closet-scholar posing as a dilettante.

In any case, he paused in London for a few days’ recovery from weeks of immersion in the bowels of Teutonic humorlessness. Making a busman’s holiday of it, he spent some of his time fussing about in the more obscure reaches of the British Library, where he stumbled across a hitherto unnoticed, time-worn notebook in the section of uncatalogued works of unknown origin.

Our guy opened the notebook and, smarty-pants that he is, immediately recognized the late-in-life scrawl of the much-put-upon Sigmund Freud. Having examined many Freud manuscripts in his day, he knew these scribblings came from the last years of the great thinker’s life.

Suppressing his excitement, our intrepid researcher started to read, and discovered that at the end of his life, Freud was in the process of recording yet another breakthrough in the understanding of human consciousness, to be called:

Daseinschock.

"Dasein" means "existence," and "Schock" means, well, "shock." But how do you get into English the sheer, terrifying awfulness conveyed by both the appearance and the sound of the German term, which conjures up whole east-of-the-Rhine generations of obsessive-compulsive attention to minutiae and fearful avoidance of reality by constructing all manner of ontological castles-in-the-air (Bach a Christian? No prob, the religion provided a living so a could write the great music; Mann a homosexual? No prob, he deserves our admiration for suppressing his urges in order to maintain his dignity and write great novels, etc.)? "Existential shock" just doesn’t cut it.

So we proudly add another term to the long list of concepts that the German languages has given the world: hamburger, Weltanschauung, Angst, Volkswagen, Auschwitz, and now…

Daseinschock!

Our contribution is the addition of the exclamation mark which, we feel, does go some way toward communicating the (pardon the expression) Angst-inducing nature of the term in German.

What, you may well ask, exactly is Daseinschock! Quoting directly from the Dr. Freud's tattered, forgotten noteblook (in his inimitable Germanic verbosity):

Daseinschock is the inevitable and deplorable behavioral condition in which all humans find themselves upon emergence from the warm comfort of the mother's womb into a world of incessant, insufferable, and intolerable assaults on the ineffable sensitivities of their entire being, assaults which from day one give no quarter and furthermore allow the entity almost no opportunity to make full expressive use of the near-infinite facilities with which nature and evolution have provided him, the result being an uninterrupted state of existential repression, tension, and trauma, all of which is excellently summed up in the droll witticism concerning the two psychoanalysts who are walking down the street and meet an acquaintance who in passing says, "How are you doing?", which causes the one psychoanalyst to say to the other, after they have walked on in silence for a bit, "What do you guess he meant by that?"

Out of respect for the great thinker, we have taken it upon ourselves to introduce the concept, Daseinschock!, to the world via a short test of our own devising which enables the reader to do a quick check on his or her state of Daseinschock-ness.

The Official Magellan's Log
Daseinschock! Test

51-150:
Your near-vegetable condition indicates either a serenity that few saints have achieved or a stubborn unwillingness to see what's actually going on.

151-250:
The surest indication of your precarious borderline state is that you constantly experience moments of blissed-out relaxation, interrupted by whole days of sheer, unexplained, irrational terror.

251-350:
You didn't need to take this little test to find out what condition you're in, now did you? The constant tremor in your hands, the arrhythmia of your heart, your stuffed to overflowing medicide chest, your maxed-out credit cards, your addiction to Fox News all tell you precisely where you're at, existentially speaking.

END

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