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Limbo

From Eruption to Frontier to Aevum…

May 25, 2009
Aevum, Dreams, Found Object, Freud, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

Be it in terms of the settling into the depressive position, the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the attainment of ego integration, the cure, or what not, when psychoanalysis prescribes a so-called “healthy” goal for the libido’s development, it also posits the desirability of the point at which the libido’s vicissitudes will have finally come to rest, the point at which Freud’s volcano will have acquired its crowning layer of lava. This, perversely enough, is also the point at which the volcano and, hence, the libido will have gone cold, become extinguished, died. Much to its subject’s chagrin, or perhaps even relief, the libido does die eventually. However, to suggest that the fact of this death is an indicator of health, or that, better still, it is the hoped for effect, if not indeed the mission, of a psychoanalytic cure is, obviously, a conclusion with which Freud would have been extremely uncomfortable.

This, I believe, is why Freud’s writing of the volcano metaphor is itself a volcanic writing. As the waves of lava, and of libido, gradually pile on top of one another and eventually harden, each may consider itself the summit by virtue of the fact that it is the highest and most recent. But each is such a summit only till the next wave erupts and covers it over, till it is nothing but a layer cushioned in between the before and the after, till, in other words, it is reduced to an entity whose time is the time of flow and decay, of the “not yet” or the “not quite,” falsely asserting itself in a hardening that will hopefully seal the crater and prevent the eruption of future layers that are thicker and harder. True to its pen’s volcanic spirit, no sooner had the ink that wrote the self-sufficiency of discontinuous moments and of the aevum dried on the page, that it got displaced by a dread of tempus and a wish for aeternitas, a dread and a wish that lock the fate of such moments to the laws of succession, accumulation, usurpation, to, in other words, Oedipal rivalry. And should such a manoeuvre not be enough to pre-empt any future questioning of these laws, Freud’s pen did not hesitate to retrace its steps back a decade and re-edit a passage from the Three Essays in order to erase any hint of the aevum and confirm that, once and for all, the “instinct” is indeed a “continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 83).

Taken in its entirety, Freud’s thought cannot but both lure and disappoint those in search of a majestic volcano in which each construct, metaphor, and technique is simply a layer that builds on its antecedents and in so doing helps cushion whatever else has yet to come. I hardly wish to rehash the debates surrounding the turns, reversals, breaks, and repressions, regarding, in sum, the vicissitudes of a text and a thought that were over four decades in the making. I invoke the fact of such vicissitudes in order to unsettle one particular (secondary) revision, obviously perpetrated by Freud as much as by his readers, from which both text and thought have suffered: the re-writing of the discovery of an episodic and hence fragmentary libido into a cohesive “intelligible whole” that is the developmental paradigm. Secondary revision, as I have suggested in previous posts, is at bottom an injunction against mutation, transitionality, and finding; it is a prohibition against anything that would undermine its official story, in this case the story of a libido that is traceable, graspable. It would be convenient to think that such a revision is merely a defence against the continued threats emanating from outside the story and the practice, from, presumably, the detractors who have not read enough or analysed enough. But it is the story and the practice themselves that pose the greatest threat to their presumed stability.

“If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an ‘instinct’ appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representation of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, 121-22) . Freud’s topography here has to allow that the “instinct” is equally “the psychical representation of the stimuli originating from within the mind and reaching the organism, as a measure of the demand made upon the body for work in consequence of its connection with the mind,” that, as a frontier, the drive is porous on the side of both the psychical and the somatic, that it is a passage in at least two different directions each trafficking its own set of demands, that its “source” is often as much psychical as it is “a somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented in mental life by an instinct” (ibid, 123). I hope to come back to this question of the drive and its sources later. In the meantime, I single out this passage of Freud’s not so much because it dovetails with the notion of an animated in-between that is the focus of my thoughts and not because it subtly, but perhaps inadvertently, lays the ground for Winnicott’s transitional object, but because it encapsulates Freud’s own long standing fascination with transitionality, a fascination which, by its very definition, questions any and all claims to coherence and completion.

Though he did not explicitly identify the frontier as a central dimension till the mid 1910s, Freud had been quite taken by that frontier from his earliest days. Consider, for instance, the dream book as it elaborates a topography that belongs to the dream as much as it does to the psyche and its three systems (conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious). The essence of a dream lies in the distortions it performs as, again, “a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work” in consequence of its connection, in this case, with reality (as stimulus and/or residue) and the unconscious (as wish). The space of the dream is hence the Zwischenreich, as Freud writes in a letter to Fliess, that is not so much an intermediary kingdom but the inter-kingdom (the interregnum) and hence the kingdom in between two kings, itself without a king. The “inter” here is temporal (as a transitional phase between the end of one reign and the beginning of another), spatial (as a border territory created by two adjoining provinces ostensibly obeying the laws of neither), and procedural (as a translation or mediation between two otherwise incongruous systems). This is the inter-kingdom of the dream that is nestled in between a seemingly ever lasting and ever gratifying hallucination and a harsh survivalist reality. We find ourselves here not only in the “facilitating” space of the transitional as Winnicott understood it but also in the realm of the aevum. For what is a dream but a diminished hallucination that grows “like a mushroom out of its mycelium” and whose meaning is never a single abiding wish but a meshwork of latent thoughts that “cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite ending” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 5-525)? Such thoughts do not accrue into an ever higher, or reach into an ever deeper, organisation. Freud himself insisted on the necessity of over-interpretation as a clinical disposition that, contrary to what its “over” (or “über” as in “Überdeutung”) may suggest, makes manifest such a meshwork and, in so doing, betrays the hegemony of an overarching and immutable meaning. It is in this context that Freud wrote his by now infamous metaphor of the dream’s “navel” as a tangle of thoughts that cannot be unravelled at the spot where the dream is supposed to reach down into the unknown (ibid). Freud here tangles up two distinct thoughts: the first is that the multitude of interpretations brings the interpreter face to face with the limit of interpretation (the “unknown”); the second is that, since interpretation is the process that reverses the dream work, the “unknown” is less the spot into which the dream reaches and more the spot from which it emerges.

Though its images may appear chaotic and incomplete, the latent time of the dream is no different from the time of the aevum. It has a beginning but is without end. Interpretation brings to light its “succession of meanings” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 4-214) and clarifies the vicissitudo of its infinite series of thoughts, each as a consistent and useful totality in its own right. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The Middle – 2: Aevum Philosophicum

May 13, 2009
Aevum, Culture, Found Object, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Reflexivity, Transitionals, Winnicott

[Go ahead; look closer. It’s next to where just about everything Greek used to be trashed before it got cleaned up and anointed the Cradle of Western Civilisation. Yes; there, in that very same pile where you just dug up “limbo,” the one from which you’d once salvaged “libido.” The pile is marked “Medieval” though you can barely tell it’s so far out from the centre (apparently, there are gradations even in rubbish). It’s the pile from a period when Jewish and Islamic thought were thriving, side by side; perhaps that’s yet another reason why some of us prefer to think of it as “The Dark Ages.” But it’s the period nestled in between the Classical and the Renaissance, the period we also call “The Middle Ages.” That’s it; right there. We’re exactly where Winnicott wants us to be—in the middle.]

The Middle Ages can be a bit disappointing for those in search of serious debate re fabulous angelic dances on heads of pins as none really did take place within that period; but there is enough in it of the deliberations on the varieties of time and being that is actually worth revisiting, especially since such deliberations often created and criss-crossed “the middle.” The Ancients, Plato and Aristotle included, had essentially identified two measures of duration: eternity and time. Eternity belongs to being in its actuality and hence to that which is and is always already perfect; time, on the other hand, corresponds to change and potentiality, to that which becomes and is hence lacking. Duration in this context is as much a quality of being, an ontology, as it is an external standard of reference by which one may track an entity’s movements and transformations, as an abstract astronomical parameter for instance. Infused with the concerns of a theology of salvation that had set out to bridge the gap between the eternal and the timely, the intellectuals of Medieval Europe were faced with the task of reconfiguring their philosophical heritage in order to accommodate a new classification of beings, a new topography, and, consequently, a new time. Henceforth, man’s relationship to God was to be rethought in terms of analogy rather than the extremes of identity and difference; angels, considered to be neither godly nor human, needed to be accounted for; the souls of the innocent who, because of accident or history, had never been baptised deserved a purgatory as something not quite heavenly but far from the fires of eternal damnation. Ultimately, time, as a quality of being, had to be recalibrated in such a way as to reflect the emerging ontological diversity.

It was mostly the scholastic texts of the 13th century (beginning with the commentaries of Alexander of Hales and extending into the reflections of Albert the Great, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Theodoric of Freiberg, and, finally, William of Ockham) that undertook this recalibration by introducing, debating, fine tuning, and, finally, completely abandoning the idea of the aevum as a time quality in between, and distinct from, the eternal and the worldly. This is an episode in the history of philosophy that illustrates the experience of a “set situation,” to use a term of Winnicott’s which anticipates the transitional object by roughly a decade(∗), a situation in which the child (philosopher) discovers the shiny spatula (the aevum), uses it, and makes it its own by picking it up, sticking it in its mouth, dropping it, and picking it up again (by conceptualising it, debating it, writing it, and debating it some more) till, at a certain point, boredom sets in and attention moves on to another object that lies at hand. This is a “total happening,” a complete experience with a beginning, a middle, and an end that the subject, any subject, deploys as it ventures outside the mutually exclusive disjunctions of eternity and finitude, inner and outer, hallucination and reality; and by venturing outside the disjunctions, and hence outside of both inner hallucination and outer reality, as opposed to out the one and into the other, the subject can take hold of time in a new way or take hold of a new time.

In between aeternitas, a complete and indivisible eternity without beginning or end, and tempus, a limited and ever flowing time of change and decay, the aevum is a created perpetuity; it has an origin but is infinite in duration; it is, in other words, eternal in its substance but finite in its actions. The aevum is a “diminished” eternity whose time moves, in succession, in vicissitudo, and where each moment tells of a totality rather than a transient passage. The aevum is the time-stop that holds all the parts that make up a world simultaneously; it suspends them in a moment so that, in fact, they do get to make up a world. This is the audible time-stop, as the note of a bell, a chime, or an alarm, the ticking of the clock mechanically produced for the first time ever in the late 13th century. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The aevum is also the time of libido. Indeed, and for Freud, the passages from narcissism to object love (via the ideal ego and the ego ideal), from repudiated homosexuality to paranoia (via negation and projection), from any one given modality, object, or aim of the drive to another, all happen in an episodic, spasmodic fashion. The unconscious does not drift seamlessly from one configuration to another so much as it hops, in fits and starts. Here. There. And there again. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. At each location and within each interval, the components are arranged in such a way as to make sense, be coherent, organised, and set. Addressing the drive’s developmental itinerary, Freud writes: “We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, 128). The time of the drive is altogether different from, on the one hand, the arrow, river, or wheel (the metaphors are aplenty here) of the time that is continuity, becoming, and decay and, on the other hand, the still and indivisible time that is permanence and perfection. The time of the drive is the time of counting, in integers; it is the time of the vicissitudo.

In this context, and while some translators have accused James Strachey of betraying the letter of Freud’s “Triebe und Triebschiksale” by rendering it “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” rather than, say, “Drives and the Fate of Drives,” Strachey’s, for me, is a faithful capturing of the spirit of the text’s most radical and innovative contribution. Of course, the “instinct” has a fate and hence a history; this is a position Freud had been tirelessly advancing since the days of the Three Essays. The idea that such a history does not always unfold in “developmental” stages but that it often involves discontinuous and yet self-contained and coherent totalities in the style of a vicissitudo(∗∗), totalities that, inherently, lack nothing and lead nowhere is an idea he had not treated as clearly and forcefully before.
________
∗ See “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation” in Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis.
∗∗ as with the drive’s reversal into its opposite, turning around upon the subject’s own self, repression, and/or sublimation

The Middle – 1: Limbus Analyticus

May 8, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

An object that is at times animated and at others inert, at times the focus of intense affective investment and at others utterly inconsequential is hardly an object that can be bound by a set of codifyable characteristics. Winnicott locates the found object in the space of creative illusion, the space that is cushioned between the heavenly omnipotence granted by hallucination and the hellish impotence suffered from empirical reality; but it is also in that very same space, ultimately identified as no more than an obsolescent “limbo,” that Winnicott declares the found object is doomed to spend its final resting days.

Should it after a rich and extended journey return to its place of origin, and hence to the site of its founding, where precisely did the found object get to live its intervening vibrancy and resilience? What of its itineraries, mementoes, and traces? Presumably, these are all to be found neither in heaven nor in hell but in the transitional space where the object itself was initially found(ed). While the question may come across as an exercise in sophistry, it is rather an argument for the over-determination of the space of the transitional as more than a topological third that is “neither here nor there” or “in between here and there” and as instead the space of “both here and there and everywhere else in between,” of the space of the found object whose reality is both inner and empirical, animated and aggressive, resilient and irrelevant, vital and deadly, of, in sum, the space of over-determination itself.

To speak of over-determination is to speak of dreams, of their components’ recurrences, frustrations, distortions, horrors even, as much as of their efficiently and unobtrusively gratifying functions. Safe as it ought to be, the transitional is not the space of safety where the subject can never be harmed. It is the space where the teddy bear, the parent, and the analyst may very well be the originators of aggression as much as they are its recipients and/or the targets of its persecutory projections. Of course, Winnicott was quite aware of the found object’s ability, and at times indeed responsibility, to frustrate and inflict what the subject will justifiably experience as an injury perpetrated by that object. However, Winnicott also held that such an injury must make sense and have a purpose, that it must be “optimal” according to the clever coinage of some of his North American followers. Presumably, once she has recovered from her “primary maternal preoccupation” , a mother ought not do all the right things at the right moments and without failure otherwise she will limit her child’s developmental options to either permanent merger or total rejection; similarly, it is the analyst’s responsibility to deploy the objective counter-transference, even if it is negative, as an indispensable guideline for analytic intervention. Whatever its harm, and in the mind of the one that carries it out at least, the injury in such circumstances is recuperated and redeemed as but a necessary misfortune for the sake of a greater gain. However, the over-determination of dreams, and hence of the transitional space, is slightly less reasonable, less harmless, and less convenient than such a calculus; it has not quite suffered, not fully and not yet, the censorial machinations of secondary revision; everything in it is not necessarily intelligible or good, and some of it may actually have no utility whatsoever. This, after all, is the space of illusion as it encompasses everything from lying and addiction to art and religion.

Much, it seems, happens in limbo. It is hardly just a junkyard for the un-found or the de-found; it is a treasure trove, a found if you will, of all that has yet to be found, or found again, and the very site that gives finding its occasion. Limbo is the pile of second hand goods, theories, facts, toys, hallucinations, of, in sum, all that is often mistaken as rubbish and relegated to the periphery, the outskirt, or the basement; it is precisely all that psychoanalysis rediscovers as memories, constructions, wishes, objects, demands, as, in sum, associations at the heart of the unconscious. Though Winnicott may have deployed the term in its most quotidian usage and thereby wished to sever it from its aetiology, or sever it again after Henri VIII had severed England’s ties with Roman Catholicism and Freud had severed psychoanalysis from all “illusion,” limbo as the middle ground remains a peculiarly evocative term. Aside from its echoes to the transitional space, limbo is the territory reserved for those in the afterworld who are neither sinners nor saints but who do merit redemption, for those on earth who are neither psychotic nor healthy but who can benefit from a cure, and, last but not least, for the members of the Middle Group in the British Psycho-Analytical Society who are neither Freudian nor Kleinian (or perhaps it should be the other way around) but who qualify for the title of psychoanalyst.

Much, it seems, thrives in limbo.

The Psychoanalysis of Irrelevance

May 1, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Limbo, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Transitionals, Winnicott

Picking up from where I left off in the previous post, there is little that’s comfortable or funny for an analyst to consider the possibility of having to dispense with the very practice that has been enlivening in the most fundamental of ways, personally and professionally. For most of us, analysis has been an animated and animating practice, a perspective and a procedure that have withstood some of our most demanding idealisations and harshest critiques, and a discipline that has given us a solid sense of who we are in the world, of how we can contribute to it, and of how we do matter in it. The thought that, at the end of the day, analysis, by its own nature rather than through, say, conquest or attrition, will have to come to nought is deeply unsettling.

Armed with the idea of a “life without analysis,” some detractors may be all to eager to declare, yet again, the irrelevance of psychoanalysis and to bury once and for all, but yet again, a practice that seems to contain within its very logic the necessity of its demise. If only things were that simple. Winnicott equips us with a tool that functions both within and without the analytic situation, a tool that allows us to pursue the relevance of psychoanalysis in light of the found object, which is to say to track the discipline’s relevance to the limit and hence to the point of its irrelevance. It is with that very same tool that we can and certainly must reconsider psychoanalytically the very notion of irrelevance itself, of how it has been conceived and practiced, of its scope and dynamics, and of, I believe, the radicalising effect Winnicott’s approach can have on it.

In principle, an object’s irrelevance is the outcome of the subject’s indifference to it, of the experience that neither its presence nor its absence deters that subject from a task or influences his or her function and position. Irrelevance is the limit a specific subject imposes on an object’s ability to make a difference at a given point in time and in a given context. Irrelevance then is a situational effect that the object must suffer rather than an inherent characteristic it may demonstrate. It is in the nature of its experience of this indifference and its response to it that the object manifests its more salient features: the extent of its vulnerability, its endurance, its need for the occasional reprieve, or, ultimately, the measure and quality of its investment in the relationship to the subject by which it is being made irrelevant.

If such a definition rings true, then “irrelevance” here is more in line with what Winnicott had identified as the found object’s capacity to survive whatever attributes the subject projects into it (reality, passivity, vitality) and whatever treatment the subject heaps upon it (possessiveness, affection, love, mutilation, hate, aggression) (TOTP, 233). Irrelevance is therefore not a discrete quality that the found object, or any other object for that matter, may or may not exhibit; it is inevitably bound up with that object’s resilience, with its ability to sustain its existence in the face of whatever may come its way—be it love, hate, or, perhaps especially, indifference.

When Winnicott speaks of the found object’s irrelevance, or, more accurately, of that aspect of the object I am choosing to label “irrelevance,” he is accounting for the requirement that, in the course of years, the found object be decathected, that it be “not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo” (TOTP, 233). The deployment of the image of limbo as the eternal in-between evokes that other earthly, human, and perhaps humane in-between by which Winnicott’s theoretical imagination, as much as his clinical concern, had been captured: the transitional. Wedged in between the heaven of hallucination, of instant and boundless gratification, and the hell of empirical reality, of helplessness and frustration, it would seem as if the transitional is a timeless and irrelevant “neither here nor there” in which no reasonable person would want to fall or get trapped. (Limbo is hardly the hoped for destination for one’s self, loved ones, or even enemies; it is heaven and hell that tend to be the choice spots.) As the drab and sense-less landscape that has been stripped of all desire and anticipation, as the endlessly grey atmosphere of apathy and unresponsiveness, limbo, it would seem, is the home of pure neutrality. While some clinicians have mistaken this neutrality for the epitome of analytic rigour, Winnicott’s transitional could not be located any further from such a dwelling. Or it is, but only from the point of view of those looking onto it from either side, those that are in heaven or hell, in hallucination or empirical reality, those that would like to sustain an attitude of indifference toward it, strip it of its ability to make any difference, and ultimately dismiss it as irrelevant.

I would like to take a few steps backwards before I go any further. My guide is the implication that the notion of the found object has for the practice of psychoanalysis, specifically for the principle of neutrality with which every analyst is vested by virtue of his or her having been “sufficiently” analysed. With Winnicott, neutrality is no longer just an imperative to neither correct nor direct but a fourfold responsibility with which every analyst must be charged:

  • first, to provide the basic context and tools for the analysand to move through the so-called intermediate space, at least for the duration of a session;
  • second, to keep as close a company as possible to the analysand’s movements in that space and hence limit the interventions to what is nowadays referred to as the “experience near”;
  • third, to keep watch over that space’s porous boundaries with its adjoining territories and encourage only as much or as little as is “enough” to seep through them;
  • and, finally, fourth, to provide an interpretation that will help the analysand transform whatever does seep through into a found object, i.e., into something other than an inevitable fact or an intractable phantasy.

In this context, analytic neutrality is an unambiguous endorsement of the intermediate space between empirical reality and hallucination, an active involvement in that space’s sustenance, and a continued participation in its inner workings. Rather than the silence of objectivity or the impartiality of disinterest, neutrality is a “Yes” to the investment in love, aggression, indifference, displacement, in the animated and unscripted, and a “No” to the collusion with, and the subjection to, the rigid demands of science (as observation and universality) and mythology (as confabulation and uniqueness). Is it any wonder that the practice that advocates such neutrality might not be welcomed, let alone tolerated, and that instead it be relegated to the status of the “irrelevant” by both science and mythology?

I do not mean to suggest here that the history of psychoanalysis is the history of a movement that has steadfastly resisted any and all heavenly aspirations; far from it. In fact, and as much as each and every analyst has been required to abide by the basic principle of neutrality and assume the position of analyst, as opposed to all the other possible ones (of parent, judge, doctor, or mentor for instance), he/she has been enjoined, repeatedly, uncritically, to think of him/herself as anything but an analyst (as a good-enough mother, a benign super-ego, a purveyor of health, or an expert tradesman), of, correspondingly, the work as anything but an analysis (as a nurture, an acquittal, a cure, or an apprenticeship), and, finally, of his or her function as anything but an analysing (as a feeding, a sentencing, a treating, or a teaching). This is the primary dilemma that has plagued psychoanalysis: to assume the instrumental position of a bridge to a healthier, freer, truer existence while holding itself up as the healthiest, freest, truest, to, in other words, privilege the mutability of the transitional without relinquishing its aspiration for the durability of the extreme—in health, freedom, or truth. Much as other disciplines and practices (including pedagogy, religion, science, and medicine) may have suffered the same dilemma, none is as vulnerable to its unsettling effects as the tradition that counts itself the model of unwavering reflexivity and introspection.

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