This is Benjamin
Posts Tagged ‘psychoanalysis’
Running on the horizon
June 1st, 2009 | benjamin
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.
Notes on a friend lost, lost notes on a friend, notes on a lost friend, a lost friend on notes, a friend lost on notes
December 18th, 2008 | benjamin
Part I: The Encounter
‘You’re here to pity me,’ he says.
The following inferences occur: the maladjusted person is a patient, the patient is sick, the sick is drawn to pity like a fly to cloying treacle. The patient is the fly, overcome, overwhelmed, suffocating, sinking in the noble concern of others.
The patient catches hold of this insight, even as the flux of images and representations engulfs his limbs and regards suspiciously those who come to visit.
I, the friend, say that there is no such thing, as far as I am concerned, that we are Nietzscheans in this regard.
The maladjusted person relaxes.
But in defending myself against this claim of pity, I am only plausible if I have an alternative explanation to our time spent together.
When the adjusted person encounters the maladjusted person there is the perpetual question, overhanging and fluttering like a curtain: ‘Why are you here?’ It is is the question of time spent. It demands an answer.
Someone for whom normal or should I say consensus meaning has broken down is both fascinating and terrifying.
While the connections that this person makes between things, concepts, and senses are not our own, they possess an undeniable logic. This logic reveals our own to be, while surely practicable, also disturbingly provisional.
Meaning and sense becomes a matter of stitching, of finding the peg that fits the hole, the number in the sequence, the missing letter that looms underneath the hanged man.
The same child-like game is played by both the adjusted and the maladjusted, but the latter play with a different set of rules that yield interconnections of an undeniable profundity.
Those of us with insight know that our own logic of meaning, while it allows us to be sane, also facilitates our adjusting to, and complicity with an established social order that in our analytical modes, but not in our everyday existence, we know to be unethical, nonviable, destructive and banal.
Whereas we the sane find ourselves not courageous enough to do so, the maladjusted person with her or his alternative logic of meaning wholly rejects this social world.
At the same time, the logic of the maladjusted person lacks the means through which any social order would be possible at all. Reciprocity is gone, much of the external world is hostile, the very universe itself is malevolent.
For sure, the hypocrisies of our own everyday existence are obliterated by this searing insight, but so too is everything else.
Consciousness becomes an apocalyptic force which does not allow for hope, or a resourcefulness to change the world, for all things in existence are touched by the decay of a malevolent social and psychic order.
This awareness does not permit friendship, mutual concern, or basic reciprocity.
It is here, I think, that we find the beginnings of a plausible answer to the question of time spent between two people at this exceptional moment in their lives.
In place of the ‘visit’, that the pitying do-gooder pays to the ailing patient, I would like to promote the ‘encounter’ between two friends.
With the benefits and shortcomings of both psychic states in mind it becomes possible to see the encounter as one of mutual benefit and ultimately of creative power.
To take but a small example:
The fabric of his pants was of a peculiar jarring contrast that words cannot evoke. My friend was able to express this experience in guttural sound. As such, we shared an experience of the visual that would not otherwise have been possible were it not for his synesthesia.
At other moments, in evoking his beautiful alter ego, and in discussing how her potential has been sadly denied, he showed me, as well as any novel or film, the compromises to banality demanded by the everyday.
And I think that, in return, I brought him back to social reciprocity in some degree. I revealed that not all parts of the world are hostile, that fixations are only attachments to chimera, that the real takes place in the social world of give and take.
It is this give and take that rescues the visit and transforms it into an encounter.
The well-intentioned friend is not there to dispense pity and the insight of sanity, but seeks to learn from the divine poetry of this other person who sees the world differently, while at the same time inviting this person into a world of others.
This other person is no longer psychically sealed from the world of others while being subjected to the authority of its doctors, nurses, police officers, and so on. This maladjusted person subjects their insights to this world of others and in so doing, become a participant in it.
For sure, the encounter can only happen gradually, over time, and always imperfectly. But the thing which draws two friends together is not pity, but that which makes the social world beautiful.
Together, in the encounter, we gather the elements necessary to turn insight into practice – the first delicate charge of revolution – and we are both changed by the experience.