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Reflexivity

Finding, reflexively

November 15, 2011
Finding, Insight, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Winnicott

“Finding” is almost always reciprocal, doubled, as the subject is incorporated into the structures that belong to the object it has found and is made to fit that object’s requirements and/or concerns. One is said to be gripped by an idea, defined—for better and for worse—by his or her membership in a family, a group, a profession, an institution, or a nation, and transformed through care and responsibility for or outright servitude to another subject or object.

That the subject finds itself being “found” by the other is no mere intellectual manoeuvre. The reciprocity here undermines the otherwise convenient notion of active autonomy implicit in the very sense that the subject tends to have of itself. In the best of all possible scenarios, such reciprocity opens up for the subject the prospect of finding itself and becoming its own found object, of experiencing itself as neither a self-fashioned hallucination nor a cog in the vast machinery that is external reality, but as a subject that is animated and resilient, even, and perhaps most especially, when confronted with the prospect of its own inevitable diffusion.

It is this reflexivity that distinguishes genuine understanding from simple explanation—in other words, introspection, psychoanalytic and otherwise, from what is merely inwardly directed truth, regardless of whether such truth is grounded in a self-serving delusion or in the presumably most authoritative and verifiable of meta-psychological principles. It is this reflexivity that invests introspection with the quality of an integral, dynamic, and mutative knowledge.

Winnicott and Deleuze/Guattari: premise for a new project

September 13, 2011
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Found Object, Freud, Guattari, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Transitionals, Winnicott

I want to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s double-sided interrogation: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Anti-Oedipus, F8, E3).

Such an interrogation has fed its authors’ insistence on the primacy of a “machinic production” for human nature, a production for which the greatest threat is the distorting transformation of its status from a fundament into a goal, from a process that deploys its productions, registrations, and consumptions along typically unpredictable lines, which is to say, from a process that plays, dreams, and associates, as Winnicott understood these terms, into a stagnant and interminable “wreck” (AO, F11, E5) that can only “fantasy” and “dissociate” in its struggle for self-perpetuation and propagation.

This is one of a number of links and relays that I would like to pursue between the presumably post-Freudian project of Winnicott and the supposedly anti-Freudian project of Deleuze and Guattari.

My investment is not in a history of psychoanalytic ideas that hopes to bridge the divide between the French and the British, each a tradition that, for the most part, has thrived on recognising its other only to dispute its legitimacy as fantasmatic and/or mundane, on, in other words, dissociating itself from that other, a history, and by extension a methodology, that would invariably, righteously, grant itself the status of an integration or incorporation that is greater, wiser, or truer than both.

Nor is my investment in exposing and clarifying the ways in which each of these two traditions is, after all and presumably, a metaphor for, or, better still, the metamorphosing outcome of the other. I would much rather spare both my Winnicottian and Deleuzo-Guattarian readers the disappointment and/or irritation of witnessing their distinctive perspectives and strongly held convictions dismissed as the derivatives of some previously or elsewhere more convincingly elaborated views.

Nor do I hope to facilitate a triumphal coupling of the two sets of disparate texts and strategies with the aim of producing a clinical and/or meta-psychological offshoot—-a strange beast indeed—-that is part Winnicottian and part Deleuzo-Guattarian, part post- and part anti-, forever honouring, which is also to say forever hemmed in by, its provenance and heritage.

Nor, lastly, is my investment in a utopian “in-between” that has gripped much of the imagination amongst contemporary readers of both Winnicott and Deleuze and Guattari, an “in-between” whose advocates, I suspect, must forever struggle to keep from drowning in the treacherous waters of the Oceanus Britannicus. On this score, and though the notion of a topographical “in-between” seems to be precisely what brings both projects in line with one another, I find the Winnicottian transitional and the Deleuzo-Guattarian intermezzo, when considered primarily as psychological topographies, to be particularly sparse and unyielding. Moreover, and just as the found object for Winnicott is an experience rather than an “object” that needs to be itemised and localised, I would like to suggest that the transitional and the intermezzo are a playing and a bricolage, a basic form of living (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 50) and a handyman’s tinkering (AO, F7, E1) that have little to do with spaces or locations that ought to be mapped, striated, and/or bound, and everything to do with events, processes, and experiences that are lived. Ditto for the “in-between.”

My investment is primarily in re-posing the question of found object and play and of machine and effect, while doubling its data, so to speak. Given two machines, each with its specific set of clinical and theoretical procedures, what can their juxtaposition be used for and what effects can that juxtaposition be made to produce? At stake here is a process that treats of dynamic effects as much as it treats of developmental causes, of potential products as much as of hidden aetiologies, and of eventual deployments as much as of retrograde analyses. Ultimately, my hope in posing this question is that these effects, products, and deployments may not only communicate to us hitherto unexplored yet constitutive theoretical and/or clinical components about either Winnicott or Deleuze and Guattari, but that they may also shed a new light on, if not indeed instantiate desire, and, in the process, allow us to do with that desire, or do with it differently, as much as it does with us.

In positing this reflexive implication, I take my cue from the “machines” I am considering, insofar as each, in its own way, has more or less relinquished as artificial and ineffectual the distinction between the functions of theory and practice, observer and observed, analyst and analysand. Indeed, by the end of his career, Winnicott was quite unequivocal when he declared that psychoanalysis “has to do with two people playing together” (PTS, 38), that such a doing takes place “in the overlap of the two play areas, that of the patient and that of the therapist” (“Playing”, 54), that, in other words, psychoanalysis has little to do with one subject developing, interpreting, or correcting another subject’s experience according to some externally pre-elaborated path toward truth or health, and everything to do with the playing that occurs “in between” these two subjects. Winnicottian psychoanalysis is therefore as much a practice as it is a theory of transitionality; it is therefore as invested in consolidating and legitimising an Ego, a Self, or a Subject, be it true or false, as a found object could be said to consolidate or legitimise a reality, be it hallucinatory or concrete.

Similarly, and equally forcefully, Deleuze and Guattari identified the principal task of their analytic orientation (which they termed “schizoanalysis”) as the dismantling of the distinction between a subject that emits a statement and a subject about or on behalf of whom, or which, a statement is emitted (AO, F323-324, E271). In schizoanalysis, there is no subject that imparts to another its accomplishments in knowledge, health, or experience; there is only an analytic machine that is neither an imaginary projection, as phantasy, nor a real projection, as cure, but a recurring factor of production among parts (associations, syntheses, subjectivities) functioning alongside one another and under specific clinical conditions. These are the gears that create new gears alongside preceding ones, indefinitely, even if, or even as they seem to function in discordant or opposing ways. As Deleuze and Guattari have summed it up, “That which makes a machine [the schizoanalytic sine qua non] are connections, all the connections that operate the disassembly” (Kafka, 84).

That something may be gained from elaborating a relationship between these Deleuzo-Guattarian connections and the Winnicottian transitional, between, in other words, the machine and the found object, that such a relationship can be productive precisely because it is as fractious and abrasive as it may be smooth, that, in other words, the friction between the presumably incongruous concepts and orientations may set off a spark capable of shedding light on hitherto unexplored territories, these are the principle assumptions motivating the project.

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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