Running on the horizon
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.