The Psychoanalytic Aleph and Turbulence
Robin Chester
Ladies and Gentlemen, our conference theme (1) offers to us the interesting concept of three levels of abstraction – the body, the mind and the social (the proposed idea of times that are troubled) – in interaction and seemingly affecting each other. With the body/mind interaction we certainly know that such affecting takes place, even though we don’t know how, and is bidirectional, but what about the mind/social, do they affect each other in a similar way? I believe that this is problematic, in part because our egos are equipped with defences that protect against the social impacting significantly upon us except in the most extreme circumstances. And our effect upon the social, the world at large, the translation of our theories of mind to having an effect upon the social is unfortunately minimal. This is perhaps exemplified by Freud’s “Warum Krieg” in 1934 and we know how much effect this had upon the history of his times. In fact it seems that the minimal impact of his courageously-won ideas upon the world added to the depression of Freud’s painful last years. However, the major part of the problem at the mind/social interactive level is that logically to see our times as turbulent means granting the social – times – as having an independent existence and character, in this case that of being turbulent, i.e. this is our perception of them. In other words, something leads us to the construction of the concept of turbulent times such that rather than wondering how our turbulent times affect us we may instead wonder why analysis has recently been drawn to take a more social focus as evidenced by conference themes, articles in the International Journal and so on; what are we looking at, for, and why?
(1) The Mind and Body in Turbulent Times
However, if you feel that I am being dismissive of the turbulent nature of the times in which we live I will refer to 50 years ago, 1974. This was the year that I graduated, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was released, and the “Beatles Agreement” was signed bringing an end to them as a band. Also: Israel fought a war against Arab states which were determined to eliminate it, American politics were in turmoil because of the behaviour of a Republican president, our Labor prime minister was being labelled as the worst ever which considering the standard of the preceding Liberal prime ministers was a challenge, inflation and interest rates were in double figures and increasing, Australia suffered its worst natural disaster in history, there was an energy crisis, etc. Also, we had the omnipresent threats inherent in The Cold War and society was recovering from the divisiveness of the Vietnam War.
My point in drawing this contrast is to raise the question as to why we see our times as particularly troubled compared with say 1974, and accordingly what has drawn psychoanalysis in recent times to becoming focused on the social in our case as being troubled, turbulent?
In this I am proposing that our view of troubled times is possibly a displacement from within analysis onto the concept of the social and if this is the case what could be the essence of our troubled times? I appreciate a couple of decades ago we were preoccupied by a sense of crisis arising because without the overriding defining paternal figure each and every analyst and analytic group believed what they did was analysis and what others did, or some others did, wasn’t. This was eventually settled by another gentlemen’s agreement that whatever psychoanalysts do is psychoanalysis. For many of us we felt that accepting this should be accompanied by the handing out of mints and a thimble or two. I am not going to revisit the tedium of those days.
Instead, to attempt to approach an understanding of what could hint at our possible trouble times I will quote from Bion’s personal scientific diary (“Cognitions”) where in1971 he wrote:
It seems reasonable to suppose that our somewhat insignificant specialty, psycho- analysis, has already exhausted its impetus and is ready to disappear into limbo, either because it is a burden too great for us, as we are, to carry, or because it is one more exploration destined to display a blind alley, or because it arouses or will arouse fear of the unknown to a point where the protective mechanisms of the noosphere compel it to destroy the invading ideas for fear that they will cause a catastrophe… (P319-320)
Following his either or, or, our difficulties would be because we’re not ready or able to fully embrace the essence of our discoveries, or we have taken a wrong turn up a blind alley, or we have glimpsed the potential catastrophic effects of the unknown at the basis of what we do and therefore have had to shut down and look away from the mind either to the body or to the social.
I believe that these three conceptions of Bion direct towards three different ways of understanding the difficulties with which psychoanalysis has been challenged or three different challenges with which we have been confronted. In this paper I will focus in particular upon the second, that is the idea that we have turned up a blind alley, or putting it differently, we have missed something of particular significance to further our understanding of the minds that we are studying. I will more briefly attend to the other two conceptions of our problems and what may lie behind them.
But what could it be that we have missed? To begin to answer this question I will put forward two observations, one from outside of analysis and the other from clinical work.
The first relates to an experience I had recently while walking around Darling Harbour in Sydney with all the other cardboard, two dimensional characters. On my walk I approached from behind a thin young man, seemingly in his early 20s, who was pushing a pram. Out of the pram fell a crushed paper cup. The young man stopped picked it up and put it back in again. Out it came again and by the time he had stopped and picked it up a second time I had caught up. In the pram was a baby person of about 4 to 6 months with an enormous joyful smile. As the cup was returned, the child chuckled loudly and as the man returned it, he joyfully said “You are crazy!” with loving drawn out emphasis on the “Zeee” part. The child’s joyful chuckles increased and to me it was like the brightest of emotional colours on the grey surrounding background. I felt like a flawed intruder into a wonderful private place and walked past them and on.
However the question that perplexed me at that time is what had I observed and vicariously experienced? In real terms there was an intense joyful happy interaction between two people both of whom were affected and involved. In analytic terms…, I could not then, not now, conceptualise what I had observed within our major analytic theories. I will come back to this.
My second observation came from an experience communicated by a patient I have called Dr M. She was then a professional woman in her mid to late 40s married to a well-known scientist. They had two children, a daughter in her early 20s who had changed from law (the father’s wish) to the performing arts and had begun a career that has blossomed since. Their son, in his late teens, had already established a successful professional sporting career.
Dr. M had sought an analysis to help her, as she saw it, to free herself of the burden of the guilt she felt for her mother‘s death from a brain tumour early in Dr M‘s life. She felt that this guilt had directed and influenced her life and she wished to be able to live her own life while she was still young enough to do so. She believed that her mother had died of her tumour when she, Dr M, was 3 to 4 months old. Her father a successful businessman had been quietly insistent that it would not be talked about and this was the rule that was operative within the home. When Dr M was five or six, he had remarried and Dr M felt that this had certainly brought any possibility of discussion about her mother to an end.
Through the process of the analysis, Dr M had come to raise the issue of her mother’s death with her father. To her surprise her mother had died when Dr M was four years old but apparently had become more withdrawn and unavailable over the year before following the diagnosis.
About three years into the four times a week analysis and a few months after learning the truth about her mother’s death, Dr M related a dream which apparently was repeated, with little change, on three occasions over the following month. Because of this repetition, and its vivid detail, Dr. M was able to recall it with significant clarity. The dream proceeded: Dr M and a woman that she intuitively knew was her mother were walking through a pine forest towards a beach. Dr M thought that she was about three or four years old and her mother seemed very young and very much alive. They were both in their bathers, carrying towels. Dr. M had been frightened because she had never been in a pine forest before but through fairytales she believed that that was where wolves lived and she and her mother were in danger of being consumed. She felt a need to protect her mother and also to be protected by her mother against the possibility of being devoured by the wolf. Her mother apparently reassured her that she could protect herself from wolves and also could protect Dr M. At this stage in relating the dream, but not while having the dream, Dr M had been overwhelmed by tears which she felt was part of her grief about her mother’s cancer and possibly the reason that Dr M did medicine.
As the dream proceeded further they emerged from the pine forest out on to a small cliff overlooking a sandy cove, they followed a sandy path down to the beach to in front of a small cave. They then went into the water which Dr. M recalled as being very cold. As they were standing in the water Dr M‘s mother splashed her and Dr M had splashed her mother back. This was repeated with an increasing sense of joy and happiness to the point of being overwhelming. Dr M’s mother had then picked her up and had thrown her up in the air three times the first two times her mother had caught her but the third time she pulled her arms away deliberately and Dr M had fallen into water and as she opened her eyes her mother was there in the water and looking at her. Dr had felt an intense sense of joy, closeness and belonging with her mother. Her mother had then chased her up onto the beach and at that point she had woken up laughing loudly which had woken up her husband on each occasion.
Of course with such a rich and vivid dream, especially one that is repeated in such clear detail, it was ripe for association and interpretation. I won’t go into full detail here and now but the work was initially directed by the physical props towards the sexual i.e. pine forest, wolves, cliffs and caves and this was seen at the time as the arresting of Dr. M’s Oedipus complex at the early sexual attachment to the mother. But over time there was a move to seeing the looming presence of death e.g. in the wolf, and a working towards a sense of loss and grief – the cold water into which the mother dropped her, but notably to be, in the dream, retrieved by refinding her mother. The understanding of the magical repair in this eventually allowed for a successful process of grieving to be initiated. In all of this the joy and overwhelming happiness was seen as part of the magic denial of, or undoing of, the loss. If you feel a sense of dissatisfaction about this apparent good analytic work then you are sharing it with how I felt at the time. Obviously the key emotional quality about the dream is the joyous interaction between mother and daughter but there seemed no place for this in our actual analytic work. I wondered then as I’m wondering now as to why this is the case.
So let me make my point that in both observations obviously the key factor is the emotional state of joy. But in both if we try to draw back to analytic theories to gain an understanding of what is actually taking place then I believe that we find a deficiency in our theories.
Let me very briefly consider some of our major theories to reflect on this seeming deficiency.
As we know, with respect the baby in the pram and the paper club, that Freud wrote of the fort-da game of his grandchild. This was seen to be mastering separation anxiety but this would seem a long way from the emotional state of the child in the pram. If we turn to Klein and her focus on early life we are confronted by the mind’s, she refers to ego, desperate attempts to protect its nascent being against the death drive arising from within the body which is at first directed against the beginning mind and then if the mother can reliably, lovingly be present, the death drive becomes directed towards the loved object and, if the loved object survives, a fragile state of guilt and anxiety can become sublimated into creativity. Not much joy there. What about Winnicott therefore? He was described by those who knew him personally as a joyful and optimistic person who was somewhat perplexed by the criticism of his ideas by the Kleinians, women and the Americans. As is well known he proposed a period of inherent growth of the ego within the protective environment of the at first narcissistic attunement of and then loving attunement of their mother, leading to a sense that they could, again with the appropriate environmental provisions of the mother, enter into the creative world of transitional phenomena leading to a capacity for play and from there creativity and fulfilment that made life worth bothering with. In this, sublime fulfilling experiences were possible. As for play, this was the prototype of these transitional phenomena and a sense of pleasure in play was achieved within the fragile triumph over the body drives and the insistent reality. But no real joy and overwhelming happiness there.
I won’t keep trying, I certainly won’t consider Bion, but of course I am interested if anybody can do better.
My hypothesis based upon my observations is that with some children there is a joyful, happy and fulfilling experience in the interaction with their mothers, at least at an early stage of development. However, this blissful experience would seem to become lost to them and it would seem important to understand what happens to it and why. With Dr M the abrupt and sudden loss of this special relationship with her mother seemed to freeze it in time behind the barrier of grief allowing it to return to her vividly in her dreams. This hints at an involved, perhaps related, process in normal circumstances that leads to the loss of the memories of these experiences in our early life. A focus of this paper will therefore be trying to understand what happens and why and the relevance of this to our clinical practices.
To begin this let me put forward an hypothesis about what to me is the essence of this observed joyous interaction. This hypothesis is that this experience occurs because the mother observes and experiences the wonderment of a human life, one that she has, with a little help, created. A part of her creative life has come to be in the form of her baby. And the baby looks in the mother’s eyes and sees, and feels in her touch, physical and that of her words, this sense of adoring excited wonderment. It looks into her glance and sees what lies within, the creative reality of her mother’s life brought to life in the form of it, its being. This is what I believe I observed in Darling Harbour but within the fascinating idea that it was presumably the child’s father. So what happens to the sense of joyous bliss? As I have indicated it is difficult to turn to our analytic theories to find an answer to this question because there seems no real place for such an emotional state in our understanding of early life. So to begin to attempt an answer to this question, I will look outside of our analytic theories to assist in understanding about this emotional state. To do this I will refer to a concept creatively conceived by the author Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges in 1945 wrote a short story: “The Aleph”.
In this the narrator wishing to expose what he believed to be the madness of a second-rate poet called Carlos Argentino Dinari agrees to go into the man’s cellar to see the claimed source of his creativity, the Aleph. The narrator, cynical and paranoid writes:
“I shut my eyes – I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.
I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use amongst its speakers assumes a shared past. How then can I translate into word the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?… In that simple gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful, not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous…
… I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought that it was revolving; then I realised that the movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror‘s face, let us say) was infinite things since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw the daybreak and nightfall…”
Borges goes on with images wonderful and distressing because of being too much and adds;
“for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon – the unimaginable universe”.
My point in quoting Borges at such length is to attempt to convey through his wonderful creativity a way of viewing the awesome quality of the interaction between mother and infant as they experience the essence of life at both physical and emotional levels. The idea is that there is the focus of the infinite, of the eternal of life, upon the finite interaction between the mother and infant and infant and mother. This brings to both the sense of joy and happiness which charges the life in each and between them. In this the mother must paradoxically create a boundarying space to keep out the substance of confronting reality from within her child, from within her, and from outside of their interaction, such that there is a space for the blooming joy of their interaction.
But obviously all this comes to an end and like with Dr M is possibly stored away in memory but at an unconscious level. But this raises the questions of how and why does it come to an end and why is the experience lost to consciousness?
I think that the beginning of an answer lies with Freud and his description of the events that transpire in early life and what happens to these as he describes in his “Outline of Psycho-Analysis “in 1938. Here Freud proposes that the mother, as he puts it, “seduces”(p188) her infant out of its primary narcissism and into object-relating, obviously to her. However this special relationship, one which Freud suggests is the protype for all the later relationships in our lives, comes to an abrupt end at weaning, an event from which Freud also suggests we never fully recover. If we follow Freud further, what would be the essence of what he’s saying is that something happens to the mother and she changes from being the mother of the child of their early life into somebody who not just approaches her child in a very different way, she approaches her child in a very specific way. Her approach is to bring inhibition and prohibition upon her child and directing it to becoming a civilised human being. And this seems to be driven by something going on inside of her, something insistent, that has either been dormant before and now has awoken or has now entered her being as if instated at a certain point in the child’s interactions with her. But what would this be?
If we stay with Freud, his conceptualisations concerning the Oedipus complex would point towards the intrusion of the sexual at that point of time. But it is unlikely that at this stage in the child’s life that it has suddenly become a sexual being so we would be directed towards the idea that something, seemingly sexual, has become stimulated in the mother with its associated prohibitions: but what?
In our analytic theories the idea that seems most relevant comes from Dinora Pines (1993) and others including Freud that is that the mother’s sexuality has been sublimated in her carnal relationship with her infant and that after a certain period, when the infant has begun to become more of its own person, this sublimation falls away and her sexuality with respect to drives, desires and prohibitions becomes once again available to her. But to me this seems an inadequate explanation. The mother who can find joy in and give joy to her infant doesn’t seem one of sublimation – she seems only too alive and real and present. So it would seem that it is at weaning something that has been dormant or absent becomes active and intrusive. This would seem related to a full awakening of her sexuality and its intrusive prohibitions. How and why this happens when her child reaches a certain level of maturity, essentially when it begins to become its own person and look beyond her, is certainly an interesting question. However, what we can observe is that the exciting relationship with her child now possibly has a quality of sexual stimulation for her and corresponding prohibitions. The prohibitions become dominant and are imposed upon her child who is instructed about the social rules and regulations it now has to follow if it wishes to continue to be loved by its mother and the shaming, i.e. the belittlement, it will suffer if it doesn’t comply with these rules.
The child, stunned and shocked and presumably bewildered by this change in its mother, and the corresponding loss involved, according to Freud attempts to find a way back into the intimacy it has lost and it does this via the sexual. Presumably the child has been able to intuitively deduce the emotional current that now drives the mother and responds accordingly. Freud proposes that the child through touching its penis or clitoris stimulates feelings similar to those that it had experienced in the touching/feeling interaction it had previously enjoyed with its mother and is now seeking to replicate these feelings in a sexual way. It turns to the pathways previously enjoyed, i.e. touching, feeling, looking and being looked at, but now these are charged with a sexual quality. But has the child really become a little Don Juan or Carmen or is it astutely aware it has lost its mother to her own inner distraction about her sexuality, prohibitions etc., and the directing of her libidinal desire elsewhere, and it is desperately trying to find a way of undoing the loss of their special interaction through the medium of sexuality where these issues are now being played out; i.e. the child is seeking to restore what it has lost, the joy and happiness of its intimate relation with its mother, through the only path that now seems available to it. The idea is that the bliss of infancy has been lost because of the change in the mother by the processes that have started inside of her i.e. her sexuality and the prohibitions around it. This sudden and extreme change at weaning, or as weaning, must be devastating for the infant and it desperately tries to restore what has been lost by intuitively feeling that sexuality is now the emotional key.
But do we have ideas about what does take place in the mother? Lacan would seem to offer the clearest picture. The key factor for Lacan is the instating of the structuring paternal metaphor, the Nom du pere, the big Other which, as part of the second time (“temps”) of the Oedipus complex in his terminology, puts in place the structuring direction that the mother conveys and lives out. This is the prohibition of access to the mother as a source of one’s jouissance and for the mother the fulfilling role for her of her child as phallus in Lacan’s terms, but in mine as a source of blissful aliveness, is now prohibited.
In other words it is the instating of the incest taboo – with respect to one’s mother and by one’s mother – that would be a basis of weaning. And as the child fights against this within the early shades of the Oedipus complex the mother gives voice to it indirectly by shaming and humiliating and more directly by reference to the father, the doctor, the rabbi/priest or whoever represents the paternal metaphor. The threat for the desperately insistent child in Freud’s terms is the loss of the treasured phallus, but in my terms it is the threat of the loss of the source of joyous filling life in and through the body now being pursued through sexuality. However, I believe that Freud‘s ideas about the castration threat also point towards a further important quality. As I will discuss the flooding sense of life under consideration is not the only powerful emotional state that can arise in the mother infant interaction, the other is the intrusive confronting presence of death focused on and in the child’s body and eventually conceptualised by Freud as the death instinct. Either flooding life or drowning death will be the focus in the earliest experiences between mother and infant. Take away the life there will be the exposure to the presence of death. This is what the castration threat can be seen to convey. Perhaps we could see the life/death balance being played out in Dr M‘s dream, although the pine forest, wolf, cliffs and caves could be seen in their sexual symbolic qualities, they also all allude to the shadowing of death.
So do we have evidence in our theories to see the incest taboo as being important other than Lacan’s ideas about it being the basis of neurosis and the neurotic’s discontent? It is curiously difficult to find in our theories any focus, beyond Lacan, upon the mother’s psyche at weaning. However what we do have is Freud’s focus on his incestuous fantasies but the issue of taboo is only one of allusion. But, let me follow Freud’s ideas about incestuous fantasies as they were a seemingly important defining factor for him – in himself –and as a basis for his discoveries and his focus upon sexuality. Through his self analysis carried out under the shadow of his relationship with Fleiss he came upon such feelings and the memory or possible fantasy of being alone with his naked mother on a train trip when he was probably age 4 but interestingly, he recalled it as two. He wrote to Fleiss (October 3, 1897)of overcoming a significant resistance in his self analysis by the use of his dreams and his approach through them to what he saw as the basis of his neurosis stating: “my “primary originator” [of his neurosis] was an ugly, elderly but clever woman [purportedly his nanny] who told me a great deal about God and hell and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities; that later (between ages of two and two-and-a-half) libido towards matrem was aroused; the occasion must have been the journey with her from Leipzig to Vienna, during which we spent a night together and I must have had the opportunity of seeing her “nudam” (page 219, “The Origin of Psycho-Analysis”). Of course we can wonder why Freud chose the Latin accusatory case for the two keywords of mother and nude. Reasons could be that the defensive covering either related to something in his relationship with Fleiss or to anxieties about the subject and image just discovered. But Freud could also be seen to be laying a foundation for his later analytic work and ours, that is that words can contain.
If we had time it would be interesting to pursue an understanding of why he focused upon his interaction with his nanny as the prime cause for his neurosis but then immediately focused upon his incestuous excitement which he recalled as being related to age 2 and his image of or fantasy of seeing his mother naked although the possible event apparently happened later.
Of this issue of Freud, his dreams and incestuous desires, Pontalis, (1981) writes of Freud’s courageous efforts in addressing the challenge of his dreams stating:
“To Freud the dream was a displaced maternal body. He committed incest with the body of his dreams, penetrated their secret and wrote the book that made him the conqueror and possessor of the terra incognito”
(p.26-27)
and Pontalis adds to this graphic observation: “Dreaming is above all the attempt to maintain an impossible union with the mother, to preserve an individual whole, to move in a space prior to time ” (page 29).
In these observations Pontalis is proposing two involved ideas; the first is that for Freud the dream took on the fascinating and potentially castrating mystery of the incestuous maternal body – and mind – but that he had the courage to look into it and found the terra incognito – possibly the unconscious world of maternal desire. This perspective although hinting at the interpenetrating interaction between mother and infant, or infant and mother, moves to the concept of an incestuous sexual desire. However the second perspective is of the preceding timeless interactive union between mother and infant replicated and relived between the dreamer and their dreams.
In his comments, therefore Pontalis would seem to be observing two different processes, two different relations between a dreamer and their dreams, and an infant and their mother. The first would be that there is an indivisible union between the infant and the mother that is timeless and is the core of the dream. But that this changes and with a division between dreamer and dream, infant and mother, there is to be found in the mother, as Freud is seen to have found, a sense of the sexual now present in the mother/dream at their base.
Staying with Freud in our consideration of incestuous fantasies and prohibitions, as of course is well known, he curiously correlated his incestuous sexual fantasies with the Oedipus myth and developed the centrality of the complexity of the Oedipus complex in the development of human being. He did this by seeing that the Oedipus myth was about the boy’s incestuous desires for the mother and rivalry with the father. However, this seems a remarkable translation or understanding of the myth.
A myth, I suggest, represents an attempt to master a challenging and possibly threatening event in the life of the individual, one that is common to all or most others. It is a shared experience of an individual’s development that is mastered in narrative. So what is the Oedipus myth about i.e. what quality of troubling human nature is being addressed in narrative form?
Of course the Oedipus myth is well known. As noted it was seen by Freud to indicate the living out of the boy’s incestuous desires for their mother and consequent rivalry with the prohibiting father. Or with Bion it was seen to indicate the boy’s hubris in terms of his desire to pursue the truth at no matter what cost which can perhaps be translated as a boy still seeking what lies at the basis of his mother’s desire no matter what the cost i.e. what he will find and the effects upon him. What seems remarkable about these views of arguably our best analytic thinkers is their seeming incapacity to see what seems so apparent about the myth and why that could be and possibly in this alluding indirectly to the incest taboo. Others, e.g. Harold Stewart in 1981, have described the apparent, or obvious, and therefore curious in being overlooked by Freud and Bion. That is that the key to the myth is the mother’s, Jocasta’s, desire. She has sex with Laius in spite of his protests and presumably in full knowledge of the fateful predictions, she allows Oedipus to be taken from her but probably ensuring his survival by her instructions, knowing the oracular truth when Laius is slain she must have been aware that the young man, the age of her son, who suddenly appeared was Oedipus and his damaged feet would have given this away. Therefore the myth would seem to be addressing the troubling idea of a mother’s incestuous desire for her son which was eventually exposed by Tiresias who, by legend, had already been blinded by Hera for seeing and expressing the truth about female sexuality.
If therefore we see a myth as addressing a troubling aspect of human being, attempting to master it through narrative, the idea of their mother’s incestuous desire for her child would appear to be the core idea of this myth.
However… although myths have a quality of truth-telling about them, they are, as I have indicated, attempts through narrative to master a troubling quality of human being, and with this myth the troubling quality is seemingly female sexuality, and the perceived incestuous desires for her son.
But it does raise the question as to what is so troubling about female sexuality, especially within an incestuous expression, that Freud and Bion have seemingly turned away from it? The narrative of the myth indicates that if this desire is not mastered then there will be drought and pestilence, death, blindness and the devastating wars that followed. The inference being that if female sexuality is not contained by the paternal metaphor, then social chaos will follow. Or put slightly differently, if the paternal metaphor is overridden by female desire, then troubled or turbulent times may ensue. We seem to have found our way back to the start. In there also are, possibly, ideas about hysteria but that would begin to lead us too far astray.
So let me clearly state my point and then come back to analytic practice.
My point is that for some infants, obviously not all, there is a period of wonderful creative pleasure, joy, in the interactions with their mothers and vice versa. To me this has the qualities so creatively outlined by Borges with regard to the Aleph – the infinite creative potential lying within the life within the infant which is celebrated by the mother. But all this ends at weaning when a radical change in the mother sets her child on the path of becoming a social human being within a socialising process occurring with its rules and prohibitions, praise and shame. This turns the potentialed infant into just another human being. The child attempts to sustain the creative union with its mother but because of her apparent sexualisation of the interaction these attempts of the child are met with a taboo turning the child into a neurotic ordinary human being – the main source of our income.
To move to the discussion of the relevance of these ideas to our clinical practice it is necessary for me to pick up what I have left behind. That is the other two perspectives of Bion’s either or, or, that he addressed to why psychoanalysis, from his perspective at least, had lost its momentum and from mine why it has, recently, become focused on the body, or the social. As indicated I have discussed at length the second of his propositions i.e. that of the blind alley. Because of time I can only briefly consider the other two and how they relate to the ideas outlined in this paper.
With the first of his propositions, that is that our discoveries have proved to be too difficult for us as we are, with relevance to what I have considered so far, I suggest that one understanding of Bion’s ideas is that the mother in the mother infant interaction that I’ve been describing has found that the flooding life in her infant was too much for her and that she had to shut it down by her controlled and controlling approach towards her infant and the experiences stimulated in her in her interaction with her child. This mother is the structuring controlling mother who does the care of her infant in a well thought out, efficient and seemingly appropriate way, which takes the life out of their interaction probably to her relief. As indicated earlier if in the infant there will either be a focus upon the experience of the life in the child and its interaction with his mother or the threat of death, once the mother shuts down the life the need for control will become more powerful, and felt to be absolutely necessary, because of the threat of the intrusion of the presence of death or the threat of death. I believe that this is by far the most common interaction between mother and infant therefore taking the life out of the interaction and ensuring a well-structured and appropriate way of being both for mother and infant and in this weaning will be just an extension of the control that is so important for the mother to impose upon her child. However, the consequence of this is that the child’s life will essentially be lifeless, in a creative sense at least, and this is what such patients will bring to their analysis and impose on the analysis, and possibly vice versa.
Returning again to Bion’s three propositions, the third refers to what it is that is feared to be found at the bottom of the human psyche. This may relate to an overwhelming flooding sense of life that is felt to be too much for two minds that are not ready for it, as may also be found in an analysis. But the other possibility is that it refers to the destructive threat of death that also lies in the infant’s mind and body.
To briefly explore this and to add a creative counter- balance to Borges’ Aleph and what I’ve been saying about life I will begin by referring to a quote from the philosopher Hegel relating to what he called “the Night of the World” as outlined in his Jena lectures from 1805–6.
As I am sure anybody who has read these lectures will attest to the fact that their meaning is obscure but with the feeling that there is profound meaning teasing to be extracted. So I will offer my understanding to put the “Night of the World” in context. Hegel, an idealist philosopher, refers to what he calls “Geist” which is usually translated as “Spirit” but is a much more involved concept than vague metaphysics. “Geist” refers to a fundamental consciousness, the original underlying unifying consciousness that links us all and allows for experience to be experienced. What I understand he means by this is that there is a fundamental consciousness which is common to all of us and of which our personal sense of consciousness is just one manifestation. From here he indicates that Geist moves towards self-consciousness, the unifying realisation of mind, it allows a sense of what it is to have a mind but a sense shared with everybody as we have a feeling for mind in general in which ours is just a particular moment. As an idealist philosopher what Hegel is establishing in this is that our experiences will be experienced within our consciousness like everybody else who shares the same quality. However it all begins to become exciting when, as Hegel puts it, Geist takes itself as its first object, that is what we become aware of is having a mind, our mind, our subjective sense of I, or I am. This is particularly problematic because this allows us – to my understanding – to see what lies within our mind, what Hegel interestingly calls “the Night of the World” seemingly with all that means by association. Hegel proposes further that this awareness, experience, is stored in what he calls our mind’s “Treasury”, essentially the unconscious. However we can become aware of this “Night of the World” especially when we look another human being in the eye, possibly as with the mother and her infant, and vice versa. Hegel graphically outlines what this experience involves, he writes:
“The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity – a wealth of infinite many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This is the Night the interior of human nature, existing here – pure Self – and in phantasmagoric representations it is Night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up there another white shape, only to disappear suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye looking into a Night that turns terrifying. For from his eye the Night of the world hangs out towards me.”
Good stuff but what is Hegel saying that is relevant to our discussion?
I believe that what he is saying is that consciousness, mind, is a universal phenomenon in humans but when mind takes its own self-consciousness, I, as its focus it can see the truth of what lies at the basis of our being but this is relegated to our “Treasury”, essentially it becomes unconscious and “the Night of the World”. However, it can be found and experienced by looking another in the eye then we become aware of the violent crazy destructiveness that lies within us and within them.
The contrast between the Night of the World and the Aleph is stark and raises a question why some mothers see and enjoy the life in their infant, some mothers are closed to their infant’s inner life, and other mothers see violent death and destructiveness. Is this determined by what is in the infant or the mother or both or beyond? Because of time I will not attempt an answer to this challenging question.
Instead I will finish these discussions by directing back to our clinical work and their relevance to this. To do this, I will refer back to Bion’s either or, or. As you will recall, he proposed the possible demise of psychoanalysis – and as I’m suggesting hence its possible move to a social focus – for the three reasons that I have used as the basis of my discussion.
With the first – it has become too hard for us as we are – I think that this relates to the mother who is aware of the boundless creative life born in her infant but this jars with and threatens her need for control of what goes on inside of her and between her and her infant. So she determinedly shuts down the blissful flooding interaction that I observed in Darling Harbour. This, I believe, leads amongst other possibilities of course, to the obsessionals that confront our practices with their need for control over the life and creativity that is hopefully a part of every analysis. Good work will appear to be done but in a controlled essentially lifeless interaction. This is where Lacan’s proposal about the use by the analyst of oracular statements becomes important because it is like teasing the patient with the presence of creative life beyond their capacity for control. The idea in this is that the potential for creative life still remains in them and as the determined control is undermined that this can begin to grow in the patient and in the analysis.
With the second possible scenario – the blind alley or the lost creative idea – what will be found in the analysis, I believe, is that the analyst becomes drawn into an emotional enactment of the controlling and forbidding mother as the patient brings the ongoing threat of an aliveness in a mode that is felt could threaten the integrity of the analysis and will generally be seen or felt to have a sexual quality. A confronting example of this is the so-called erotic transference, which was so perplexing for Freud, that can perhaps can be seen as the patient bringing the life in themselves in the medium that they have learnt to express it in – sexuality. The inherent playfulness one often feels within such patient’s expressions I believe hints at where they are coming from i.e. their aliveness being lived out within their confronting sexual demands and their challenges to the analytic structure.
My point is that the analyst can become drawn by the exciting alive aspects of the transference, with the erotic transference being an example, into failing to see the expressions of life and creativity in these and instead seeing the potential dangers of transference enactment and can accordingly become fixed, like the weaning mother, upon the propriety of the analytic method. I am not questioning the need to help an infant to grow into a child that lives comfortably within their society or the need for the correctness of the analyst’s behaviour, but am attempting to draw attention to the need for the analyst to be aware that they, like the mother, can be imposing upon the patient their need for propriety and control and the reason for this i.e. that in the transference they have been drawn into the role of the mother of the infant at weaning i.e. needing to contain and control the aliveness now perceived as inappropriate and helping to structure it in a perceived appropriate form, i.e. doing the analytic work rather than being able to play at it.
To me is like listening to a Liszt rhapsody, it is alive and threatening to break into chaos but is held by the music and our work with these patients is the same but for us it is with the words given and not given.
Returning to the start of this paper the hypothesis therefore would be that because analysis has lost its capacity to not take itself too seriously and to be able to play with the patient at helping them to understand what has happened to the life inside of them, we feel threatened and challenged by the aliveness, often seemingly sexualised, some patients bring to their analysis. And as a response, like the mother at weaning, under the perceived threat of acting out by the patient, but also possibly the analyst, we impose the propriety of the analytic situation upon the patient and do our job properly but uncreatively, i.e. without the creative aliveness of play.
Because of time I will only briefly mention the third of Bion’s three perspectives, the avoidance of the fear of the catastrophic consequences of finding what lies at the base of human being, that is finding the death and destructiveness in our core. As mentioned if the mother has been drawn to only see this death and destructiveness within her child’s being then this will have a profound effect upon her and her child and this is what certain patients will bring into the analysis. Our understandings of this situation outlined by Klein and extended by Bion, I believe, are invaluable to our work with such patients. However in this there is a significant risk that we will be like the mother with her infant and believe that this is all there is to see. My thought is that there is played out in the infant a balance between life and death and that their mothers are drawn to see one and her focus on this buries the other. This is perhaps easier to see when the focus is on the infinite of life. However, if it works the other way round then the risk with such patients is that we will fail to see the potential spark of life lying within them covered by the focus upon death and destructiveness and the defences against these.
To finish I will draw the ideas I have outlined back to the start of the paper. That is the idea that we are displacing from within analysis onto the construct of turbulent or troubled times, and the question of what it is in analysis that could be being displaced, therefore. From the ideas considered following Bion’s either or, or, it could possibly be that we have had the creative life taken out of analysis by a focus on the obsessional both in our patients and our choice of candidates leading us to have to look to the life in the body or out there. Secondly, when patients do bring a challenging and engaging liveliness we are prone, like Freud and the mother at weaning, to move to seeing the sexual and then instate controlling prohibitions rather than allowing such life to persist to be contained in words. Thirdly we have also, perhaps by necessity, become focused on the destructiveness of the presence of death with its consequent part objects and persecutory anxieties as graphically described by Hegel and as importantly outlined by Klein and the early Bion.
However the later Bion, possibly freed from his analysis with and interactions with Klein, and through the love for him of his second wife Francesca, was able to conceptualise something at the base of human beings that he called “O”. Although sadly for him he seemingly could not conceptualise the essence of love and life in this but with tankish determination he tried.
I will finish there, thank you.