benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

While running the length of the Bosphorus River on the Asian bank of Istanbul, I listened to a discussion on art, living, and death on Late Night Live.
The guests were psychoanalysts who were speaking at the Freud Conference in Melbourne and they introduced an electrifying concept called ‘Creative Living’.
This concept starts with the familiar Freudian insight that there are dimensions to our actions that escape our awareness. It also encompasses the more obscure concept of the Unheimliche, or when rendered in english, the Uncanny. Literally speaking, the Unheimliche is that which we aer not at home with, that which is strange to us, that which makes us uncomfortable for example or arouse our hatred and loathing. By tracing an etymology of the world Freud discovered that the various meanings of and associations with the Unheimliche gradually merge with those of the direct opposite of the word, the Heimliche, the familiar. The point is that that which utterly disturbs must have some kind of hidden life within us.
The analysts partly divined the practice of ‘Creative Living’ from artists that they had treated. To live a Creative Life is to continually confront these mysteries about the self, not to pin them down so as to uncover and absolute and final truth, but the opposite, to allow the self to continually grow and change through navigating the uncomfortable limits of our awareness.
It excited me because it seems to liberate psychoanalysis from what Michel Foucault identifies as its oppressive traits. Foucault identified a set of discursive practices that had emerged in late antiquity and continued through Christian ascetic practices and beyond into the Victorian ‘repression’ of sexuality and nineteenth and twentieth century psychology. What unites all of these different accounts of the human being is that there appears something like a ‘self’, and this self has a ‘true nature’ which is often characterised as sinful, errant or pathological. Finally, these errors can be corrected through the application of certain techniques through an authority or specialist of some kind.
Whereas the psychoanalyst may genuinely believe that she liberating human beings by bringing them in touch with their ‘true’ nature, Foucault feels that psychoanalysts were oppressing their patients when they scrutinised the minutia of their thoughts to find the ‘truth’ of their sexual desires.
Foucault instead looks to the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome. From these writers he discovers a kind of asceticism, a way of regulating one’s behaviour and pursuing a virtuous life that did not require the uncovering of a ‘truth’ about the self. For many of the ancients, this is achieved through a process called ‘Self Writing’ in which one kept journals to reflect on one’s own actions and possibly to modify them.
It seems to me that there is a lot of overlap between Creative Living and Self Writing. The analysts on Late Night Live were suggesting that when we keep the past alive and confront that which disturbs us, such as our own deaths for instance, by seeking the limits of our self understanding, we have an opportunity to remake the self again and again.
As such, the Freud’s concept of the self—as a puzzling stranger whose inner motivations can only be interpreted by an analyst—is transformd into a style of life that frees the individual to continually grow and change. I feel electrified by this possible being wandering soundlessly just over the edge of this horizon.

A few thoughts I wanted to share. Please do not crucify me upon them.

I always understood the following phrases metaphorically: ‘I didn’t really feel like I was there.’ ‘I felt like someone else was inside my body.’ ‘I didn’t feel like I was alive.’

That is, I understood them to reflect a state of being, a being-blase kind of thing. But in my moments of recent epiphany, when the world floods my sensations with such rich impressions, I wondered if these statements had a literal truth.

Is it possible that in those moments where for whatever reason, perhaps because of a trauma, perhaps because we have become habituated to everyday life, perhaps because of a sensory overload from life in the metropolis, we really are in a state of non-being.

Does this imply a dualism? Because if the body is still functioning, and yet the mind feels as though it doesn’t really exist, surely this would only be possible if there was a separation between mind and body.

Maybe this is the case only if we choose a less nuanced concept of being. Having read Heidegger, and understood a little, we might be able to see parallels between the feeling of not being there and the state of being that he called ‘thrown’, I forget the German term. This is a kind of being in which we are not attendant to our own possibilities for being, but rather to those of the ‘crowd’ around us, we measure ourselves according to the standards of the faceless ‘them’ and live our lives accordingly.

I like this concept, except that I feel it might be a tad too action-oriented, that it implies that to really be we need to go out and satisfy our possibilities for being through doing something.

Even when we are completely passive we are still attending to our most basic needs. If we fail to breathe, after twenty seconds, thirty seconds, the air in our lungs expires and we very quickly learn a basic fact about our being in this world.

Does being ‘thrown’ also lie in not attending to the world at all of which we are a part. Are we not ‘thrown’ when we experience the world as a grey homogeneity, when we do not experience the world much at all.

Perhaps then, nichtdasein, the feeling or state of non-being, occurs when the self is disconnected from its own embodied nature and the fact that this self and body exists in a physical world.

For the last couple of days I have been working, although I would hardly call it work, a joyful rambling perhaps, through Oliver Sack’s Awakenings.

It consists of some analysis, some pharmacological background, but largely case reports from a group of patients who received L-DOPA to treat a rare and intense form of Parkinson’s Disease as a result of a mysterious virus that spread through the global population at around the same time as the Great Flu Pandemic.

I’m surely not the first to be surprised, but it is not at all how you would expect a text based in neuro-psychology to unfold. Nor is the deeply philosophical Dr Sacks at all like the hard-nosed devotees of scientism that I met when working for the Psychology department at the University of Melbourne.

In fact, what Sacks details is more like a set of incredibly beautiful, illuminating and sad short stories arranged around a common theme, of disintegrated minds chaotically reintegrated in unpredictable ways.

Together, these intimate portraits coalesce to reveal some outline of the being of the mind – not purely a mechanics, and not simply the dramas of the ego. It’s a moving-picture of the mind that comes out something like an Escher sketch.

It answers any model of human consciousness and behaviour that would arrange us on a bell curve of normality. What he details is much closer to a hive, an ever twisting, changing, growing root system.

The implications of his work span from scientific psychology to metaphysical philosophy and in a most dramatic way collapse the distinctions between the two.