Changes in Relationships and the Perception of Self through Technology

Introduction

 

Emotional disruptions often lead to efforts to relieve psychic pain through engagement in activities that are intended to modify a sense of our self identity. Those challenged by depression, anxiety, and a wide variety of other mental health problems appear particularly likely to seek out such activities, with addictions frequently serving as a common, effective, but ultimately destructive, means of psychological coping. In this context, contemporary technology has come to provide seductive opportunities and potential dangers (including addiction) in the quest for psychic relief and escape from a painful sense of who we are to some modified, more bearable, version of ourselves. This paper examines some of the ways that our use of technology may change our sense of ourselves, and how some of the problems occasioned by the embrace of technology may manifest themselves in clinical treatment.

The literature written for clinicians seeking insight into this topic is negligible. A statistical review of professional therapy journals, using a cross-analysis with pairings of the word technology with counseling, therapy, and psychotherapy reveals that very little has been written on this subject. I found some articles about the future use of technology in working with children and adolescents, but little on adults and nothing on personality changes or modified sense of self related to technology. Others, however, have written very clearly on the relationship of technology to the world of our experience. Goren (2003) writes that “Technological innovations of the cyber age have altered fundamental processes of perception and experience,” and our sense of self (p. 437). And Clark, who has written more incisively than most in this area, notes that technology provides the ability for us not only to re-create our own body images, but to gain knowledge about who and what we are, and “alter, augment and extend our sense of presence and of our own potential for action” (2003, p.115).

It is beyond question that technology even now, and certainly in the future, can provide people in emotional pain with a wide spectrum of opportunities for coping with their problems. Those with relationship issues, for example, may engage in a broad range of social experiences online, which allow them to easily try on different personas, as well as gain knowledge about themselves and the world in which they exist socially. Alternatively, the advent of online and video game playing offers the opportunity to fantasize new versions of an idealized or altered sense of self. There are useful and productive ways to enhance a sense of self that are provided through the use of technology, and there are other ways, including an addictive relationship with technology, that are more likely to have destructive than constructive outcomes.

Our discussion here presumes that both the formation and subsequent modifications of our sense of self are in large part shaped by our interactions with the world around us. As Clark has suggested, the most basic notion of the self is our physical presence in the world, “determined by our direct control-experiences that provide kinds of statistical correlation between motor signals and sensor feedback” (Clark, 2003, p.132).  From the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, or course, the most important part of the world around us in our psychological formation is our experience of the relationship between the self and another person (Stern in Neisser, 1993). Our sense of ourselves is shaped in the context of social interactions with others, who provide information about us (through the lens of their own subjectivity), and assist us in developing the means to regulate, share, and understand our affective experiences (Stern, 1985). The kinds of developmental issues that often drive adult consumers to exploit technology to regulate, define, or re-define their sense of who they are seem frequently to originate in problems associated early in life with our relationships to our human and physical environments.

Technology, of course, is no stranger to the world of the psychological growth of the self. Playing recorded music to stimulate or soothe infant-toddlers predates the lives of most, if not all, of us. More recently, parents who themselves are immersed in a technological world utilize technology in child-rearing quite freely. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey revealed that sixty-one percent of twenty-first century babies one year of younger were spending an average of one hour and twenty minutes daily with screen media (Tapscott, 2009). Mobiles on cribs are being replaced by screens, and it is not unusual for a parent to give a child, even a baby, the parent’s cell phone as a toy. One of the eeriest experiences I have encountered in my clinical professional career was observing a grandmother changing her granddaughter’s diaper while the baby’s mother was attending an outpatient chemical dependency treatment class. The baby, who was two or three months old, was extremely fussy and easily irritated. To divert the baby’s attention and quiet her, the grandmother put her I-pad about six inches from the baby’s head. The baby turned toward it and became totally focused on the activity on the screen. Her eyes were widely dilated and her body became quite still while she watched.

A 2007 study found that as pre-schoolers were exposed to more electronic media, parental reading and teaching activities at home decreased (Tapscott, 2009). A multitude of “apps” claiming to boost imagination and learning skills are available for toddlers as young as two years old (Hallak, 2014). Short videos on YouTube carry forward the Sesame Street television tradition, but on demand, teaching pre-school children the names of letters, how to count to ten, how to identify colors, and how to identify shapes. Somewhat more passively, one study showed that twenty-nine percent of children two years old and younger had a television set in their bedrooms (Tapscott, 2009); for those not so fortunate, the family room set is usually close at hand to keep them quietly occupied.

Neuroscientists theorize that technologies are now shaping, and will continue to shape, brain functions as we expose ourselves increasingly to technological forces in our lives. Clark, for example, called the invention of the cell phone “a mindware upgrade, an electronic prosthesis capable of extending and transforming one’s personal reach, thoughts, and vision” (2003, p.10). He contended that as technology becomes more portable, pervasive, reliable, flexible, and increasingly personalized, our tools will become more and more a part of who and what we are (2003). In his view, technological processes are constantly contributing to a person’s emerging psychological profile, as well as shaping our lives and our sense of self. Rosen (2012) has reported on research on the science of the mind and the growing use of social media, showing that this technology is actually changing the brain. Such changes are possible because of the plasticity of the brain, wherein experience itself promotes a constant process of strengthening and weakening nerve cell connections. Given the rapid pace of technological change in our lives, it is not unreasonable to expect that the relational worlds and intersubjective fields of our consulting rooms will be occupied, and have been for some time, by brains which function and are wired differently from their predecessors.

Katherine (Case Study)

One case of mine in psychoanalytic treatment illustrates well how technology was put to use in the service of promoting a coherent and ongoing sense of self for a middle-aged woman from a chaotic family background. Katherine was a mental health practitioner whose technical competence was widely recognized, but her difficult personality ultimately undermined her ability to have satisfying relationships professionally and personally. Her sense of herself was so fragmented and negatively toned that her every professional and social engagement with the world would inevitably become annoying and be converted into an attempt to gain confirmation of her own value and importance in the lives of those with whom she worked and lived. Her immediate motivation for coming into treatment was an ongoing rupture in her relationship with her daughter, who told her she needed mental health assistance. In what seemed initially to be simply a gesture to pacify her daughter and regain access to her, Katherine began treatment with me (and then agreed to be a control case in my training), and soon thereafter sought to engage me in direct communication with her daughter to validate Katherine’s good intentions (and presumed progress).

Katherine’s early life had been highly chaotic. Her mother appears to have been psychologically unstable, and involved perhaps promiscuously in multiple relationships from early in her life. She had given up her first two children for adoption at birth, but kept her next two from different relationships with her as she moved from state to state in search of a place to settle down. At one point, she settled in the Midwest where she met and married Katherine’s father, but remained there only a short period of time. After Katherine was born, her mother left again, this time with three children in tow. Katherine reported that her father was an ineffectual man, but his sisters (her paternal aunts) persistently tracked her mother’s location through welfare offices as her mother moved west from one place to another. Ultimately, they contacted Katherine’s mother and convinced her to transfer custody of two-year old Katherine to her father. Katherine did not reunite with her mother until she was a young teen bent on reconnecting with her. In the interim, her mother had given birth to a sixth child who she also relinquished for adoption. After the reunion with her mother, Katherine visited her in the summers for short visits, but remained physically with her father and his family.

Nevertheless, she never felt a secure sense of attachment with her father, or welcome in his family, despite being his only child. He disengaged from her upbringing for most of her childhood, leaving his two sisters to raise her. She reported feeling more like a pawn in a custody game than a cherished niece.

She was left with the idea she was a nuisance to them, and remembers their telling her that she was expected to leave home as soon as she graduated from high school. In treatment, Katherine wavered between bitter feelings that her mother had never committed to their relationship, and had never considered fighting for her custody, and a desperate wish to idealize (and identify with) her mother as a persecuted victim of her paternal family’s anger and disdain, someone of whom she might be proud and derive some positive sense of herself from their relationship.

Given the young woman’s difficulties in finding family relationships that could foster a positive sense of self or secure sense of attachment, it is not surprising that once on her own, she sought such relationships with men. After two unrewarding efforts, Katherine found herself alone with a daughter and a son. In a remarkable display of sheer will and intelligence, and in the face of severe financial difficulties, she went back to school and achieved an advanced degree in the mental health field. She was able to pull herself out of debt, and in time began a successful small business as a service provider. In this limited, but impressive way, Katherine literally became a self-made woman.

But psychologically, the task of finding a narrative of her life that would allow her to feel an enduring and positive sense of self remained daunting. In treatment she recited an ongoing litany of relationships in her life that followed the same pattern of hope and disappointment. Typically, she would identify someone with extensive unmet needs and become a provider for them, in exchange for which she sought their obedience to her as a symbol of her importance to them, and ongoing validation of her value to them through their loyalty. As appeared most dramatically with her daughter, but equally in all of her significant relationships, the other party would end up feeling emotionally used by her and reject her completely. I was not immune to this experience. While I was pleased by her agreeing to become a control case in my training, I was less pleased by repeated boundary violations such as pressures to meet on her behalf with other family members, and to accept without comment the signs supporting her business she posted on the property of my office. Katherine came to recognize this pattern after considerable work in the analysis, a project that was probably driven equally by my wish not to be used with such utter disregard. Regrettably, however, it cannot be said that her insight has freed her yet of this futile pattern of turning her good works into ashes through her need for ongoing recognition and obedience to her will from those she sought to assist.

There are several reasons why I have written here in such detail about Katherine’s version of her personal history. First, it provides the background for understanding how tools of technology became vitally important to her efforts to search for and gain a coherent and positive sense of herself, particularly in the wake of her repeated failures to accomplish this goal otherwise through her well-intended, if relentlessly self-serving, engagements with family members, friends and acquaintances. And secondly, it shows why Katherine became obsessed by efforts to unify her childhood experiences into a coherent and validating personal narrative by creating a family history, one that would document the injustices to her, and demonstrate her ability to establish control over both the narrative and the chaos to which she had been constantly exposed in childhood. Making skillful use of her computer aptitude and various online search programs, she was able to chart a genealogy and locate the place precisely where she belonged (and should be attached) in it. This brief description does not begin to convey the enormous depth and scope of the project, which would have been inconceivable without the computer and software programs for creating genealogies. In a project that dwarfed in scale and intensity her aunts’ ingenious search for her during her own infancy, Katherine’s search for herself involved relentlessly tracking down historical documents such as family birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, legal cases and other family lore. She contacted family members through email and saved every message of response from them, often focusing obsessively and defensively on the negativity of the insults she found in most of their replies to her. Her project became the proof she wanted that she was truly a victim.

The narrative she was developing from this research was a vital part of her project to demonstrate her victimization and essential goodness in the family, and I, as her analyst, had an important assignment from her to be a witness and provide the validation and confirmation of her claims to have been regarded and treated unfairly, as recently as by her own daughter. When I reviewed my notes on her treatment recently, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data about the family that she had deposited with me, and demanded that I make sense of and organize coherently. For quite some time, it was impossible to see the forest for the trees; flooded in details and obscure facts, I found it difficult to know why Katherine was conveying all of this information to me, and why it was important to her that I take it all in. I knew only that I was buried in computer charts and genealogy data, forced by her need to be understood as a good family member to master the details of her family’s history. In a sense, the computer was helping her create a strengthened sense of identity as belonging somewhere, to someone; and I, among those close to her, would be called upon to accept her version of events as she documented them. This assignment became particularly difficult not simply for logistical reasons, but because the level of viciousness of the comments directed against her, from her daughter as well as others, left me wondering what kind of person I was dealing with and being asked to validate as an innocent victim.

What I wish to emphasize here, rather than the treatment issues posed by Katherine’s case, is the importance of her use and mastery of the technology available to carry out her project. Her case represents an instance of a constructive, if exhausting, effort to exploit available technologies to develop by herself a positively toned sense of self, in the absence of any other effective relational approaches to reconstructing her identity. Subsequently, her analysis created a means to establish a positively toned relationship with an idealized other, her analyst, so that her experience of being seen and loved, rather than despised as she was by her family and later by her romantic partners, daughter, and friends, could ease the pain she constantly carried in her day-to-day life. It is perhaps not a coincidence that she has since also constructed a Facebook presence with more than 400 “friends,” as equal testimony of searching for a sense of herself as valuable for having positive meaning in the lives of so many others.

Technology as an Instrument of Fantasy and Dissociation

Technology at the cutting edge unquestionably offers ever-multiplying avenues for the management of affective states through fantasy and dissociation. Both fantasy and dissociation may be put to use in the service of escaping from awareness of these states, or alternatively, as a means of managing those states in productive ways that open opportunities for creativity and focused action. Video games, for example, may promote original or unorthodox approaches to problem solving that require the extended use of imagination (fantasy). Equally, the role-playing required in many video games can allow players to assume identities which legitimize giving full play to pathological thoughts and behaviors that may be carried back into daily lives of the players, even after the machine has been turned off. In the same way, the Internet provides broad access (as in Katherine’s case) to highly useful data, as well as to relatively benign or even self-enhancing ways to share human experiences with others. Conversely, we may immerse ourselves in online communities and activities that not only relieve us from the pain of our daily lives, but also actively furnish pathways for detaching ourselves altogether from the realities of our non-cybernetic selves. Indeed, some of these pathways offer prospects for a descent into addiction of one sort or another, and leave us just as troubled and badly off psychologically as more traditional forms of addiction unrelated to technological development.

Lou (Case Study)

A second case illuminates some of the issues associated with the availability of ways to participate in self-altering, technologically generated, cyber-communities. Reverend Lou appeared at my private office four years ago, a Protestant minister in his mid-thirties, seeking treatment for sexual addictions. Married and the father of three children, he was impelled to begin therapy by his wife’s decision to end their marriage, and legally restrain him from having any contact with their children. The work began despite a rigidly-constructed narcissistic line of defense behind which Lou denied having any psychological problems.

Both Lou and his wife were victims of sexual abuse as children. She had been molested at the age of twelve or thirteen; Lou had been engaged in a traumatizing three-year sexual relationship with his older half-sister beginning when we was six or seven years old. Lou’s mother was a chronic alcoholic, physically and emotionally abusive, and, needless to say, far from the kind of mother with whom the children could form secure attachments. Their father, too, was remote and self-absorbed. Apart from the relationship with his older sister, Lou was left largely to his own devices when it came to managing the torment and chaos in the family home. In the safety of his closet, the young boy spent hours reading the classics, and later fantasized that he would bring the characters he read about to life when he grew up. In early adolescence, he became interested in studying for the ministry, and fueled by the recognition he received for this interest, he ultimately became a Protestant minister. Also in early adolescence, he became interested in print pornography, and eventually went onto adult Internet sites. He became fascinated with the variety of options available on these sites and began to explore secretive sexual fantasy sites where stimulation is disconnected from a relationship. Apparatus exists that can interconnect multiple people through Skype. Physiological response can be monitored by electrical devices connected to the computer in these virtual relationships that do not involve any physical contact with another person. Intimate relationships are based only on fantasy. Lou revealed that his behavior became compulsive, and he withdrew socially from his family and other real relationships.

His wife was a minister’s daughter, and they met through their affiliations with the same denomination. Lou was ten years her senior, and they eloped when she turned eighteen, much to the displeasure of her parents. Lou and his wife shared not only a denomination; they were also united by a common interest in sexual fantasies, and in utilizing technology in their exploration of the erotic. One of their fantasies involved participating together in sexual activity while under the watchful eyes of an imaginary young boy, six or seven years old. The fantasies then broadened to include the young boy as participant as well as observer; and soon thereafter, they were joined by an imaginary girl of twelve or thirteen, who was similarly deployed either as observer or participant in their sexualized dramas. Lou and his wife participated in several sexual fantasy sites, ultimately leading to their own personal sexual experiences becoming public via the Internet.

Whatever psychological meanings these fantasies and imaginary evocations of their youth may have carried, they were not sufficient to satisfy Lou’s intense desire for sexual gratification. Eventually, his wife encouraged him to seek other sexual relationships online and in the course of his doing so, he became interested in experimenting with a polyamorous relationship with a woman and initiated a meeting with her. He planned to come back from the rendezvous and communicate the details of the experience with his wife. Lou fully intended to draw his wife into her own experience with this process. Such a relationship depends on mutual trust and the consent of all parties involved, but Lou’s wife found herself unwilling to sanction it. When Lou persisted, her resentment mounted, and ultimately she chose to leave him rather than compromise on her opposition to such arrangements. She was experiencing guilt and remorse for her involvement in the fantasies, and became fearful of the depth of what she was beginning to experience, while Lou was interested in becoming more deeply involved in the uncharted territories of the imagination.

Lou initially perceived the circumstances of his wife’s departure in terms of her conflicts, and not at all his. At one point, he even suggested that she had left him for another man. It took a long time for him to acknowledge that his sexual activities, fantasies, and choices, even at the expense of the integrity of his family, were expressions of his relational issues. As a specialist in the treatment of addictions, I regarded Lou as being in the throes of a powerful sexual addiction, which his wife had reoriented away from her to the Internet, because it was exceeding their capacity to regulate emotionally and psychologically within the confines of their marriage. Perhaps the irresistible (and overwhelming) power of Lou’s insatiable addiction derived from its expressing in eroticized form some fantasized version of the hunger he felt for relationships he had never been able to have growing up, apart from his eroticized relationship model he shared with his sister. Whatever the cause, the power of his erotic attraction towards the woman he found online sufficed to rupture his connection with his family.

From the outset of our work together, Lou believed that our relationship would likewise be inadequate to contain his yearnings for relational gratification. His entire experience as a child, to say nothing of the termination of his marriage, suggested that he would not be able to ever find a relational home. In a powerful expression of paternal transference, he complained that I did not show signs of empathy for him and his situation. He felt I doubted the information he provided, or was overwhelmed by the nature of his experiences. Such anxieties were not without foundation; I had much work to do with my countertransferential feelings about how his lifestyle had shattered his family. We persisted nonetheless, and in time he seemed relieved to discover that I could understand him. I sensed that he saw in me the father he yearned to connect with, someone who could help him make sense of his childhood and contemporary experiences. Together, we were in fact able to identify some of his deepest needs, feelings and thoughts, furnishing an experience for him that was closer than any such bond he had enjoyed in his sexualized world.

Throughout the initial therapy sessions, Lou never expressed guilt for his online addiction, which fit his narcissistic personality style. He may have felt some guilt or remorse, but primarily he focused on his shock that his wife had taken their children and left him, possibly because of his insatiable sexual appetite, the nature of his internet involvement, and the depth of their fantasy exploration. The only regret he came close to having for the experience was that his wife became somewhat uncomfortable being involved in it over time. He remained focused on the fact that she broke her marriage vows. According to him, because he was a minister, and both he and his wife were committed to their faith, he held her accountable for leaving the marriage and separating him from his children. His secret commitment to his sexual fantasies was to remain a secret.  More than guilt or shame, he felt humiliated and was concerned about what his wife may have told the children about him. After a tremendous legal fight and the resistance of his wife’s allowing any supervised visitation with his children, Lou remained vigilant as to their reaction to him, especially with his oldest son. He still believed that his wife should accept responsibility for her side of the participation in the escalation of their sexual fantasies. He was also humiliated about what had circulated in church about his situation and caused some members to separate from the congregation, but again felt his wife was primarily responsible for this. In intense sessions to try to draw out of Lou some recognition of his lack of remorse or guilt for how his involvement affected his family, numerous times he would avoid or reject this. He always reverted to his wife being responsible. He would not accept responsibility for grooming her into this process that had been unknown to her.

Reflecting on the role technology had played in Lou’s marriage, the multifarious nature of Internet activities revealed itself to be highly worthy of close attention. In the beginning, it had furnished inspiration and perhaps a source of ideas for the couple in their experimentation with different sexual fantasies to play out together. This role seemed a harmless enough contribution to their efforts at regulating through fantasy some of the pain each endured as a consequence of difficult childhood experiences. They began with a creative cartoon fantasy site where each of them selected a character and then projected their characters into different scenarios of sexual activity. They created their own short movies. When they moved on, it was to Fantasyland where couples share their fetishes and other unusual sexual interests. The role of the Internet in their relationship took a more toxic turn, however, when it was designated by the two of them as caretaker of his emotional needs (defined narrowly by her as “sexual” needs, but more broadly by him, eventually, as a deep emotional connection). Lou and his wife formed online relationships with other couples and groups on Swinger sites. These relationships could lead to actual social connections for sexual parties. In retrospect, it is easy to imagine that a more satisfactory outcome might have been achieved by turning to couples therapy at the least, to say nothing of intensive therapy for each of them. But before his resort to personal therapy in analysis, Lou grew more dependent on the Internet’s ability to furnish him with objects of sexual desire, posed addictively as answers to his yearnings for relational gratification. The ultimate tragedy here was that in his pain, he chose to sacrifice the relational gratifications available over the long term by his wife and children in favor of the lure of illusory gratifications offered in online sexualized packaging. Essentially, his overpowering emotional needs and fantasies of gratification were uploaded out of the relational limits of the marriage into the infinite but depersonalized expanse of cyberspace. It remained for analysis to help ground him once again in relational matrices where he might develop the capacity to achieve such gratification without the intermediation of sexual fantasy.

Therapy and Technology

Finally, we may ask how technology is affecting our work as psychoanalysts. We might first observe generally that contemporary psychoanalysis requires a higher level of personal involvement and exposure with our patients than classical models and rigidly defined boundaries would permit, much less require. The intimacy achieved in the therapeutic relationship today is regarded as one of the key mutative factors in our work. By the same token, our patients have available to them, in addition to their relationship with us, a host of online relationships and data bases from which to draw information about themselves and, for that matter, about us. While this availability may enhance the level of intimacy in our connections with them, it may equally dilute or impede the development of that intimacy. To ascertain the impact of our technology on our patients’ ties to us, we need to be aware that these issues exist, and must be investigated as part of our illuminating the environment in which our relationship unfolds.

Even the analytic frame provided by the consulting room and the clock is potentially impacted by technology. Whereas extra-consulting room contact was previously limited by and large to phone messages, answering machines, and well-defined office hours, emails and cell phones expose us to calls from our patients, with some expectation of responses prior to the next session. Such technology again brings patient and therapist into closer contact with each other, at times more so than the therapist may welcome. Boundaries between personal and professional hours may blur. By the same token, online technologies such as Skype permit visual contact between therapist and patient, perhaps enhancing the value of their contact beyond that of the old phone session. However, as many of us have already discovered, Skype sessions are not equivalent to face-to-face treatment in our offices, despite their convenience where distances and traffic may easily deter personal attendance at therapy sessions. It is possible that technology may increase the popularity of analysis, if some (or eventually all) of therapy can be accomplished without requiring the patient to come to the analyst’s office.

In the shadows of the net: Breaking free of compulsive online sexual behavior.  Patric Carnes, Ph.D; David Delmonco, Ph.D ; Elizabeth Griffin, MA.  Hazelden  Center City, Minnesota  2007.

CDG (p1) cites  some of the problems created with internet access. “The opportunity is too enticing, alluring, fulfilling, immediate, and powerful.” “So much is available. There is so much opportunity and stimulation available that it’s difficult to control. And hard to stop. For some it is seemingly impossible to stop. CDG (p.1) labels the shadow side to the Net to be of concern. “The shadow world of cybersex is overtaking and overwhelming…” CDG (p.3) proposes that “of the estimated 322 million individuals who actively use the Internet, and estimated 40 million adults admit to regularly visiting pornographic Web sites.” “Many people struggle alone and in silence, too embarrassed of guilt-ridden to seek help, not knowing where they can find help, believing that no one else would really understand anyway.” One of the most fascinating experience I have discovered as a therapist is that many people find themselves in a kind of online trance or time warp, during which hours just slipped by. Another interesting variable is when individuals, develop friends in sexual chat rooms who become more important than their family and friends in their life.  CDG (p.5) states that “It’s almost impossible to imagine it now, but only ten short years ago, most of us knew little, if anything about this mysterious creation of communication called the Internet.” “Today, however, its burgeoning growth and wide accessibility are altering patterns of social communication, business activities and interpersonal relationships.” Cdg (p.5) further states that “the Internet has profoundly changed many aspects of our lives.” CDG (p.5-6) states that “authors like Lynn White in a classic book on Middle Ages, Medieval Technology and Social Change, and Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, have argued that new technological developments can actually created change in human thinking patterns and in how we see the world-changes that re known as paradigm shifts.” CDG (p.7) notes that “some social scientists have noted the educational potential of the Internet, citing the greater availability of information about sexuality and the potential for more candid discussions of sexuality online.” “The Internet can also offer the opportunity for forming online or virtual “communities” in which isolated or disenfranchised people can communicate with one another about sexual topics.” CDG (p.13( references a developed medial model for measuring the attraction of people to the Internet to engage in sexual activities, called the Cyber Hex for understanding the reasons why the Internet is so attractive and powerful for individuals.”  “The cyber Hex contains six components (a hexagon) that combines to create a “hex-like or trance state for online users (CDG p13). The sides of the hexagon include: integral, imposing, isolating, interactive, inexpensive, and intoxicating.

According to CDG (p.14) , the Internet has become an integral part of most people’s personal and work lives. Internet has become a way of life. Avoidance of the Internet is difficult, if not impossible  CDG (p.15) states that the Internet is becoming more and more often a necessity. “It is being integrated inot our lives, its use is, in a sense, being externally imposed on us by society.” The imposing factor suggests “a loss of contrl in that we have fewer options to decline using the Net.” Likewise “The very breadth of the Internet’s content is, in and of itself, formidable and imposing.” With Isolation, CDG (p.16) refers to “the most powerful component of cybersex. Intoxication occurs quickly and privately. The opportunity is available for separating oneself from others and to engage in whatever fantasy you prefer, well beyond the distraction of reality.” “The internet system is interactive system, with a pseudo-intimacy with others. The Internet equipment provides a low-cost alternative to part methods of material. Intoxification from the process and available content can produce and euphoric response.” There is an abundance of choice for communication and materials.” This also presents the possibility for instant gratification.” “The variety of choices in retrieving and connecting provide an enormously alluring and creates an intoxicating trance.” CDG (p.18) states “the opportunity of people to “develop sexual fantasies and objectify others without the fear of rejection.” Also, the user is free to become part of the fantasy without responsibilities or consequences.”

CDG (p.39) emphasizes that “part of the power of cybersex is that It’s one step removed from reality.” “Having thoughts and urges and fantasies and then acting on them via the Internet seems different from acting on them in real time.” “We are not face-to-face, literally, with another human being.” “We can’t look into their eyes, feel their touch, read their emotions, or in any other way physically interact with them.” Cyber-interactions feel more remote, and safer.” “We can be whoever we want to be…” CDG (p.43) warns of experiences where “addicts progressively go through stages in which they retreat further from the reality of friends, family, and work.” “Eventually, what other people know is a false identity.” “leading a fantasy double life is a distortion of reality.” “Addiction is a system, one with its own momentum.”  CDG (p.43) claims that “the addictive system has various component “parts,” the first of which is a belief system.” Most important to recognize is that the addiction begins with delusional thought processes, which are rooted in the individual’s belief system.” “That is these people begin with core beliefs about themselves that affect how they perceive reality.”

CDG (p.43) maintains that “each of us has a belief system that is the sum of the assumptions, judgments, and myths that we hold to be true.” “It contains potent family messages about our value or worth as people, our relationships, our basic needs, and our sexuality. It is continued, CDG (p.44) within it is a repertoire of what options-answers, solutions, methods, possibilities, and ways of behaving-are open to each of us.”In short, it is our view of the world.” Our belief system, therefore, filters through what behavioral conduct we make choices.” Coping mechanisms is another consideration when viewing addiction. Online experiences may reinforce unhealthy coping mechanisms learned earlier in life.  Dissociating mentally and emotionally helps one to detach from unsuccessful experiences. Interpersonal skills may not be practical on an emotional level in real life. Consequently, the person may become dependent on creating distance in real-life relationships which leads to prevention of intimacy.” CDG (p.45) state that the “Internet is a way to interact with others while keeping a barrier between you and other people.” “It is especially useful if you never learned healthy ways to engage with or relate to other people or if you don’t trust or feel safe with them.” “You can remain anonymous and distant and never have to reveal you true identity or anything else about yourself.”

“Cybersex provides the ultimate pseudo-connection with another person-the perfect impersonal personal relationship-with no hassles or demands or connection.” “Cybersex enables users to truly objectify the person on the other side of the computer connection.” CDG (p46).  “In many ways, according to CDG (p.46), the Internet allows people to create a kind of cyber-dissociation.” “They remain detached from those with whom they are interacting.” “The cyber-world offers the ultimate form of detachment.”

CDG (p.46) points out that with one’s belief system, when considering addictive behaviors, one creates  the set of interacting faulty beliefs. Furthermore, what develops are distorted views of reality and delusional thinking to support the sustainment of their behaviors.” “The delusional system provides the rationalization of justifying ones behaviors. With addictions, a preoccupation of what is important for oneself may even be perceived as a trancelike state.

Conclusion

For both Lou and Katherine, efforts to find online what they believed to be solutions to their relational problems were ultimately unsuccessful until, in the context of their therapeutic relationship with an analyst, their relational needs might be more directly and effectively addressed. For Katherine, the personal costs of this effort were small, and indeed, her genealogies likely provided her with a stronger sense of herself as a singular center of agency over the period of a lifetime, that facilitated consolidation of a more coherent sense of herself from without and within. But all these gains required confirmation from the analyst in order to have any prospect of becoming permanent in the face of challenges to her positive sense of herself from without and within. By contrast, Lou’s adventures in cyberspace stand as somewhat of a cautionary tale, not only in the treatment of compulsive sexual addictions, but also in terms of how the intervention of technology in human relationships may transform, and often depersonalize those bonds, and in the process may also worsen our sense of who we are.

As observed earlier, the development of the self is no longer based solely on face-to-face interactions with significant others and physically present peer groups. Information about us that influences how we think about ourselves also comes from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, text messages, emails, chat rooms, blogs, sequentially listed “comments” on specific topics, and impersonal repositories of data. On one hand, for Katherine this may mean finding that 400 Facebook friends find her “likeable,” even if none of her intimate acquaintances and relatives do. For Lou, the potential to find sexual gratification online may have felt self-enhancing, even if his family relationships left him feeling insufficiently worthy and set aside. Through technology, we are able to meet an unlimited number of people and a large number of “friends.” Our online relationships may buttress our sense of who we are, and so we seek them out. But information about us from online sources arrives mediated through screens and typed words, in contrast to the personal interactions we have with people in our presence. Technology allows access to new data about ourselves from those who are in direct contact with us. That is one reason why both Katherine and Lou required face-to-face therapeutic relationships to consolidate any gains in self-enhancement they may have obtained through online connections.

There are no easy answers to the question of how technology is affecting our work; we can only say with certainty that it is, and that it will continue to in ways not easily predicted. Perhaps as our brains become rewired to cope with the changes in our technological environments, answers will come to us from places we do not yet know exist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

 

Clark, A. (2003), Natural-born Cyborgs:  Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Goren, W. (2003), America’s Love Affair with Technology: The Transformation of

Sexuality and the Self over the 20th Century, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 20:487-508.

 

Hallak, A. (2014), Fun for Little Ones. Family Fun, ed. A. Hallak, 4:60j.

 

Rosen, L. (2012), iDisorder:  Understanding our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us. New York:  Palgrave Macmillin.

 

Stern, D. (1985), The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. U.S.:  Basic Books.

 

Stern, D. (1993), The Role of Feelings for an Interpersonal Self in the Perceived self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-Knowledge. In: The Perceived Self, ed. U. Neisser, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 205-215.

 

Tapscott, Don (2009), Grown Up Digital. New York:  McGraw-Hill.

 

 

 

 

The Necessity of Metaphysics for Ordinal Psychoanalysis

Robert S. Corrington, PhD

 

What is metaphysics, that most contentious of words?  In an average bookstore the metaphy sics section covers esoteric literature, for example, the study of astrology, flying saucers, and Tarot cards.  For the sophisticate, the term can have a variety of technical meanings not all compatible with each other.  In any event, since Aristotle metaphysics has been called “first philosophy” in that it deals with the broadest subject matter in the broadest possible way.  For some the prefix “meta” has the meaning of that which is beyond the physical, forgetting that the concept of the “physical” is one of the most vexing and elusive in the history of philosophy.  Nor does it help to substitute the word “matter,” especially in the way that Santayana does in his monumental 1942 Realms of Being.  So-called “matter” is no more metaphysically useful as a term of broadest designation than is the term “physical.”

For Heidegger, especially in his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics,  metaphysics asks the primal question: Why are there beings at all and not rather nothing?  He insists that the question of ‘the’ nothing is as fundamental as the question of Being (die Seinsfrage).  It is from the nothing that Being arises and stands forth and measures the sway of beings.  Yet there is ambiguity, for Heidegger, in the concept of metaphysics in the West.  On the one hand it has degenerated from its primal meaning in the ancient Greek world of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Sophocles, where the originary meaning of Being was at least partly understood, while on the other hand, especially in the subsequent Latin language tradition, metaphysics has concerned itself with the beingness of beings rather than their sheer Being.  Post-Greek metaphysics gives an answer to the question: Why are there beings at all and not rather nothing?  For Heidegger there is only the firestorm of the questioning without a definite answer.  But subsequent metaphysics posits a creator being as the highest being that/who creates all being things by intellect or will.  For Leibniz and Schopenhauer, still partially in the shadow of the Latin tradition, the principle of sufficient reason is the key concept in metaphysics that explains the beingness (whatness) and Being of beings.   While Schopenhauer has a vastly superior metaphysics to Leibniz, whose reflections remain in the domain of science fiction, much like Whitehead, he remains ensnared in a Kantian epistemology that ironically limits the force of his metaphysics of the Will.

We are on more fruitful ground when we examine the classical pragmatic and naturalist traditions of Euro-American philosophy.  In his epoch making Experience and Nature of 1925, John Dewey talks of metaphysics as the systematic study of the “generic traits of existence” as they are encountered in the organism/environment transaction best rendered in human aesthetic experience.  The links among metaphysics, experience, and aesthetics are key to understanding both pragmatism and naturalism.  C.S. Peirce also makes this link but in a vastly more technical way in his phenomenology (phaneroscopy).  For Peirce, the aesthetic realm is the summum bonum that crowns all of metaphysics and phaneroscopy, transcending the logical and the ethical.  Kant’s concept of the “sublime” in his Third Critique is perhaps what Peirce, as a partial Kantian, may have had in mind.

More important, for our discussion, is the naturalist tradition within Euro-American philosophy.  A naturalist may or may not be a pragmatist, while a pragmatist will usually be a naturalist.  Naturalism as a metaphysical perspective argues that nature is all that there is and that there is nothing beyond nature, especially not an extra-natural or supernatural creator.  The so-called “supernatural” is always an event within and as the one nature that there is.  It may be vagrant or elusive but it is natural in all respects.  There is a kind of piety to naturalism that pays homage to nature as the only reality that there is.  Within Euro-American naturalism there are distinctive types that I cannot elucidate here.  Elsewhere I have designated them as the descriptive forms (Dewey, Santayana, James and Buchler), the honorific forms (Emerson and Thoreau), the process forms (Whitehead, Hartshorne, and partially Peirce), and the ecstatic form (Corrington).  Each of the four forms rarely appears without some admixture of the others.

There are several striking metaphysical claims coming out of Euro-American naturalism, although not all the listed thinkers agree on all points.  My emphasis will be on what my ecstatic form takes from the other forms and radicalizes into what I have called “ecstatic naturalism” for some decades now.  I simply list the points: 1) nature is not an order of orders nor does it have a contour, 2) there is no system of internal relations linking all that is in nature (contra Whitehead, Hegel, and Bradley, for example), 3) there is no one trait found in each order of nature, only traits in a blinding variety of prospects, 4) radical pluralism is thus the proper metaphysics of nature, 5) nature is not an organism or a whole, only orders (a reiteration of point 1), 6) there are no ultimate simples in nature, and 7) the fundamental divide within the one nature that there is is that of nature naturing and nature natured—the former term referring to the unconscious of nature and its innumerable potencies (Schelling), the latter term denoting the innumerable orders of the World, what Christians call “creation.”  While this pair of terms has a Medieval provenance it is, of course, most noted in Spinoza’s 1677 Ethics.

Nature is constituted by what Justus Buchler calls “natural complexes,” each of which has subaltern traits (complexes), but none of which is related to all other complexes.  In his main work Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (1966/1990) he works out the definitions of these terms with uncanny precision.  Within a natural complex there will be subaltern complexes that do not relate to all other subaltern complexes ‘within’ the larger complex.  Of course, metaphysically speaking, each complex is infinitely complex in its own way although one may have more scope and a richer integrity than another.  In this ordinal scheme god, however envisioned, encountered, or contrived, is a natural complex within the one nature that there is and hence cannot be ‘connected’ with all other natural complexes, another example of William James like radical pluralism.

The above listed seven points will show their special pertinence when I create what I call an “ordinal psychoanalysis.”  The goal of ordinal psychoanalysis is to work out of and use the scheme of ordinal metaphysics and the perspective of ecstatic naturalism to radically broaden and deepen its foundations (grounds) and to ultimately link the vast unconscious of nature (nature naturing and its potencies) to the collective and personal forms of the unconscious in the human psyche.  Aristotle, Santayana, and Jung use the concept of “psyche” in different metaphysical ways as the dimension of the human process rooted in nature from which it gets its animating principle.  Jung gives the term a more honorific meaning than either Aristotle or Santayana were inclined to do although, as Heidegger points out, for Aristotle “psyche” was in a sense “all things” and has a relation to the higher intellect and the unmoved mover—a metaphysical extravagance that Santayana would heatedly reject.  Be that as it may, the perspective of ecstatic naturalism roots the psyche in an ecstatically self-transcending nature.  Note that these moments of transcendence are immanent in nature and do not somehow lift the human process ‘outside’ of nature—an impossibility in any case.

The key term in ecstatic naturalism is nature naturing (natura naturans).  It refers, as noted, to the infinitely deep and ultimately capacious unconscious or underconscious of nature, which can neither be rendered conscious nor mapped by the finite human process.  It is limitless and filled with churning potencies that act on the human process in ways directly calling for intervention by an ordinal psychoanalysis.  Without probing into nature naturing, psychoanalysis loses much of its own potency insofar as it ignores the potencies of nature.  A “potency” is an elusive momentum that erupts from the heart of nature and impacts directly or indirectly on the domains of nature natured, the orders of the manifest psyche and the human process in general.  In itself, a potency is beyond or prior to the distinction between good and evil.  Its effects, as worked through via an ordinal psychoanalysis, can be dealt with more directly in terms of good and evil, however ambiguous these realities may be in the human orders.  Of course, psychoanalysis must directly deal with neuroses internal to the psyche and do this internal work at all times, e.g., on the unhealthy form of narcissism, anxiety disorder, schizoid splits, and phobias.

Moving to psychoanalysis itself, Greenberg and Mitchell thoroughly and cogently argue in their 1983 Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, that the fundamental theoretical divide within psychoanalysis is that between drive/structure theory and object relations/structure theory.  For them, they are almost logically incompatible frameworks and yet many theorists struggle to bridge the gap between them by mixing the models in a variety of largely unsuccessful ways, two examples, among many, being the theories of Melanie Klein and Heinz Kohut, which struggle to correlate Freudian drives with later object relations models.

The purest examples of drive theory are Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the radical wild child of psychoanalysis.  In the drive model, objects, internal (Klein) and external, take on a secondary place.  The emphasis is on the biologically rooted drives as they move outward and attempt to make the transit from anxiety and internal pressure to a release and reduction of energy—the classical concept of “cathexis.”  The primary drives of sexuality and aggression permeate the human process and always seek expression in some momentarily suited ‘object.’  However, this object is only a means in itself and never a true object with independent worth and equal status with the attending drive driven psyche.  In the orderly march of the unfolding erogenous zones, the objects remain within the ambit of primary narcissism and concern the nascent psyche from within, as it were.

Whether or not one accepts Freud’s post-1920 concepts of the life and death drives, aggression takes on a more dramatic role in Freud’s later work.  The aggressive drive is the motor force of the rise of civilization as a means of sublimating those highly volatile drives into a drive compromise that makes collective living even possible.

Reich takes issue with the centrality of the aggressive drive arguing instead that it is a secondary process resulting from the repression of the core life drive that lies at the bottom of the psyche.  Like Freud he uses the tension/release model for the route of the cathexes.  He envisions an arc wherein the armoring rings around the psyche block off the natural flow of sexual energy producing the rise in internal tension.  Without sexual release these tensions turn outward into aggression.  Hence aggression is not built into the basic/normal human psyche but is a byproduct of characterological armoring, an armoring that embeds itself in the musculature of the body.  When psychoanalysis, working through the negative transference at first, removes these armoring rings, sexual release eliminates both anxiety and aggression.  Hence, aggression is not a fundamental drive as in Freud but a negative result of the blocking of the one fundamental drive, sexuality.  Thus, while Freud is a drive dualist, Reich is a drive monist.  He rejected Freud’s notion of a death drive in humans but later posited a kind of death energy in nature that worked against what he called “orgone,” i.e., the cosmic energy that swirls through the universe and all living things.

Orgonotic energy is not the same as electro-magnetic energy and has rules of its own, for example, that it swirls rather than moves in a straight line or vibratory pattern.  He argued that it can sometimes be seen as a bluish gray light that permeates the atmosphere.  Regardless of the potential dubiousness of aspects of his orgone theory, he remained convinced that the central drive of the universal energy is benevolent and life affirming.

Drive theory thus envisions biologically rooted internal drives that must move from inward narcissism to an outward expression that latches on to whatever ‘objects’ promise release and the maximization of the pleasure principle, what Reich called the “pleasure premium.”  The Oedipal struggle takes precedence over later object relations and the role of parenting, in the external sense, is downplayed.  Drives exist to express themselves no matter what and the individual psyche is hopelessly enmeshed in its own need for satisfaction, by whatever means.  The object relations model sounds a different tone.

With object relations theory the focus shifts away from the real or alleged internal drives to the objective field of relations that surround, haunt, and empower the individual.  Klein emphasizes both internal and external objects, while other theorists place their stress on external objects.  There is less concern with the erogenous zones and the Oedipal complex and more of an interest in pre-Oedipal object relations, the issue of good and bad parenting, and the future negotiation of the psyche with healthy external objects/persons.  The person is seen as constituted by and through a mobile field of objects that shape his or her identity over time.  These external objects are real in themselves and not a mere means to drive gratification.   The parents are by far the most important objects in the psyche’s development and can either reinforce or thwart a healthy non-regressive narcissism.  Winnicott’s “good enough mother” can stabilize and empower the nascent psyche as it finds its way beyond the mother/child bond to larger and more empowering object relations.

In the object relations model there is a two way trafficking between the psyche and the other object/person.  Each co-constitutes the prospects and actualities of the other and a bond of empathy emerges between psyche and object.  In the drive model there is only a one way trafficking between the drive(s) and the so-called ‘object.’   In the process of psychoanalysis, as understood by Kohut, there develops a “vicarious introspection” that opens up the inner life of the analysand to the analyst—this, of course, can work both ways through the transference if it is open to the reality principle, however difficult that might be.  Empathy replaces the “pleasure principle” as the touchstone of analysis.  Not all object relations are good of course and there is always the risk of depression or a schizoid split.  And a healthy narcissism can collapse into a primitive primary narcissism that is almost pre-object.

Hence, a person is defined by the object field, with which he or she interacts.  Perhaps the premier concept coming out of the object relations model is Kohut’s idea of the “self-object,” which has a special power to enliven and enrich the psyche.  The self-object can be a transitional object weaning the child from the mother or it can be something non-personal—an extension beyond Kohut.  For Julia Kristeva, language functions as a self-object because it pulls the nascent self away from “the good breast” and into the world of “the name of the father” where patriarchal linguistic codes intercede between the psyche and the now lost “material maternal” ground.  While language is not a traditional self-object, except perhaps for a poet or a philosopher, it functions like one insofar as its effects life and transforms the young  psyche into an entirely different field of relations.  For Kristeva the experience of jouissance can break through the paternal linguistic code and re-connect the psyche with the maternal ground.

Semiotics in general, which probes into the sign/object relation, whether iconic (likeness), indexical (causal), or symbolic (meaning and generality), can certainly function as a powerful self-object in that it connects the human process to the object fields that surround it.  For a pragmatist like C.S. Peirce, semiotics functions along Darwinian lines where there is a kind of natural selection among signs determining which ones come closer to the reality principle.  Nature is the selecting agent that props up more valid signs and deconstructs less pragmatically useful (adaptive) signs.  The psyche traffics between and among a bewildering number and variety of signs and somehow, in most cases, makes the right choices among them, thus enhancing its object relations and serving the reality principle.

In objet relations theory there is a strong emphasis on the maternal and less of a concern with the super-ego, which internalizes patriarchal codes of conduct and ideation.  In a relational matrix the entire object field shapes the values and self-restrictions of the psyche, shifting the burden away from the unconscious super-ego to more open and positive relationships within conscious life.  While the unconscious still exists in object relations theory, it takes on slightly less destructive or even demonic features—that is, it is no longer at war with the ego and the expanding and contracting light of consciousness.

It is now time to shift to another model of the psyche that transcends and transfigures both the drive and object relations theories.  Such a psychoanalysis is here called “ordinal” because it deals with the innumerable orders of the human process within nature and its innumerable orders.  Everything whatsoever, “what ever is in whatever way” (Buchler) is an order (natural complex) and has innumerable ordinal locations.  Ordinal psychoanalysis, unlike other forms, roots the psyche in nature’s unconscious (nature naturing) and its potencies and does so through an affirmation of the above seven listed principles of ecstatic naturalism.  In creating ordinal psychoanalysis I hope to show the necessity of the right kind of metaphysics for psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.  The psyche is a natural complex among other natural complexes and receives and creates its contour through these assimilations and manipulations of other complexes.

Among the seven points of ecstatic naturalism, the seventh one assumes priority; namely, that between nature naturing and nature natured, together representing a fissure within the one nature that there is rather than constituting two separate natures.   This fissuring is on going and permeates nature and especially the human process.  As noted, nature naturing is the unconscious of nature that churns in its uncanny depths generating innumerable potencies that become manifest within the innumerable orders of nature natured.  I define nature naturing as: “Nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone.”  There are direct, if elusive, links among the unconscious of nature, the human/animal collective unconscious, and the human personal unconscious.  Any treatment of the personal unconscious must work through the two other dimensions of the unconscious that live ‘below’ it.

The most important link between nature naturing and nature natured is that of the archetype, what C.S. Peirce calls “developmental thirdness” or ultimate generality.  The archetypes lie in nature itself, not just the collective unconscious of the human and animal processes.  It straddles the fissure between nature naturing and nature natured, bringing both dimensions into more intimate contact with each other.  The archetype is a special potency that contains both power and meaning.  For Peirce, meaning evolves over time in a universe that is constantly, if slowly, developing new laws—his notion of “developmental teleology.”  It is a vexing and fascinating question as to whether archetypes can evolve and feel adaptive pressures.  For Plato such cannot be the case.  While for Peirce this is not only possible but is happening through his concepts of tychism (chance), synechism (law-like gathering), and agapism (evolutionary love).

Thus the archetypes are rooted in nature, as argued by C.G. Jung, especially in his later works.  Treatment and aesthetic creativity both involve wrestling with the archetypes on all three levels: 1) natural, 2) collective, and 3) personal.  They must be brought to a stand within the fragile structures of consciousness, which must struggle with their power as it also tries to extract meaning.  The risk of psychic inflation is always there and the travails of individuation are life-long.  But this Homeric contest (Nietzsche) must be undertaking if the host psyche is to maximize its prospects and its quest for the central meaning of the Self archetype.

The psyche, in ordinal psychoanalysis, which is also an archetypal psychoanalysis, manifests the other six points of ecstatic naturalism: 1) the psyche does not have an ultimate order of orders nor does it have a fixed contour through time, 2) there is no system of internal relations linking all aspects of the psyche—there are breaks in continua and no psychic continuum of all subaltern continua, 3) the psyche manifests a variety of traits and no one, such as sexuality, is prevalent in all respects, 4) ordinal psychoanalysis posits a radical pluralism within the psyche and its contacts with the world, 5) the psyche is never a whole or totality, and 6) there are no ultimate rock bottom simples in the psyche.  These ordinal concepts make possible a different kind of psychoanalysis that is consistent with the principles of ecstatic naturalism.  To work with and on the psyche is to recognize its innumerable ordinal locations and many traits, manifest and non-manifest.

As in Peirce, Dewey, and Santayana, the aesthetic sphere takes priority as it is the fullest expression of the potencies and their special intensification in the archetypes.  It must be noted, however, that, especially for Peirce, the aesthetic sphere of the summum bonum has direct effects on the ethical sphere and helps it attain what he calls “self-control.”  Aesthetics, ethics, and logic are intertwined in their effects on each other and the logical person is also the most communal and ethical person as logic rules out selfishness as simply illogical.  In a special sense, logic is also the servant of self-control.

For Kant and Schopenhauer the distinction between beauty and the sublime assumes a central role in ordinal psychoanalysis.  For both thinkers, the beautiful is that which is bounded, harmonious, and what gives pleasure to the viewer, while the sublime is unruly, boundless, and can produce fear and anxiety in the participant.  Schopenhauer lists a violent storm at sea as an example of the sublime that de-stabilizes the psyche and cracks it open to the demonic and creative depths of what I call nature naturing.  Hence the sublime is the ultimate category in aesthetics and aesthetic experience—it is the inner telos of all art, both in art works themselves and the art work of creating the fully actualizing adult psyche.  The experience of and encounter with the sublime gives the psyche its deepest and most profound awareness of the sheer prevalence of the World.

Within psychoanalysis the work of Otto Rank takes priority as coming closest to the principles of ecstatic naturalism and the sense of the sublime.  His 1930 work, Art and Artist: Creativity and Personality Development, remains one of the few genuine masterpieces in psychoanalytic literature.  And for me, but not for all, his 1924 work, The Trauma of Birth, represents a milestone in our thinking about the potencies of nature and their impact on the human psyche.  Let me quote a passage from the latter book:

We have thus surveyed the whole circle of human creation, from the nocturnal wish-dream to the adjustment to reality, as an attempt to materialize the primal situation—i.e., to undo the primal trauma.  From this survey the so-called advance in the development of civilization has proved to be a continually repeated attempt to adjust to the enforced removal from the mother and the instinctive tendency to return to her.  Following along the path of the development of culture, we will now trace the unmistakable approach to the primal trauma in the expression “Back to Nature!” (p. 103)

 

The trauma of birth is the first of the fissures that permeate the human psyche and drive it to various forms of creativity in order to symbolically and artistically return to the primal situation in the womb, not only of the biological mother but also of nature itself.  The birth trauma is the manifestation of a potency that speaks right out of the heart of nature naturing itself.  The manifest psyche, within the innumerable orders of nature natured, struggles to return to the womb through the creation of civilization.  Rank’s view here has a deep echo in the above mentioned work of Julia Kristeva and her reflections on the primacy of the material maternal and the chora (receptacle) over the ubiquitous “name of the father;” namely the patriarchal structure of contrived civilization.

In the process of healing a route must be found that reconstitutes the womb of nature but not through a regressive narcissism.   For Rank, among all human types the artist has the will to create not only works of art but to become him or herself a work of art per se.  Rank’s concept of the “will” has family resemblances to that of Schopenhauer’s who sees the will as operating underneath and through all of nature—a kind of nature naturing, but not exactly a Kantian thing-in-itself.   For both, the will is a fundamental drive of the psyche and of nature and can shape itself via aesthetic means, bringing us full circle.

The artist type thus replaces the more classical hero type as the new creator of a world of power and meaning via the archetypes and an ongoing encounter with the potencies of nature naturing.  Let me quote a passage from his Art and Artist:

The new type of humanity will only become possible when we have passed beyond this psycho-therapeutic transitional stage, and must grow out of those artists themselves who have achieved a renunciant attitude towards artistic production.  A man with creative power who can give up artistic expression in favour of the formation of personality—since he can no longer use art as an expression of an already developed personality—will remould the self-creative type and will be able to put his creative impulse directly in the service of his own personality. . . . And the creative type who can renounce this protection by art and can devote his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type, and in return for this renunciation will enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness.  (pp. 430 & 431)

 

In Rank we get potencies, the chief of which is the birth trauma, archetypes, if not always named as such, and the ordinal principles.  The artist creates a new psyche that is never a completed totality or a tight system of in-place internal relations.  The notion of psychic simples gives way to the complexity and unendingness of the artistic process that transits between the beautiful and the sublime.  Above all, the psyche is rooted in nature naturing, what he calls the will, and encounters the potencies that are the hallmark of the depth dimensions of nature.

Rank thus stands as the premier psychoanalyst of ecstatic naturalism and ordinal psychoanalysis.  He transcends the split between the drive and object relations models by stressing the formation of a new type of psyche that has itself as the premier self-object, but not in Kohut’s more limited sense.  The psyche-to-be is that of the genuine artist who is neither merely gratifying drives nor remaining only controlled within a field of external object relations.  The artist, as the paradigmatic human, creates beyond the self and its relations to form a new self-in-process that opens out what Peirce calls “genuine novelty,” the outcome of which, of course, cannot be predicted in advance or brought under the explanatory control of previous psychoanalytic rules and so-called laws.  His ecstatic naturalism stands as a model of the way forward in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

 

 

 

 

 

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Buchler, Justus, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, New York: Columbia University    Press (1966), Second Expanded Edition, SUNY Press (1990), ed. Wallace, Marsoobian, Corrington.

Corrington, Robert S., The Community of Interpreters, Macon, GA: Mercer University   Press (1987/1995).

Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, New York: Fordham             University Press (1992)

An Introduction to C.S. Peirce, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Pub.,         (1993).

Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University    Press (1994).

Nature’s Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit, Lanham, MD: Rowman and       Littlefield, Pub., (1996).

Nature’s Religion, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Pub., (1997).

A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2000).

Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (2003).

Riding the Windhorse: Manic Depressive Disorder and the Quest for          Wholeness, Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books (2003).

Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism, Lanham, MD: Lexington     Books (2013).

Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism, Lanham, MD: Lexington     Books, forthcoming in 2016.

Dewey, John, Experience and Nature, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University         Press, (1988).  Original Edition (1925).

Art as Experience, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, (1989).   Original Edition (1934).

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Essays and Lectures, New York: The Library of America          (1981).

Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations is Psychoanalytic Theory, Cambridge, MA:     Harvard University Press (1983).

Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics, Second Edition, translated by Fried   and Polt, New Haven: Yale   University Press (2014).

Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Second Edition Vol. 9.I of The   Collected Works, translated by R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University             Press, (1971).

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Guyer and   Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2000).  German Edition         (1793).

Kohut, Heinz, The Restoration of the Self, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1977).

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Philosophical Papers and Letters, translated by Loemker,   Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Piblishing Company (1969).

Lieberman, James E., Acts of Will: The Life and Works of Otto Rank, New York: Free     Press (1985).

Peirce, C.S. The Essential Peirce, Vol. 1 (1867-1893), Bloomington, IN: Indiana    University Press (1993).

Rank, Otto, The Trauma of Birth, translated by Lieberman, New York: Dover    Publications (1993).  German Edition (1924).

Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. translated by           Atkinson, New York: W.W,    Norton (1968).  German typescript (1930).

Reich, Wilhelm, Character Analysis, translated by Garfagno, New York: Farrar,             Straus, and Giroux (1972),  German Edition (1933).

Santayana, George, Realms of Being, New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc.           (1972).  Original edition (1942).

Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Presentation, Vol. I, translated by           Aquila and Carus, New York: Pearson Longman, (2008).  German Edition      (1819).

Spinoza, Benedict de., A Spinoza Reader, translated by Curley, Princeton: Princeton    University Press (1994).

Strozier, Charles B., Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, New York: Other       Press (2001).

Criticism and Healing

A Study of Human Agency Steven Goldman, Ph.D. July 2015

 

For the last several months my research has focused on the relation between criticism and healing. More specifically, I’ve been looking at critical partitioning in relationship to therapeutic strategies.  Put differently: I have been looking at various kinds of mind maps and various opportunities for self-­?regulation that they suggest.  The key problem of psychological integration varies with, must adapt to, and is empowered by the elements we identify as out of sync and needing integration.  Thus we can learn something from looking into this distinction and its development through history.

 

This essay is really no more than a few notes from ongoing research -­?-­? I have really only one conclusion to offer -­?-­? mainly I am recounting histories and working through philosophical arguments -­?-­? I am also trying to formulate some ideas for further research.   I am trying to get some of my thinking down on paper.  As always, the point of doing this is to set down a marker -­?-­? to make a claim and see where the argument leads, in order    to get some distance from it -­?-­? to see if it is true -­?-­? and to seek criticism of the work.

 

Definition of Criticism

 

By criticism I mean things like seeing truth, seeing what is, openness, really looking at the evidence, and acknowledging reality; as taking care, taking the time, taking effort, as closely observing; as venturing objections and proposing problems for a line of thought, posing arguments for and against; as testing; as pointing out limits, lines, structures, patterns; as drawing attention; as saying the uncomfortable thing, as speaking up, negating, opposing, hectoring, mocking; as denial, rejection, and demanding proof;       as departure, disloyalty, breaking ranks, opposing the natural attitude, as questioning whatever is held to be true; as focused on knowledge, as discounting mere opinion, dismissing convention, as skepticism; as precision, accuracy, as error detection; as attacking presumption; also attacking one’s own arrogance, as facing oneself, confronting oneself, having the courage of one’s convictions, as cleaning away, clearing away the lies, as putting the problem back in one’s own court, as self-­?responsibility.  Stirring the pot -­?-­? and not replacing one delusion with another. Living in doubt -­?-­? as work, discipline, practice.  This is what Nietzsche called “unquiet living.” Criticism has its purest expression in Socrates’ saying that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

 

Definition of Healing

 

By healing I mean things like getting it, waking up, awareness, understanding; recovery; recognition, resolution, restoration, renewal; I am talking about ideas such as remedy, cure, therapy, medicine, prescription, drug, antidote, treatment, relief; I will use terms

 

like integration, differentiation, maturity, mastery, growth, health -­?-­? even happiness; I am talking about self-­?regulation; I am talking about suffering and the relief of suffering.

 

Healing matches the disease, just as criticism is specific and focuses on a particular weakness. But in all cases, healing is a return.  From its earliest history, healing has been practiced as primum non nocere -­?-­? first do no harm; make preventions for harm with any knowledge about it; then address harm as it arises. Healing in this prime sense is the restoration, in the wake of an injury, of a person’s health and power for life -­?-­? restoring the person, giving them back their life, restoring their dignity and agency.

 

Criticism and Healing

 

Philosophy exists in order to address suffering. We should think of arguments and systems of thinking in the same way as we we do about treatments, therapeutics, drugs of various kinds and surgical techniques. This strategy becomes more transparent as we work through various stages in the history of the critical attitude. Philosophy in its early stages is comprehensive -­?-­? philosophy is all learning -­?-­? historically, lines of thought in philosophy break off from philosophy -­?-­? philosophy becomes physics, medicine, politics, ethics, logic, natural and biological science. But philosophy is also ‘learning’ in basic senses like learning to speak, learning by experience, learning to do, learning from mistakes, learning to cope, to manage, to get along on one’s own -­?-­? strengthening the part of ourselves that learns; learning what is really true, learning about oneself, learning from real confrontation; learning to put things together, learning some realism, learning as failure and survival, or learning a new language; learning the ropes. Philosophy is less what and more that we learn. Philosophy is also less what we say and more how we say it. In my conception of philosophy, it is crucial to hang on to the learning process itself, rather than identifying with any of its results -­?-­? or with any kind of expert knowledge; and what I am claiming is that practicing skepticism is deeply healing just by itself.

 

By working through some of the following stages and arguments, we put forward an idea of selfhood as the ability to learn, but also come up against objections to this idea that seem to suggest that the self is far more than what the conscious self can survey -­?-­? our idea of philosophy becomes more sophisticated and we begin to discriminate more problems -­?-­? this gets us to a place where we can get a clear view of the key idea of agency.  Then we can test the idea that skepticism empowers self-­?regulating agency.

 

Historical maps

 

Some ‘mind maps’ (as I am calling them) that seem especially germane to the idea I am exploring in this essay include Greek maps, psychoanalytic maps, and biological  maps.  I am not discounting the import of other ways of conceiving the problem of the self or the value of other teachings about psychic wholeness -­?-­? with some humility, I am trying to keep the scope of the study fairly simple and stick to what I am able to understand.

 

Greek maps

 

“Psychology is another word for what the ancients called fate.”1 Implacable forces are set against a person, shaping and prefiguring the whole course of life, but especially in the sense that accidents of birth underlie human temperaments and the fortunes that follow these different makeups and natures -­?-­? showing a logic of personality that makes a restless man a sailor, an impetuous man fail, or prefiguring the fall of a haughty king. Heraclitus’ fragment 119 is ???? ??????? ?????? -­?-­? “character is destiny” -­?-­? the kind of person we are shapes the kind of life we lead -­?-­? our personhood makes our life course. The divine machinery behind the scene does not so much explain as lament human folly. This subtle idea insinuates a ‘moral’ responsibility for disasters of fortune -­?-­? as Oedipus bears some responsibility for his angry outburst at the crossroads, where he killed a party of strangers, even though they treated him roughly -­?-­? his own flaw in character ‘explains’ the downfall -­?-­? hinting at a more patient Oedipus who lets the strangers pass.

 

Calling out Oedipus’ heedless arrogance is dangerous -­?-­? messengers fear to come before kings with bad news.  Finally someone must stand up and speak truth to power -­?-­? to say what everyone knows but fears to say -­?-­? and gradually, beginning in Archaic times and developing in Athens, Greek culture makes an honored place for truth-­?telling.

 

The Greeks also categorized various kinds of madness such as prophetic madness, poetic madness, and the madness of ecstatic frenzy. This suggests a model of the self in which a human being goes in and out of extraordinary states of madness, and also one in which people return to kind of baseline sanity after losing all control of themselves.

 

Homer shows Achilleus struggling between courses of action but also reveals his weak character -­?-­? we get both the idea of careful choice and the idea that weakness makes people choose badly. It is not simply his fate to have lost his temper and left the field of battle to his friend Patroclus. Homer shows that Achilleus could have acted differently, but for his character -­?-­? this subtle idea insinuates that agency still has some power even in spite of implacable fate.  Homer’s hero is wily Odysseus, who adapts to his situation.

 

In Euripides’ Bacchae we see reason and unreason at war with one another. Pentheus cannot bring himself to honor Dionysius, and this proud refusal brings about his doom. His punishment at the hands of the god seems at first like barbarism triumphing over reason, but the playwright points to Pentheus’ prudishness and extreme repression. There are powerful instinctive forces within us that we struggle to keep in check; but when we repress these forces for too long or too harshly, with no outlet in sight, they explode so forcefully that they overwhelm a person and entirely extinguish the self.

 

Whatever the circumstances of our lives, we have to look for the flaws in our own characters; and we have some power over our character, even if we have none over

 

1 Donna Tartt, The Secret History (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 29.

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882, section 110.

 

fortune.  We have to get back to ourselves, even if we sometimes lose ourselves; we need a habit of reflection and a chance to think. And whatever it is that we are doing in terms of self-­?regulation, we need outlets -­?-­? otherwise ‘control’ becomes a stranglehold.

 

The Anaximander fragment (the earliest philosophical writing by any Greek author) says: “Into that from which all things come, they pass away again, by necessity, for they make reparation and satisfy one another for their injustice, according to the law of time.” Anaximander seems to speculate that balance, in some cases, in order to reach balance, becomes unbalanced -­?-­? thus balance needs a kind of outlet, in order to reestablish itself.

 

Thus from an early division of mind into characters -­?-­? proud Achilleus and wily Odysseus -­?-­? and with conceptions like fate, fortune and destiny, connected with observations about temperament and weaknesses, such as impetuousness or pride, we get a kind of ‘folk psychology’ and course of treatment that is about controlling one’s temper, not being too much in a hurry, and not thinking too much about oneself -­?-­? a loose control with room for outlets -­?-­? also a sense that the main problem has to do with adjusting to something over which (whatever our circumstances) we have no control at all.

 

The implacable destiny is death.  The characteristically Greek ‘heroism’ confronts death with cool honesty, defining the problem of suffering and a strategy of self-­?regulation.

 

These are a few results from looking at the earliest Greek ‘mind map’ we can discern.

 

Socrates’ strategy is to focus on ignorance rather than death -­?-­? even to make death a problem of knowledge, since we know nothing about it -­?-­? offering the model of living life with a profound sense of being ignorant, and to stay in the game of telling the truth -­?-­? originally about ordinary people speaking up to kings, and now about saying truth to oneself -­?-­? as the centering act of healthy living. Philosophy is principled ignorance.

 

Plato like Freud keeps developing his ideas. He offers the tripartite model that Freud reinvents -­?-­? dividing the soul into reason, spirit and passion, and conceiving their integration as a steadying, taming power that gradually gets a hold on lust and anger -­?-­? in Freudian terms this is a calculating, steering realism mediating id and conscience.

Plato offers the idea in the Symposium that wholeness is inherently unstable -­?-­? we get hungry and want something new -­?-­? and the trajectory of desire keeps ascending.  Thus the life-­?problem is less about getting a hold on one’s empirical self, and more about escaping the hold of the self, and following one’s passion.  The power of abstraction and the mental ability, growing with practice, to extrapolate to wider contexts, gets us closer to the world of Ideas, and pulls us out of the world of mere dull sense.  Yet Plato also offers the idea that otherworldly aspirations are ultimately pointless -­?-­? the philosopher who escapes his bonds in the Cave and makes it into the light above must descend back into darkness and try to rescue some of his former cellmates -­?-­? which in Freudian terms is a rejection of infantile fantasy, showing some development towards a reality-­?based ego -­?-­? which is something like “adjustment” or healthy engagement.  Plato also sees that class and conditioning have an inalterable effect on a person’s character -­?-­? thus chipping away at the idea of sovereign agency -­?-­? stressing both the huge impact of early childhood experiences and the import for a person’s life chances that he is born into an elite, as one of the Guardians, or into a lower station, destined only for menial labor.

Thus the focus of his studies changes from psychological questions to practical politics: if the problem of self-­?regulation is ultimately about how things are arranged in society, then human beings can only improve themselves by creating a better society.

 

Plato sees the mind as divided and needing to be mended together and harmonized. He also sees the mind as alternately withdrawing and then focusing in, observing intense interest in a thing followed by aloofness and comic distance -­?-­? conceiving that we can escape the shifting world of the senses by seeing the truth; steadying emotional lability (whether this is an ecstasy of erotic passion or an presentiment of impending doom) with more realism -­?-­? getting back into the world, to what is real -­?-­? thus arguing for the healing power of actually seeing what is the case -­?-­? being able to say and hear the truth.

 

Plato surely is a pioneer in what people call ‘mentalization’ today -­?-­? i.e., explicitly being puzzled about something and questioning it, and explicitly ‘transcending’ the puzzling immediate situation by explicitly calling it out as a theme and trying to think about it.  He is proposing a kind of reality therapy, focused on reality-­?testing and verified thinking, thus a rejection of fantasy, a psychology of acceptance -­?-­? we have to see what there is before we can do anything. Becoming self-­?aware is also a baseline -­?-­? we have to have some self-­?awareness in order to think about how we are looking at the world or to direct ourselves to dismiss our fantasies and try to really see what is real.  Plato is also the first social psychologist who calls upon his readers to re-­?engineer society in order to create human beings who are strong and wise enough to govern themselves.

 

Aristotle’s key insight is seeing that in every arena in which a person could exercise self-­? control, there is an excess and a defect and a mean in between; which first articulates the idea of modulating affect, rather than letting go altogether (as in Dionysian frenzy) or harsh repression (in the example of Pentheus).  Thus courage is a mean between excessive fear (cowardice) and inadequate fear (recklessness) and in general the key problem in mental health is to bring thought to feeling, and feeling to thought, to create moderation -­?-­? the golden mean -­?-­? thus developing a line of thought from Anaximander that stresses symmetry and balance.  The dissociated condition is conceived as off the mark, unbalanced, unjust, inaccurate (excess or defect) -­?-­? the integrated condition is conceived as aiming at the center, with a loose control, and making room for error.

 

Aristotle is aiming at a vision of the ‘person’ emerging from the ability to learn, and in reflecting on this model he observes that people do not seem to learn anything without experiencing pain. Learning is difficult and implies coming back from failure -­?-­? for example, driving a chariot takes some practice -­?-­? skill comes from arduous practice.

We seem especially to care about something when it has made us hurt -­?-­? we remember something that has caused us pain -­?-­? we stay fit through a painful regimen -­?-­? everything that we care about that is really worth doing takes persevering through painful exercise.

 

Thus rather than the self ‘falling into place’ naturally like the function of an organ that takes no conscious effort to achieve, the reality-­?ego is a won-­?by-­?pain-­?ego.  If the self is the ability to learn, then the self is made up gradually of injuries.  (Lacan talks about the painful differentiation from the infant-­?mother couple: “I am means, I have lost.”)

 

Aristotle stands at the end of the world created by the Homeric poems in which human beings achieve dignity in a warrior culture, closely linked with a fierce pride, competition and cruelty. Aristotle’s teaching of this culture inspired the incomparable Alexander, whose death in 323 BCE is generally regarded as the end of the classical period.

 

Nietzsche’s reflection on this history brings him to the conclusion that not just in the ancient world, but even today and for every single person, everything depends on self-­? imposed hardship and even cruelty, in order to creative something like a strong will -­?-­? a masterful will, a will to power, a will to get into the game of life, rather than ceding the power to determine what is important to other people.  Nietzsche talks about the human capacity to endure the creative transformation – the “transvaluation of value” – as a kind of “spiritualization of cruelty”  “Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on cruelty becoming more profound.”

 

“Rather than let it all go and stay in the world of appearances, there is a will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience … this is the sublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge -­?-­? the kind of person who insists on profundity, multiplicity, thoroughness -­?-­? all really courageous thinkers will recognize this in themselves. They will say ‘there is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit.’”2

 

Aristotle is an important source for the idea that creativity is bound up with passionate, violent emotions that break through social conventions; that forces deep in the soul shove themselves forward and upend morals; that we can measure thought by emotion and get some practice doing it, sometimes checking and sometimes encouraging desire, which builds up in us as habits -­?-­? what Aristotle calls ‘strengths of character’ or ‘virtues.’

 

Nietzsche takes a critical step beyond Aristotle in further reasoning on the question, arguing that we harness the creative process by laying hold of the impersonations one has already undergone and enacted in countless episodes of social life; he argues that taking on roles in social life offers a precedent for explicitly creating a persona for oneself and acting it out; so that by conscious intention one may transform oneself into one’s own explicit creation. He emphasizes that creative work emerges out of a place where good and evil are still indistinct, but not because self-­?creation is amoral; instead, because art tries to wrestle raw, rude drive energies into an explicitly ‘created’ form.

 

 

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882, section 110.

 

This gets us back to the idea of feeling an imperious longing in every instant, so that each moment of conscious renunciation is another conquest, if not of an enemy then of some force in oneself -­?-­? self-­?regulation in Greek terms is a kind of ongoing battle in which we are fighting something, but also trying to keep our head -­?-­? a love-­?affair too, chasing a dream that threatens our wits -­?-­? thus a trial and a test of character, a learning process with successes and defeats -­?-­? in which we earn some self-­?respect (or not) through our sense of being able to feel and steady ourselves and act with purpose.

 

Thus moral competence is shaped from the outset by upsurging emotional pressure, by societal judgments and biases, but also by ‘strengths of character’ (virtues) that guide us between extremes of losing all sense of ourselves (just getting absorbed in the feeling) and determinedly focusing our every effort (acting with tight self-­?conscious control).

 

Medieval and early modern maps

 

At least as early as the fifth century, living tableaux representing Bible stories such as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the last judgment were introduced into sacred services, gradually expanding to large public performances called Mystery plays.  In 1210, Pope Innocent III issued an edict, forbidding clergy from acting on a public stage -­?-­? which is an indication of how popular these kinds of shows had become. Change in pontifical policy encouraged a separation of church and stage -­?-­? this is how the more secular Morality play of medieval times emerged slowly from the religious Mystery plays that preceded them.

 

In the medieval Morality play, we see Youth traveling on the Road of Life, set upon by Temptation and encouraged by Wise Counsel.  Our protagonist strays from proper guides such as Simple Virtue or Godly Life, and begins to spend his time with Misrule, Ignorance or All-­?for-­?the-­?money.  Things go downhill as Ignorance introduces Youth to Pride and Pride introduces him to Lechery and Lechery at last brings him to Iniquity, typically through the door of a tavern.   Then Charity, reminding the audience of the mystery of divine Grace, frees Youth from the influence of Ignorance and restores him to the company of Humility.   Thus we glimpse the profound change in the underlying psychology in society in making the jump from the heroic ideal of classical times -­?-­? a world of self-­?power -­?-­? to a new world of faith in which the agent cannot extricate himself from the troubles of life on his own initiative, but only by the grace of God.

 

Shakespeare scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, James Schapiro, Bill Bryson, Jeffrey McQuain, Tucker Brooke and Anthony Burgess help us imagine what the experience of seeing a Morality play was like for young boy living in a provincial town like Stratford. “With a flourish of trumpets and the rattle of drums, the players swaggered down the street in their colorful liveries, scarlet cloaks, and crimson velvet caps. They proceeded to the house of the mayor and presented the letters of recommendation, with wax seals, that showed that they were not mere vagabonds, but that a powerful patron protected them. The first performance was always known as the Mayor’s play, and was free to all comers. Municipal records in Stratford routinely show the record of broken windows and damaged chairs and benches, caused by mobs of unruly spectators jostling for good view of the play. The magic of the play included the fashioning of imaginary space, artful impersonations, elaborate costumes, and the use of theatrical and heightened language all aimed to capture the imagination.” Greenblatt writes that Shakespeare learned from Morality plays how to give his characters emblematic names such as the whores Doll Tearsheet and Jane Nightwork or the drunken Sir Toby Belch.

Morality plays helped him understand how to focus theatrical attention on his players’ psychological state. They helped him fashion physical emblems of the inner life, such as the withered arm and hunchback that marked the crookedness of Richard III. The Morality plays provided him with a source for the theatrically compelling and subversive figure of Wickedness, hidden in each person, which we all must struggle to keep at bay.3

 

The authors of Morality plays thought that they could enhance the broad impact they sought to achieve by stripping their characters of all incidental, distinguishing traits to get to their essences. They thought their audiences would thereby not be distracted by the irrelevant details of individual identities.  The story of Everyman reaches us all.

 

Colin McGinn’s book Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (2007) argues that the thing to emphasize in trying to understand Shakespeare is particularity.  The Bard rejects the universalism of medieval thinking, in which the tale of Mankind is the undercurrent in every single life.  He is equally is pre-­?Newtonian; that is, he has a pre-­?scientific vision of the world; he has no idea of scientific generality; thus he would find it odd to think that all human beings are afflicted with the same problem (e.g. the Oedipus complex) or that all human beings’ behavior is dictated by the same biochemistry (e.g. in which low oxytocin supplies inhibit affection and high dopamine supplies arouse mania).  The Bard does not see unity across all bodies, hearts and minds, but portrays a world of singularities -­?-­? a rich irreducible variety -­?-­? insinuating that everyone, no matter what a person’s station in life, has some truth to teach us.

 

Shakespeare’s works -­?-­? plays, sonnets and poems -­?-­? contain some 17,677 different words. Of these, roughly 1700 were first used by Shakespeare, a feat of creation in language unparalleled in history. This includes much of our language of courtship -­?-­? including the word courtship itself. Tracking the key problems of mental illness and health, dissociation and integration, the boy from Stratford gives us words like addiction, drug, excite, reinforce -­?-­? also numb, submerge, torture -­?-­? also arousal, discontent, flaw, gloom, glow, instinct, misgiving, rancor, domineering -­?-­? also negotiate, ruminate, transcend, unclog -­?-­? also splitting, undervalue, unreal, and question -­?-­? also the term healing -­?-­? also the term criticism itself. Perhaps he was forced to create so much language, because of all the differences he saw. If we look with all our powers of observation, and with less reliance on existing ideas and filters, we begin to see more. We do not have a word yet to capture what a “Shakespearean” understanding is like.

 

3 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 29.

 

On Aristotle’s model, tragedy and comedy are worlds apart, as tragedy shows the character of man as better than the average man, while comedy shows him as worse; but Shakespeare mixes fools with heroes, jesters with villains, drunks and gravediggers alongside unhappy maidens, melancholy princes, soldiers and courtiers, every station in life -­?-­? his characters have the stamp of real people with complexities of feeling and thought -­?-­? Dr. Johnson’s praise of Shakespeare still rings true, for holding a faithful mirror to life. Shakespeare is also clearly a voluntarist. “For use can almost change the stamp of nature” (Hamlet, III, iv, 178). We are what we choose to do and bring about by our own actions -­?-­? by our actions we make new habits that can overtake our histories.

 

The Mystery play, Morality play and the Shakespearean drama represent new mind maps for our survey.  They define the underlying dissociated state of human being in gradually more secular terms, with gradually less moral didacticism, and with greater leeway for individual differences, as if to argue that effectively we are all broken up in unique ways, and that the problem of integrating broken-­?off parts of the self is ever a personal matter, without necessarily implicating the grand world drama of Humanity.

 

Psychoanalytic maps

 

Freud often refers to Shakespeare whom he began reading at the age of eight and could “recite at length in his near-­?perfect English.”4   In his work “Psychopathetic Characters on the Stage” (1905), he recalls the import Shakespeare had for him in developing the idea of the Oedipus complex.  “The conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left for me to unearth it” -­?-­? Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess show that his self-­?analysis was often guided by his reading of Shakespeare and that thinking about the Elizabethan stage was helpful for him, with “every member of the audience a budding Hamlet,” submerged under a deep measure of repression, separating an infant from an adult.5

 

Harold Bloom perhaps goes furthest in trying to make this case: “Freud has to be seen as a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakes-­? pearean … What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention

… Freud is merely codifying this work.”6   Freud speaks for himself on this issue: “The

poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.”7

 

Freud tries to conceive a minimal self. Over his long career, he continues to revise his minimalism and ideas about the self.  He offers new models and draws new conclusions.

 

Freud begins explicitly from ordinary language by talking about the I (das Ich).  This fact

 

 

4 Peter Gay, Freud (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 166.

5  Norman Holland, “Freud On Shakespeare,” 1960, PMLA, 75(3), 163-­?173.

6 “Interview with Harold Bloom,” The Paris Review, http://www.mrbauld.com/ bloomshk.html/

7 Quoted in Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: NYRB Classics, 2008).

 

is obscured by the English translation of his idea into the Latin term ego. Latin trans-­? lations of his other concepts, the It (das Es), and the Over-­?I (das Über-­?Ich), into Id and Superego, also misrepresent more commonplace examples as forbidding abstractions.

 

We can get an idea of how Freud thinks about the self from his developing ideas about das Ich – the I – the ego. The ego has to contend with three powerful influences. First there is wild libido (id, instinctual impulses); then a repressing moral sense (superego, ethical restrictions); then the dangerous external world (reality, sensory stimuli). Freud refers to the ego as an organizing function. It manages conflict passively, by inhibiting incoming excitation. The excitation may be a wish clamoring for satisfaction, a fear threatening pain, or a sensation of any kind. Thus my sense of being does not come from my experiencing pleasure, or from upholding ideals, or from my experience of the outside world. It comes from my ability to slow these impressions down – to take them in – to manage experience with some critical distance. I begin to see myself and I gradually become someone who can manage this material. The sense of self so understood is what Freud is referring to in his discussions about “ego development.”

 

Freud hypothesized a weak, inertial, structural ego, trying to keep order while confronted by waves of primitive untamed energy, waves of rejecting, guilt-­?inducing conscience, and constant input about the external world from the senses. He argued that self-­?development is possible.  The ego can make the transit through epochs of maturation and emerge on the other side with new freedoms.  It can grow more self-­? confident and manage conflict with less coercion and more art. It can become less driven by fantasy (imaginary wish fulfillments) and more by reality (achieving mastery).

 

In this picture the self is something like a structure. It changes only very slowly. It is made of parts that either fit well together, as if well glued, or that can fall apart easily. Thus a self is “cohesive” or “fragile” -­?-­? these terms define a large gray area with lots of room for compound forms -­?-­? so that dissociation and integration are relative terms -­?-­? not so much opposite states of being but more like different settings or tunings.

 

Talking about the ‘structure’ of the self however is metaphorical. The Freudian self or mind or I does not exist as an entity. We are talking about something that develops (or fails to develop) through a history. It can remain trapped in the past (stuck in infantile positions) or become free for a future (making adult decisions). Thus a self is “regressed” or “differentiated” -­?-­? but again these are comparative terms and do not point to substantives -­?-­? Freud begins from, and stays with, ordinary language.

 

Freud also began to open the box where we have kept hidden everything we have disowned or disavowed, all the dissociated aspects of ourselves that somehow we cannot deal with. He discovered that these same broken off pieces of ourselves that we cannot quite see or acknowledge seeing, have an odd way of popping up unaccountably when we’re least expecting them, and without our knowing how to deal with them. Unwanted, unrecognized, unacknowledged parts of ourselves, they still feel alien and strange; yet somehow we also see very clearly that these are parts of ourselves.

 

It is generally held that Freud’s greatest contribution to science, the one usually associated with The Interpretation of Dreams, was his conception of the unconscious mind.8 Thus it would appear that thinking may even be unconscious, as well as irrational and not yet subsumed under a rational principle – in thinking, some parts fit well but some don’t fit very well – thinking cannot see all of itself or from outside itself or with complete detachment – some the of the I is awake, and some of the I is asleep.

 

Freud discovered the clinical fact of repression; also the clinical fact that experiences repressed in childhood find an outlet later in life; and the theories he formulated to explain repression focus on instincts and diverting instinctive energies towards socially approved goals. Freud thought that just giving a person perfect freedom to talk out whatever occurred to him could be a method of healing. Socrates also thought that carefully talking things out could become a way of healing the soul. Shakespeare very much wants to talk also as a way back to health. Talking is important because it is a way of getting something into the light where we can see it and get a handle on it.

 

Thus Freud begins with a deterministic idea and borrows the concept of the It (das Es) from Groddeck, who wrote “We should not say ‘I live’ but ‘I am lived by the It’ (The Book of the It, 1923).  Groddeck’s claim threatens to overthrow the whole idea of a unique and self-­?responsible person.  As a scientist, he is trying to see how much of human behavior he can understand without talking about anything like ‘agency.’  Advancing from this premise, Freud gradually moves towards a conception of a self actively changing itself. Gradually consolidating senses of self-­?awareness, growing competence (ego nuclei), a witness, an autobiographer, float up from the depths of total amnesia. Repression in the first instance is the interest in not creating awareness of something. Freud held that the very basic human phenomenon of ‘not knowing’ in this connection is a not wanting to know.9 Repression is inferred from the symptoms it leaves behind. Psychoanalysis is a means of teasing up the return of the repressed and in that sense overturns the interest in not knowing and replaces it with a powerful desire to know. The person gets to know herself or himself better, but at the same time the patient becomes a different person, who may feel and remember many kinds of impressions but who no longer exhibits particular symptoms. Freud advances to an idea of freedom and characterizes his aim as strengthening the ego, writing “where id was, there ego shall be” (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1932, lecture 31).

 

Many far-­?reaching changes in psychoanalytic theory have taken place since Freud. Some different conceptions of dissociation and integration come up especially in the Objects Relations School and in later thinkers influenced by Freud -­?-­? some we will mention here come from Fairbairn, Winnicott, Kohut, Lacan and Foucault.

 

8 Ernest Jones, Freud, (New York: Basic Books, 1953), vol. 1, p. 397

9 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, op. cit., volume 2, p. 270

 

 

Repression gives us the idea that selfhood is a result of the conflict between instincts. In that sense it is negative. The hypothesis in Object Relations is a basic object-­?seeking libidinizing life drive of the human psychic self. The ego, psyche or personal self grows, Is disturbed, and is restored to wholeness in the life context of the ego’s relations with others, primarily in infancy, and thereafter in the unconscious – which is the repressed infantile ego, split and in conflict with itself. Selfhood emerges in the course of interacting with other people in life – that is to say, in the contexts of beings who are themselves egos and object-­?seeking life drives of psychic selves. Selfhood emerges in the first context of the mother-­?infant relationship at the start of life, and develops through all sorts of personal relationships, good and bad, that make up our life, and proceeding if necessary to the psychotherapist.  The restored self gets back into the world and acts. In this sense the Object Relations School as a whole moves on from the problem of the control of instinct towards the deeper problem of developing a stable core of selfhood.10

 

Fairbairn: Freud begins his thinking with a very stark – a very deficient concept of human reality. We should work with the concept of a whole human being from the very beginning of life, normally whole at every stage – the newborn infant starts life as a whole psychic self, however primitive and undeveloped it may be. The pristine personality of the child consists of a unitary dynamic ego. The crudest beginnings of the ego feeling developed in the initial stage are the ego feeling appropriate and proper to that earliest stage of development. The ego is not a later synthetic growth. The human psyche, simply because it is human, contains the innate psychic potentiality of ego growth in a way that an animal psyche does not. The psychosomatic whole of a human being does not begin as a bestial layer of animal instincts blindly seeking a relief of tension, so that the repressing, social environment has to conjure up a controlling ego in an entity that is born without any sense of itself. The human infant is a unitary dynamic whole with ego potential as its essential quality from the start. Freud was wrong in thinking that the drama of childhood is intrapsychic – referring to the internal private space of the individual – it is interpsychic – referring to the external public space of the family. Ego potentiality takes shape in the matrix of primary objects (parents), passes to transitional objects (cuddly toys, teddies, dolls), flourishing (or not) in social life.

 

Winnicott: The human pattern of advance and decline flows through key thresholds. Human potential unfolding though the life course matures in an environment that in the first instance is a mother’s care. This environment may nourish growth through nurture, support, understanding and encouragement – not perfect, but “good enough,” or “ordinarily devoted” – or instead it may fail as a nurturing, facilitating environment. It may not satisfy the needs of this life form, in which case development becomes arrested and distorted. In a case like this the potential is not realized, but instead a false self emerges on the pattern of conforming to, or rebelling against, the failing environment.

 

10 Harry Guntrip, Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 12.

 

The false self tries to survive the life course by a principle of least action – it lives defensively, fearful, on guard against exposure.  The result is tame goodness or criminality.  In the ordinary case, the good-­?enough mother is this environment, and there is some continuity of being, and the infant is not forced to react.  The idea is that the mother keeps the world of the infant as simple as possible.  The idea is to provide a graduated failure of adaptation, so that the psyche-­?soma has some chance to build up a tolerance to suffering. Positive social relationships make it possible for us to see reality.

 

Psychosis is therefore an “environmental deficiency disease” – mental illness is the result of poor “object relations” and “attachments.” Sexual problems as hysteric conversion symptoms represent a clue to the nature of a being whose outreach towards relationships has power to libidinize any part or the whole of a body, accordingly as intense need, or as withdrawal from intimacy, direct. It takes these actions accordingly because it is seeking the object – it is seeking the maturational, facilitating environment in which it can take root, grow and flourish – it is seeking its mother.  Once the mother is possessed by the baby, she can be represented symbolically by things, cuddly toys, by transitional objects and not-­?me objects on the way towards developing a less exclusively mother-­?centered outreach – if only the mother remains reliable enough – then the infant gains some capacity to be alone. Thus we need a mother who is herself a healthy whole ego to enable a baby to perceive and develop her own wholeness as an ego.

 

Kohut: From the personal perspective -­?-­? from ‘my’ perspective, my mother is part of ‘me.’ Thus the self begins to form in its most archaic condition in intimate connection with another person – someone who is nonetheless not experienced as separate and independent of the self. This precarious union and its later dissolution represent thresholds for the self unlike any others. They are fraught with difficulties such as the creation of a false self and the inability to exit from merger. It implies a developmental schedule and different problems keyed to injuries at different junctures. Because human being is innately temporal -­?-­? because people develop through important epochs-­?-­? there are likely to be various special kinds of temporal deficiency disease.  Therapy redramatizes the normal phase of the development of the grandiose self in which the gleam in the mother’s eye, which mirrors the child’s exhibitionistic display, confirms the child’s self-­?esteem and, by gradually withdrawing its approval, begins to channel the object-­?seeking, libidinizing ego drive into realistic directions.  The mirror transference is a kind of playhouse for acting out the confrontation between grandiose fantasy and reality.  The cure lies in accepting the painful truth that life offers few possibilities for gratifying narcissistic-­?exhibitionistic wishes. The trick is to take this news with some humor.

 

Kohut was skeptical about the use of the term ‘agency’ and thought it made more sense to talk about a person whose changing senses of self, strong or weak, with greater or lesser clarity and realism, in various moods and conditions, begins to take shape through choices.

Kohut’s idea is very like the Buddhist idea of the anatman, the no-­?self, or of the illusion of the self.  This is an experience of being without a center – without an unchanging core of identity – the mind does not exist as an entity at all.  But minimally it exists as a series of relationships.  Gradually I build up an autobiography, a chronology of who I was at various times of my life, and thus an unfolding sense of who I am and who I might be. I get some experience and learn some realism.  There’s no sense that the same basic construct is undergoing various changes -­?-­? we are talking about deepening relationships.

 

Lacan: we are born into the world living in our bodies, exploring and expressing our physical being and figuring out what we can do. But gradually the world we are exploring becomes less the physical world and more the human world of symbols, gestures, language, images, all of which alienate us from just relaxing back into our bodies. At a certain moment, the child becomes alienated from the kinesthetic body self and from knowing who she is by what she does, and thus the child enters the human system of symbols and thoughts – this is the Logos – and from this point on we use gestures, bearing, images, language, concepts and references to define who we are – and thus instead of being this psyche-­?soma, I am this mind (Écrits, 1966)

 

When we enter the human world we get defined in myriad ways, as strong or pretty or serious or funny – a fighter, a quiet one, loving, moody – as something-­?class, religion something, ethnicity something, race, sex, all of it.  These categories and impressions seem to come from without, from ways in which we get defined, but at the same time they stick to us and take up residence – they take up space in the world of the self – even if they are painfully partial and only capture us haphazardly.  We are far too complicated and dynamic to be delineated by any handful of markers – such as social categories or points on a map – family roles, social roles, roles at school. And even more than from these sources and apart from religion and race and class and sex and myriad roles, we all have a big basket of accumulated memories, fantasies, images, reflections and ideas about what we believe to be real, of how we think relationships are supposed to go, and expectations for virtually every situation we find ourselves in.

 

In relationships we use our human capacity for symbolization – what Lacan calls the Logos – to forge our personal identities and to share them with other people.  We also dissociate inconsistent or unwanted selves within us, allowing us to experience them as not me.  This works until our presumptive identities become challenged by our relationships. At that point the mask comes off.  In effect we are living presumptive selves, but unawares we are also signifying unacknowledged experiences of otherness that we have disowned, that we fear to show but also somehow want to show. Thus Lacan is offering the idea – emerging out of the legacy of object-­?relations thinking – that the basic libidinizing life drive of the human psychic self does not want pleasure, love, power or anything like this -­?-­? it wants itself, it wants truth.  Eros continues to drive us into relationships that provoke transformation in which the disavowed parts of ourselves break into the open and finally gets a chance to be assimilated.

Foucault: Foucault talked about the hermeneutics of suspicion.  The idea was to break up the illusion of the Cartesian ego. He thought we had to be skeptical about ourselves. He thought we had to be on the lookout for our shadow selves. He thought we had to develop a skeptical outlook and look for openings for multiple origins of valuation rather than remaining transfixed in an obsessive self. We have to get away from the idea that dissociation per se is problematic and that wholeness per se is something that makes sense for us. The transformation made possible by the life process, translated into the Logos, and the presumptive I think that emerges out of it, gradually takes shape as a skeptical attitude one takes towards oneself. These are some steps in the development of an agentic, critical awareness. Existing involves a continual emerging from and potential transcending of one’s past. Thus transcending – literally to climb over or beyond – describes what every human being is engaged in doing, every moment – every moment when he is not seriously ill or temporarily blocked in despair, anxiety or fatigue.

 

Psychological injury leads to loss of freedom – to be rigidly confined to one and only one world is the mark of psychological disorder – oppositely, freedom is a kind of letting go of the world, letting it occur, and taking up various stances as explicitly selected choices.

 

In general, psychoanalytic maps mark out the problematic state (illness, fragmentation, dissociation) and the desired state (health, integration, wholeness) by talking about excitation vs. inhibition, and split-­?off part-­?selves vs. a gradually consolidating agency.

The Object Relations School defines the basic dissociated state, and the basic idea of wholeness, in social terms -­?-­? as the false self or the good enough self; as the motherless condition or having good attachments; as grandiosity versus a healthy sense of humor. Lacan talks about the presumptive self and its disavowed parts -­?-­? also the relational self confronting the truth.  Foucault sees far enough to challenge the idea that dissociation is even problematic, or that wholeness is something we really want or could live with.

 

Biological maps

 

Beginning in the early 21st century, a new consensus formed around a fundamentally biological understanding of the brain. Some researchers whose work is important in this new school are Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, Helen Fisher, Scott Atran, Michael Gazzinga, Pascal Boyer, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Sara Lazar, Andrew Newberg, Antonio Damasio, Jonathan Haidt and Deborah Kelemen. This school tries to synthesize findings from archeology, anthropology, linguistics, experimental and developmental psychology, mathematics, cognitive science, physics and electrical engineering, and computer science -­?-­? developing with ideas in neurology. The idea is to connect basic biological, mathematical, and physical parameters so that we can begin with neurons and computations and get to behavior. The overall research program in neurology is to understand the neural basis of thinking, consciousness, emotion, memory, language, perception – of human powers of mind – as well as the various disease conditions of the nervous system. This is the kind of work that Freud wanted to do but abandoned because the science of his day had not advanced far enough to get at the problem.

 

This school begins with the psychoanalytic principle of the unconscious -­?-­? the idea that the brain is up to a great deal more than we are aware of -­?-­? following Groddeck the idea is to see how much of human behavior we can understand without assuming an ‘agent.’ This school reads human psychology as having been shaped by natural selection -­?-­? evolution impacts behavior just as much as it does the body -­?-­? thus the mind and its problems of dissociation and integration ultimately rest on biological principles.

 

The mind in this conception has no single belief network. It is more like a toolbox with many sorts of tools. Just as color and shape are handled by different parts of the visual system, so myriad distinct networks contribute to the behavioral system – which domains remain separated in human cognition -­?-­? our problem has to do with this separation and what we can understand from research about making it conscious.

 

I have been reading the research literature from this school for several years but I cannot find yet any consensus or consistent vocabulary for talking about behavioral network systems. Some researchers talk about “unconscious guidance systems” (e.g. perceptual, evaluative, motivational) at work simultaneously in shaping behavior. Some talk about “tacit knowledge” – something generally not available to conscious inspection – a basket of implicit ideas and principles of explanation running independently of one another. Some use words like clumps, bundles or networks, also variously called programs, modules, schemas, and operators. At some level these must be nets, webs, links, grids or lattices of nerve tissue -­?-­? a very complex interactivity within the brain but also distributed throughout the body via the peripheral nervous system.

Research in neurology supports the conclusion that some of these networks, such as affect programs, social interaction schemes and cognitive modules, operate without our awareness as the unconscious, pre-­?reflective frame of behavior. Some use Freud’s terminology -­?-­? ‘unconscious’ -­?-­? some use the Objects Relations term ‘psyche-­?soma’ -­?-­? the human psychic self.  Some of Freud’s other terms survive: the Id, arousals, instincts, drives -­?-­? there is a also a return to the simplicity that Freud was looking for in simply talking in a common-­?sense way about basic nervous functions or patterns that we all call out in everyday speech, such as seeking, lust, fear, rage, care, play, panic and grief.

 

Affect programs include ‘surprise’ and ‘fear’ – reactions human beings share with reptiles – as well as ‘guilt’ and ‘grief,’ which may be unique to human beings. Like echolocation or an active sonar device, we send out bursts of affect to test the environment, trying to fine tune and speed up the basic decision of fight or flight. We make our way through an environment by means of an emotionally charged positioning system. This is a kind of defense system, or a security and precaution network -­?-­? e.g. dedicated to preventing potential hazards such as poisoning or contamination. These networks trigger specific behaviors such as checking the environment and washing.

 

Social interaction schemas include ‘detecting predators,’ ‘seeking protectors,’ and ‘reciprocating in kind’ – which appear to reach back very far in evolutionary time – as

well as newer patterns such as ‘welcoming strangers’ or ‘showing mercy.’  Part of the social interaction schema has to do with detecting agents versus mere objects; as it were, this function is a human-­?specifying and human-­?defining function.

 

Social interaction networks form the background for something like ‘group feeling’ or ‘coalitional psychology’ or ‘principles of social cohesion’ – e.g., detection of kin or in-­? group members and feelings such as loyalty (thought to have evolved from cross-­?group or sub-­?group competition); inclusion functions based on kin-­?detection that motivate trust and cooperation and lending of aid -­?-­? engaging care; also submission patterns, behavior signaling respect and feelings such as respect and awe relative to leaders (thought to have evolved from primate hierarchies). Thus in many different kinds of ways, the brain keeps us ‘in the group’ and connects us back to evolutionary priorities.

 

Cognitive modules include something like a ‘causal operator’ (a function that searches for causes and effects) and a ‘holistic operator’ (a function that searches for wholeness in the midst of diversity). These functions represent a kind of hard-­?wired metaphysics: they determine what is real and define patterns of explanation (as social interaction schemas determine ‘agents’).

 

Alternatively we can think of seeking as a basic nervous function -­?-­? excitation of nerve tissue surveying, feeling its environment -­?-­? e.g. seeking objects, kin, dangers, protectors, causes, wholes, agents -­?-­? rather than various different modules that engage ‘seeking’ affectively, socially or cognitively -­?-­? thus we would also look for lust, fear, rage, care, play, panic and grief to kick in, whether perceptually, socially, or cognitively.

 

At some juncture this whole approach gets us to a list of basic functions that operate unconsciously or without requiring any kind of awareness -­?-­? we are talking about blindly adaptive processes that have accrued through immeasurable stretches of evolutionary history. The explanatory idea is that mental representations that have evolved to perform a certain function will perform that function once they are activated. The source of the activation is irrelevant. The function is ‘blind’ about its source. It has no ‘memory’ about it that might cause it to behave differently depending on the source.

 

These systems arose from the very immediate problem of surviving in an environment. Whatever the system undertook to survive in past situations predisposes the system to do in new situations; but new adaptations that emerge and foster survival are repeated.

 

As microorganisms ‘choose’ genes useful to their survival out of the ambient flux of organic material -­?-­? which could, for example, confer resistance to antibiotics -­?-­? then a relatively ‘simple’ entity is capable of interacting with its environment and equipping itself with a gene (a sequence of nucleotides -­?-­? the basic unit of heredity) to help it survive. ‘Higher’ organisms appear to operate on the same principles, in which different parts of the organism interact with each other, and with other organisms, and with environments, ‘selecting’ from an even more complex flux of materials, to enhance life.

 

Tacit ‘knowledge’ is unconscious but can be detected via experiment; decades of work in this field (e.g. by John Bargh and his colleagues at Yale University) demonstrate both its existence and that, beneath human variation – differences in culture, language, religion, climate, race, economy, social mores – people are remarkably identical at the level of tacit knowledge, or unconscious processing, or basic nervous functions.

 

Emotions are normally seen as enemies of cool rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relationships -­?-­? the biological map overturns these biases -­?-­? we should think of emotions as ways of keeping us in the group -­?-­? emotions organize rather than disrupt rational thinking -­?-­? emotions guide our perceptions, memories and judgments, typically in ways that empower effective responses in the current situation -­?-­? e.g., anger gets us attuned to what is unfair in order to animate actions that remedy injustice; sadness prompts people to unite in response to loss; lust, play and care activate attachment.

In general the emotional ecosystem is social, which means that we have to think about consciousness in relation to the breakdown of normally unconscious, social processes.

 

Thus on the biological model and beginning with the idea of blindly adaptive functions, facing our problem (dissociation and integration) means explaining the emergence of explicitly conscious processing -­?-­? we also have to try to extrapolate from the evidence what we can see regarding ideas like self-­?regulation, self-­?responsibility and agency.

 

Thus the brain is reacting to one person differently than another because the one activates a pre-­?existing schema and the other does not.  Without any conscious intention being involved, I react to someone to whom I am attracted differently than with someone who makes me afraid.  But in some cases, e.g. in meeting a new person, I am aware that I have never met this person before, yet at the same time I have an intimation that this person is quite familiar -­?-­? perhaps I meet a young woman who somehow resembles my mother.  Much more effort is required to discern this person and actually ‘see’ the person -­?-­? more of the brain lights up, more error circuitry kicks in (the left and right insula, the motor cortex, the right caudate) to make them out from previously stored patterns -­?-­? because the situation is more complex, more ‘brain’ gets involved -­?-­? we can think about ‘consciousness’ in relation to situations in which this kind of extra effort comes into play.  The brain enables us to thrive in a social context, but as our social context changes, our range of options expands, and more effort is required to live and experience social life -­?-­? we incorporate social dynamics into personal choice.

 

Thus at first and primarily, we are members of a collective, or rather of several such -­?-­? family, clan, village, city -­?-­? this is where we can locate our basic ideas about agency.

That is: agency does not exist in the brain -­?-­? or the self -­?-­? it is an interaction between people. We can say that our extensive “mirror neuron” systems give us the ability to understand the intentions and emotions of others.  Thus e.g. I learn to put a brake on my unconscious intentions -­?-­? I inhibit my intentions when I am interacting with other people -­?-­? this is a way of thinking about ideas like ‘self-­?control’ and ‘choice.’  I don’t attack you just because you scowl at me.  I am still in the group and adapt my behavior

 

to it -­?-­? communal ties impact individual mental states -­?-­? thus we are talking about a brain interacting with other brains, which then ‘interacts’ with itself on this same model. From interacting socially we get a kind of story or theory about the people we meet -­?-­?        at a later stage we use this same social experience to create a story about ourselves. Thus agentic control is a kind of rule that emerges in social life and, out in the social world, which develops according to its own dynamic, and especially with the advent of spoken language, this rule becomes something we can apply to ourselves even when we are alone. Culture develops and culture gives us new resources to think about and expand our cognitive processes. Culture develops and, eventually, Greek culture emerges, which has no counterpart among other ancient civilizations, and which is remarkable especially for locating power within the individual -­?-­? developing the Greek map we have been discussing -­?-­? an idea which spreads around the world and which is also still vigorously resisted as the most problematic aspect of human culture.

 

“The Greeks, more than any other ancient people, and in fact more than most people on the planet today, had a remarkable sense of personal agency -­?-­? the sense that they were in charge of their own lives and were free to act as they chose. The very definition of happiness for the Greeks was that it consisted of being able to exercise their powers in pursuit of excellence in a life free from constraints.”11

 

The biological map comes full circle by explaining the existence of the Greek map and its successors, medieval and early modern and Shakespearean and psychoanalytic maps. Essentially these are all social developments and advances on the strength of cultural ideas -­?-­? meanwhile human nature, as shaped by evolution, remains untouched -­?-­? which means that all the ideas which we have been exploring such as ‘dissociation,’ ‘agency,’ ‘integration,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘self-­?regulation,’ ‘responsibility’ and ‘self-­?responsibility’ and the like, are cultural artifacts, and do not indicate physical structures in the brain.

 

The first principle to linger on here is complexity: twenty-­?two parts of the brain are involved in distinguishing between the sounds for “P” and “B.”  Whatever the brain is doing in cases where we experience sensation or emotion or cognition, there is an enormous complexity -­?-­? the mathematics involved in thinking about the brain are daunting, since the brain has typically roughly 100 billion neurons -­?-­? and even further, every brain (or its owner) is “out there in the world” interacting with other brains.  Let us give ourselves some language here and say that the “mind” is what the brain has developed in contact with the world, and in social life, in a complex and nuanced interaction with itself, as a strategy for survival or as a way of equipping itself to survive. It does not seem possible that the region of the brain that is most involved with speech would not be deeply integrated with structures involved with social behavior as well as memory and imagination, in wildly different degrees and circumstances.  The idea of response or of the whole being reacting to its environment and exploiting resources at hand to try to survive and flourish -­?-­? which we can see in much simpler cases -­?-­? is what

 

11  R.E. Nesbitt, The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 2-­?5.

 

we are trying to say with the word “mind.” The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is doing so much, and is interacting so powerfully with other brains, in so complex a form, that we have so much to look at when we start thinking about consciousness. My idea here is simply that the basic functions -­?-­? such as seeking, fear, rage, surprise and play -­?-­? in interactions with each other and in society, constitute what we call mind.

 

“As proof of the existence of mind, we have only history and civilization, art, science and philosophy.”12   Language that would have been adequate to describe the ages before the appearance of the first artifact must now be enlarged by concepts like agency and intention, and new forms of life in which the universe itself begins to be questioned.

 

The idea of the self emerging in the biological model is not any kind of fixed entity – it is more like a collection of dynamic processes – by exploiting cultural resources, we begin to get a handle on processes that normally operate without any conscious control at all.

 

Conclusion

 

Looking over the whole expanse of the history covered in this research, without belaboring the material or trying to force it into some ready-­?made shape, there is nonetheless one large result that emerges very consistently in each lengthy epoch. Briefly this is the exploitation of social resources for expanding the power of the self. We see this in Homer’s praise of wily Odysseus -­?-­? taking on many disguises, anxious to learn new languages and customs, diplomatic, ingenious, self-­?restrained -­?-­? whose protean nature allows him to adapt to different fates in society and thus learn to become more than he was.  We see it in Plato’s insight that the key to making men strong enough to govern themselves lies in refashioning the society in which they are born and educated.  We see it in Aristotle’s definition of man as a political animal.  We see it in the jump from the heroic ideal of classical times -­?-­? a world of self-­?power -­?-­? to the medieval ideal of obedience -­?-­? a world of god-­?power -­?-­? as we see that society teaches us to see ourselves as the authors of our actions or as having no power in ourselves -­?-­? both conceptions showing us a social origin for the way people look at themselves and their expectations about what they can and cannot do.  We see it in Shakespeare’s creation of drama from the Morality play, his unparalleled display of human types drawn from every station in society -­?-­? Shakespeare gives us more of the human condition, and thus more to absorb and become, than virtually anyone else.  We see the same theme in Nietzsche, who shows us that the roles we take on in social life create the precedent for our explicitly creating a persona and an agency for ourselves. We see it from our psychological and biological studies, which confirm for us again that we are exactly as much as we can learn and take on from our social relationships.

 

Thus the study of different schemes for laying out the nature of human being and its problematic divisions and recombinations leads us to conclusions about the nature of

 

• Marilynn Robinson, Absence of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p.

 

society and the jump from social contexts to individual behavior -­?-­? taking in more of the social brain, making more of the social brain explicit, and incorporating more of social dynamics into personal choice. By doing so we exploit the dynamism that emerges in the evolutionary process -­?-­? human social evolution and cooperation -­?-­? and thus make ourselves more social, which in our time means more cosmopolitan and open -­?-­? as if to remake ourselves into a bigger city, a deliberative body, a noisy community that airs its disputes and works through them, by talking things through, and by making decisions.

 

Thus it makes no sense to investigate the construction of self, or the division of the self into parts and so on, because the self is only what one creates and puts into practice. All we have done here is to show that when we create more ‘self’ for ourselves and a larger sense of agency, we do so by taking in more from the society in which we take part, unhooking somewhat from society and its power to determine the significance of things for us, by explicitly appropriating this power and deploying it on our own.

 

+

 

By this line of thinking skepticism is healing of itself and this is the claim we are testing.

 

I smile with my readers in hearing someone claim to teach us anything about  healing.  Of course there is a spirit in the Gospels, and in the ancient Dhammapada, in which holy men teach about healing, which may be legitimate cases even if mine is not.  But it is also true that ‘healing’ often means becoming indoctrinated or is equated with believing some or other nonsense.  This is the mistake of equating real understanding with belief.

 

My particular teaching about healing turns out to be about society. This is my finding. I’m saying: no one is healed alone. I’m talking about relationships, and the social mind, and living in society, and taking in more of the social mind explicitly for oneself. In a sense the problem is to take on more from society and become a new kind of society, a more explicitly mindful society, with more and more focus on thinking. (“If man’s dignity consists in thought, let us all strive to think well” -­?-­? Pascal, Thoughts, VI, 347).

 

Healing -­?-­? but healing from what? To give it a name, let us say that healing is about forgiveness. Then psychotherapy is forgiveness. The healing process offers forgiveness. This means that the unforgiving are still sick, believing that they are unforgiven.

 

I’m saying that forgiveness is the coin of the realm. I am saying we all must feel this -­?-­? that we are after something fundamentally social -­?-­? though ‘forgiveness’ is just a word. We can think the problem in other ways and propose other ways of setting the course.

 

We all have some sickness unto death, something to confess, some shame or sin or something about which we are guilty, some division, which William James calls “a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.”13  This is a very old idea. C.G. Jung argued that only the wounded healer can heal, and there is a kind of biblical precedent for this idea in the story about Jesus perceiving in himself that power had gone forth from him, or as Shakespeare says, “that virtue had gone out of him,” after he had healed a woman without even knowing it, when she touched the hem of his robe. The story tells us that when one has done real work and there is real healing, the healer feels exhausted.  They feel exhausted because they are fighting against powerful forces.

 

Everyone who goes on being sick and refines the sickness and polishes the sickness and nurses this sickness, has the secondary gain of refusing to forgive, so that he can go on in anger, and in greed, and in every other kind of emotion that might rise up from pain. But we are talking about an idea in which human beings can gain increasing happiness as they are relieved of servitude beneath the emotions -­?-­? a servitude engendered in unconscious mental conflicts -­?-­? as emotion, conscience, observation and thinking do more work -­?-­? this is what we are zeroing in on in thinking about criticism and healing.

 

Let us say then that the patient is a screen for the projection of the therapist’s sins, enabling him to let them go.  The therapist sees in the patient all that he has failed to forgive in himself.  Here he has another chance to look at it.  He can open it again to re-­? evaluation.  He can forgive.  Thus the more he is skeptical and brings criticism back to himself, the more he uncovers and can heal.  Skepticism is healing -­?-­? we don’t have to be protected from truth, or ‘explain,’ deny or repress it -­?-­? truth really is healing of itself.

 

The fundamental concept of mental health that seems to emerge in these researches is complex; it involves exposure to reality; it is social in nature -­?-­? it is a kind of growth via relation; it involves replacing automatic responses with mindful responses (via social resources we have a chance to isolate what is going on unconsciously within us -­?-­? by means of social learning we gets some handholds to bring more of the automatism under conscious control -­?-­? ultimately to a new kind of unforced but thoughtful response. In this sense Freud’s maxim that where Id was, there Ego shall be is exactly right.

 

A frequent metaphor from the new biological synthesis is imagining oneself as a very small rider on top of an enormous elephant.  This goes to the sense that we are much more elephant than we are rider.  At the same time absolutely everything depends on the rider learning something about the elephant, and gradually getting some control over the elephant.  This is very difficult and should make us patient with people who have some trouble handling their elephant.  We a chance to learn something from experienced riders, and from people who spend their lives studying elephants, and from poets, artists and philosophers who show us the elephant-­?struggle in all its complexities -­?-­? but mainly we learn, and have to unlearn, from our families, and from our struggle to get out from the closed world of the family into the enormous reality that includes it -­?-­? which means that much is expected of us -­?-­? healing is something we have to work for.

 

• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), XX, Conclusions.

The Western Adaption of Eastern Spirituality: Fetishism, Conscious Consumerism, and Global Capitalism

 

Abstract

As Slavoj Žižek asserts in his 2001 article “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism,” “Western Buddhism” serves as a fetishistic means of existing in the age of global capitalism. This Western fetishism of Eastern spirituality is suiting in coping with the ferocity of contemporary capitalism. Furthermore, such Asiatic thought provides Westerners with a way to fill the gap between succumbing to capitalism and its social injustices as an invincible global force, and the belief that absolute social change in the face of capitalism can and should occur if we are to take proper action.

 

Keywords

Eastern spirituality, fetishism, global capitalism, Buddhism, Žižek, Lacan, Marx

 

            While the heightened circulation of goods and services is an inexplicable feature of the Global Era, the exchange of distinct ideologies amongst the international community has become quintessential to it as well. A notable consequent of this exchange is the influence of Eastern spirituality on the Occident. Slavoj Žižek poses Eastern spirituality as a matter of capitalist fetishism in the Western world.[1] Intrigued not only by the ingenious, but more significantly the soundness of Žižek’s suggestion, I have been compelled to further investigate and expand on his original claim. Due to the brevity and specificity of Žižek’s article, he reasonably refrains from providing detailed context for both Eastern spirituality, or “New Age ‘Asiatic Thought,’”[2] and fetishism as a whole. These are details I find significant in bettering our understanding of the subject at hand, and have therefore elected to expound on these particulars in the following.

To begin with a disclaimer, let it be known that I have intentionally chosen to utilize the terminology “Western adaption of Eastern spirituality” rather than what is often referred to, and as Žižek refers to, as “Western Buddhism”. My aim in doing so is, for one, refraining from the use of the term “Western Buddhism” leaves close to no room to offend self-described Western Buddhists. Furthermore, “Western Buddhism” proves itself too vague a notion, with the potential to include matters ranging from consumer products like the iPhone app ZenView (an app that creates “relaxing wave-effects” over photos of bamboo and bonsai trees) to revered and meticulous Western Buddhist practitioners. On the other hand, “New Age ‘Asiatic’ Thought,” as Žižek eloquently words it,[3] allows us to consider a broader spectrum of Eastern influences on the Occident while omitting profane facets of Western Buddhism, such as ZenView, which prove trivial in the discussion at hand. However, while I have chosen to abstain from the term “Western Buddhism,” we cannot deny that Buddhism does account for a significant amount of the Western intrigue with the philosophy of the Far East. This being said, some universal Eastern influences to take into consideration include the notions of the illusory nature of reality, or maya, the aspiration to eradicate human suffering, and enlightenment, or nirvana. The ideologies are present in Eastern religions and philosophies including but not limited to East Asian and Indian Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Taoism, all of which have a notable presence in the Western world.

Most consequential in the discussion of the appeal of Eastern philosophy in the Age of Global Capitalism is the common Eastern understanding of the world we live in as an essentially illusory realm of temporal adversity. In various sects of Buddhism maya can be literally translated as “self-deception,” i.e. while we can recognize the physical world as one of significance, we cannot regard it as absolute truth.[4] Maya, through its extensive Hindu etymology, it is best summarized in Hinduism as the origin of the human conviction that the illusory, finite world in which we exist is Absolute.[5] In Sikhism, maya refers to the sentient experience of the corporeal world as that of a dream world.[6] While these philosophies do not endorse nihilism, it is clear that a common theme amongst them is a general denunciation of the physical world.

            A second vital feature of Western New Age Asiatic Thought is its emphasis on the pursuit of alleviating human suffering. (Bear in mind that while Judeo-Christian doctrine does mandate an ethic of altruism, it does so specifically from a theistic authority, or in other words, an authority that has undoubtedly lost its leverage in the post-Enlightenment, post-Modern world. On the other hand, the appeal of Eastern mysticism is not bound by such theistic limitations and thus proves itself more attractive than Judeo-Christianity to a growing number of Westerners.)  The third of the Four Noble Truths, or the pith of Buddhist doctrine, is the Truth of the Cessation of Dukkha, or The Truth of the Cessation of Suffering. The objective of the Truth of Cessation is to bring an end to sentient affliction, both for oneself and for humankind in its entirety.[7] Similarly, selfless service, or sewa is considered an indispensable tenet of the Sikhist faith. In fact, Sikhs go so far as to prioritize aid for those in need over devotional worship.[8] In Jainism, Ahimsa, or non-violence, functions as the first of the Five Great Vows, or the cornerstone of the Jainist doctrine. Ahimsa forbids all violence spanning from torture and killing to oppression and enslavement.[9]

            Finally, Eastern spirituality more often than not presents enlightenment as the remedy to human affliction. Enlightenment, or nirvana, is the ultimate aim of Buddhist practice in which a person existentially trivializes his/her ego, and in doing so, achieves liberation from human despondency. In nirvana “with remainder” the only discomforts that persist post-enlightenment are the banal yet inevitable, such as physical malaise and the regular fluctuating of one’s sentiments. However, an individual having achieved nirvana allegedly undergoes these wavering experiences without lingering lust or animosity.[10]  Similarly, in Hinduism, moksha, or liberation from the cycle of rebirth (samsara), is characterized by the practitioner’s devaluation of the finite mind and body. Like nirvana, the attainment of moksha allows the individual to accept and embrace the temporal world as secondary to that of the absolute.[11] It is imperative that we recognize the unifying themes of Eastern philosophy not only as those that emphasize the existence of a non-temporal reality, but that also those that assert that gaining access to such a realm relieves us of our terrestrial tribulations.

In the contemporary era, the Occident can boast an extensive history of Eastern philosophy and religion. In addition to expounding on the basic tenets of Eastern philosophy, spelling out the origins of such Eastern credos in the West proves crucial in recognizing the contemporary allure of such notions, particularly in the Age of Global Capitalism.

            As many baby boomers know first-handedly, a seemingly sudden influx of Eastern spirituality reached the United States in the late 1950s and 60s. Although the Beat Generation, including quintessential Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, is often credited with the popularization of such philosophies and practices, it was figures like D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts who first made these Eastern ideologies palatable to educated, generally well-off Westerners. (On an aside, it is noteworthy to mention that while both Suzuki and Watts are often referred to as Zen masters, both are considered controversial figures amongst Buddhist practitioners; Suzuki for his notorious skewing of Zen philosophy to condone violence, and Watts for candidly criticizing Zen doctrine.[12]) Since this time, the Occident’s interest in the philosophies of the Far East has grown and continues to grow at an exponential rate.

But who are these Westerner believers and just how prominent are these Eastern ideologies in West? According to a 2015 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, self-identified Hindus and Buddhists alone account for approximately 1.4% of the population of the United States, or in other words, about 4.5 million Americans.[13] Of course this excludes demographics including but not limited to New Agers, the “spiritual but not religious,” those embracing aspects of numerous Eastern ideologies, and even atheists and/or secularists. As Jan Nattier draws attention to in her 1997 article, “American Buddhists: Who are they?” while Western Buddhists exist as an assortment rather than a homologous collective, there does exist one indisputable split amongst them: that between hereditary Buddhists and converts. Of course the same goes for any and all Western Hindus, Sikhs, New Agers, etc. who were either born into or have adopted Eastern philosophies. Pertinent to our discussion here is the latter of the two breeds: Western converts. These converts are overwhelmingly Caucasian and from the upper-middle class, but why?[14]

Here I argue that Eastern spiritualty serves a similar function to that of social entrepreneurship, for example. While social entrepreneurship debatably exceeds the capacity of a concise definition, in so many words it is a now more or less hegemonic mode of capitalist functioning in which companies appeal to consumers’ salacious urges to contribute to social reform, and in doing so, maximize profitable consumer demand. Toms Shoes is often cited as the archetype of contemporary social entrepreneurship, advertising that for every pair of shoes purchased, another pair will be given to “a person in need.” Such practices exist not only through corporations dedicated specifically to social enterprise, but have also seeped into the operations of companies notorious for their perpetration of social injustices. For example, Starbucks’s “Oprah Cinnamon Chai Tea Latte” … “helps give kids a brighter future.” The 2011 documentary, Pink Ribbons, Inc., exposes yet another quintessential model of social entrepreneurship, bringing to light the devastating consequences of the Think Pink! “consumer awareness initiative,” in which consumer products ranging from SunChips and Beanie Babies to Kentucky Fried Chicken and 5-hour Energy are fixed with pink labels and images of pink ribbons, all in the name of raising awareness for breast cancer. Of course the general public, as well as the media outlets of the financial elite (Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, etc.) applaud social entrepreneurship, viewing social enterprises as a matter of giving rather than guzzling.  While the benefits reaped by social entrepreneurship might seem inherently valuable to some, it’s difficult not to fantasize about the alternative, i.e. an economic order in which the social injustices generated by consumerism are remedied with something other than consumerism.

So here I argue that the function of New Age Asiatic Thought in the Western world is uncanny in its similarity to that of social entrepreneurship. It operates, as Žižek so eloquently phrases it, as a “most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.”[15]  While “conscious consumers” are often aware of the shortcomings of their contributions to social entrepreneurship, they nonetheless continue to condone it, and in doing so display characteristics quintessential to that of fetishism.

Sigmund Freud in his 1927 essay, fittingly titled, “Fetishism,” argues that the origins of sexual fetishism arise in a boy’s childhood, where he understands his mother’s so-called “lack” of a penis as a representation of his fear of castration. However, by the time most males approach puberty, they successfully transform this horror of castration, manifested in the vulva, into an object of desire, a means of coping with the boy’s original terror. Fetishism, however, comes into play when a man cannot and does not make this transformation, but rather replaces the desire for the vulva with a seemingly arbitrary substitute. Freud refers to this object(s) of desire as a “permanent memorial” to a boy’s original fear of castration.[16] Nevertheless, the fetishist is more often than not aware of what he is doing. He is capable of and often does immerse himself in his fetishistic desire, or phantasy, while consciously dismissing it as just that, a phantasy. Therefore the fetishist remains seemingly helpless to the jurisdiction of his paradoxical, rationalized desire.[17]

Karl Marx’s “commodity fetishism,” on the other hand, presents itself in society’s value of commodities in and for themselves, rather than the labor and social relations “between men” that are required for their production in the first place. Through commodity fetishism, capitalist societies welcome a “fantastic form of the relation between things” rather than embracing the value of simple commodities, or those which are inexplicably connected to the work required to produce them, also known as a commodity’s labor-value.[18]

 

Žižek’s interpretation of fetishism, however, is most pertinent in the consideration of Eastern thought as a capitalist coping mechanism. In the following, Žižek provides an articulate definition of fetishism through measuring it against the customary notion of the symptom:

 

The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse. That is to say, the symptom               is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at                           which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the                            Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.[19]

 

While fetishes and symptoms are often mutually exclusive, a simple instance of the two might exist through an ex-lover’s t-shirt, for example.[20] In the case that the t-shirt functions as a symptom, the subject’s contact with the shirt provokes the jolting trauma of a lover lost, a trauma that remains repressed until exposure to the t-shirt. However, as a fetish, this article of clothing functions as means by which the subject can existentially, rationally accept the loss of his/her lover. This rational solace is sustainable for as long as fetishistic object is accessible to the subject. Therefore while such a fetishistic object is seemingly reliable, the consolation it provides lasts only as long as it is literally accessible. Upon the loss of the fetishistic object, via destruction, misplacement, etc., the person whom it previously comforted is subjected to the trauma that the object allowed him/her to suppress via rationalization.

So here we can ultimately pose the Occident’s intrigue with Eastern philosophy as a fetishistic mode of coping with the trauma of global capitalism. Of course global “capitalism” is an indulgent term, seeing that the world government is oligarchical in nature at best. The Western world is slowly but surely coming to terms with this matter, as seen through grassroots movements such as Occupy Wall Street and its international counterparts, March Against Monsanto, and even the preliminary success of allegedly socialist politicians such as Bernie Sanders in the United States. It is evident, to say the least, that the global community has finally recognized and is infuriated with the global oligarchy. This being said, many well-educated, affluent Westerners are catching themselves red-handed, self-aware of their privilege, and more significantly, of the injustice it perpetuates. As Žižek often writes, in contradiction to Marx, “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.” Of course, we loath to imagine ourselves directly contributing to the monumental sacrifices and near-slave labor that go into the production of our iPhones, our Olive Garden breadsticks, our underwear, etc. However we knowingly sustain such atrocities with every ordinary purchase we make. So outside moderated, “responsible” consumerism (which proves far from flawless, to say the least), how should us comfortable Westerners approach the capitalist civilization in which we exist? Should we break down in tears, overwhelmed by the barbarity of capitalism every time we go grocery shopping? Should we commit ourselves to lives of austerity and solitude? Of course not, and Eastern spirituality provides us with a model of existence in the face of such capitalist horrors.

            To further develop this claim, let us consider an analogy. Here let us compare the aforementioned ideologies of nirvana and maya with the notions of complex commodity and simple commodity, the latter two existing as a microcosm of the former two. Complex commodities, or those isolated from their labor-values, and nirvana successfully allow the individual to act from a position of disavowal, permitting and even encouraging attitudes of existential disengagement. In Eastern philosophy, the individual is able to liberate him/herself from the illusory, temporal sphere of human suffering by dwelling in the “true” realm of nirvana.  Similarly, and as proves evident through commodity fetishism, the complex commodity allows the consumer to disengage from the brutality that goes into the making of an otherwise simple commodity, or a commodity that remains intrinsically affiliated with its labor-value. In both circumstances, nirvana and the complex commodity function as fantastic facades for the atrocities present in the profane world. In so many words, the simple commodity is to maya as the complex commodity is to nirvana.

Furthermore, Žižek claims that New Age Asiatic Thought is the fetish that allows its participants to “(pretend to) except reality ‘the way it really is.’” I am in full agreement with this contention, and have but only one alteration, or addition, rather, to Žižek’s assertion. I claim, for one, that nirvana serves as the fetishistic object of universal human suffering, while “conscious consumerism” functions as the fetishistic object of the horror generated by capitalist social injustices. In order to elucidate this argument, allow me to fit both circumstances into Žižek’s fetishistic framework. Here we can liken the t-shirt of an ex-lover, from our previous example, to first nirvana and then conscious consumerism. Just as the subject is permitted to cope with the trauma of love lost through clinging to this article of clothing, conscious consumers similarly cling to the notion of being able to do good via consumption, allowing them to cope with trauma, in this case with the guilt, of sustaining the capitalist brutality which they intend to combat. In the same way, Eastern philosophy permits the subject to cling (a term practitioners would surely abhor in this context) to his/her state of nirvana, thus allowing the individual to endure the weight of the suffering world.

Moreover, and more pertinent to the discussion at hand, I maintain that Eastern Spirituality, in addition to conscious consumerism, also serves as a fetishistic object used in coping with trauma rooted in capitalist atrocities. In fact, Eastern philosophy arguably functions as a more reliable fetish than conscious consumerism. Again, and as mentioned in the previous example of the ex-lover’s shirt, New Age Asiatic Thought can only serve its fetishistic function for as long as it is accessible to the subject. With this is mind it becomes evident that nirvana is an exceedingly more sustainable fetishistic object than conscious consumerism, seeing that it remains unscathed by the market, corporate decision-making, misallocation of funds, etc.

            Still, with or without a fetishistic means of enduring the world in which we live, we find ourselves confined to a realm in which our attempts at acting righteously seem consistently unsatisfactory. While consumers find themselves in a domain in which “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it,” this may not necessarily serve as the ideological pith of the global age. A more suiting essence of the contemporary era might be manifested in this question: “They know very well what we are doing, but what better alternative is there?” While some argue that the pressing matters of the present day require thinking over action, abstaining from taking part in the market is not only impractical, but also nearly impossible. With this in mind, we might condone, or even embrace the fetishistic purpose Eastern spirituality serves in the West.

            So here the age-old problem of free will manifests itself in our reactions to capitalist obscenities. Taking opposing extremes into account, that is of hard libertarianism and hard determinism in this case, we are left with two ideals. From the hard libertarian perspective we have the utopian ideal that the global community can collectively combat and maybe even over throw the capitalist hegemony, and in doing so, replace it with a more charitable, humanitarian institution. On the other hand we have the equally impractical hard determinist position, that is that the momentum of global capitalism is assuredly invincible, and therefore leaves us with no choice but to fully consent to and immerse ourselves in the violence of the market. Eastern philosophy grants Westerners with the ability to avoid both extremes, permitting us an arguably satisfactory compromise between these perspectives. At first the fetishistic use of nirvana in coping with maya might seem to condone the deterministic course of action, i.e. the idea that “the temporal world exists only as an illusion, therefore I may as well disengage from it, acting in it only as if it were a trivial game, etc.” In his 2012 European Graduate School lecture, “The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism,” Žižek refers to this notion as the “minimalist attitude” of moral responsibility in Buddhism. This minimalist attitude, as he puts it, reflects the radical conception of nirvana as a perspective from which “everything is different but nothing changes.”[21] However, this drastic approach is neutralized through Eastern philosophy’s call to altruistic action, in which humanitarian efforts are encouraged in the allegedly trivial world of appearances in which we reside. (As a disclaimer, it should be known that I maintain, as Žižek does in his EGS lecture, that this call to altruism does not rationally follow from, and even contradicts Eastern ontology. However it is only pertinent here that Eastern mysticism complies with this precept, despite its logical shortcomings.)

When it boils down to it, whether or not we utilize our capital to purchase an Oprah Chai Tea, its egomaniacal counterpart, customary Chai Tea, or none at all, ultimately makes negligible to no headway in combating global social injustices. While means of coping with consumer guilt do exist, such as conscious consumerism, such approaches prove far from adequate. Therefore Eastern spiritually functions as both a fetishistic coping mechanism and a code of conduct for Western partakers. As a means of fetishistic coping, Eastern philosophy allows us to substitute our horror and shame regarding capitalist atrocities with the disengagement nirvana permits us. As a code of conduct, the philosophy of the Far East requires that we aid in the alleviation of human affliction, thus presenting us with a middle ground between succumbing to the violence of global capitalism and fruitlessly, but incessantly striving for an Eden void of it.

All and all, Eastern spirituality grants us the ability to further diminish the weight of capitalist enormity, which without, we would find ourselves incapacitated by remorse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

 

[1] Žižek, S. (2001, March 21). From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism. Cabinet.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Maya. (2014). In New World Encyclopedia. New World Encyclopedia.

[5] Maya. (2015). In Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica.

[6] Maya. (2014). In New World Encyclopedia. New World Encyclopedia.

[7] Velez, A. (2015). Buddha (c. 500s B.C.E.). Retrieved July 24, 2015.

[8] Sikhism: Poverty and Wealth. (2014). Retrieved July 24, 2015.

[9] Shah, P. (2015, January 21). Five Great Vows (Maha-vratas) of Jainism. Retrieved July 21, 2015.

[10] Velez, A. (2015). Buddha (c. 500s B.C.E.). Retrieved July 24, 2015.

[11] “Moksha.” World Public Library. 2015. Web. 24 July 2015.

[12] Victoria B. Zen as a Cult of Death in the Wartime Writings of D.T. Suzuki. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. 2013 May [cited 2015].

[13] “Religious Landscape Study.” Pew Research Center: Religion and Public Life. Pew Research Center, 12 May 2015. Web. 10 July 2015.

[14]Nattier, J. (1997). American Buddhists: Who are they? Retrieved July 20, 2015.

[15] Žižek, S. (2001, March 21). From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism. Cabinet.

[16] Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Standard ed. Vol. XXI. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1927. 147-157. Print.

[17] Felluga, D. (2011, January 31). Terms Used by Psychoanalysis. Retrieved July 24, 2015.

[18] Felluga, D. “On Commodity Fetishism.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 31 Jan. 2011. Web. 23 July 2015.

[19] Žižek, S. (2001, March 21). From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism. Cabinet.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Žižek, S. (Director) (2012, August 10). The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. European Graduate School Lecture. Lecture conducted from The European Graduate School.

The Phenomenology of Fetishism in ‘Objectum Sexuals’

Sunayana Baruah, M.A, M.Phil

Right from the time of inception of a child into the world, instincts come to define her by influencing the choices made. These choices then mould personality as she gradually assimilates as a member into larger social systems. (Bronfenbrenner, 2006) Parental authority and socialisation form the foundation that encourages independent decision making. The idea of development, at some level however, is intrinsically associated with trauma. This trauma might not always be a catastrophe that overturns the course of events. It could be a deep seated sense of loss and mourning that comes associated with every stage of growth with which the individual is forced to negotiate. When the individual is unable to compensate for this sense of loss arising out of trauma, a desperate need to find a substitute for the lost object arises.(Khan,1963). When this substitute object is found, it begins to provide the much yearned for comfort and security that was otherwise elicited by the intrinsic loss. This attachment to the substitute object tends to become all pervasive gradually engulfing all aspects of an individual’s otherwise mundane life. The very sense of establishing homeostasis then comes to depend on the presence of this object; leading to an obsessive striving to be associated with it. This paper involves the employment of various contending psychoanalytic theories and concepts that could shed light on the causal factors of the phenomenon of fetishism among a very specific group of individuals. The idea of fetishism comes to be inherently related to sex as it is that one aspect of personality that exerts pleasure and can be controlled and manipulated. The sense of loss experienced comes from a need to assert and gain control over such an important domain of one’s existence. This paper marks the initial part of analysis of phenomenology of sexual fetishism through the lenses of Freudian ego defense mechanisms, particularly repression, denial and  reaction formation, Winnicott’s transitional object, ‘not me’ phenomenon ,the idea of holding, Klein’s intrapsychic loss, splitting and Projective Identification.

This article is mainly an expository one in which I employ the aforementioned themes to analyse the notions of internal associations with the loved object that manifest in fantasies of the sexual dimension. Bion’s conception of the container and the contained in the context of comprehending a traumatic reality would all be extensively applied in terms of explaining the nature of the intimate relationships. I take into account certain specific real life case studies as a pivotal starting point for the analysis of the development of fetishism from chiefly an Object Relations perspective. However, I strongly maintain a clinical standpoint to explain the phenomenology keeping in mind the eclectic approach adopted by the workings in the clinical setting in recent times. My sole intent behind writing this paper by focussing on fetishism among the group under study is to question the element of deviancy assigned to their sexual choices and if at all they are that different from ‘normative’ sexualities that are otherwise highlighted by psychosexual-societal constructs.

Freud’s (1927) initiative towards bringing forth the phenomenological study of fetishism in psychoanalysis was brought about by the knowledge of the civilizational traditions surrounding the idea of obsession towards an object. He was greatly influenced by the works of anthropologists that accompanied European imperialists in West Africa. He elaborately defined how tribes worshipped totems ranging from idol worship to skin piercings and tattoos while attributing them with special powers to such an extent that their very existence as a collective identity came to depend on these objects.

These then performed an intermediary function that fulfilled the innate needs of safety, security and affiliation of man. Alfred Binet in 1887 introduced and defined the term, Fétichisme as the unconscious associations that attribute erotic qualities to an otherwise neutral object (Kafka,2010).

Objects have always played a major role in negotiating trauma meted out by the external world. A blanket, a toy, a pillow, a garment have all played important roles in an individual’s life right since childhood. Be it the unavailability of the mother to be constantly present to comfort the child or the flight into fantasy to escape an abusive environment, objects have always been a constant supportive presence throughout a child’s developmental dilemmas. Marsh in her paper, Love among the Objectum Sexuals (2010) denotes how objects have come to be associated with transference of affection throughout history as she quotes The Hunchback of Notre Dame to describe Quasimodo’s passionate attachment to the bells of the cathedral.

In Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1938), an identification with an object always involved an affiliation for either reverence or hatred for the power and control the object yielded over the person; the fetishist in this paper. It was this idea of a totem that Freud defined as inciting the interplay of the functioning of the Eros and Thanatos. (Benjamin, 1988) It is only when the individual acquires the lost element; a totem, tangible object that leads towards achieving sexual fulfilment, then that object becomes a fetish; an object that even when possessed never fully delivers sexual satisfaction. The individual might be aware of this intrinsic shortcoming of the fetish being a temporary compensation. This could in turn, lead to the repetitive use of the object resulting in the foundation of the phenomenon of fetishism.

It is only a matter of varying degrees of intensity of the individual’s obsession with the necessity of the presence of the object.

In this paper, I have taken detailed case histories of three women who recognise themselves as a group of individuals called ‘Objectum Sexuals’. Objectum Sexuals are those individuals who develop intimate, sexual relationships with inanimate objects. I have selected the ‘Objectum Sexuals’ for analysis as they could very possibly stand at the extreme of the spectrum of behaviours associated with sexual fetishism. Being intimate with an object itself demands analytic scrutiny of the emotional worlds of the individuals and calls for a purely intellectual understanding of the conditions of external reality that preceded such life choices.

The first dissemination of information in media about the existence of Objectum Sexual individuals occurred through the BBC documentary, Married to the Eiffel Tower (2008). In recent times, it has met with considerable criticism from the community for sensationalising their intimate lives, inviting social ridicule as they were perceived to be titillating because they pushed conventional boundaries of sexuality. The film has been viewed as promoting voyeurism and judgement, eliciting revulsion or pity among the masses as they were perceived as excluding themselves from ‘real’ relationships in society. However, the film alone elicited intellectual scrutiny from diverse disciplines. Among the scarce research initiatives undertaken, Amy Marsh’s (Love among the Objectum Sexuals, 2010) and Jennifer Terry’s (Loving Objects, 2010) contributions have been noteworthy. This phenomenon has still not been met with adequate psychoanalytic scrutiny which calls for immediate further examination.

“Erika La Tour Eiffel, 44 is a former soldier in the U.S Army who lives in San Francisco. She is a former world class archer and has many titles and trophies to her name. She is a smart, athletic woman who is outgoing and traveling is one of her greatest passions. She changed her name to Erika La Tour Eiffel in 2007 after she married the monument. She describes herself as one of the forty(40) people in the world who define themselves as Objectum-Sexuals or OS. The term was first coined by Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, a 61-year-old woman who has been “married” to the Berlin Wall for more than 30 years.”(BBC; Married to the Eiffel Tower, 2008)

Her very first infatuation was with her bow that she christened as Lance. The Objectum Sexuals as seen from the narrative in the film, reportedly have a telepathic sense of the sex of the loved object, are open to bisexual relationships and could be polyamorous. Erika even though married to the tower, later grew fond of the Berlin Wall and visited it in Germany. She had to however, go meet Eija Riitta in Sweden first who had already been married to the Berlin Wall. Erika relates The Wall to her own life of abuse and neglect. She exhibits an awareness of her paraphilia not adhering to socially sanctioned norms and the subsequent acceptance of her own alternate sexuality.  Erika’s story then intertwines with Herr Riitta. Riitta lives in Sweden having been married to the Berlin Wall for over 30 years. Herr Riitta had never had a relationship with another human being in her lifetime.(Marsh,2010)

The documentary then follows the life of Amy Wolfe(40) who had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child; a label that she rubbished. She had been obsessed with a cartwheel at a fair. Her long time love however, had been the Twin Towers in New York that were one single male entity for her. Riitta, Erika and Amy had never had intimate physical contact with humans apart from the abuse Erika had suffered in the hands of various perpetrators.

Freud explained when the original object satisfying a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression; it gets frequently represented by an endless series of substitutive objects none of which, however, brings about full satisfaction (Petocz,1999). The constant fixation towards achieving a state of near-perfect satisfaction of the aroused libido leads to repression because the ego is under great pressure. Three phenomena can occur that closely explain the obsession with the fetish object: the fetishist in overt social behaviour denies the existence of these already repressed needs, projects the thwarted libido onto a neutral object that could be easily controlled, manipulated and altered, or employs reaction formation by denying the want for another social being that is seen as a stressor and in turn replaces the need for the other with the fetish object.

Throughout every stage of development, the individual seeks to transfer the frustration experienced arising from fixations with instinct satisfaction onto an object. This object could also represent a narcissistic ego ideal for the person and serve the function of eliciting a belief in one’s own grandiosity in the face of the threatened ego. This narcissism serves as an ego defense mechanism to protect one’s already damaged ego from further harm by a ‘real’, threatening partner in a relationship. The element of being in control also plays out in the extreme dynamics of such a form of fetishism.

Winnicott(1960) attributed a greater role to Freud’s otherwise deterministic child by assigning a definite personality to the child when it came to exploring the external world and making meanings out of external circumstances. The baby starts off its life with the oral stage during which the act of sucking denotes a desire of wanting something beyond nourishment.(Grand, 2000) At every stage, the baby wishes its wants to be satisfied in a particular way from the ‘good enough mother’ in the external environment. When the mother fails to ‘hold’ the baby’s emotional dilemmas, the baby finds ways and means to recuperate for this loss of a supportive base. For the manifestation of such an intense fetish as that seen in Objectum Sexuals(OS), the complete absence of a figure that otherwise fosters the supervised yet independent exploration of the world by the baby might prevail. The baby needs an external object that reassures her of not meeting with disintegration in an untrustworthy, aggressing world. That is when the first ‘not me’ phenomenon occurs and the baby reaches out to an external source of comfort that stretches beyond her own person.

This ‘not me’ phenomenon results in finding the transitional object (Winnicott,1953) that helps the baby make the transfer of libido from self to object love.

In an optimal pattern of development, the child’s illusion of omnipotence gradually begins to dissipate when the love for self gets transferred onto the transitional object which in turn, aids in the transferral onto the loved object in the external environment. In other words, the transitional object acts as a go-between in the process of transfer of omnipotent love to an external object of affection. However, if this transmission gets thwarted, the libido gets fixated on the transitional object which could in turn manifest as a fetish. The disruption of the process could make the child dependent on the transitional object. The object aids the child to regress to a stage prior to the disruption and rejection of the libido by the neglecting mother. Thus, the last remaining vestiges of an unhurt, intact ego are carefully guarded by the fetish object as a buffer against the onslaught of any kind of further trauma.

The ‘not me’ phenomenon influenced Melanie Klein’s (1955) perspective in formulating the Object Relations Theory in which she described the universal instinct driven phenomenon of projective identification; identifying an object as fulfilling one’s repressed fantasies. The fetish is the remaining semblance of reality for the child who could only grasp it from a paranoid schizoid position. This object then facilitates her delving deeper into her own world of fantasy where her needs are imagined as actually fulfilled.

Schizoid personalities (Fairbairn, 1940) could become a consequence of identifying with the fetish and subsequent withdrawal from human relationships. This could quite possibly answer the question as to why most fetishists including Objectum Sexuals do not see their sexual choices as deviancy of some sort. When the mother fails to reciprocate the love of the child or even so much as shuns it; the child goes on to develop the feeling that her love is hateful, unwanted and potentially destructive.

The child becomes fearful of losing her grip on external reality when she is faced with the inability of the same reality to hold her insecurities, frustrations and in turn, pushing them back into the child. It is this desperate attempt to gain an understanding of  the painful truth that the trauma gets dissociated, abandoned from the hurt ego and the child creates an intrapsychic world where she is in supreme control of herself and of others around her. This process is was what was defined by Klein as splitting (1946). By showing extreme resilience, the child carefully reconstructs an internal object love that is unharmed by external influences and is fully under her control. The object comes to represent a yearning for reciprocal love that the child never experienced. The preoccupation with this internalised world of control makes the child gradually withdraw from a need to establish concrete, social relationships in external reality.

Extending Winnicott’s idea of the fetish object acting as a mediator between self and object love, Bion’s (1959,1985) concept of the container could be equated to the fetish as absorbing or containing the hatred, aggression and vengeance unleashed by the child at being threatened.

The fetish takes in the Thanatos, decreases the destructive intensity, transforming it into Eros to be absorbed back; thus initiating the process of re-introjection. The fetish thus becomes an essential container of murderous rage and in turn facilitates the experience of safety, security and even love. When she reaches puberty, sexual awakening and experimentation occur; she might then come across an entity that finally leads to a sense of gaining back the lost object resulting in its inevitable, overwhelming presence. The theory also greatly equates the attainment of emotional maturity with the gradual acceptance of the world in grey rather than in black or white; adopting a depressive stance with all its flaws while retaining hopes about its goodness. This comes about only with an intricate understanding of a sense of loss as an inevitable entity to be encountered at every stage of development. Fetishism can be a resultant of an all-encompassing denial of a deep seated loss, a tendency to hold on to, clinging on to an object that feels akin to an extension of the self because of the investment of libido that goes into it.

The sense of touch (Bick, 1968) provided by the objects in the cases mentioned above proves pivotal for the fetishists to experience intimacy in their own terms and feel connected to the real world. In the lines of most other psychoanalytic concepts that emanate from childhood traumatic experiences, fetishism in the Objectum Sexuals could stem from a perceived helplessness of one’s ability to control the loss of the loved object; a perceived trauma in other words.

The denial of the need for human contact and the inability to establish sexual relationships with another human being in each of these case studies highlight a strong sense of denial of a painful traumatic reality. The idea of being intimate with the inanimate is a strong indicator of vehemently shutting out the external social reality. At some point in development, this same social structure had failed the individual to such an extent that the she had intrinsically recovered from it by establishing a dehumanised internal world. The fantasy to change the traumatic situation and to flee from reality is so intense that the child creates his /her own cocoon with substitute objects that are fully under his/her control. This brings about a reassurance that these loved objects can in turn not push back the hatred projected into her as they will be controlled at all times. What better substitute of loved objects than inanimate transitional objects that form an essential part of every child in transitioning from one developmental stage to another. The positive emotions get associated only to objects that could be controlled instead of human beings that dominate, alter, control and traumatize the child’s very existence and reinforce the threat of annihilation and persecutory anxieties all the more at every situation possible.

The idea of an object that could be trusted to take in the trauma, to reduce the intensity so that the altered reality by the object is safe enough for the child to take in is the key purpose of the fetish object. Bion’s concept of projective reintrojection could be applied here. It becomes a parallel reality so it permeates into all aspects of living especially sexual as it gets manifested in expression of pleasure. The fetish object is Bion’s container and the fetishist is the contained here.

Other clinically significant behaviours

The human mind seeks to overcome dissonance. There are myriad ways how it strives to achieve this end goal and the ruthlessness affects behaviour.

In the narratives of Erika, Riitta and Amy, we observe certain common occurrences of behaviour that spread out from conventional constructs of normalcy and could easily border on psychosis. The Objectum Sexuals have withdrawn from human contact through their committed relationships with their choice objects. Dissociation forms an ever present undertone of their childhood narratives. The urge to construct one’s own world view is so intense that at times they have been considered to exhibit symptoms of Schizoid Personality Disorder, Autism and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Narcissism arising out of a grave sense of inadequacy and an awareness of one’s own shortcomings could be observed from their testimonies. This obsession with the fetish acts as a reminder of one’s omnipotence as it reserves a sense of identity which is otherwise associated with an ingrained persecutory neurosis of falling apart or disintegration.

This dissociation becomes necessary for the child to maintain orientation and a homeostasis in mental acuity.

In the intimate lives of the Objectum Sexuals described in this paper, what comes to light is the dichotomy of the fetish object’s functioning in one’s life. At one level, the object elicits behaviour bordering on psychosis while on the other, it is key to maintaining the grip on reality.

 

Overview

Freud defined the term traumatic in terms of economics that is saving mental energy. When sudden occurrences in external reality are too intense and powerful to be processed by an individual in a conventional way; his mental faculties and behaviour rearrange themselves permanently to protect the ego. (Freud 1917, p. 275)

The child, even before reaching Freud’s stages of psychosexual development is born with a turbulent mind that is governed by threats of insecurity, dependency, helplessness and subsequent fear of disintegration. She needs an external presence that reassures her of a trustworthy world (Eriksson,1980). The parental figure; usually a good enough mother (Winnicott) is able to take in all the fears of the child through physical presence and emotional support; introjection and give back positive emotions of nurturance to the baby; projection.(Klein) . Introjection by the child is essential to comprehend external reality. The breast of the mother initiates her into the process right from the time she is expelled from the mother’s body. Introjection is the medium through which a perspective is adopted towards comprehending the world. The infant adopts two stances according to object relations with the breast: both the mother and the world are good or bad; nurturing or depriving. The breast becomes the prototype of how the world will treat the infant. The primal phantasy of omnipotence begins to act as a defense while the infant continues to develop and grapple with an uncharted territory which is the external reality.

Ferenczi’s(1913) concept of the omnipotence experienced by the child as a response to uncertainty functions as a wish fulfilment that first gets manifested through the baby’s cry and subsequent wish fulfilment or deprivation that result from it. The phantasy of omnipotence determines positive and or negative hallucinations in the cases discussed in the paper.

Throughout pre-oedipal as well Freud’s psychosexual stages of development, each phase is marked by distortions and manipulations of reality and fantasy. An infantile wish is always associated with an organization of a construct of reality from a narcissistic worldview. Freud also talked about autoeroticism intrinsic to infantile sexuality which explains the lack of need for an external functioning being to achieve sexual fulfilment in the Objectum Sexual women. When the child reaches the stage of weaning, the anxiety and frustration of being persecuted by the depriving breast is at its peak. The inability of the primary caregiver to reassure the child of the presence of an adequate substitute for the breast makes the child introject a deep seated sense of loss giving rise to a perennial state of existence what Bion termed as the ‘nameless dread’(Bion,1962). The process of transition and separation gets hampered and ego stability becomes inadequate.

Freud’s explanation solely focussed on explaining fetishism from the male child fixated on substituting the fetish object for the mother’s non-existent penis.

The Objectum Sexuals being documented in this paper are women. That makes Klein’s understanding of the ego development for the girl child appropriately applicable. Both the child and the mother being of the same sex make the processes of projection and introjection more fluidic. The girl child is however under constant pressure from the ego ideal of the mother representing femininity and being compelled to achieve it. The mother could in these cases, instead of holding in the hatred of the child for deprivation of the breast, projects it back into the child. The child then experiences an emotional vacuum; a dread of disintegration. In the Objectum Sexual women, anthropomorphising objects as belonging to both sexes is indicative of turmoil in identification with one particular gender. The only way that remains for the child to emerge out of it is to find a substitute for a container that the mother could never be. The child then projects its extreme hatred onto it through displacement. As the object proves itself to be a good enough container, the child begins to project feelings of love, devotion and even obsession towards it.

In a much later paper, Freud finally brought in the concept of primary disavowal in terms of fetish behaviour.(Bass, 2000) He explained how repression results only when there is a deep seated acknowledgement of the existence of a traumatic reality. Primary disavowal allows one to understand the loss of the object love, repress the traumatic experience and go on to substitute that lost object with another entity. The individual although knowing that the satisfaction brought in by the replacement can never be equated with the original element continues to deny the longing for it. The replaced object is repeatedly used for the projection of negative emotions and the introjection of a perspective of a safe, trustworthy world. Disavowal was what later came to be equated with Klein’s concept of splitting.

In Freud’s terms, the fetish wards off the anxiety of the unseen, persecutory interior of the mother’s body that threatens to engulf the child back in. The concept of the uncanny; the familiar becoming threatening could be applied along with Klein’s paranoid schizoid position. The fetish aids catharsis of the child’s murderous rage; the Thanatos to in turn destroy the persecutory mother.

The fetishism exhibited by the OS women has a strong basis in neurosis that easily could cross over into borderline psychosis and other categories of psychopathology. The inability to reach a depressive position, still idealizing and equally hating the loved object even when it has failed them thoroughly and the inability to explore one’s reality because of the absence of a stable supportive not me object all bring about an extreme intimate relationship with inanimate objects that help them in repudiating the traumatic dynamics of human intimacies. At various levels throughout development, these associations and objects have deeply failed them. The sexual association made to objects is only a deep desire to maintain sanity and resilience in a deeply hostile, persecutory world. The psychotic elements associated with such a fetish help them maintain an orientation towards reality.

The fetishists in general are still unable to reach an infantile depressive position because of the projection of love which was met with hate. The subsequent introjection of the hate heightened the threat of internal annihilation.  The child grew up internalising the belief that her love towards the external figure was unwanted even dangerous and had the potential to bring about pain and destruction.

Stuck in Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position of comprehending reality through the mode of primitive splitting, they are unable to fathom and tolerate even the slightest ambivalence towards their object of affection. That is the reason the fetish in Objectum Sexuals involves the inanimate that promotes absolute control to maintaining their love towards the fetishist.

In their relationships with various objects that are anthropomorphised by the OS women, they prefer to fetishize a wide range of objects as that provides them with a consolation of being loved by all. That is when the narrative in the documentary states that the fetish involved the practice of polygamy. The obsession with each one of their ‘lovers’ denote the striving to achieve the phantasy of complete satisfaction by that one perfect object along with the simultaneous experience of disavowal. The sole purpose of focusing on the intimate lives of the three Objectum Sexual women is that they fall at the extreme end of the spectrum of fetishism. The range of symptoms with varying intensities associated with overlapping symptoms of various psychopathology and paraphilia begin from there. The tendencies of a weak ego, “omnipotence, delusions of erotomania, splitting both within one’s own mind and the external reality”(Balint, 1951); disavowal, adopting a paranoid schizoid world view, oral fixation because of inability to reach infantile depressive position and manic-depressive tendencies are common in all individuals and exhibit themselves in the quest for sexual equilibrium . It is just that they are present in varying intensities impacting psycho sexual social lives on parallel planes of existence. The Objectum Sexuals embody the complete replacement of the fetish for a sexual partner with that of an inanimate object that defines intimacy at a whole different level. The phenomenon of fetishism in Objectum Sexuals also is one of the very few areas that blur the lines between psychosis and non-psychosis. It maintains the ever dwindling continuum of Freud’s two dichotomies governing the human mind of neurosis and psychosis. The fetish object in light of these perspectives serves a multi-functional role in a deprived individual’s dehumanised internal world. Objectum Sexuals showcase resilience in the face of an incomprehensibly traumatic reality and refuting to succumb to it.

The trauma of birth as explained by Klein and in scourge of the modern age of commodity fetishism ,technocratic nihilism as proposed by Heidegger (1968) make all of us experience, repress and displace the internal destructive drive; what Freud called Thanatos onto the fetish object. When the fetish object is discovered and explored, it becomes essential to in turn introject the arousal of Eros.

The unitary ground of selecting the focus group of the Objectum Sexuals in this paper was because the phenomenon of fetishism all throughout the spectrum of broader paraphilia encompasses dehumanising, objectifying the other to exert control in the face of an unpredictable traumatic reality; a struggle to be in the here and now.

It is a reassurance that at least on one aspect of life; the sexual aspect the individual is in control of her satisfaction of primary needs.

The Objectum Sexuals stand at a position where dehumanising ends and complete objectification begins because their intimate relations involve inanimate objects in themselves. This sexual fetishism could be the merging point of the Eros and the Thanatos as one delves deeper into passion for a lifeless entity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

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Bass, A. (2000). Difference and disavowal: The trauma of Eros. Stanford University Press.

 

Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis. Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 20.

 

Bick, E. (1968). The experience of the skin in early object-relations. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

 

Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking(I). International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40(p308), 8p.

 

Bion, W. R. (1962). The psycho-analytic study of thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43(4-5), 306-10.

 

Bion, W. R. (1985). Container and contained. Group relations reader, 2, 127-133.

 

 

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Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1940). Schizoid factors in the personality. Psychoanalytic studies of the personality, 3-27.

 

Ferenczi, S. (1913) “Stages in the development of the sense of reality” in First Contributions to Psychoanalysis (New York: Bruner-Mazel, 1980).

 

Freud,S. (1917) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, S.E. 16.

 

Freud,S.(1927).Fetishism(Strachey, J., Trans). In The complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XXI: (pp. 147-157).

 

Freud, S. (1938). Totem and taboo (p. 1). Pelican Books.

 

Grand, S. (2000). The reproduction of evil. Aronson, Hillsdale, NJ.

 

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Terry, J. (2010). Loving objects. Trans-Humanities, 2(1), 33-75.

 

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Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41(6), 585-595.

 

 

 

 

Postmodern capitalism and fundamental terrorism or the death drive in over-drive: a Lacanian Interpretation

The Desert of the Real
“What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.” (William Shakespeare).
It is very difficult to stay clear-headed in a very complicated world which seems to have lost its balance (a state called koyaanisqatsi by Hopi wisdom), especially when confronted by a constant environment of violence of all sorts, (named naqoyqatsi according to the same wisdom), and its spectacular rendition in which the Media blurs all differences and confuses issues.
In the more specific case which concerns us here, the violence of postmodern terrorism is nothing new. It inscribes itself within the long succession of wars and crises, conquests and massacres, revolts and revolutions which characterize mankind’s history as one unfolding continuum—if one can envision such a thing. An exhaustive list would be impossible to draft and leave an extremely bitter taste in the mouth. This may be why utopias were imagined.
After the fall of Rome, the Western World fell into a period of unrest, uncertainty and general insecurity. The Early Middle-Ages were characterized by widespread war, poverty and brutality accompanied by a general loss of high-culture and education. A relative stability was only precariously achieved with the invention of the feudal socio-political contract—but not for long, since the inner contradictions of feudal society threatened its relative cohesion.  An ideological and aggressive appeal to the populist, negative fear of “contamination” (abjection) and threatening “otherness”, present in any society, and especially in the European Medieval world, was therefore deemed necessary by the hierarchical, clerical order of Middle-Ages. Obviously, the role of the “Jew” as scapegoat and Christian society’s “ultimate other” was not sufficient. In order to project societal dissatisfaction and anxiety towards the outside of Christian society, control heresy and dissent, and unite a social body threatened by centrifugal tensions, an outer, powerful and dangerous common enemy had to be found. The Church found in the “Muslim other”, who had just occupied the Medieval world’s Holy City (Jerusalem), the new ready-made enemy who could play the scapegoat-role adequately, distract attention, and procure to the doubting or wavering faithful the “sublimity” needed for a renewed sense of transcendence. The Church made sure that the danger was real and pressing by turning “the Muslim other” into the common enemy poised for conquest at the Gate of Christendom. By cleverly and artistically creating a populist and high-brow “nationalistic memory” (hence the famous early French epic poems called Chansons de Geste), the Church fabricated a credible figure (or “bogey man”) upon which all the fears and frustrations of Medieval wo/man could be channeled. Via what we would today call state propaganda (Althussser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses”), the propped-up ideological fantasy unleashed a fascinating energy-flux which revealed itself catastrophic. The “spontaneous” 1096 People’s or Peasants’ Crusade (prelude to the following Crusades) ended up in disaster. Better organized by Medieval states, financed and directed by business interests, kings, feudal lords and prelates, the eight successive Crusades created havoc by violently imposing feudal kingdoms, massacring and persecuting populations, causing havoc across the land of the Near-East (Levant or Orient). The Crusades did not even spare Europe itself (Crusade against the Cathars in Occitania). The dystopian dimension climaxed during the 14th Century which was a period of turmoil, diminished expectations, loss of confidence in institutions, and feelings of helplessness when confronted by forces beyond human control (the Black Plague, the Hundred Years’ War, famines…). Historian Barbara Tuchman entitled her book on this period A Distant Mirror because many of our modern problems seem to have had counterparts in the 14th Century. Even the possible eradication of the human race (something we ponder when dealing with the possibility of nuclear war) was directly faced by Medieval Europeans. Later, the conquest of the Americas by the Spaniards, the Thirty Years’ War in Eastern and Central Europe, the Westward expansion of the United States, as well as European colonialism caused irreparable damage, suffering and loss of life to entire populations (from genocide to the cultural obliteration of peasantry and native peoples). Needless to say, the West has a bad track record in the area of human rights and its correlative, i.e. the quantification of violence.
The European 20th century can pride itself on having produced two World Wars at immense human and economic cost. Maybe then our times, because of genocides and the Holocaust and the invention of nuclear weaponry represents the apogee of horror. In spite of countless treaties and conventions, human rights declarations and conventions, women’s liberation movements, the United Nations and international cooperation treaties…, modernity does not win the medal for benevolent, rational humanism, and a more humane treatment of our fellow-beings. As Freud explains Civilization and its Discontents, humanity’s negative dimension is inherent to any societal configurations; or as E. M. Cioran wrote,
“We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation. The ages of fervor abound in bloody exploits: a Saint Teresa could only be the contemporary of the auto-da-fé, a Luther of the repression of the Peasant’s Revolt. In every mystic outburst, the moans of victims parallel the moans of ecstasy… Scaffolds, dungeons, jails, flourish only in the shadow of a faith…”
“In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy… whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.
Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.”
History itself seems to be in decline… It is no longer the defining aspects of actions.
But what is special about our times and makes the discontentment worse and more far-reaching in its consequences, are:
1) the close association between dystopia and utopia;
2) the quasi-instantaneous globalization of all events, affects and effects (from the economical to the cultural) obeying the rules, laws and regulations of a “market-consumer-consumptive” society.
3) the replacement of reality by a hyper-real or hyper-virtual reality severed from traditional representation and reality (Baudrillard): “we no longer perceive the same things as real, and coincident with our vanishing sense of a common reality we are losing our common medium for expressing and communicating our experiences. The world has been splintered into countless, fragments of atomized individuals and groups. The disruption in the wholeness of individual experience corresponds to the disintegration in culture and group solidarity. When the bases of unified collective action begin to weaken, the social structure tends to break and to produce a condition which Emile Durkheim has termed anomie, by which he means a situation which might be described as a sort of social emptiness or void. Under such conditions suicide, crime, and disorders are phenomena to be expected because individual existence no longer is rooted in a stable and integrated social milieu and much of life’s activity loses its sense and meaning.”
4) the rule of what the French call the “pensée unique” (the resort to a total, or totalitarian form of capitalism or neo-capitalism—i.e. an all-encompassing economical approach to solving all social and political issues), the consumerist dimension of all social and individual life (called reification in Marxian theory);
5) the belief that High-Tech will save humanity from its contradictions and problems;
6) the commodification of the life world by which the world of economy changes the reality of the world into its own image, i.e. an economy-world.
This race to the finish, to stay ahead of the debilitating contradictions inherent to capitalism (staying one step ahead of “the revolution”), to a more and more generalized abstraction of all production and consumption, and of all lives, is, of course, threatening the world eco-system to a degree never achieved by any world societies or civilizations before. It mires human imagination in the mode of production itself.
In the world we “have” now, violence contends with hope for peaceful change; and the outcome is very uncertain; fueling all kinds of anxiety-filled narratives and Imaginary prognostics–from millennial, apocalyptic, and doomsday scenarios to science-fiction projections of existential catastrophes. Some make a lot of sense and have a quasi-premonitory dimension such as the speculations about the future of societies imagined by the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.
In order to start understanding postmodern terrorism, one has to analyze it in its contemporary, proper historical frame in order to begin to comprehend its “mind-frame.” Postmodern terrorism did not come out of nowhere as if produced on a tabula rasa by a sudden violent outburst of a “génération spontanée” phenomenon, aroused by ill-boded feelings of resentment, jealousy, and spite, contrary to what many an American political pundit declared after the 2001 al-Qaeda 9/11 suicide attacks targeting symbolic US landmarks.
In the most recent case of fundamentalist terrorism targeting the West, the January 7 attack on the Paris office of the political magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Kosher supermarket (which claimed 17 lives–plus the three perpetrators), issues are more muddled than ever, not only because Muslims were among the victims, or because a Muslim man helped saved hostages, but also because the terrorists invoked retaliatory vengeance against the repetitive Islamic iconoclasm of the satirical magazine, as a slogan carried by a French Muslim during the January 9 Paris Union Nationale march recalls: “I am Ahmed, who died for the right of Charlie to ridicule my faith.” This should have come as no surprise. Already in 1988, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses generated a controversy as conservative Muslims accused him of blasphemy and mocking their faith. The outrage among many Muslims resulted in a fatw? calling for Rushdie’s death issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989. The result was several failed assassination attacks on Rushdie, who was placed under police protection, and attacks on several connected individuals such as one of his translators, Hitoshi Igarashi, who was assassinated. In November 2004, the Dutch film-director, Theodoor Van Gogh was murdered by the Dutch-Moroccan citizen Mohammed Bouyeri for having made the film Submission (2004), criticizing women’s condition in Islamic countries. His collaborator, the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, (a woman who became a member of the Dutch parliament) had to hire a body-guard (as did Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief). The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publishing of Muhammad cartoons inflamed the Muslim world in October 2005, and in 2011 the Paris Office of Charlie Hebdo was firebombed. This shows clearly that for many Muslims, any satiric caricatures targeting Islam and Mohammad are considered Satanic, aniconistic and iconoclastic.
Since it is a postmodern phenomenon (at least in the Occident), to understand fundamentalist terrorism one needs new conceptual tools; the ones provided by literary critical theory, for instance. By the same token, the questioning by fundamentalist terrorism of the impact of the logic of European secular reason and policy (separation of Church and State) on multiculturalism in Western societies (be they communitarian as in England or integrationist as in France) is something relatively new. It is an especially important question for France since it is part of her political and historical identity (concept of laïcité). This questioning needs to be addressed if for no other reason than the fact that this secularist politics does not seem to work as it used to. The post-sixties immigration has changed the socio-political reality of the nation to such an extent that a new strategy of thought and reason for the body-politic has to be invented, especially in view of the frustration of many immigrants in Europe, and especially the French of Maghrebin origin.
At the interpersonal level, in order to try to understand the causal explanations and roots of fundamentalist terrorism, the theoretical approach of this essay will attach a fundamental importance to the role played by the socio-economic sphere and conditions, by politics and history, putting aside what Fukuyama, for instance, has called the clash of civilizations. Although there is a clear intention of a forceful re-Islamization of Sub-Saharan, North African and Levantine countries by the different trends of fundamentalist Islamist sects, religious postmodern terrorism of Islamist obedience does not enter the dynamic of “civilization clash” as Fukuyama predicted. Islam is not at war with Christendom or even against the West. What is interesting to note, and we will come back to it later, is the spread of Western materialist, atheistic influences (via consumerist capitalism) all over the world and especially the Muslim world. This is an indication that Islamist fundamentalist terrorism is a desperate, ultimate, absolute reaction against this “invasion” perceived to be de-humanizing and de-essentializing by fundamentalists (called “intégristes” in French). The same could be said about “Christian fundamentalist” reactions—except that they have not yet resorted to the systemic use of terroristic violence (at least in Europe). The Norwegian case of the massacre of young Norwegian leftists seems to point to the contrary–except that Brevik (the assassin) was not a Christian fundamentalist. He acted more along Fukuyamist-lines—fearing what he perceived as the Islamization of Scandinavia via the complicity of what the American Right would call “liberals.” Extreme-right parties in Europe fuel Islamophobia and hatred for immigrants and in many cases are in/directly responsible for anti-immigrant crime and desecrations of Mosques; but they have not yet crossed the line and declared an all-out terroristic war against Islam.
At the intrapersonal level (the “terrorist psyche” so to speak), this essay will also minimize the appeal to cognitivist positivism, something Anglo-Saxons tend to privilege (especially the use of “problematic brain mapping”–dysfunctional or abnormal electro-chemical brain functioning, as revealed by MRI, or CT scanning, supposed to produce criminal or pathological/anti-social behavior for instance), and the explanation via heredity (genes).
The underpinning belief of this essay is that human perversity, pathological, or even psychotic behavior are fathomable and can be more or less understood–especially through the use of Sigmund Freud’s theories (made more relevant to the postmodern world by post-structuralist work—especially the “return to Freud” done by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and his cultural followers, such as Slavoj Zizek…). Although irrational (meaning that it is not the result of a direct cause-effect logic), postmodern, fundamentalist terrorism is amenable to rational explanations.
Our premise is that Islamist terrorism is more a symptom of the West, of globalization and the hyper-virtuality (hyper-realism) dimension of neo-capitalism, in so far as the Occident/West spearheaded and still imposes globalization with its logic of disintegration, of atomized individuals and groups (third wave of colonialism— as the book Empire by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt explains) than a symptom of Islam itself.
In fact, we will directly jump into the fray/heart of the matter and argue, following the path traced by Slavoj Zizek, that the case and symptom of postmodern terrorism (and fundamentalist terrorism) is an answer to another type of “economic fundamentalism” (what the French call the pensée unique—“one-way-type-of-thinking” as we explained earlier). How so?
What Zizek says about the hurdle, paradox and complexity of Lacanian communication can easily apply to the message (if we can venture to use the word) sent by fundamentalist terrorism—but after all isn’t postmodernity defined by a state of ontologic equality?
According to Lacan’s definition of a successful communication, the messenger/sender/utterer gets back from the other his own message in its inverted form, which is to say with its “true” (hidden) meaning, i.e. the truth about him/herself that s/he had repressed. Lacan’s famous seminar on the Edgar Allan Poe story, The Purloined Letter, is the seminal illustration of this inversion. As we will see later, this structural, inverted logic explains the game of paradoxical inversion played between Islamist fundamentalism and the liberal West (American meaning).
Isn’t today’s Western capitalism getting back from the Islamist fundamentalists its own message but in its inverted—i.e. “true” form—since the unconscious doesn’t lie, although it is structured like a, or by language? In other words, isn’t Muslim fundamentalism the symptom of capitalist globalization and liberal tolerance? Isn’t the furious explosion against liberal/capitalist corruption the very arcane, painful/tragic metaphor/figure which enables the liberal/capitalist democracies to encounter the truth behind their own hypocrisy—caught, as many of its citizens are, in their identity-politics single-issue struggles? In the fatal Western/Oriental game of message-exchange, the Other (our own collective unconscious) distributes the cards on both sides after having shuffled the game in its own underhanded way, with lack of legerdemain. Are fundamentalist terrorists unconsciously playing the game of the irascible, punishing Other– i.e. acting out our own unconscious? In the Muslim world today, Western globalization is very often perceived (with its often obscene, by Islamic standards, demanding, over-fed tourists, all-powerful advertising, daring Media spectacle, crass materialism and quasi-atheist nihilism) as an affront to Muslim decency, an offense to values and rules, a terrible, disparaging invasion—a new form of total colonialism, more pernicious than the previous forms. Expanding on the 18th century Wahhabite religious ideology, this total Western cultural and economic domination would explain the resurgence in the 1990 of a reactionary form of these values and rules in many Muslim nations, functioning as a desperate, last minute anti-dote; and as we know, anti-dotes are often as potently deadly as what they claim to fight off.
Consequently, trying to focus on the essential, one has to approach the phenomenon of postmodern terrorism from a phenomenological point of view based in the belief of the total/holistic interdependence of every socio-political phenomenon. That is to say that terrorism has to be understood as the result of the convergence of three main counter-currents/forces, themselves reactive phenomena to a more general, over-arching, all-encompassing flux. We have to start with these three counter-forces.
A) Opposition to the Master-Discourse of the neo-liberal pensée unique (here liberal is taken in its European acceptation).
Contemporary capitalism has concentrated power to such a magnitude that it has created its own (new) reality, displacing the reality of traditional peoples, cultures, and economies, and is pushing all over the world (globalism/the global village) a hegemonic power which is spreading rhizome-like and with a viral prolixity. This automatically generates its own anti-bodies:
“We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalizing…The Western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image.”
This new systematic way of being/thinking also preempts any other form of serious social alternatives other than velléités (vague desires) of change. By monopolizing and condensing everything into a technocratic and hyper-technological/informational nexus (institutions/ machinery/ network), the global economy has, de facto, created the objective conditions for systemic violence and brutal retaliation. As Jean Baudrillard reiterated postmodernism generates an all-absorbing culture and ideology that turn citizens into consumers. However uneasy citizens/consumers may feel about their “tidings of comfort and joy” and the malaise this total culture induces in them, they still cannot seriously imagine or even trust any other alternative. And if, by chance, so to speak, they start significantly/seriously opposing the “global system,” they quickly discover that their resistance has been neutralized by hyper-virtualization, or that it is quasi-impossible because of the “System” and its defense apparatus, vast and totalizing systems of human control, such as the NSA (postmodern version of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptikum or panopticon) are too powerful. Today, everything people do leaves a digital trace that is easily accessed, recorded digitally, analyzed and stored, forming a “cloud of unknowing” looming over people’s heads, like Jack Kirby’s algorithms, astutely and ironically called the “anti-life equation.” In this situation, digitizing is synonymous with de-humanizing. The imperial triumph of a Western way of thinking which reduces and transforms all lives and everything material and immaterial (even time) into objects/signs to be bought, sold, or financially speculated upon, and force-feeds this transmutation to the whole world, automatically generates a violent counter-push. Albeit irrational, postmodern terrorism is the (bleak) expression of the reactive-movement to globalization, fueled by a capitalist economy which wants to be total, all-inclusive, tolerating no exception, leaving no stone unturned, which makes it, may we like it or not, a new form of totalitarianism.
B) Nihilism brought about by Poverty/Marginalization/Oppression.
Western civilization’s global reach, its hyper-technological power, its imperial world domination, its particular way of objectifiying everything via the economy, its self-righteousness and all-absorbing ideology have become unbearable for many because its benefits are selective and separatist. Its basic social inequalities force/maintain an increasing percentile of the population in a state of poverty (something experienced more acutely when amidst a sphere of relative affluence), but also arouses a deep sense of injustice, of inferiority and inadequacy (which translates into a feeling of deep rejection). It also generates in individuals a spiritual void (which can lead to ontological despair). All this provokes a deep-seated sense of anger. In some, this can turn into rage (especially if pre-determined by a personal loss or trauma). The sense of rejection and marginalization can then metamorphize into a radical counter-rejection. This where intégrisme (Islamic fundamentalism), as its name indicates, factors everything in; it integers everything and plays a determinant role. The transformation of this radicalism/absolutism of this refusal into radical rejection depends on the ways individuals or small groups internalize the marginalization/rejection/oppression. Many individuals internalize these factors in a very traumatic way for different reasons; because of a personal trauma and/or a historically based trauma; for instance the Boston Marathon bombers who went through the terrible ethnic and repressive war in Chechnya. But alienation is not enough. Rootlessness and cosmopolitanism, identity fluctuations, opposed or contrasting cultural heritages are not enough to make a terrorist. For many, cosmopolitanism (with its problems of cultural friction and religious antagonisms) is not so much an identity problem as a normal condition of life. Hybridity is the positive by-product of the postmodern mixing of races, cultures and religions, as the life in Sarajevo, Tangiers, Salonica, Istanbul, Odessa, Alexandria, Trieste, Hong-Kong, New Orleans, Marseilles, even London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, or New York used to attest–or still attests, to a certain extent. Something else is often at stake. Identity politics are not enough to explain/account for the terrorist temptation. Ideology can go only so far in explaining behavior. Social causes matter. This is where one has to bring back the politics of class as the fundamental causal, determining factor. Poverty exacerbates sectarian antagonism pushing it over the edge into sectarian hatred, especially if ever-morphing associate fundamentalist forces are on the lurk for candidates, disciples, followers and militants.
Poverty, unemployment, racial profiling, and police harassment, conjugate their effects, re-enforcing a sense of total alienation, planting seeds of despair and hate. Even the mundane, petty humiliations of daily life can blow out of proportion (which explains the nervousness, edginess and volubility of the banlieues’ youth and the excellence of its RAP music and culture). As Toni Judt writes in the Edge People, “We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.”
But what is interesting and specific to postmodernism is the fact that this sense of popular despair and frustration which, decades ago, used to express itself politically via a counter ideology, a critical thinking politics and policy of rational analysis (Marxist praxis for instance), and a critique of the power and exploitative forces in society (Via socialism/ communism/trade-unionism/anarchism), cannot do it any longer. Popular revolt and resentment, inclined to lean to the left, have transformed themselves into a populism of the extreme right; religious or economical. This world phenomenon is caused by globalization.
If one looks closely at the terrorist events of January 2015 in Paris, one cannot but realize that they are largely about France and what it means to be shut out of Frenchness, by living in the bleak reality of the concrete, limited world of the banlieues of French cities (the Paris ex “red-belt” for instance). Although “not that bad” by Third/Developing World standards, or even by American ghetto standards, their immiserized immigrant populations (or sons/daughters of immigrants) still live with endemic unemployment. 40% of its unemployed youth is stuck in “the projects” with no place to go, to escape from, which explains why the use of drugs is rampant and why, every night, youths set cars (symbols of mobility) ablaze. This situation is paradoxical in a society, valorizing (and valorized for) its great democratic tradition, but which, nevertheless, harbors deep racism. Paris’ banlieues such as Bobigny, Villepinte, La Courneuve, and Clichy-sous-Bois are violent places to live, with dismal housing projects where spontaneous rioting often occurs, and are a disgrace to such a democratic nation as France. One can buy good pâté, fromage, and vins fins (cheese and fine wines) at Carrefour (the name of a multinational chain of hypermarchés–symbol of national and international consumption,) if there ever was one—since rioting and arsons have chased off most businesses. But everyday life in the banlieues degraded and abandoned public spaces is simply awful.
The Paris terrorists were French born and bred, and were ignorant about mostly everything, until they became converts to a religion they did not know, and whose Koranic Arab they could not read. While killing Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists, they proclaimed in perfect French, that they were killing a symbol of a self-proclaimed liberal (European meaning) France which ridiculed them, adding insult to injury. They retaliated against a culture which, de facto, for most, excludes them from birth and was incapable of accepting them into its fold. Like the acts committed by others before them, their target was pathetic and repellent for most—meaning it did not represent the power of the state itself as such, but rather the symbolic dimension of its culture.
The West has a large number of totally dejected and effectively disenfranchised people of all varieties, including poor white males. Political and social extreme-rightist activism and rightist political parties, from the Neo-Nazi, and White Power groups, to the Tea Party, Ukip, Pegida, and Le Front National of Marine Le Pen, etc., are providing a “voice” for the dejected white males. Radical Jihadism is providing somewhat of a voice for some youth. The rest are still basically rudderless. Who knows what the next individual will personify if and when s/he “passe à l’acte?” (acts out).
The Kourachi brothers were products of the West – and of the traumatic collision between Western power and an Islamic world that has been torn apart by both internal conflict and Western military intervention. They were, above all, beurs, French citizens from the banlieues, Parisians of North African descent. It is unlikely they could have recited more than the few hadith they learned from the ex-janitor-turned-imam who presided over their indoctrination, or that they learned in jail. They came from a broken family and started out as petty criminals, much like Mohamed Merah, who murdered a few soldiers in Montauban, and a group of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse in 2012. Their main preoccupations before their conversion to radical Islam, seem to have been football, chasing girls, listening to Hip-Hop music and smoking marijuana. Radical Islam gave them a sense of purpose that they could not otherwise find in France. It allowed them to translate their sense of powerlessness into total power, their aimlessness into heroism on the Mediatic stage of history. They were no longer criminals but holy warriors. But the analogy has to respect some logical limits. As the British-Pakistani intellectual Tariq Ali writes, to consider their crimes as a religious expression is like treating the crimes of the Baader-Meinhof gang as a Marxist expression of historical materialism.
C) The Global War against Islam and Terrorism
Christendom and the West have accumulated a debt towards Islam. Since the 11th century they have waged war, one way or the other, on Islam. From the Medieval crusades to the 19th century colonization of the Maghreb, and later, the Near-East and Middle-East, from the post WWI Sikes-Picot agreement partitioning the Levant and the Middle-East between English and French interests, to the political coups against Arab regimes organized underhandedly by Western powers, and the new “crusade” conducted against Iraq by most of the West under the leadership of President George Bush, the Orient has been the target of Western desire ranging from manipulations, aggressions and occupations, to “democratic-nation-building wars.” The especially violent decolonization of Algeria has left dolorous sequels which still haunt the French body-politic. Although basically uneducated and ignorant for the most part (because of a school system which fails to address their socio-political and cultural specificities), for many a banlieues youth this relatively recent history has not passed into oblivion, and often its sequels are lived in a highly emotional register, or take on an Imaginary dimension.
The fundamentalist movements which train, arm, finance and manipulate these terrorist groups are not simply religious.  They are funded by wealthy Gulf businessmen, by Saudi groups, by governments such as Yemen, and Turkey, while the US government looks the other way since they serve an important geopolitical function. The American government favored them during the cold war when the unabashed aim was to build an “Internationale of Muslim fundamentalism” of some sort, to violently oppose the “Socialist/Communist Internationale.”  The “evil” Osama bin Laden was first a C.I.A. funded and trained operative used against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan which was upholding the local Marxist regime bent on secularizing, modernizing and reforming Afghan society. Until very recently, Qatar was a state sponsor of terrorism – least of all because of its support for Ikhwan in Egypt. The result of Occidental campaigns has been to “mess up” the Arab world, putting a knife into Pan Arabism (though not really needed since the US made sure that it became a moot point by sabotaging Nasser’s nationalist experiment—The United Arab Republic with Egypt and Syria), and, after 9/11, certainly destroying any regional solidarity under the pretext of removing “evil dictators from the Axis of Evil,” (Saddam Hussein) or later, by riding the “Arab Spring” movements and purging its undesirables (by Western standards–Colonel Khadafi); and, most important, in the last few years, it started to destabilize and threaten Russia’s allies, Syria and Iran.
Although the terrorists’ actions and the manipulative strategy of their leaders do not represent Islam as such, Jihadists still speaks in its name. Let us remember here Shelley‘s definition of an “ism”: “a consideration of thoughts not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results.” The al-Azhar Seminary (Cairo in Egypt), seat of Sunni Muslim learning and fatwas, condemned the Paris terrorist attack, as did the Arab League (twenty-two Muslim-majority states). The only effective response to the terrorist manipulative strategy (as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few, and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals. This is why the editorial policy of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons may have been misdirected. They not only fold these terrorist groups in with disgruntled French citizens of North African and African descent in the grab-bag “Muslims,” but, also, in recent years they seem to have focused their satire on Islam exclusively. Again, did “the chicken come home to roost”? Did the fatal message knocked home tragically?
This Western mode of conduct literally helped put the Muslim world upside down. Provocation, covert interventions, economic pressures, business interests, manipulations and direct interventions aggravated tensions and contradictions. Polarization, the sharpening of contradictions, provocations, scapegoating…, are, although Machiavellian, “good politics.” Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, led, a decade ago, by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed this sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly attacking Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic cleansing of a million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization proceeded, with the help of various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for ISIL or ISIS, which descends from Al Qaeda in what was known as Mesopotamia in ancient European colonial maps). And in the end, the brutal and genocidal strategy worked, such that Daesh was able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals that they sought the protection of the very group that had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.
To these three main oppositional forces, one must add another deep-seated, albeit psychologically complex component. To explain it, one will make again appeal to Lacanian theory, and especially the notion of “drive.”
The drive of capital and the death drive
Ironically, the logic of this global system of generalized exchange which wants to make sure that everything/everybody can be bought or sold promotes itself as a “radical” positivity bent on the improvement/extension/embitterment of human life via the virtues of the free market economy. This grand circulation of signs, objects and affects, commodities and consumer goods can be summarized/illustrated by the great arcs of circulation/traffic which circumscribe and crisscross the Pacific Ocean. The drive of capital is inscribed onto the very body of the earth, as well as onto the body of individuals and nations. But who speaks about drives cannot ignore the death-drive.
Conveniently forgetting the death it has imparted on traditional societies, cultures and family structures, animal species and entire eco-systems, the linear optimism of postmodern, consumerist capitalism ignores the death that it cannot stand—excluding it from its generalized, circular permutation of exchange and its symbolic system, as Jean Baudrillard explains throughout his work. But can one forget, deny, or repress death? The repressed generally returns from the negative side of things as the critic and playwright Antonin Artaud wrote.
Tragically but interestingly enough, postmodern fundamentalist terrorism re-introduces the forgotten remainder of the equation; that which algorithms, algebraic and digitalized formulas gloss over; that which has been forgotten by the positivist logic of exchangeability—death. It does so via a brutal re-emergence, a sudden, illogical, mad and maddening avenging response from the irrational dimension of things–the Real in Lacanian theory). Fundamentalist terrorism focuses on a singular exchange with death. Pre-empting/hyper-virtualizing history, politics and ideology, postmodernist capitalism transforms the world by force; for terrorism, as Jean Baudrillard puts it, “the aim is no longer even to transform the world, but (as the heresies did in their day) to radicalize the world by sacrifice”—which means death. Globalization’s logic unwittingly has brought about a new reign of terror.
New forms of terroristic violence.
In mimetic response to the trickle-down theory supposed to financially invigorate the “entrepeneurship” of people according to laissez-faire capitalism, the new radicalized form of violence not only trickles down along the same lines but also diffuses itself along the horizontal lines, which like a rhizome, distributes power and responsibility throughout society. Since in postmodern societies there is no longer any center, as such, to address one’s claims or punitive anger, no central power to take over and eradicate, terrorism also follows the postmodern trend of de-hierarchizing and de-centralizing power. 9/11 belongs to the past. It still bears the marks of a modernist attack since, in more ways than one, it targeted the financial/legislative/military/executive centers of power. As Baudrillard (again) asserted, al Qaeda attack against America was an ideological war where the enemy compensates for its technological/military inferiority by hijacking the First World’s vectors of power and transportation, turning them into missiles.
With the Boston Marathon attack we are confronted with something already different, where violence diffuses itself through the pores of the social body-politic targeting the daily life of the people practicing the “Aristotelian good life” (enjoying “the care of the body” as Michel Foucault would have said). It was an act of particular individuals, lost in the crowd, using the multitude (Michael Hardt’s concept) against itself—which is the ultimate act of terror (Public Enemy Number One). The new terroristic configuration incarnates the logic of the new neo-tribal dimension of postmodern societies described by the postmodern sociologist Michel Maffesoli, where the democratization of responsibility and the relative autonomy of small groups is agglutinized by common interests and modes of self-validation.
From the limits of the Empire (Michael Hard and Toni Negri), from a “barbarian” zone whose name is hard to pronounce, forgotten after having been barely noticed for a short while, relocated to the dustbin of history, and to the “crypt of evil,” somewhere South of the half-Asiatic, ex-“evil” Empire of Russia, now controlled by Mafia executives and ex-apparatchiks (Chechnia), came two young men, Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, (lost brothers, like the two perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo massacre) whom neighbors personified as innocent… Together they killed three Marathoners and maimed 264 in Boston in 2013.
Therefore fundamentalist terrorisms, such as the one obedient to Daesh (ISIL/ISIS), should not come as a surprise, as the Pakistani social commentator Tarik Ali once said while commenting about Middle-East terrorism and Al-Qaeda: “the chickens are coming home to roost.” In the suburbs of Paris and London, fed by the leftovers of Orientalism, the emotional debris of Arab nation-states and frustrated nationalism, the rage spilling over from the conflictual zones of the Zionist/Palestinian polarity, and an insurgent extremist Islam, terrorism metastatizes itself like a cancer, influencing other lost youths or “jeunes en rupture de ban.” The Occidental smooth and smug “Master discourse,” speaking from its imperium, tends to ignore its own unconscious and that of others’. It either forgets others’ responses/ominous silence, or dismisses/diminishes their threat, provoking what Baudrillard calls a “terroristic situational transfer.”
Since marginalization and destitution are not enough, in themselves, to turn dis-enfranchised young people into assassins, are fundamentalist terrorists “machines célibataires” beyond politics, ethics, or aesthetics? Is something going far beyond “the wretched of the earth’s” hatred for the dominant ideology and economy—in the psyche of “those who… ended up on the wrong side of the global order?” Something else is at work to motivate the capacity of young people (mostly young men) to identify with, and obey the demand of fundamentalist terrorism.
The legacy and contradictions of France’s actions in Algeria—colonization, mass killing, torture, and racism–are not so easily resolved, much like America’s legacy of slavery, or South Africa’s apartheid inheritance. These young Parisian terrorists, and others like them, certainly do not know not what they do. But there is something in their psyches still surviving as a nightmare, hidden, as in a cache…, like unwitting messengers, they become the conduit of the return of what French society has repressed.
Psychological fundamentals of fundamentalism
“Adolescent nihilism makes it abruptly apparent that from now on the religious treatment of revolt finds itself discredited, ineffective, and unfit to ensure the paradisiacal aspiration of this paradoxical believer, this necessary nihilistic believer, this shattered, desocialized adolescent afloat in the pitiless ghetto of global immigration. Indignant, we reject him, until he threatens us from inside.”
Even if the doings of a tiny minority, the Islamist terrorism in France is indicative of a deep malaise, of a serious decomposition of the social body created by a policy (or lack of politics) which engenders despair and nihilism and barbarism. But this irrational, blind violence does not come out of nowhere. It is understood by its practitioners to be a justified counter-violence. It is the response by a noteworthy fraction of France’s suburban youth to the social and moral violence, due to racism or xenophobia, discrimination or exploitation, they encounter on a daily basis.
The “terroristic subject” is a subject who painfully “feels” (experiences) his/her split in a different way than most of us. We do know that according to Lacanian praxis, the subject is fundamentally constituted around a gap/void; it is a split subject ($). In the case of ghetto/banlieues youth, the gap is not adequately (re)covered/covered up and circumscribed by the Symbolic buffered by a functional name-of-the-father. In their case, the gap is more gaping and yawning, making them vulnerable to intense Imaginary narratives of quick compensation. It is not so much that “terrorists of all stripes are steeped in a victim mentality” in which they wallow, as if enjoying their symptoms of suffering, deprivation and helplessness), but it has to do with the fact that these young men (and also women) cannot escape victimization/victimhood. They cannot transcend it since something is awry/missing in their symbolic structure—and this “something” directly connects with the socio-economic dimension. The “nom-du-père” is missing (doubly missing since the familial, paternal dimension and the super-egoic ideological dimension of the state are lacking, or are negatively barred). This is a youth greatly at risk, since on the edge of the Real without guard-rails (garde-fous as the French say). For instance, as a French beur rap says, for immigrants living in what was called Paris red-belt, France is not synonymous with the beautiful, monumental, museum-like city of Paris, but a “banlieue merdique” (a bunch of shitty suburban projects). The spirit of postmodern terrorism does not directly infiltrate itself as such into the body-politic through or thanks to the contradictions of capital (aka Marxism) within the fractures of the social body (the fracture sociale as the French call it generically) as it used to be the case, but through the fractures, the molar (or molecular) lines as Gilles Deleuze writes, or the pores of society as Walter Benjamin writes. This is why terrorism is so able at using the social Media to spread their messages, since these Media come directly to incarnate the new nerves or molar lines of the body-politic, where public opinion and individual opinion (the notion of multitude—après Michael Hardt) obey the same logic, at once product of, and producing, a new collective of individuals/consumers. This new form of “being-together” (être ensemble— après Maffesoli) has nothing to do with the (proletariat) masses of the 20th century where class-belongingness and national or international citizenry/citizenship played a major role.
This is why some young people more and more leave/abandon realism and the political fight against discrimination, and the struggle against the vicissitudes of society (constituted by the Symbolic–with its limits and expectations), and jump into the Real, into a dangerous territory where the Sirens sing louder, where the death-drive of an intégriste version of Islam (or integral—in mathematics an integer is a whole number that can be positive, negative or zero) unconsciously tries at all costs to counter the global death-drive of capital, threatening its dominion (as during the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center). It is a fight to the death by an international of the Real and the Imaginary against the externalization of the death-drive of Capital.
The terrorists’ recourse to this extreme variant of Islam is explained by the fact that it mobilizes ideas of masculinity denied by the de facto symbolic impotence into which the host society has put these mostly male youth. The revival of a lost communal belonging (of brothers) which, in postmodern secular society has broken, revenge, lost existential meaning, the need for transcendence (which can induce martyrdom), all are compensating for the moral and spiritual vacuum of an ultra-materialist postmodern society (a materialist enjoyment from which, by the way, they are excluded). This return of a fantasized Islam (complete and replete with an ummah and a sharia displacing a Sha’b blemished by capitalist materialism), although naïve and pathetic in its Imaginary reach and Medievalist target (to recreate the Caliphate of yore) does speak to young people, especially young men, around the world, in spite, and because of, their alienated and oppressed particularities.  Formerly they might have joined the Communist party and formed unions. But since any socialist alternatives were destroyed by the West in the Maghreb, Near- and Middle-East, and, of course, in the West, they had no place to turn but to “their” God.  In Lebanon the young men of Tripoli (a largely Sunni city in the north, near Syria) join the Nusra Front, ISIL or the local Bab-al-Tabbaneh militias for simple reasons. They are poor and unemployed (Tripoli is a very poor city); they feel that their communal bonds of sect and family are threatened, and that their “masters”–sheikhs and others working for big Lebanese boojies and warlords, pay them well enough to kill others.
Modernity is an idea whose time has come. It is based on the ideas of an historical project, (industrial, political, or technological) revolutions, humanity, science, and linearity progress. These paradigms constitute the ideological reason that can only reproduce the political and economic status quo. The reduction of the world to a world of economy as we analyzed earlier (trans-national globalism with its pensée unique) brought about trans-national terrorism using the very tools of globalization and its communication network. The status quo is the real, actual state of the situation. Why not admit and confront it as such? A malaise of capitalist culture which it wants to appease (political correctness’ symptom of guilt and denied impotence), multiculturalism doesn’t even preserve individuals from the hell of the same, from the ideology of mono-thought, of the economical world/world of economy with its loss of utopias, with its avant-garde social ideologies replaced by rearguard ideologies, with its lack of objects of belief or unbelief since everything has been reduced to the same level of exchangeability. There is no democracy of the (material) object.
Revolutionary movements and terrorism share one thing in common. They both exemplify (albeit differently since they must not be equated as such) the link between what post-Freudians call sublimation and the death-drive, i.e. the extraction of the sublime (pure untainted object—the Freudian Das Ding) from the corrupted body-politic. In the case of Islamist radicals, they want to extract the new Islamist Body (the Caliphate) from the old corrupt one (be it Sunni, Shiite, Christian…), or the body of capital (with its Westernization mode) seen as corrupt, decadent, effeminate. Through provocation, direct provocation, al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram—each in their own way, but with an overarching similarity of goals and methods, are trying to jump-start a new form of Islam, to force a radical Islamization of societies not yet totally under the yoke of Western, capitalist/materialist globalization.
The Prophet, God (Allah) represents the super-egoic voice charging the radical Imam to give birth (by force if necessary) to the new God’s society based on the Sharia (Slavoj Zizek). The super-egoic dimension represents, as he writes, “the Master-Signifier in the name of which we fight out battles… designate an identification not with a clearly defined positive content but with the very gesture of identification… When we say “I believe in …x,” the ultimate meaning of it is pure intersubjectivity: it means that I believe that I am not alone, that I believe that there are also others who believe in x.”

The sublime object of terrorism.
As Baudrillard writes, postmodern terror is the ecstasy of violence (The Vital Illusion). The repressed is coming back to haunt us, but in an inverted form and smacks right in the middle of the “Empire of Signs.” Inverted because it has no way out, no access to the Symbolic function, except under the form of the unacceptable and unthinkable formless stain, das Ding, the horror, re-ified by Hollywood scenarios, since as usual, they precede the reality they caricaturize (Baudrillard’s precession of the simulacrum)– except that here the real thing precedes its simulacrum. All this means that things are accelerating and reaching a point which Baudrillard calls “integral reality.” Slavoj Zizek would simply state (Lacanian interpretation), that the Real and the Imaginary have bypassed the Symbolic and are fusing their effects together.
This bypass is the result of the rejection of modernity by fundamentalist terrorists as we have shown earlier. This, among other things, makes them opt for a more terrible/exacting master, who asks for cleansing and purifying by death, than the consumerist/ capitalist Western society. They reject the secularist French other and adopt a divine one. While postmodern globalism pushes all limits (“we are the world” sings Bruce Springsteen et al.), fundamentalist terrorism also pushes all limits.
Which explains the fatal irreversibility between Western values and fundamentalist values.

Paradoxical Inversions/Reversals
Terrorism and the West are caught in a Moebius loop inverting each other categories/paradigms as Jean Baudrillard writes: “The transgression of the code is the reversion of opposite terms, and therefore of the calculated differences through which the dominance of one term over the other is established.”
The Occident and the Orient (or, at least, its most tragically affected regions) now exchange missiles and missives of radical ideas (letters of hatred); terrifyingly exhibitionist images, i.e. a generalized rhetoric of escalating violent behavior which vies for the control of minds and bodies of whole populations. The “weird game” of this fatal logic played by the terrorists not only works “tit for tat,” but also inverts the “benevolently utilitarian” and “pacifying” image the West wants to project to the world. Why this paradoxical and peculiar inversion? Because the Western mode of total development and its only existing challenge, i.e. the terrorist, fundamentalist, total rejection, both pursue immortality and the negation of time, but from opposite directions.
Secular, Western rationality (under its hard or soft forms—atheism, or “temperate” religiosity) is answered with religious Medieval fanaticism;progressive and liberal tolerance with transgressive and “barbarian” provocations; Western Humanism (“human rights,” “normality,” quality of life,” (or what Jean Baudrillard calls “the vissicitudes of profitability”) with inhuman acts; the capitalist privatization of all space with a nomadic-type of communal, neo-tribal space; the Media hyper-virtual manipulation/simulation of reality (from reality TV to survivor shows) with “live” videos of raw, bloody, “real” public executions.
Commercial advertising is countered by religious propaganda; the West’s drones and smart bombs by cleverly hidden explosives smuggled on board jet-planes; the US-led coalition of neo-crusaders by a new “Internationale” of radicalized, Muslim jihadists; American nation-building by the Caliphate; the Founding Fathers’ model legacy by the Prophet’s voice; Political Correctness and Western-cloned democracies by a literal and reactionary interpretation of the Koran; the subordination of egotism to the self-reproduction of Capital by the subordination of individualism to the Sharia, etc.
The Western exhibitionist, ubiquitous gaze which wants to make everything visible and transparent is opposed by black veils and djellabas which cloak faces and bodies, blocking the introspecting gaze; to Western pornography, prurient nakedness, and promiscuous bodies (especially women’s) the response is a veiled female dimension and a de-eroticized male presence (bushy beards and hair, unkempt appearance, loose thobes…). Crass Western materialism is answered by the crass ideology of mentally/morally desperate people–sons and daughters of failed nation-states, war-ravaged countries, or neo-colonized states. To the nothingness and vacuity of Western individualism and reification responds the fullness of a hypostatized and hystericized Islam. To the rhizome-like proliferation of capital answers the viral-like propagation of terrorism. The fundamentalist, ideological propaganda even reaches into the heart of the West, addressing its inner contradictions through the pores of its social skin, i.e. the ethnically and culturally alienated youth (the hybrid, impoverished, and marginalized “suburbanites” of large European cities, the poor and marginalized of American “ghettos”…) and, something new, the “estranged/alienated” youth of the relatively affluent Western middle-class (now “courted” by ISIL). Is postmodern society a breeding-ground for new forms of terrorism?

Reasons for the Terrorist Strike
As Juan Cole (director of the Center for Middle East and North African Studies at the University of Michigan) proposes in The Nation, the last terrorist act in Europe certainly obeys the logic of a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public and the Immigrant population of Arab descent or Muslim obedience. Since in France at least, a unified Muslim block and community do not exist as such, the best way to create one is to force a logic of escalating repression/oppression. Muslims in France have been secularized up to a certain point and the Muslim religion practiced by many is not radical (it does not “integer” and subsume all life and civil society under its umbrella, as the Shariah does in regions governed by the ISIS/ICEL or al-Qaeda.) Despite the bloodshed in the name of religion, billions of believers go about their lives, peacefully “doing unto others.” Al Qaeda’s recruitment pool targets European Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Many are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million are of Muslim heritage. But only a third, less than 2 million, express a strong interest in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims also have low rates of belief and observance pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai music forms). In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say profess loyalty to their country of immigration–France. Al Qaeda wants to artificially create new, radicalized French Muslims by:
a) targeting the unemployed, marginalized, ghettoized, largely uneducated youth of the banlieues via young, radicalized clerics who preach radical Islam. They provide ISIS/ICEL and Al Quaeda with volunteers, disciples and warriors.
b) violently forcing the French State Apparatus systems (Althusser ideological statist forms) into repressive violence against Muslim citizens (profiling, harassing, imprisonment…), and thus jump-starting the creation by default (via the defensive) of a common political identity formed/shaped around Islamic grievance, and resistance against discrimination.
Disenfranchised, unemployed, ghettoized youth identify themselves with their particular social situation/condition (impoverished suburbs) and not with an abstract universal quantifier such as “the French nation.” “Frenchness” has not become a “for-itself” (to use a Hegelian and Marxist notion) transcending all social situations or peculiarities. Although the escape from any peculiar social situation (an “out-of-jointness” so to speak) is the necessary mode for any individual to feel/be covered by (accept) a universal, or transcendental signifier, their “out-of-jointness” has not allowed them to accept the rule of the signifier “France.” They are stuck in their suburbs –hence the nighly ritual of burning cars–symbols of consumption and escape. The only way out is the “magic carpet” of fast (simplistic) ideology. The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. Their speech was unaccented while their action was.

Secularism and Satire
The Liberal/Conservative dichotomy obscures and distracts from serious analysis of power. Conservatives are easy targets for Liberals.  Liberals are easy targets for conservatives.  But, as Andrew Long remarks, “both mindsets are about the loot…. and push their loot agendas at the expense of social justice.” Their spoofs and satires come right out of the register of the Imaginary—hence the easy laughs and entertaining playing-outs of political campaigns. It is true that Charlie Hebdo satirizes everybody. The satirical attacks on the Prophet and Muslims in general are easy since they form an easy target. Most of the Muslim populations or descendants of Muslims immigrants, or those culturally circumscribed by Muslim traditions in the West are in subaltern/weak position since their majority is part of the new proletariat which has replaced the traditional European working-class which has become petit-bourgeois and moved to better housing.
The terroristic execution is a pious protest against what is perceived as the ultimate blasphemy, i.e. the defamation of the face and figure of the Prophet. Al-Qaeda and ICEL had already “called the shots,” if one keeps in mind the fatwa placed against Salmon Rushdie. They had called for punitive revenge against sacrilegious defamation. Of course, fundamentalisms are the evil we know, and unfortunately, they are not the only enemies of subtlety, irony and nuance, let alone freedom of expression. It suffices to see the state of academic freedom in the US, for example; or the way radical, albeit intelligent, opinions are shunned by US Media. The world is up in arms about Charlie Hebdo, but could a magazine like Charlie Hebdo even exist in the US? Bill Maher’s satire functions like a comedic counterstatement to Fox News (in general).  Neo-cons, for example, want to be able to demean women, especially rape victims, and poor people in general, use disgraceful racial epithets, and caricature Muslims whenever possible, and then cite their “democratic rights” sententiously quoting the First amendment to the Constitution, when anyone criticizes them.  Bill Maher’s documentary “Religulous,” is exploitive of very easy targets. For a satirist, it is the moral and functional equivalent of dropping your pants onstage – a cheap laugh. For an enlightened alternative to Maher, we should look at the courageous work of the comedian Jon Stewart, especially his work with the jailed and tortured Iranian journalist, Maziar Bahari.
Concerning the threat against political cartoons and satirists, Charlie Hebdo’s attack is not only new, as we have examined earlier with the Danish and Dutch case. They have also involved other “actors” from other “persuasions” and political motivations. Here, we have to remember the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al Ali, who was murdered in London in 1987 by Mossad, using double agents within the PLO. Thatcher was so shocked that she shut down the nefarious Mossad London office. This terrorist event was quickly forgotten.  Al Ali’s cartoon character, Handala, a 10 year old Palestinian boy, still well-known in the Arab world today, was a close friend of Ghassan Kanafani, the famous  Palestinian novelist/writer who was also assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut in 1972, before the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon.
There is no equivalent in the US to Charlie Hebdo, with its multitalented editorial board of graphic artists, socio-political critics, radical journalists and essayists (Stéphane Charbonnier, Bernard Maris, and cartoonists Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut, aka Cabu, Berbard Verlhac (Tignous)…, all of whom died in January 2015). As Charbonnier, known as Charb, said, “I prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.” Well, tragically, he was heard. The Colbert Report, the Onion, Mad Magazine, or the TV shows and cartoons such as Saturday Night Live, Family Guy, South Park, or the underground comics like Crumb’s (which are more remembered for being x-rated than political) do not correspond to the mind and spirit of Charlie Hebdo, which inscribes itself in a populist and intellectual Gallic tradition, going back to Medieval times (the fabliaux tradition and François Villon), followed by the Renaissance of Rabelais’ Gargantua, and the anarchism and surrealism of the 20th century. The reasons for that difference may lie in the neo-Puritanism of American culture, and the heavy doses of Political Correctness and litigiousness that are drugging her creativity. In American culture, comedy is generally not seen as a politico-intellectual pursuit. Our humor is usually more in the toilet as in the Jackass movies series. Has the West really free speech in the West? Does free speech means being free to say just anything, gratuitously?
We have a model for response to violent terrorist provocation and attempts at sharpening the contradictions. It is in Norway, where, after Anders Behring Breivik committed mass murder of Norwegian leftists for being soft on Islam, the Norwegian government tried Breivik in court as a common criminal.
Einstein once said that we will have the destiny that we will have deserved.

Death and the Unconscious: An Epistemological and Ontological Reconsideration of Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

Victor L. Schermer

SUMMARY ABSTRACT: Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is an important work which has many flaws and at the same time contains rich insights into the role of death in the unconscious. This article critiques Freud’s difficulties placing his understanding of death in a scientific framework incorporating Kant’s metaphysics and Goethe’s naturphilosophe that he acquired in his medical studies, resulting in a conflict between reductionist and holistic views of the brain and the role of death in living systems. Yet the ideas he proposed brought him closer to an existentialist view of life and the mind. Freud and Heidegger arrived at their views on death in the same decade as a result of World War I and the cross-cultural shattering of identity. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is useful in developing linkages between psychoanalysis and phenomenological/existential thought.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Introduction: “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
and Freud’s Controversial Death Instinct

Death is an event of absolute psychobiological, phenomenological, and existential consequence. Yet it was only as a postscript to his major discoveries and in wake of a devastating World War that Sigmund Freud took on the problem of death as it pertained to his theory of the unconscious. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in contrast to his long-held emphasis on the hegemony of the pleasure principle, he now proposed death as an imperious instinct that impels organisms towards annihilation. In this paper, I consider Freud’s rationale for that radical hypothesis and propose a critique of the conceptualization of death as an “instinct” or “drive,” examining the merits and flaws of his arguments. I will then try to view Freud’s ideas in light of biological science and phenomenological-existential thought. I will suggest that there are gems of insight contained in this essay despite the flawed theory of the “death instinct” as such. The essay provides nascent ideas that can link psychoanalysis and modern existential philosophy in new ways.

“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is Freud’s only major theoretical work which has incurred the sharp criticism of his most devoted Anglo-American followers (with the notable exceptions of Melanie Klein and Kurt Eissler) from the time of its publication in 1920 to the present. Its ideas have been rejected by Freudians, ego psychologists, interpersonal, and object relations theorists alike on account of Freud’s proposal of the “death instinct,” a drive towards extinction present in all living beings, a force against successful adaptation and upward development that opposes all the intentions of the “life instincts” and individual and species survival. The notion that life could be purposefully motivated towards its own death seemed to go not only against Freud’s central theory of infantile sexuality, but flew in the face of all the findings of the life sciences and all of Western thought and values! It led many to ask, had Freud gone mad? Had the devastation of World War I or the untimely death of his beloved daughter Sophie Halberstadt led to his disillusionment with his hallowed theories and a thoroughly grim assessment of the human condition?

The Anglo-American analytic majority’s dismissal of the death instinct unfortunately has obscured the richness and significance of this profound work. One can only admire Freud, who having devoted his career to advancing the theory of infantile sexuality and creating a loyal group of adherents, had the intellectual courage to acknowledge a major fault line in his thinking. In the essay, he acknowledged the tentative nature of his new view. Whatever personal struggles drew him back to the battlefield, it is clear that he felt he had uncovered a major loophole in his treasured metapsychology, a difficulty that he couldn’t ignore. The loophole was that not all human experience, in particular the repetition compulsion, could be accounted for on the basis of the pleasure principle, the foundation of all his theorizing up to that point. Like Einstein, who discovered a fallacy in Newton’s theory of motion, Freud, like Oedipus, had toppled himself.

From Clinical Observation to Neurology and Biology

In what follows, I am going to re-examine “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” from a combination of natural science, philosophical, and psychoanalytic perspectives. I will try to hover above it from a historical, scientific, and philosophical distance and suggest that Freud’s otherwise profound understandings of the role of death in the unconscious were marred by distortions brought about by his adherence to a quasi-metaphysical scientific paradigm that harked back to his initiation to neurology in the laboratory of his medical school mentor Ernst Brucke, as well as to the general biology of his time. The particular distortions have to do with 1) the idea of pleasure as tension reduction and 2) the misplacement of the teleological notion of drive or instinct. I will use living systems theory and complexity theory to explain and rectify these distortions in the light of modern science. Then I will discuss how philosophy, in particular the turn away from Kant through Husserl to Heidegger, opens up a window from which new insight can be drawn.

To provide the setting for a discussion of its wide-ranging and at times nearly inscrutable ideas, here is a brief, selective summary of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” with my commentary:

Freud begins by asking whether the pleasure principle alone guides human mentation and behavior. He examines instances such as sadism and masochism where people actively seek pain and discomfort, and finds that they nevertheless can be accounted for in terms of pleasurable drives and affects. He believes that the one phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by the pleasure principle is the repetition compulsion. He gives two examples: post-traumatic stress with its flashback dreams, where the traumatic experiences are re-played despite the suffering they evoke; and the spool game of “Fort-Da” where the child never tires of throwing the spool and retrieving it as a way of coping with mother’s absence. He also cites as un-pleasurable repetitions the transference neurosis and real life maladaptive patterns that are repeated despite their negative consequences. He concludes that the pleasure principle cannot, in itself, account for such recurrent encounters. He contemplates the possibility of a destructive or death drive that has no pleasurable consequences. (Importantly, the terms Eros and Thanatos as classes of instincts do not appear in this work. Freud is here talking about specific biological drives.)

Freud then explains the repetition compulsion neurologically with a model that traces back to his 1995 “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” which derived from his neurological studies and which I will suggest reflects a dualistic view of neuroscience rooted in Kant, whom he cites, and, at the opposite pole, the empiricist neuroscience of Brucke and Brucke’s inspiration, Helmholtz. Essentially, and in a way that is remarkably similar to current ideas about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Freud sees psychological trauma as the consequence of stimulation that overwhelms the ego and its resources, with an implication of psychosomatic brain changes for which we now have significant research evidence.He regards consciousness and the sense organs as protective shields (stimulus barriers) that filter and sort external energies so as to render them tolerable to the unconscious components of the mind. The breach of the stimulus barrier, as occurs in trauma, sets in motion a darker, “demonic” set of responses that, in a kind of eternal recurrence, lead the organism towards quiescence or death. Thus, the pleasure principle cannot manifest unless the stimulus barrier first “binds” the excess energy and prevents the repetition compulsion and the drive towards death from taking over. Death, says Freud, is a bio-psychological imperative that antedates the pleasure principle. Death must be contained in order for life (as pleasure, desire, striving, development) to be sustained.

Freud develops the idea of death as the regression to an earlier state, ultimately the state of inanimate matter from which all life emerges. Paradoxically, he attributes this regressive character to the ego rather than the id! He says that the ego, aligned with reality, opposes the pleasure principle, which is ultimately the drive towards sex and reproduction, i.e towards life. So the ego, even though it is adaptive to reality, is paradoxically driven towards death. Freud argues that the so-called survival instincts are in fact death instincts, which has proved to be a very disturbing idea for ego psychologists! For example, he considers the ego’s secondary narcissism, the great “I am,” as a regressive substitution of the self for the object. And in the realm of biology, he indulges in the speculation that sexual reproduction, a late stage of evolution, finds a precursor in the division of single-celled infusoria, Moreover, such infusoria are “brought to a natural death through their own vital processes.” Freud even cites Plato as giving a mythological example in which sexual intercourse derived from earlier gods or humans who contained both sexes. Thus, life itself inevitably harks back to earlier forms, and ultimately to the inanimate, which is death. He ascribes to this regression the force, propulsion, and goal-directedness of a drive or instinct. This attribution of a force towards death is puzzling, because up to then he is talking about a regressive tendency, not a drive as such. In retrospect, what he calls a drive or instinct is related to the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency towards entropy. Freud rests his case for the death instinct on the organism’s inherent regression to randomness and the inanimate. In so doing, he conflates regression and drive.

A Mixture of Naturphilosophie, Fallacies, and Scientific Brilliance

Throughout his career, Freud encountered the ongoing challenge that psychoanalysis is mere mythology, an imaginative story rather than proven fact. Thus, despite its profound humanistic implications, he carefully framed psychoanalysis in scientific language, often refraining from philosophical and literary discourse despite his attraction to and frequent allusions to them. (Some, for example Bettleheim have claimed that his translators such as James Strachey made the situation even worse.) So here he encounters death itself, the eliminator of all discourse, with the weapons of science. However, the version of science he had acquired in his medical training was not strictly speaking the emerging empiricist science of the physicists but rather a combination of Kantian metaphysics and Goethe’s and others’ naturphilosophie. The former proposed categories or synthetic a priori propositions which the human mind imposed on inscrutable reality, so that science was organized in accord with inherent categories of understanding. The second avowed that nature itself manifested evolving dynamic forms that possessed an aesthetic beauty experienced as wonder and reverence. Thus, even though he always sought “facts” such as clinical material to justify his position, Freud also superimposed particular structures, such as his topographic and structural models, as a priori organizing principles (Kant) and regarded nature, including human nature, as possessing awesome and often concealed truths (Goethe). At the same time, he adopted from his laboratory research days the Reymond-Brucke reductionist pledge that “no other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism.” So in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” as in much of Freud’s work, there is a shift and contradiction between holistic-systems and atomistic-reductionist frames of reference.

In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” this contradiction is especially salient in two problematic concepts invoked to build a rationale for a universal impulse towards death: pleasure as tension-reduction and the teleological notion of drive or instinct. Regarding the pleasure principle, Freud was aware that pleasure can come from arousal and excitement (increase in tension) as much as from the state of ease which he called the “nirvana principle.” Yet, neurologically in accord with the Reymond-Brucke pledge, he attributes all pleasure to a reduction of nervous excitation and a tendency towards quiescence. For instance, the infant, having sucked at the breast, is satisfied and calm. Thus, he regards the functions of perception and consciousness as maintaining a state of minimal tension, ignoring the contradictory fact that sensory input and stimulation are actively sought and maintain normal functioning, as we now know from sensory deprivation experiments and the like. The idea of tension reduction as the principle of neural functioning came to Freud from the neuroscience of his time, which emphasized the way in which neurons remained in a state of low excitation until triggered by stimulation, as Helmholtz had demonstrated regarding muscle contractions. Freud goes on to say that the unconscious-as-a-system and its psychosomatic core cannot maintain this low tension state by themselves, so they require the protection of a cortical shield of nerve cells that regulate consciousness and perception to prevent a catastrophic buildup of energy leading to illness or death. This leads to a notion on Freud’s part that death is active rather than passive, that some X factor propels towards repetition, regression, and death unless it is controlled and regulated by conscious reality (perception), just as in the libido theory, sexual impulses will go unbridled unless checked by the ego and superego.

Here, Freud is using the reductionist neurology of Helmholtz, which he acquired in his medical studies in Brucke’s laboratory, in which the mind is nothing more than the summation of neural activity, an idea which still has great appeal to many neuroscientists today. But he is using it in a way which would have incurred the disapproval of Helmholtz, namely to build a case for a drive or instinct, concepts which have holistic and teleological implications more reflective of Kantian metaphysics and naturphilosophie than of reductionist science. So he ends up equating what is essentially a state of instability or disequilibrium with a purposive, goal-directed drive or instinct, i.e. an organic intention towards death. In accord with Kant, death must be an a priori category, and in accord with Goethe, death must be a purposive quality deeply embedded in nature. Freud therefore argues that death must be embedded in the organism, not the result of accidental, external causes. Moreover, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, death has intentionality riding in the saddle.

Thus, Freud’s loyal followers who denounced “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” had a good point in questioning the death instinct concept. It would take quite a stretch of the known facts to assume that life willfully intends its own demise. There might be special circumstances in which this is true, but not in the general case. So we can agree Freud was wrong in the respect of a death instinct. However, in rejecting the death instinct as such, it is easy to miss Freud’s brilliance and intellectual honesty in emphasizing the importance of death in the psyche. Give him a little room for error and intellectual bias, and it can be seen that in this controversial essay, he was trying to penetrate to the ultimate nature of existence and the human mind.

Modern Life Science: General Systems and Complexity Theories

In order to demonstrate the relevance and prescience of Freud’s understanding, a detour into the modern life sciences is necessary. General Systems Theory (von Bertalanffy) and Complexity Theory shed much light on Freud’s views about death. In General Systems Theory, life is an exception to the second law of thermodynamics: that all systems tend towards entropy (randomness; loss of information and organization). Entropy applies to closed systems, but life is an open so-called neg-entropic system that exchanges information, matter, and energy with the environment. Through their metabolic and behavioral capabilities, living systems are capable of postponing their own entropic death by forming a relatively stable system within the instability of the physical-chemical environment. They are also capable of reproduction, perpetuating their form indefinitely. In this respect, life is a disruption of entropy, a postponement of death. Complexity theory adds that life emerges in a chemical environment as a result of turbulence, a combination of chaos and order that through chance occurrences but under precise circumstances can produce self-organizing molecules (amino acids) that eventually structure themselves into living systems of greater complexity, i.e. organisms.

If these tenets are true, then death is present at every level of biological organization, including minds, as a tendency, not towards quiescence, but towards chaos, the end stage of which is the randomness of closed, inanimate systems. So, notwithstanding the death instinct, Freud was right that death is an inherent liability of living systems which are always working to change entropy into neg-entropy within a turbulent state. For example, cells are always dying, but in the process they reproduce themselves. The heart beats 70 times a second to sustain a body/mind that may last for 80 or more years but that could end in a matter of minutes in the absence of a pulse. And, regarding the mental life, as we now know, memories are not so much stable “engrams” as they are momentary constructions as part of a current narrative. Moreover, the self is a living system of part-selves adapting themselves to present social needs and roles. At every moment, life wrests itself from the jaws of death in a process of self-organizing dynamic equilibrium amid turbulence. (Parenthetically, we may say that this sentiment is echoed in Buddhist thought, with its emphasis on impermanence, and as I will soon suggest, in existential philosophy.)

So Freud was right that death as an entropic tendency is a condition of the living sub-system that we call mind! However, he was wrong to label it an instinct or drive. The latter are goal-directed cognitive-behavioral structures that have evolved through natural selection to increase the probability of survival. If an instinct propelling towards death appeared as a mutation, it would quickly support its own demise and we would not find it in nature on a regular basis. Natural selection favors instincts that are life-preserving.

The Sacrificial Instinct

However, under certain circumstances evolution does self-select the demise of the individual in favor of the propagation of the species. Male sea lions engage in near-fatal battles over mating territory, selecting the stronger of them for the gene pool. Salmon die when they return to the site of their origins to spawn their young, a perfect example of what Freud meant by a death instinct. Humans regularly die in wars on behalf of their country and their cherished beliefs. Many instances of a so-called death instinct involve the element of sacrifice. The part dies for the sake of the whole or for the Other. The individual dies for the sake of the preservation of the group. The child or the domestic partner suffers abuse in order to preserve a faulty attachment. Or, psychoanalytically speaking, the child’s omnipotence dies in order to enter the depressive position (Klein) and become part of the symbolic order (Lacan), a development which also supports its own survival. Indeed, a case could be made for the presence of a sacrificial instinct. Living systems appear widely programmed to enable the survival of the species at the expense of individuals, and of the organism at the expense of its cellular components.

Ten years before Freud wrote “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Sabina Spielrein, the famous patient of Jung who subsequently became Freud’s patient and student, presented a paper to Freud and his group entitled “Destruction as a cause of coming into being.” (Freud acknowledged this paper in a footnote to “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” with reference to the possibility of primary masochism.) In this paper, Spielrein views death in the psyche as a sacrificial tendency inherent in the organism, suggesting how sacrifice is related to conception (noting that sperm and egg each sacrifice half of their chromosomes) and birth. She included creativity as one of the outcomes of sacrifice, and importantly held that the death and sex drives were interwoven in the psyche. She gave a rich and clinically exemplified (and one could perhaps say, early feminist) view of the relationship between sexuality, death, and sacrifice that anticipated aspects of modern Continental thinking about psychoanalysis. For her, death can be in the service of life, a very important notion that Freud seems to have entirely missed.

The Instability and Vulnerability of the Unconscious

Thus, Freud’s death instinct concept, though flawed, has merit insofar as it points to the omnipresence of death in the life cycle and to specific manifestations of a goal-directed intention towards death such as in sacrificial behavior. But “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” contains a deeper insight into the unconscious mind bypassed by most if not all of its commentators. It occurs when Freud posits the protective stimulus barrier provided by the senses and consciousness. In classic Freudian theory under the sway of the pleasure principle, the unconscious is an invincible bio-psychological structure (the id) and topological region (the system ucs.) Housed deep in the regions of sleep and memory, the unconscious is impervious to change, free of the constraints of time and space, preserved forever like the archaeological artifacts that Freud kept in his consulting room. In many ways, Freud portrayed the unconscious as a frozen, archaic, historical realm of relics in the form of “reminiscences” and desires that have outlived their usefulness or been transformed into symptoms and realistic social attitudes. Having been laid safely to rest (shall we say hibernation?) by the ego and superego, they reappear as Derrida would say, as ghosts or “specters.” But in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud is saying that the unconscious is a living Dante-esque world filled with struggle and vulnerability.

Freud tells us that the neural “traces” of consciousness and perception dissipate quickly. (Thus, perception and conscious awareness are capable of being framed in time and space, because they quickly process input and then move on to the next situation; in other words, perception quickly samples the environment and attributes permanence and organization to it.) Using the idea of the consciousness/perception stimulus barrier as a protection from trauma, Freud points to the unconscious part of the mind as consisting of more lasting neural traces that linger in an unstable state of being formed and unformed. (This sounds remarkably like the “turbulence” of complexity theory.) Unconscious “traces” don’t “see” or “know” anything. They are Bion’s beta elements, “thoughts without a thinker” floating around in a psychosomatic soup. They require the constant protection of the stimulus barrier to protect them from the encroachments external world, of overstimulation, of too much reality. In other words, the “always dying” unconscious, in contrast with everything Freud has said in connection with the pleasure principle, is a place of vulnerability and chaos. (Bion likened the unconscious to Milton’s “deep and formless infinite.” William James’ depiction of the infant’s mind as “a blooming buzzing confusion” and Balint’s metaphor of “an interpenetrating harmonious mixup” also come to mind in this respect.)

Classically speaking, in accord with the pleasure and reality principles, the analyst’s role is to strengthen the ego’s ability to contain the id and adapt to the exigencies of reality. This comes about through a therapeutic alliance that aligns itself with reality and overcomes resistances through an analysis of defenses, fantasies, and transference in such a way as to facilitate partial gratification within the constraints of the real world. As we know, this is an effective treatment rationale for patients with intact ego functions. However, for patients with so-called “narcissistic neuroses,” i.e. schizophrenia, psychosis, and we would now add borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, aligning with the ego over the id and the inner needs of the self is at best only partly effective because the unconscious or non-conscious itself has the potential for fragmentation, loss of self cohesion, and regression that cannot be repaired by interpretation alone. A relational approach that includes mirroring, holding, and containing is required. Why is this so?

Following upon the notion of the unconscious as an unstable and partly dissipative state (tendency towards death), there are times when the ego’s battle with the id is less relevant to treatment than the vulnerability and potential for disruption of the id itself. The disintegration of the unconscious is manifest in the prodrome of schizophrenia where the primary process decomposes into fragments and beta elements. We also find it occurring in states of confusion, traumatic dissociation, and hallucination, and, in daily life, when people are placed under pressure to conform or adapt without being able to consult their unconscious in order to integrate reality with their inner experience. Often, treatment is not so much a matter of reigning in a voracious, insatiable id but rather of taking care of, respecting, and protecting the irrational, fragile, vulnerable inner world. Such understanding is implicit in much of the work that followed Freud, and in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” we see Freud himself begin to develop a more inclusive and rich formulation of unconscious vulnerability and its need for care.

Thus, by proposing that the unconscious is an unstable part of the mind that is under the sway not only of pleasure and omnipotence, but also of pain, fragmentation, and death, Freud disclosed the hidden tragic nature of the part of the mind hitherto thought of as indomitable energy and hallucinatory wish fulfillment. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the relationship between the conscious ego, the “I,” and the unconscious the “It,” is analogous to the relationship of man and nature. In the natural world, we may safely cultivate the land, form villages and cities, and organize commerce, but the natural environment must be respected and taken care of, even regarded with mystery and awe. If we do not do so, we may produce carbon emissions that lead to catastrophic climate change. Similarly, the therapist must respect the patient’s id and unconscious and provide for their care through relational engagement. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which emphasizes the instability of memory traces, the unconscious is not so much an archaeological site of unfulfilled memory and desire as it as an ever-changing, partly unformed wilderness of affects, images, and motives that is the ego’s place of origin and to which it will ultimately return. The unconscious, like nature, is awesomely powerful but at the same time acutely vulnerable. Life is always dying and must be protected.

Why Husserl? Why Not Husserl?

In order further to pursue the problem of death in life and the mind, I must turn to Husserl’s phenomenology, back “to the things themselves.” Since Husserl was all about distinguishing phenomena from the “wraparound” ideas projected onto them by science, religion, and metaphysics, it may seem impertinent to bring him into a discussion of Freud’s science-based excursions. However, this is precisely the point. Nowhere does Freud stop to inquire into the phenomenological experience of death. How would he describe it? Why is it so important? How does it arise in our consciousness? Instead, he projects onto death, colors it, and obscures it with an overlay of neurology and biology, so that death becomes a cause and effect explanatory concept remote from our individual and collective life worlds. Ernest Brecker’s seminal work, Denial of Death, was a significant attempt to fill this lacuna in psychoanalytic thought. Up to now, I have been going along with Freud’s biological and physicalist frame of reference. Now I want to apply the epoche, bracket it off and see what happens if we do so. Ultimately, by bringing in Husserl’s student, Heidegger, I will come full circle to suggest that in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud was on the brink of becoming an existentialist, but his scientific frame of reference prevented him from taking that step.

The problem that immediately arises is that if one rigorously applies the epoche to death, we are left with a cipher, the no-thing, the entirely Other, Bion’s “O.” The transcendental ego is helpless to describe death “in itself.” Death is hermetic and opaque. We can describe its projective aura, namely experiences of dying, grief, absence, transition from the animate to the animate, loss of consciousness, destructive aggression, rituals, myths, and images describing an after life, and consequences of mortality for the living. But if we take all that away, what are we left with? Pure death is a void that eludes the grasp of intentionality.

Husserl, influenced by his student Heidegger, later proposed a phenomenological “lifeworld,” an experience imbued with a holistic relational sense of things-taken-together as something that we inhabit with our intentionality. In this world, we find death always and everywhere. But death in the lifeworld is not “the thing itself.” Rather, it is part of a narrative of impermanence, of coming and going that is infused with mystery and unknowing, expressed by Freud as the instability of the memory traces. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” like so much of what we think and feel every day about death, is not so much about the phenomenon itself as it is about death in the lifeworld. It happens to have been expressed by Freud in the language of science. Death-in-itself, however, is the ultimate Rorschach test, inviting us to project onto and into its nothingness. That’s the part of the equation that Freud missed. As a patient once said to me, describing her terrifying sense of a living death, “I don’t exist.” I felt that her angst was not about her existence as a “this” or a “that,” i.e. her social identity and lifeworld, but as a threat to her “being-in-the-world” as such. Phenomenology prior to Heidegger is about the “ontic,” describing “beings” in their pure form. For Heidegger, without “Being” as “ontological,” with a capital B, there can be no beings, no phenomena. Being as ontological prior to the ontic is imbued with impermanence and awareness of mortality.

Heidegger: Death and Being-in-the-World

The problem of the indescribability of death, the impossibility of the subject grasping death in consciousness, death as wholly other, non-Being, is one of the conundrums which led to the development of existential and postmodern thought, primarily in Heidegger, but also in those like Sartre who independently developed their ideas, and those who came after them, like Levinas and Derrida. Before we come full circle back to Freud, I would like to consider how death takes a central place in Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time. Heidegger makes the distinction, crucial to all existential thought, between “beings” and “Being,” between the ontic and the ontological. Beings can be thought about and described, but they are grounded in dasein, “Being-there” or “Being-in-the-World,” which cannot be described like a thing, but may disclose itself in a clearing, which I take to arise via a suspension of judgment in some ways comparable to Freud’s “hovering attention” and Bion’s “absence of memory, desire, and understanding,” although strictly speaking awareness of dasein is not under anyone’s control; it simply presents itself. In this clearing is great beauty and ektasis, but also a terrifying abyss brought about by Being’s temporality. This is where Heidegger encounters death, not as a thing itself, i.e. an object intended by Husserl’s transcendental ego, but as a condition of “thrown-ness,” time and space without an anchor of dependable expectations, a taste of mortality as it were, as a consequence of dasein’s immanence: the temporality, historicity, and facticity of Being-in-the-World.
Freud was so steeped in metaphysics in the form of permanence and determinism that he failed to grasp the significance of temporality in the unconscious, and that, on account of such temporality, the unconscious, like Being, needs what Heidegger called sorge, care structure. His view up until “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was that the unconscious doesn’t know time; it knows only pleasure, i.e. nirvana, oblivion, quiescence. However, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Alan Bass uses Heidegger, as well as Nietzsche and Derrida, to develop a position that the primal unconscious prior to its encounter with reality is already imbued with temporality and pain, or more exactly, the pleasure/pain of Nietzsche. (If it didn’t, it would have no way to begin its relational journey, since it is the differance, in Derrida’s sense, which sets everything in motion.) In existential thought the unconscious is Being which knows its own vulnerability and mortality but is incapable of saving itself from the abyss without the care offered by conscious perception, critical awareness, and a relational attachment to an other. In Heidegger’s language, the unconscious as unformulated Being begins a process of using what is “already there,” “at hand” (most notably language and significant others – “the they”) to limit, disavow, or postpone the fall into the abyss. For instance, my patient, who “didn’t exist,” used me to restore a sense of being-in-the-world by taking hold of what was already there: me. By making frequent “emergency” phone calls to me, she used me to construct a temporary care structure or shelter in which to survive until the next session. She used me to do what her mother should have done from the moment she was born, namely to provide the attachment that would help her to withstand what Winnicott called “annihilation anxiety.” (From what the patient told me, her mother was a schizoid shell who had little capacity for empathic attunement and could only respond to her children with catastrophic anxieties and moral indignation.)

Death as the Link Connecting Psychoanalysis with Modern and
Post-Modern Phenomenology and Existential Thought

Although one could say a great deal more about possible connections between Heidegger and Freud (and much has already been written about that subject, mostly by existential therapists and some by psychoanalysts, as well as philosophers and literary scholars), the focus here is on the significance of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in the corpus of Freud’s work. What I want to say here is that Freud came to consider the dynamics of death for the same reason that Heidegger came to Being and Time, namely a change in Western consciousness in which death became propelled into the forefront of intellectual life by 1) a philosophical, historical, and literary shift away from permanence and elegance as defining truth; and 2) a World War in which not only was the stench of death in the European air, but national and cultural identity was severely undermined. Freud and Heidegger, both intimately affected by this cultural change and wartime atmosphere, were brothers in pointing to the loss of meaning that were taking place, but their foundations for saying so were diametrically opposite. Freud focused on clinical phenomena using the natural sciences paradigm, while Heidegger focused on everyday “at hand” existence by showing the temporality and interpretive nature of “being-in-the-world.” Their divergent perspectives which yet suggested a significant overlap left a trail of problems as to whether and how their world views could be reconciled.

That trail has expressed itself in various attempts to combine their views. The Frankfurt School, existential psychotherapy, humanistic psychology, the critical theories of Marcuse and Habermas, and Foucault’s historicism, might be cited as examples. There are numerous instances where phenomenological, existential, and psychoanalytic views are used in tandem, often without sufficient attention to the epistemological and ontological concerns that are involved. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” can be used to take a fresh look at ways to bridge these three disciplines.

Just to stimulate some thinking about where we might go in such an endeavor, here are three examples of issues which might provide important bridges but where I can only touch the surface for now:

1) Levinas proposed the notion of “Face” as an encounter with the Other who, like death, is unknowable but for whom one is responsible. Although he rejected Heidegger’s view of death as an ontological entity, preferring to focus on the phenomenology of everyday life, the opaqueness of the Other and the “no-thing-ness” of death are deeply related in human experience. We also have relationships with the deceased, and we can inquire into the role of Face and the Other in the mourning process and the transference. We may further ask, how do death and the notion of the unconscious as “formless, infinite void” come into play when one is face to face with the Other, say in a psychoanalytic session? If, like Levinas, we regard the Other as impenetrable, what function does interpretation serve in the healing process? And are we perhaps violating the patient’s sanctity when we claim to know and understand him? Does the vulnerability of the unconscious provide a basis for taking Levinas seriously as a protector of human integrity?

2) Given Freud’s biological focus in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” how does Lacan’s shift of the locus of the unconscious from the soma (biology) to language affect our understanding of death as it manifests in the real, imaginary, and symbolic realms of discourse? And how does the vulnerability and turbulence of the body and of the unconscious enter into Lacanian theory? For example, does Lacan’s signifier/signified relationship include lapses, gaps, and sudden shifts in discourse? Does the real include somatic impulses and perturbations? How does the child’s relationship to his body – and to death awareness – change form and meaning as a result of the mirror stage?

3) How does death relate to Derrida’s idea of deconstruction, especially since in a key writing about Freud, he emphasizes the “difference” and the “trace” from Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” which also figures heavily in ”Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” At a certain point, Derrida’s thinking was heavily influenced by Freud’s neurological theories, and much of his work implies the death of the author-as-subject, but it is never clear how human vulnerability and mortality fits into his discourse. Does he bypass that problem or is it disseminated throughout his text?

My point about “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is that it is the singular writing by Freud in which he confronted the phenomena of death, nothingness, vulnerability, and formlessness that are central to existential thought. Unfortunately, he couched them in a scientific language that is difficult to decipher, especially if one doesn’t accept the notion of a “death instinct” as such. Still, as laborious as it may be, a careful reading of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” can provide valuable ways of building or re-building bridges between psychoanalysis and existential thought. To paraphrase the Beatles, “All I am saying is, Give “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” a chance!”

Autochthony Versus the World-View of Alterity (Otherness)
-Possible Implications for contemporary Mental Health Practice and the Mental Health Client as Reluctant Philosopher-

Loray Daws, Ph.D.

Abstract
Mental health as relational area contains the calling forth of a unique sort of engagement and management between the individual and his or her mental health practitioner. It is unfortunate that contemporary mental health practice sees a greater emphasis on calculative explanation ala Heidegger, objectivism, fear of the mental health patient, growing ‘state’ vigilance, ‘control’ of deviant behavior, and greater reliance on bio-medical approaches favoring non-humanist ethics. The latter has given rise to an inflation of treatment protocols, manualized treatment, complex health care ‘rules’ and ‘regulations’, actively removing human to human interaction, the very interaction needed to support the Other. In this essay special attention will be given to the concept of Autochthony versus the World-View of Alterity (Otherness), the reality of ‘psychiatric management’, the possible use and abuse of diagnosis as related to identity, and the wisdom of client’s verbalizations as signs to problems in living.
Keywords: Autochthony, alterity, psychoanalysis, dual track theory, ethics, reluctant philosopher

Introduction
Contemporary mental health carries the burden of man’s psychological pain, his traumatic psychological heritage, and even his most creative expressions and failures to attend to this very suffering. Finding the various reasons for psychic pain has seen the creation of various interpretational and notational systems- from demon possession theories, witchcraft concerns, one sided biologism, and a multitude of psychological and sociological explanations- all valid expressions of our capacity to construct symbols in representing psychic difficulty. Modern mental health practice personifies the complex relationship between man’s native self as well as his relationship with the Other (alterity). This very relationship is central to healing, although extremely vulnerable to misunderstanding and misuse. The contact between the mental health practitioner and the mental health client will be approached in this essay within a critical dialogical unfolding of the ever present Autochthony ‘drive’ (†) versus the world-view of Alterity (‡) (Otherness). It is hoped that the discussion will emphasize the importance of remaining faithful to the notion that the mental health client remains particularly sensitive (and gives accurate feedback) to (‡), even more so to the frequent misunderstandings and misrecognition that occurs between (†) and (‡). (†) under the sway of cumulative life stressors as well as misrecognition engendered within the discourse of Alterity (‡) (Otherness) may give rise to an estrangement akin to Dasein-icide (du Bose, 2009) exposing the client to the most primitive of agonies. Verbatim transcripts as well as poetry and literature will be used to express the impact of one sided (‡) on (†), that is, the impact of colonization of the native self. I will open my dialogue with two clients diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and their relationship toward themselves as well as the Other (i.e., family, mental health professionals etc.).

Minding Jane
Jane consulted my practice with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and has been making many changes, slowly and painfully adjusting to her medication and the diagnosis itself. Her psychotherapeutic and psychiatric process has had many implications for her, especially for her relationships with her family, and according to her various ‘consistently’ related narratives, backed by her husband and the psychiatrist, Jane’s family seems loath to accept both psychological or psychiatric “thinking” concerning her difficulties in mood. It would also seem that the psychiatrist, a sensitive and thoughtful Seelsorger (Care of soul), had his own difficulties ‘convincing’ the mother, in the client’s presence, about the ‘validity’ of such thinking. When the psychiatrist pointed out various double- bind communications between the mother and Jane, Jane’s mother only reported an inability to ‘understand’ the very reality of the debate, leaving both Jane and the psychiatrist uncertain as to why. It can be argued, if not interpreted, that Jane’s mother had her own inabilities that supported obstinate approaches to Jane’s predicament making it difficult to successfully ‘know’ something of the ‘reality’ of her daughter’s bipolarity, for reasons unknown to me as participant observer (till much later in the therapy ). Jane’s father also seems to interpret her difficulties in living “just” as a “bad attitude” in need of “correction”; “Whatever I feel, since I can remember, it gets interpreted like that. Makes me feel so depressed, as if I am a burden, a difficulty…” Feeling understood within her family of origin seemed a remote possibility for Jane.
Back to the present and after deciding to relocate cities, Jane requested her medical files as she had to consult a new physician. Jane received her file and noticed many references to previous ‘contacts’ she had with the medical system to access services, pre-bipolar as well as post bi-polar, with the aim of helping her with her depression. Reading her file Jane discovered that various service providers described her as being “borderline”. Now, accurate or not – their observations became part of a very complicated and emotionally painful discussion with me. During our conversation, initiated by Jane as she was confused by the description and its relationship with bipolarity, I explained to Jane the various research results and the work of Akiskal (in Maj, Akiskal, Lopez-Ibor, & Sartorius, 2002) on bipolarity, as well as Greenspan’s developmental model (1989), and indirectly my own (Daws, 2011). Discussing the content of the conversation and the approach taken is beyond the scope of the paper although it can be said I take a very optimistic developmental approach since it is scientific verifiable and non-stigmatizing (see Daws, 2011). Jane seemed to take my thoughts seriously although my explanations did not seem to sooth the “upset-ness” of the information to her sense of self, the mental pain of knowing that others now may come to know and think of her in a very specific way—a way she had never thought of, or conceptualized herself as exclusively, i.e, as “bad” and in need of further “correction” ; Here are parts of the session verbatim,
“I have difficulty thinking of myself – the fact that I went for help and its interpreted like that…It makes me doubt myself, the way I see things, that makes things worse for me… I am grappling with the borderline thing. Resent it…it’s just [quiet, struggling] (Me: Let me know what’s on your mind when you are ready Jane)…The intake nurse, it is when I went to look for therapy, before seeing the psychiatrist, and before you were recommended. She wrote the Borderline thing, although I thought I was being rational, reasonable, I could only get 5 sessions! I said that was not enough, she gave me two options, short- term counseling, or a psychiatrist. I was reasonable and rational, I was recommended mental health, and only 2 options! In 5 counseling sessions I would not be able to address it all…. Got me thinking now… questioning myself now…when I now do things I wonder if … is this now a symptom of this disorder? If I am uncertain is it identity issues? And not being put on my file… Now I am paranoid, will he [the new Doctor] treat me funny…I went in with chest- pain to the General Practitioner… I lived with it, I don’t panic , I don’t rush to the ER , the doctor did check me out and said that I scared myself, he talked down to me.. Did he read my diagnosis before he spoke to me? What bothers me is people are quick to judge, she [the nurse] sat with me for less than an hour and tosses out a diagnosis… my previous psychiatrist … she didn’t do an extensive history, told me I have recurrent depressive something, she didn’t give me a prescription, said I should take supplements and exercise; I was so depressed, she had me figured out in less than 30 minutes! Another person told me about Doctor B, he let me fill out stuff, he sat with me, interviewed me, he even had an interview with my husband and said “I think this”- “tell me, have a look and challenge my diagnosis”… I was comfortable with him and he had time for me…”
After this session Jane had a follow up session with her psychiatrist Doctor B- herein some further thoughts:
“He mentioned that he is seeing an improvement. I told him what happened. The Doctor likes to talk… [becoming tearful] I didn’t get to say how I felt, I wanted to cry, he pulled out the DSM …explained borderline and said I need 5 symptoms…. He also talked about the flaws , said there are two types, aggressive type and the softer type….I fit in there, he said that it’s a good thing, to know borderline then one can address it. He made it sound like I am in denial. I know I lose my temper, I want to control my environment, etc, but I didn’t know its borderline… [tearful and struggling]…. (Me: Take your time Jane)… [red in face-shame?] Sorry. (crying) That is where I am with that. I want to reject it, push it away, but by doing so I fulfill it! You say I may ask you, you support me but I fear, AM I THAT? I don’t mind dealing with symptoms, doing therapy, that does not bother me. But I don’t want another label. Borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder ? Doctor B said that BPD is 5 years of therapy and you don’t do it anymore. But it is on my medical file, it can be destroyed after 7 years – that it is then not relevant anymore, but to have it on my file, I will have to deal with it, I don’t want to deal with it. Want to get rid of it… any number of things throw me off now…. Couple of years – BANG on my file, not get away from it…. The DSM is so extreme in its descriptions…. Don’t want people to equate me with that extreme… The doctor launched into the symptoms. I tried to breathe through it, didn’t get chance to say anything…. (Me: Would you like to talk to it?) Yes, it is good to be understood, he looks at it differently, he looks at it as a chance to get better, address symptoms, I really respect that, I tried to listen and take in (crying), to take in as much learning as I could and remain open minded to what he had to say.”

I gently returned to the description of BPD I felt could help her, and also mentioned if she would feel comfortable we could keep it an open conversation, i.e., that we could come back to it at any time;
“It is still like a big thing, hard to pull apart…. [laughs playfully]… I just want to be ‘healthy’, want to be better, deal with symptoms (Me: The labeling seems difficult.) Yes! You are the only person hesitant to label me as borderline or anything, how can I effectively stand against them, do I have a right, ability to have a say. Technically I am mentally ill, I need to keep trusting the professionals …. I have always been a willing patient, to listen to the experts, to do what they are asking me…. I am not comfortable in this…. If I can stand up and have a say …how to do so effectively…. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t ….(Me: To want to have a say, to say something of your own ‘treatment’…)… This is the first time I have not had a say! Previously I did…. Dr B said-look it up, argue with me….”

The narrative was followed by a beautiful, if not unconscious derivative when Jane stated that they ‘fixed’ their trailer, kept it out of the rain to ensure it had no leaks , investing in new upholstery- only to have it leaked on! That is, and mostly an interpretation held by me privately, is that Jane had a very good understanding within our work together (and with her psychiatrist) of her difficulties, that is, changing her own mental upholstery so to speak given her family of origin and her bipolar diagnosis. It may also be said that the change in diagnosis was experienced as being leaked on, especially ‘into’ and ‘onto’ an interior she felt that was ‘repaired’ already by the work done, i.e., that the repairing of the inner was spoiled from the outside by the changing interpretation of her interior (as borderline). I now turn to Matt wherein medication and psychiatry/medicine supported a “gutted interior” and greatly aided our work together.

Minding Matt
I also feel it ethical to mention an opposite experience of medication and the use of diagnosis. I have been treating a client for more than four years with what I refer to as a cycloid disorder (Daws, 2011). Matt has had many setbacks throughout his life concerning work performance and he was, according to many psychotherapeutic conversations, born into an excessively strict and competitive middle class. For many years Matt has tried in vain to “get to a diagnosis of what is wrong with me, but I always get that I am smart and only depressed as I don’t present like a typical psychiatric patient”. This was in fact true, Matt had an IQ of two standard deviations above the mean and was clearly a very intelligent individual. Unfortunately his capacity was marred by objective attention difficulties (later received a diagnosis of adult ADHD) as well as a seemingly stubborn inability to work within any context of authority. Herein some thoughts as discussed in a session two years into therapy,
“It was not until I consulted you and the psychiatrist that I knew what was wrong with me [a diagnosis of bipolarity and ADHD], to get the right medication. I still have those thoughts, the negative thoughts, but I am managing so much better. I tried to tell the doctors there was something wrong with me, that it is not just depression, but they always treated my mood with anti–depressants. That only made me feel worse. When I would get angry they would tell me to change, be happy, and that is it, no more help. I would get so angry I could smack things- I wouldn’t hurt people, but felt like it! Now it is different. I still struggle with ‘having’ a diagnosis, that there is something wrong with me and that may be the reason I can never get to a place I want to be. Maybe never. That makes me sad and angry as well. But at least I know now what is ‘wrong’ with me, the medication is making me feel better [mood stabilizer] and I can actually say that I am happy now and then. It took me 20 years to get the right help! It also makes sense why I could not focus, that I am not just a difficult and lazy person.”

Although helpful Matt remained fearful of the diagnosis as it worked against his ego-ideal of having to be extremely smart and capable. Paradoxically it also protected him against his critical internal father that called him “stupid” and “lazy bum”. Here diagnosis served as a psychic skin and supported an alternative developmental trajectory that was internalized from childhood and many adult failures in living. Psychiatry as ‘conceptualized’ beliefs and ‘conceptualized’ experience (as diagnosis) (see Fulford et al., 2006, p. 423) was thus clearly of tremendous value in the ‘case’ of Matt and more complicated in the case of Jane. Although a bit of a conceptual jump, the cases just described parallel McDowell’s (Fulford et al., 2006, p. 423) thinking on moral judgment, i.e., that although scientist may be thoroughly trained and inherently decent in their way of being (ethical in the dissemination of a diagnosis), they may still retain very limited understanding of their impact on Autochthony (†) . This is, in my view, also true for Evidence Based Practice (‡) and mental health approaches build upon logical empiricism, i.e., classification systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with its contemporary changes that has had immense impact in the way the Other is approached and thought about. To describe this view in more detail I now turn to psychoanalytic thinking on Autochthony, Alterity, and fated situations

The Dual-Track meta-theory of James Grotstein: Autochthony, Alterity and fated situations.
The work of James Grotstein (1978, 1997), a post-modern Bionian psychoanalyst, has followed various trends in the field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and remains one of a few analysts who has spent a lifetime articulating the inner realities of our most injured and frightened fellow human beings (Grotstein, 1996). Conceptualizing the complex moments of meeting as to create the possibility of radical friendship needed in containing and reworking mental complexity in the mental health context, Grotstein’s articulates the following concepts important to the debate to follow; the various ‘dimensions and coordinates of inner and interpersonal space’ based on the highly complex interplay between ‘Autochthony’ and ‘Alterity’; the importance of ‘fated situations’ (destiny as related to fate), as well as developmental failures that sees the tragic lived worlds of ‘Orphans of the Real’. Creating a mental health dialogue within a transitional space, a third so to speak, allows an unfolding understanding and ‘interpretation’ of mental health ‘events’ and its complex signifiers (contextual, biological, political to name a few as seen in the works of Jacques Lacan (2006) and Michel Foucault (2006) as well as creating a sensitivity to the native self and its need to ‘come to grips’ with the various environmental demands placed on it throughout a lifespan.

In a seminal article, later taken up in works such as Orphans of the Real (in Allen et al.,1996) and Memory of Justice (van Buren & Alhanati, 2010), Grotstein focusses on the important shift from the one-person model to a two-person model in psychoanalysis, supporting an ever increasing understanding of ‘inter’-subjectivity. Achieving such a shift was made possible through the concepts of autochthony (the I born from the self-as-ground) and cosmogony which can be defined as “the technique of narratology whereby the primitive aspect of the personality employs primary process in the form of projective identification in order to claim an event as personal, thereby making it the individual’s own experience” (Grotstein, 1997, p. 404) (italics added). Rather than a passive self suffering the shadow of Pavlovian imprinting, and increasingly in theoretical tandem with modern developmental theorists, the ‘I’ is viewed an active agent from the beginning of life. That is, the infant/child is continuously, both ‘intra’- psychically and ‘inter’-subjectively organizing experience and self-other needs. In analytic language the dual processes of libidinization and aggressivization are active psychic pathways of projectively and introjectively “personalizing” interaction (self, with others and things) with emotional experience (Grotstein, 1997, p.404). Autochthony (“the fantasy that the self is defined by its self-creation and its creation of external objects”, p. 404) exists in an active and vitalizing dialectical relationship with Alterity or Otherness, i.e., “the fantasy and eventual recognition of the creation and defining of the self by external objects” (Grotstein, 1997, p. 404). Developmentally autochthony (†) can initially be viewed as ‘omnipotent self-creationism’ and as such, it may seem counter to Alterity (‡) and its vicissitudes. Alterity in essence entails (as part of Lacan’s Real) the reality, if not awareness of, dependence, lessened omnipotence, greater mutuality, and the complex interrelationship between destiny and fated situations. It must be mentioned that Alterity is described by many psychoanalysts with a both a sense of wonder and suspicion. Alterity remains the principle focus of many psychoanalytic works, especially as the interaction (†) and (‡) demands a psychological bilingualism (Charles, 2014) that takes many years to master, the failure to do so resulting in what Grotstein would call the Orphans of the Real . Even the great Eric Erikson envisioned a theory based on the notion that a person moves through various sensitive periods of negotiation where there remains a precarious ‘inter’- ‘play’ between a self- creationistic senses of self, and the allocation of a “finite range of socially meaningful models of identification” (Groake, 2013, p. 166). According to Groake; “For Erickson (1946, p.360), the development of a secure sense of self is evident in what society grants initially ‘to the infant, to keep him alive’, administers to his needs, and invests him with a ‘particular’ lifestyle.” (2013, p. 166) (italics added). This reminds very much of the pioneering work of Harry Stack Sullivan and brings into sharp focus that ego-identity remains surprisingly dependent on social ministration and management (ala Donald W. Winnicott), i.e., the average expectable environment. Ericksonian theory articulates the various negotiations, compromises, and resulting failures when this negotiation falls short, i.e., lack of trust, autonomy, initiative, identity, intimacy, and generativity, leading to feelings of utter despair. This notion has also been adopted by Daseinanalysts (Martin Heidegger, Medard Boss, Ludwig Binswanger) (Holzhey-Kunz, 2014), Frommnians, as well as Lacanians. To most of these theorists the self is born into a symbolic and imaginary order, and as such, man’s conscious and ‘un’- (non) conscious speaks more to, and of, the desire of the Other (Alterity).
This is of importance as, given Bion and Sullivan (although using different language and conceptual structures), the relevant component functions of the container (the Other) allows for the native self to projects his/her raw proto-emotions or beta- elements, “thoughts without a thinker”—into the Other (maternal container, later the world project), who, in a meditative state of reverie would absorbs, prioritizes, detoxify and transduce (Grotstein, 1997) the proto-mental elements from infinity to finiteness (good vs. bad, etc.), reflect upon these emotional communications, allow incubation while at the same time not lose touch with his/her own autochthonous sense of self.
From this incubation and resonant interchange emerges Bion’s “selected fact”, an element securing coherence to the entirety of the communication. An enlivening sharing of the self and the other, or a ‘harmonious mix up’ as described in the psychology of Michael Balint (1949). Grotstein (1997) adds the interchange, over many years allows the transformation of beta- elements into alpha-elements suitable for mentalization (thinking, thinking about thinking based on one’s own epistemology). In turn the interaction informs the infant/child/adult what he/she is both feeling and thinking, thickening the native self’s experience of its own unique ontology and epistemology (as seen in Piaget and many others). Although it reads a bit one-sidedly, it must be stated that the mother (the Other) is not, like the infant, a passive container but remains a complex psychology ensuring ‘co-creation’, for both enlarging or constricting/confining the native self . The mother/ the Other as container functions as (a) psychological translator, (b) mediator (c) filter, and (d) detoxifier. In contrast the obstructive object (or Other), which represents in essence an amalgam of the real mother/Other who cannot seem to tolerate her infant’s emotional ‘outpourings’ or ‘projections’ (may even seem to hate the infant for having emotions), would project in reverse (the so called Omega function) (Williams, 1992). Add to this scenario the infant’s frustration, confusion, anxiety and finally ‘hatred’ of such a mothering experience (his/her rejection of him/her), which the infant then projects into his image of mothering. The result – an interaction, or more specifically, an enactment of disorganization, imperviousness, disruption and fragmentation of the personality based on fear and annihilation anxieties. Without containment, negotiation and consensus we are all vulnerable to unimaginable affects and ideational content. Heidegger (see Kaufmann, 1956/1975) and many other philosophers and psychoanalysts have written about the moment(s) the world becomes uncanny or is infused with the uncanny. For many patients this is a daily reality and is repeated in various situations, relationships, and institutional life in general. There does not seem sufficient holding- no translator, mediator, filter or detoxifier supporting the native self (†) leading to enactments and problematized and problematizing interactions, whether shared publically or held privately. Paradoxically it would also seem that (‡) also ‘re’-‘acts’ with confusion, frustration, anxiety and hate of the (†)’s painful endopsychic and interpersonal struggles, or tries to colonize and thus enslave. It is also evident that, as just argued, the native self may come to ‘hate’ (‡), adding additional layers of estrangement and distancing. The final version of an encapsulated violence to the native self is seen by an excessive ‘problematizing’ Alterity evoking hate, but using its presencing (as world- mood, i.e., ‘he is always an oppositional person no matter what!’) as evidence of pathology, and as such, as central ‘reason’ for colonizing and re-educating the native self.
The psychoanalyst Marilyn Charles (2014) also describes the difficulty between (†) and (‡) as the ‘lack’ of both psychological bilingualism and the inability of truly entering the lived world of another without doing violence to the other’s ‘desire’ (in the Lacanian sense). Being psychologically bilingual a person can actively navigate the language (-ing) of self (native self- languaging) as relating to, and internalizing, the language of the Other (in Lacan’s words the Symbolic Order and the Imaginary). If the latter cannot be negotiated, so to speak, many problems in living will be found, from those suffering from being too normal (the normotic personality, Bollas, 1987) to patterns of madness wherein the autochthonous drive is forever negating or in rebellion against the Other. The result remains catastrophic for all involved. Charles (2014) beautifully articulates the importance of the relationship between desire of the (†) drive as well as the desire of (‡). As argued, obstructive processes, from childhood onward, may swallow (†), enslave, colonize, solidify, and entrap the native self. Revolt against psychological colonization and control may be at the root of many ‘mad’ patterns as found in literature and existential writings (Lang, 1967, 1969, 1971; Miller, 1981),
“Some children are able to become bilingual, to speak in the language of those around them while maintaining faith with whatever internal logic drives them. Some, however, are driven mad by the disparity between the way things seem and the mandates of the consensual world. In contrast, some young people are driven mad at the threshold of adulthood, when the “Law of the Father” threatens to deny and override the nascent, developing, autonomous self (Lacan, 1953/1977b). The need to move beyond imposed desires, to discover one’s own desire, is at the core of Lacan’s ideas about the psychoanalytic process. We develop through a series of identifications and dis-identifications with important others” (Charles, 2014, p.550)

Furthermore,
“In my view, madness is always a function of trauma (2014, p.550)…. Selfhood then slips to the side, encapsulated in a safe place where it is less likely to be further ravaged, but also cannot easily heal or adaptively develop. As the gaps between public and private increase, so does the difficulty of navigating in public spaces . Because of the danger of being revealed but also the terrible urgency to be known, madness tends to speak in its own language : encoded and indirect, a call that both invites and repels reply.” (2014, p.551) (italics added).

To reiterate, when the native self is not allowed or supported to discover and articulate its own desire the self runs a tremendous risk of alienation, even madness, that is, a ‘selfhood’ slipping to the side. To protect the native self, especially those that have experienced much violence to their soul (Shengold, 1989), one (for example the mental health practitioner) needs to learn the unique articulation/language of the Other through entering into an authentic/authenticating conversation with the Other as seen in the works of Martin Buber (1937/1984), Emmanuel Levinas (1978) and Martin Heidegger (1966) (amongst others). This may at times imply the abandoning/suspending of the comfort of consensual realities as it is held by us as professionals (even our most sacred professional nomenclature )(Charles, 2014). More specifically, entering and speaking ‘in the patient’s tongue’ (Charles, 2014) the native self’s presencing is expected (if not hoped) to mediate the relationship between (‡) and (†), strengthening their inter-relationship through co-mingling of perspectives without hegemonic pressures; “Working with the individual with such problems—rather than problematizing the individual—is an ongoing challenge in an age in which distress and disorder are too often thought of as aberrant phenomena to be eradicated” (Charles, 2014, pp.550- 551).
An important reality accentuated by both Grotstein and Charles is not the reality of the client’s suffering per se, or even the client’s own awareness that something is amiss, but the way in which they are/were met by the Other (‡). The scientific and calculative gaze of (‡) (psychiatric nurse, establishment, psychiatrist, psychologist) may unwittingly problematize a client’s being in the world more, and as such, cultivate a general ‘feel’ of not being held by the Other, but ‘handled’. In a timeless piece of academic scholarship Erwin Goffman (1963/1986) discusses the impact of such ‘handling’ he termed ‘Stigma’. More specifically, Goffman studied in depth ‘the management of spoiled identity’ and the growing schism in such a destructive and alienating process between the private and the public. This schism serves as basis for “in-deeper-ism”, i.e., “the pressure to elaborate a lie further and further to prevent a given disclosure” (p. 83). In such a state of affairs subjectivity may go underground, find limited ‘spaces’ for expression and undergo, in Sullivanian language, malevolent transformations (Sullivan, 1953). What remains imperative is,
“Discovering the story behind the symptom can provide an essential anchor, affirming one’s very subjectivity . People are driven mad by social exclusion. The marginalized stand outside the gates and those inside are haunted by the pain and its implicit reproach. The psychotic is lost outside of history in the realm of what Lacan (1953/1977b) calls the Real, a realm outside of symbolization. For Lacan, the Real represents that which is both necessary and impossible. Unarticulated, he says, it is that which ‘doesn’t stop not being written’ and so resides outside space and time, intruding upon us in its own ways (Lacan, 1972–1973/1998, p. 59). When social forces eliminate the subject, narrating the story becomes a way of not only affirming one’s being but also one’s essential humanity.” (Charles, 2015, pp. 352-353)(italics added)
Again just think of Jane’s experience- her upholstery being leaked on. Or in Matt’s case, how supportive intervention can lead to unexpected growth. Charles, echoing many others, also holds that to access such a sensitive area of being, the mental health practitioner should always remain a skillful guest. Although diagnostic and taxonomic understanding could be of immense use , it could also be experienced as alienating, totalizing, and suffocating. That is, where diagnosis and deontological reality can eliminate the subject through intellectual de-contextualization and appropriation, what remains is an ‘ejected’ and ‘stigmatized other’ as well as an internalized order (even in those that are left behind, or ‘insides the gate’, Charles, 2014) ensuring compliance and/or rebellion as last ditched efforts at both salvaging the native self and finding some measure of connection with Alterity (Freud’s ego destroying superego). Succinctly stated, mastering life comes under the sway of the Master, threatening to engulf autochthony. The reader will note the difficulty the modern-day mental health practitioner faces- stigma as well as opening the gates between two very different worlds of experience, and reaching out to both. Stated differently, the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Ronald Fairbairn sensitively mentioned that the psychoanalyst primarily serves as the bridge between endopsychic reality and external reality. We as practitioners need to personify the very process we envision for the other, that is, reaching into our own autochthonous strivings, our own inner authority, as well as navigating the complex relationship with Alterity. Alterity contains both freedom and violence and we should not be standing in for Alterity against the vulnerable other. This can be achieved by studying the structure of Alterity (our epistemologies, ‘cultural’ legacies) as well as truly learning the unique language of our guest. Again as stated by Charles (2014),
“If we believe that the purpose of our work is to facilitate the possibility of insight for the other, then we must try to encounter the other person as fully as we are able, to enter their world as best we might, and to try to have sufficient sense of what they are working on so that we might have any idea at all as to how we might possibly aid, rather than obstruct. Lacan’s stand insists that one cannot presume authority when questions of individual existence are at stake. This is an inherently ethical stance, a statement of a value system that demands a recognition of the inherent narcissism at the base of our presumptions regarding the ‘illness of the other’ and the proposed solutions that such a model implies” (p.555).
Also,
“ …if we are to face the challenge head on, our task is to sufficiently to be able to recognize the gaps and elusions, the condensations, the ways in which meanings are organized and formulated by that individual. If we can avoid correcting or challenging this patient’s system of meanings, then perhaps we can recognize the logic sufficiently to be able to invite a conversation that is in relation to that system. From such a position, the analytic conversation moves toward obtaining a better sense of the meanings as they exist, the ways in which they function for the person, and then perhaps—but only then—to begin to consider together ways in which that system fails the individual in relation to his or her own desires.” (Charles, 2015, pp. 555-556) (italics added).

This approach has been thoroughly articulated in the voluminous work of Michael Eigen. He continuously reminds the therapist that the patient “reads himself in the therapist’s being” (Eigen, 2001, p. 5), that although we may not be getting the ‘message’ or language of the client, we should attempt to ‘remain’ with the communication until we feel truly ‘reached’ by it. This should allow the therapist to speak “from a place he is touched, which includes his own incomplete, ongoing bonding process….” (Eigen, 2001, p.4). By remaining a welcoming Other (Eaton, 2015) we may be able to hold and grow from the client’s ‘impact’,
“[The] core ingredient […] is the impact of the patient on the therapist. Impact is primary raw datum. It is the most private intimate fact of a meeting. The therapist may hide yet secretly nurse the deep impact the patient has on him. To put the impact into words too soon may spoil its unfolding. An impact needs time to take root and grow. It occurs instantaneously, but needs the analyst’s faith, time, and loyalty in order to prosper.” (1996, p. 143; emphasis added).

This clinical attitude is clearly seen in the doctor that eventually treated Eleanor Longden when he stated (and truly wanted to know): “Don’t tell me what other people have told you about yourself- tell me about you” . The latter seems to come closer to what is meant with Heidegger’s meditative thinking- the search for a third through which two individuals, irrespective of the fact that their relationship may remain non- symmetrical, can gain from each other and can help each other transform in ethical ways. This does not exclude calculative and deficit correcting language, it does however change its power differentials, and its use potential,
“In this societal context, there is a move towards the concrete that threatens to meet the psychotic in the very place where words are no longer layered and meanings cannot be investigated… Such can be the eviscerative effect of the imposition of meaning, as can happen, for example, with diagnoses, a common theme in the research interviews. In those interviews, we could see an individual struggling to make sense of self and experience through the newly acquired language of diagnostic criteria, a language that may be clarifying and organizing, but can also be disorganizing, writing over the individual and further obscuring him or her from view.” (Charles, 2015, pp. 557-558).

One is reminded of Grotstein’s thoughts as he articulated that the individual from birth onwards orders all events encountered in his or her life, transforming them into “personal, subjective experiences by autochthonizing (“creating”) them, then by housing these autochthonized personal experiences in a fantasized cosmology (inner world of psychic reality) before finally deconstructing the “alpha-betized” elements of fantasies and dreams and reconstituting them into secondary-process, objective, symbolized thoughts.”(Grotstein, 1997, p. 414). This process is in constant need of a welcoming other as the native self thickens its self- understanding and the complex ongoing relationship with Alterity. It is true that much mental pain is encountered by reality, the Real, by the fact that no amount of omnipotence can control the other, that there exists an Impersonal Otherness. It is even more painful to know that there are many that only experience such reality as a continuation of the trauma they have had to endure since infancy. Utter despair from which we as mental health professionals also turn away due to its intensity- those that become homeless (literally), chronic institutionalized patients and patients that fall through the ‘cracks’ (again our language gives us hints at the structure). Our ‘professional language’ many at times protect us against such knowledge and relating, reflecting our limitations, our prejudice, and our fears.
To return to the complex relationship between (‡) and (†), Alterity can be considered as the awareness of the Otherness of the object. This awareness follows its own developmental trajectory as described by psychoanalysts as separation-individuation. For analysts, and so painfully described by Harry Stack Sullivan (1953), within the anxiety-arch and the tension of needs of the infant, through the ministrations of the mother, ‘learns’ to adjust to the separate world of the Other. In pathological states there seems to be a predominant need to accommodate and thus comply or rebel. The latter is usually the result of impingement, trauma, neglect, mismatch, and many other untold variations. Given the need to either comply, rebel or withdraw from Alterity both Grotstein and Charles sees ‘psychopathology’ in part as the result of a failure between the meeting between (‡) and (†) leading to a “cyclopean, single-minded perspective” (Grotstein, 1997, p. 425). Although mental health literature frequently behaves towards the client as cyclopean “If they would only see what we are trying to do” (and the like), couldn’t Alterity, as it is held by a human psyche, suffer from its own cyclopean biases? Together they may form a stereoscopic if not cubistic perspective (2 eyes needed!), even if they remain in search of a phoropter (science/theory)! Grotstein argues that it is through the dual track reality that a third can be created; “Thus, the achievement of the third dimension presupposes the developmental achievement of the dual-track, stereoscopic perspective. The third (dual-track) dimension provides a mental sanctuary due to its openness to alternative possibilities: other solutions exist” (Grotstein, 1997, p. 425). Within this mental sanctuary, balancing, or attempting to explore the dual track realities of living through psychological bilingualism may allow the restoration, reclamation, and reparation of both the native drive and give birth to a tolerable cosmogony. Grotstein adds wisdom to this sanctuary and its transformational properties when he states: “Blame and protest against the world of external objects is often objectively justifiable, but we each must ontologically ‘earn’ our passport to such objectivity—i.e., through being sufficiently in touch with a sense of self- responsibility so that we are separate from the provisional “enemies” and are thus able to hold enemies authentically responsible.” (1997, p. 426).

The same can be argued for objectivity in search of its own lost and damaged (damaging) subjectivity in the name of law, science and progress. The dual track theory may support a growing solidarity between (‡) and (†) and enhance mental health bilingualism. To explore the concept of such solidarity I now turn to the work of Prof Kevin Boileau on Vivantonomy (2015).

Vivantonomy’s Noetic, a Trans-Humanist Phenomenology of the Self: Ma Facon
Recently a client with a bipolar diagnosis I will call Tony entered my office with a sense of calm, if not joy. A rare moment, signaling years of work and tolerance, many sets- backs as well as successes. Tony proudly showed me his newest painting. Both I and Matt could enjoy his talent, as well as his ability to experience ‘joy’ due to his talent;
“I really didn’t know I had it in me…. When I initially came here….. I am excited about it, I am going to give it as a gift to a friend…. I hope he likes it…My girlfriend criticized it. She has a degree in fine arts and said that I am not following the rules….[laughing and I am relieved that he can allow and be with his experience although the important Other is experienced as critical] My own rules versus others… like we spoke previously, she wants me to go look at others’ art but I said not now, I don’t want to be influenced by their style. She want to superimpose her education and her style on mine…I was like…go away! [Laughing and said without malice or anger]….O, I also helped a lady with a poem she was writing, its initial title was Rat’s ass… It was something else, very unconventional, when she asked my advice I said to her it is like… its…her way, her voice! So we renamed it Ma Facon, i.e., my voice/way, she liked it!…You know it’s not that I don’t learn from others- I love van Gogh, his shapes and feel, I use that, it is in the background when I create…. Or how Michaelangelo used mathematics to plan size in his paintings…It when it is superimposed or I have to compare myself- that’s different!”

Tony went on to describe two beautiful thoughts based on the poem of William Ernest Henley entitled Invictus (beautifully talking to the unconquerable soul, being unafraid, being/feeling master of one’s fate, captain of one’s soul ), a poem that still brings tears to his eyes, as well as the Book of Alma- the Son of Alma (he is a Mormon)- wherein it is written that the Lamanites fought against the people of God, and even when being slaughtered on the battlefield (about 90–77 B.C.) resisted out of faith not to stain their soul by taking up arms. The fact that they allowed, chose, and even welcomed their death lead to the Lamanites to know faith and their own murderous sin. This was of importance for Tony as previously he would ‘act’ very angry. Although it begs a multitude of interpretation, given how I got to know Tony, his struggles and his soul, I thought it an important communication of his growing faith in himself, his openness to the vicissitudes, if not a critique, of Alterity. To follow a poem from Tony reflecting an oppressive Alterity (growing up in a military context) and having to fight throughout his life to be understood and accepted;

The Sky I Grew Up Under

I loved to play
Adults loved status
I loved friends
Adults loved Rank
I loved life
Adults training to Kill
I loved freedom
Adults loved to follow Orders

Adults loved Strictness of thought Parameters
I was stifled: No independent thought allowed
Corporal punishments a must for Adults
To me it only created rebellion

Adults loved to be transferred to new places
I hated to lose my friends ,soon stopped making them

Under the military sky I grew up under
There is a Culture with two major facets
The willing Slaves
The military Brat an unwilling isolated captive.

Tony, 2015

It is no surprise that Alterity was something to be resisted, to be actively fought against, i.e., a meaningful if not desperate active communication of resistance against being superimposed upon, and treated like a slave. Certainly much of the reaction can be ascribed to the way Tony was raised. It can also be argued that it made Tony a sensitive and astute observer, sensitive to the various behavioral-ideational and affective currents based on dominance. Tony’s experiences illustrates the complex relationship between both (‡) and (†), an inherent need/desire to articulate the self, to find “I didn’t know I had it in me” as well as “I don’t want to be influenced now”, although Tony clearly articulated that he also appreciates and even judiciously makes use of Alterity/ the Other (in art) as background support. It is an articulate and sound gesture to all of us involved in dialogue with Tony. Recasting the latter in existential language one could see such an attitude in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1979) as well as Adrian van Kaam (1970) wherein there is an emphasis on true mutuality, fraternity and solidarity- an attitude (if not theory) taken up in the work on Kevin Boileau’s concept of Vivantonomy. Boileau argues that mutuality, fraternity and solidarity allow a true recognition of the Other. The various cases, Jane, Matt, and Tony illustrate this reality with much depth (this would not exclude the reality of experiencing ‘bipolarity’) and how the lack of mutuality, fraternity and solidarity throughout their lives creates a despairing estrangement. In Boileau’s own writing,
“Solidarity comes from this recognition that the Other comes from the same community. In humanism the community is the set of humans. In a trans-humanist approach the community is all sentient beings, and includes the balance of the environment. The community is all aspects, elements, forms, and beings of the ecosystem. My argument is that we need to rethink the set of beings that ought to be included a community of beings that has a comprehensive, deeper understanding of solidarity. In scientific vernacular, by definition, all beings in an ecosystem are interrelated. In a spiritual-phenomenological vernacular, each and every sentient being has the capacity to make an appeal. One can see it in their eyes. To deny that all sentient beings ought to be included in a community of solidarity is simple deception and denial. I have explained the reasons elsewhere, and previously in this essay, but in short they stem from narcissism: the not seeing what is directly in front of our eyes. If the reader is not persuaded by this obvious truth, then I advance the ecosystem argument, which science proves over and over again: each part of the environment is highly interrelated with other parts. Nothing is separate. Human beings are not separate. Unfortunately, humans have been living as if they are separate. We have pretended that we can continue to re-engineer our environment over and over, therefore, we should not be afraid to ignore the appeals of other sentient beings, and we should not be anxious about our dominating, possessory tendencies. This is simple obscurantism and ignorance.” (2015, pp. 54-55).

To ensure such a relationship Boileau argues for a Trans-Humanist Anthropology, allowing for a suspension of the predominant western scientific endeavor that isolates man from this very fact, i.e., that we are inherently communal and ‘co’-‘response’-‘able’ to each other. Western science and systems of thought such as logical empiricism instrumentalizes the Other, with severe implications on mental health practice; “This is the possessory, dominating subjectivity that instrumentalizes all others, and even in a system indoctrinated by rights and duties, fails to see the Other’s world on its own terms, as its unique manifestation” (p. 55). According to Boileau we can ensure, if not cultivate, Vivantonomy by continuously reflecting on our tendency to prioritize meaning, scaling existence and worth, by accepting a new Archimedean point wherein our contemporary and dominant discourse that we are the center of the universe can be changed holding that all living beings have equal interests and rights, acknowledging and accepting a growing depth and breadth of our responsibility to Others, and developing a new philosophical anthropology for human beings.
In reviewing Boileau’s thinking it can be argued, as seen in Charles’s work, that taking on a view of ‘one as lesser due to a mental disorder’, even though the intention remains in service of ‘help’, one runs a risk of enforcing a Masters-Slave dialectic. Although the western scientific project ensured man dominion over nature, doing so ‘over’ man’s nature carries catastrophic implications only truly seen currently in many treatment contexts. Most importantly, it carries the danger of deciding what is better for the Other, i.e., that one’s epistemology (usually embedded in scientific theories of Being, calculative in nature as read in the work of Heidegger) is of greater importance, inadvertently subsuming autochthony. Given Heidegger’s thinking the latter does infinite violence to Being, en- ‘closes’ the very fact that all humans are born to find their own ontology, becoming a philosopher of (their) Being in their own right. Mental health patients, given the processes described throughout will remain reluctant philosophers within the Master-Slave dynamic,
“ Therefore he [Martin Heidegger] can provocatively state: ‘The ontic distinction of Dasein lies in the fact that it is ontological’ (Being and Time, p.10). With this, every human being is recognized as an ontologist, that means- implicitly knowing about his own being and adopting a position towards it. The widespread notion that only the philosopher freely decides to turn his attention at leisure to the question of being is thus repudiated in favour of the thesis that every human being exists philosophically in an elemental way and that it would not even be possible explicitly to posit the philosophical basic question as to the being of beings if every single human being did not always already have an implicit, pre-ontological knowledge of being” (Holzhey-Kunz, 2014, p.44)

Although beyond the scope of the current paper to critically review and discuss the work of Lacan on the Real, it is also true that we are subject to growing impersonal cultural and scientific forces that may effectively ‘steal’ our ability to become a philosopher of Being. In the logic of Bakhtin (1993),
“Having detached the content/sense aspect of cognition from the historical act of its actualization, we can get out from within it and enter the ought only by way of a leap. To look for the actual cognitional act as a performed deed in the content/sense is the same as trying to pull oneself up by one’s own hair. The detached content of the cognitional act comes to be governed by its own immanent laws, according to which it then develops as if it had a will of its own. Inasmuch as we have entered that content, i.e., performed an act of abstraction, we are now controlled by its autonomous laws or, to be exact, we are simply no longer present in it as individually and answerably active human beings.
This is like the world of technology: it knows its own immanent law, and it submits to that law in its impetuous and unrestrained development, in spite of the fact that it has long evaded the task of understanding the cultural purpose of that development, and may serve evil rather than good. Thus instruments are perfected according to their own inner law, and as a result, they develop from what was initially a means of rational defense into a terrifying, deadly, and destructive force All that which is technological, when divorced from the once-occurrent unity of life and surrender to the will of the law immanent to its development, is frightening; it may from time to time irrupt into the once-occurrent unity as an irresponsibly destructive and terrifying force.” (p. 7)

As stated by Boileau (2015), an unreflective life project and scientific structure ensures unreflective opinions, ensuring a closing of subjectivity – an accommodation to Alterity akin to du Bose’s Dasein-icide (2009). When transcendence is denied and language is used to “taxonomically differentiate one type of being from another, which includes different levels of ontological value, rights, and protections” (2015, p. 57) one enters a new domain of bio-‘politics’, if not bio-ethical laws used to ensnare both the reluctant philosopher and the Seelsorger into fixed positions in service of a larger agenda, making ‘therapy’ increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to carry out the growth needs and realities of the native self. What would this mean in essence, that a relationship is ‘regulated’ and ‘practiced’ with such non-reflective practices and laws? I do hold that various basic assumption anxieties as articulated by Wilfred Bion (see Hopper, 2009; Scharff & Scharff, 2001; Shaw, 2014; Shur 1994) have created taxonomies as defense against many serious realities, that although we have come a way in articulating many mental health difficulties, we remain deeply affected by its presence- it ‘makes us into a THAT’. Psychiatry, the very bastion of protecting the space for ‘madness’ has been under unprecedented pressure, societal and otherwise, to not only prove its existence as a ‘science’, but to ensure a ‘safety’ (socially) that in essence begs for dialogue and reflection with all role players, not just political, but judicial and regulatory practices as well. Boileau (2015) would argue as follows, i.e., that we need to “engage in more rigorous hermeneutic inquiry of the meaning of these axioms and their competitors. In short, I propose a strong sense of the meaning of responsibility as I outlined earlier in this work. This implies a derivative duty to gain more accurate, deeper, broader, and truer perspective about the meaning of the human anthropology, and the way we fit in ecosystems in good ways. It might be argued that we already do that, but I am suggesting even greater critical awareness. I suggest this explicitly with those words, and I suggest it implicitly by arguing that through a phenomenological inquiry we can discover what is most human in humans [which implies an account of trans-humanist understanding of the whole]. I don’t think we are there yet” (p. 58)
This is imperative when considering dialoguing with those (which by definition includes ourselves), who experience an ontological unsettledness, a terror at Being and relatedness. Through Vivantonomy, a philosophy that is deeply concerned with life and living per se, we may as mental health practitioners be able to ‘hold’ and relate to both the native self as well as to Alterity with the express help and permission of the reluctant philosopher. This is not an easy task. Being treated as an ‘object’ or being ‘objectified’ unsettles heteronomous ontology, exiles experience and works against solidarity and fraternity. It is evident as practitioner that this is a tri-directional phenomena, that is, the patient, the mental health practitioner, as well as the mental health system that can be ‘objectified’. Objectifying missed how we are all co-constituted. For Boileau (2015),
“Thus, we transform human-centered anthropologies into trans-human ontologies that move us from egocentric, desirous, possessive, unmindful beings into a complex constellation of elements that constitute a new kind of humanity based on a new sort of autonomy that is grounded in Vivantonomy. These new self-constitutions include the self-as-responsible, the self-that-lives-in-solidarity, the self-who-promotes-rights-of-all-that-lives, and the self-who-lives-in-underlying-ontological-space. We could formulate these elements with more finesse, I am sure, but leaving them in their rough state articulates them with crispness and accuracy. The second moment of this transformation comes from the replacements of egocentric values and action potentials with a whole new set of values and action potentials that are virtuous within this new worldview. The values and virtues come from a new anthropology that we become more identified with through the practices that constitute them. This trans-humanist foundation re-constitutes, therefore, what we mean by autonomy and heteronomy.”(p. 63)

It is thus not the aim to upsurge that which has been painfully accumulated through centuries of thought and reflection. We owe a rich depth to many taxonomists, classificationist, revisionists, and rebels. What is equally true is that we have been witnessing a frightening demand on mental health practitioners as well as clients to suspend autochthony, to re-educate into the scientific Ideal, to exile those that give voice to such concerns through code inflation, bio-ethics, greater oversight and impingements of law, and even threatening professional’s livelihood. Protection of Autochthony should be our first ethical task.

Conclusion
Mental health practice allows a unique philosophical approach to the difficulties inherent in Autochthony and Alterity (Otherness). As mentioned, the contemporary mental health arena as psychological relational context calls forth a unique sort of human engagement and management mostly reflected in an over-reliance on ‘scientific explanation’, excessive objectivism of the Other, fear of the Other’s autochthony, an ever expanding vigilance and ‘control’ of so-called deviant behavior embedded within bio-ethical approaches (favoring a non-humanist ethics), all supporting many alienating/estrangement practices. By becoming sensitive to both (†)’s ontology and the world of (‡), alienating misrecognition may be suspended, inviting a philosophy of Vivantonomy and psychological bilingualism characterized by a Heideggerian meditative state/stance. It is held that such a stance may support all involved to cultivate a trans-humanist philosophy deeply reflective of its own practices, ensuring solidarity, fraternity and fidelity.

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Loray Daws, Ph.D., Reg. Psych., FAPA

Loray Daws is a Registered Clinical Psychologist with the Health Professions Counsel of South Africa and a Registered Psychologist with the College of Psychologists of British Columbia, Canada. He graduated from the University of Pretoria and served as a full time lecturer from 1998 to 2006. Since formally leaving the University of Pretoria he completed a three year post- graduate certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for the disorders of self (personality disorders) and serves as faculty member at the International Masterson Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in New York since 2010. Loray moved with his family to Vancouver Island in 2009 where he currently works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Never far from the academic field Loray still serves as assistant editor for Global Journal of Health Sciences , evaluator and international advisory board member of the International Journal of Psychotherapy (IJP), assistant editor at EPIS (Existential Psychoanalytic Institute and Society) and has published articles on dreaming, psychosomatic disorders (burning mouth syndrome and eating disorders) and the disorders of the self in journals such as the International Journal of Psychotherapy, Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology, South African Rorschach Journal, and Clinical Counselling and Contemporary Psychotherapy. He also supervises and teaches in South Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia and Turkey and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at EPIS.

Victor L. Schermer, Ph.D.

Victor L. Schermer is a psychologist
and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Philadelphia, PA. He is a Life Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association. Author or co-editor of eight books and a regular contributor to professional journals, his most recent book, Meaning, Mind, and Self-Transformation: Psychoanalytic Interpretation and the Interpretation of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2015) explores the relationship between hermeneutical-existential philosophy and psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Michele Valentin, Ph.D.

Michele Valentin is a Professor of French (University of Montana) and researcher/teacher for EPIS—specializing in French textuality of Lacanian obedience. Topics: popular culture, French/US and West African cinema, politics and the arts.
 

Sunayana Baruah, M.Phil, MCP

Sunayana Baruah is completing an M.Phil. degree in Psychoanalytic Studies at Trinity College, Dublin on the 31st of July,2015. She also has a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Amity University, New Delhi. Sunayana’s studies focus on the amalgamation of traditional psychoanalytic systems with eclecticism in therapeutic approaches. Her other interests are existential psychotherapy and metaphysics. Besides writing, she invests her time in photography, gastronomic pursuits and yoga.

Brenna Gradus

Brenna Gradus is originally from the New York City suburbs of New Jersey. She now resides in Missoula, Montana as a third-year student of Philosophy at the University of Montana. She serves as both an Intern and Student Liaison for EPIS, and spends her spare time studying subjects including but certainly not limited to critical theory, psychoanalysis, and Eastern philosophy when she isn’t tending to her duties as Pet Care Specialist at Quick Paws Hiking Company.

Steven Goldman, Ph.D.

Steven Goldman, Ph.D. studied at St. John’s College (honors graduate), The University of Paris, Heidelberg University, and completed his doctorate in philosophy at the Claremont Graduate University (CGS fellow). Steve started teaching in the early 80’s – formerly at places like the UC Irvine, the Claremont Colleges, the Venice Community Adult School, the Art Institute of Portland, Pacific Northwest College of Art – and currently at Portland State University. Steve writes under the name ‘Steven Brutus’ and has several books out there including Important Nonsense (2012), which was named one of the best 100 books of 2012 on Kirkus Reviews “indie list.” Steve’s most recent book is Orientation in World Philosophy: A Companion for the Examined Life. Steve started dabbling in philosophical counseling in the 1980’s and has written extensively about the application of philosophy to therapy.

Robert S. Corrington, Ph.D.

Robert S. Corrington, PhD is the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Philosophical Theology in the Graduate Division of Drew University in Madison, NJ. Author of ten books and many articles, his current book project is Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism, forthcoming from Lexington books in 2016. For decades he has been unfolding his philosophical perspective of “Ecstatic Naturalism,” that represents a new metaphysics of nature. His interests include, metaphysics, aesthetics, pragmatism, Continental Philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Gary Kolb, Ph.D.

Dr. Gary Kolb is a clinical
psychologist with an active
practice in the State of
Washington, USA. He has
recently finished a program at
the Institute of Contemporary
Psychoanalysis in Los
Angeles, and is currently a
psychoanalytic candidate at
the Existential Psychoanalytic
Institute & Society. His current
research explores the effects
of technology on the psyche
from a psychoanalytic and
phenomenological perspective. He lives in Aberdeen, Washington with his wife and children.

Andrew Nutt, MA
 
Andrew has a degree in theology and biblical studies from Moody Theological Seminary and currently is finishing a degree in counseling psychology.  He is an itinerant speaker and adjunct professor addressing suffering from a phenomenological and theological perspective.  His research interest is in intersubjective ontology and the philosophic foundations of counseling theories, specifically relational models of healing.  Andrew is a member of EPIS and lives in Alaska when he is not traveling or studying. 
 

Professor Emeritus Roger Burggraeve, Ph.D.

Roger Burggraeve was born in Passendale, Flanders (Belgium), in 1942. Salesian of Don Bosco (priest). Licentiate in Philosophy (Rome, 1966). Doctorate in Moral Theology (Leuven, 1980). Associate Professor at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven (1980-1988). Professor (Ordinarius) from 1988 till 2007; now Emeritus Professor. Has taught at the Faculties of Theology, Pharmacy, Philosophy, Canon Law, Medicine (Dentistry, Sexuality and Family Sciences) courses of Fundamental Theological Ethics; Sexual and Relational Ethics; Faith, Biblical Thought, and Ethics; Faith, Values, and Ethics: on Emmanuel Levinas’ Ethical and Metaphysical Thinking; Perspectives on Religion and Meaning; Pharmaceutical Ethics. As Emeritus with an assignment he continued till 2010 to teach courses on “Bible and Ethics”, “Christian Sexual and Conjugal Ethics”, and “An Ethics of Growth for Difficult Pastoral and Educational Situations” at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He actually taught the same courses as Visiting Professor at the International Institute for Religious and Catechetical Sciences ‘Lumen Vitae’ (Brussels), Dharmaram College (Bangalore, India), in Congo, Kenya, and Canada. Since 1987 he was the Co-founder and Chair, and now he is the Honorary Chair of the Centre for Peace Ethics, KU Leuven.
Domains of research: the ethical and religious (Jewish) thinking of Emmanuel Levinas; the relationship between Christian faith and ethics; sexual, relational, marital and family ethics and education; ethics and (therapeutic/pastoral/educational) guidance; the relationship between bible and philosophy (with special attention for the dialogical Jewish philosophy of Rosenzweig, Buber and Levinas). He also developed an ethical model of growth for education, social welfare, and pastoral work. He is a member of several Ethical Committees (Caritas Catholica Flanders, Ethical Committee for Metally Disabled People, Flemish Welfare Union). He published more than 365 books, articles and contributions in English, Dutch, French, Italian, and Japanese on: Emmanuel Levinas; relational, sexual and marriage ethics; Bible and ethics; nationalism and holy war; education, pastoral guidance, social welfare and ethics; evil, judgement, revenge or retaliation, forgiveness and reconciliation.
He is last but not least Spiritual Director at the Holy Spirit College in Leuven, where 50 to 60 international priests (Asia and Africa) reside for studies in theology, philosophy or canon law.

Letter from the Editor

Kevin Boileau

Fall, 2015

I am writing this year’s letter in the early Autumn of 2015. A subtle wind has emerged in the morning, and coldness at night that reminds of falling leaves and eventual frost. I go through this experience every year, and more particularly in my experience working at the EPIS Journal as Executive Editor. Through the years we have built a diligent, committed team of professionals who see to it that we have our annual, academic conference—as scheduled—and that we produce the companion journal. Each conference is different and this produces a different journal issue. Yet, they are all tied together with our common commitment for innovative reflection that leads to contributions to both the academic and clinical worlds.

There are many psychoanalytic institutes; many phenomenologists; many psychoanalysts and therapists; and many critical theorists and philosophers. Several focused and hardworking individuals from all over the world engage in these daily disciplines and discourses in order to serve their clients, other academics, and humanity at large in the hopes of making modest gestures toward an improved world. We at the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society are part of these efforts and intend to deepen our commitment to this work in the future. Fortunately, we have had the privilege to receive into our community a number of these sorts of individuals: caring, committed, intelligent, creative, and responsible to the solidarity of our group. I am personally humbled and grateful to have met so many unique, responsible, and first-rate thinkers who have chosen to become EPIS members and students.

We have come a long way over the many years that EPIS has been in existence. Our quarterly seminars always sit at the core of who we are because it is in this forum that we confront great ideas and texts of former scholars and thinkers, most of them who are now deceased but not forgotten. Our weekly radio show is now almost three years old, and it has become a valuable forum for the exploration of new ideas presented audibly and verbally. However, we are also considering the memorializing of some of these radio shows in order to increase the world’s exposure to our ideas. Our educational programs are growing in scope and intention. As such, it is our intent to become a valuable, contributing educational program for clinicians, academics, and other intellectuals who want to deepen their knowledge and understanding of these fields in a focused and intense way.

This leads us to the EPIS Journal, which is entitled Presencing EPIS. Our current commitment is to produce one issue annually, which could change from time to time as we see fit. We are considering the publication of companion publications that speak to different communities, for example, a journal that explores radical critical theory; a journal of applied phenomenology for practitioners in a number of fields; and journal for innovative conflict resolution methodology that finds our fields valuable and useful. Nevertheless, these all supplement our original journal, this journal here for which I am writing this Letter in the autumn of 2015.

I do not know the future. I do not know the future of EPIS, its programs, or this journal. I do know that EPIS and EPIS Press are on a golden path, so I anticipate that we will continue to compile year after year of interesting and valuable essays for our journals and related publications. I also know that as long as I can hold a pen I will write this Letter, as a continuing contribution to this journal. In time, as in all matters, some of us older contributors will teach and train the younger to take over, and to make it theirs whatever that shall be, but always with human goodness and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding at its core.

It is with this appreciation and gratitude, and much hope for the future of EPIS and this journal that I write this Letter. I thank everyone who has contributed to it, and I encourage future contributions and growth in our mutual responsibility.

Dr. Kevin Boileau, PhD, JD/LLM
Executive Editor, Presencing EPIS
A Journal of the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute & Society
Fall, 2015 issue