Some Reflections on Robert Bosnak's “Embodied Imagination”
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(2003). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 39:697-710 On Being One's Dream: Some Reflections on Robert Bosnak's “Embodied Imagination” Philip M. Bromberg, Ph.D. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravel'd world … —Tennyson's Ulysses, 1842 When seen within the model of embodied imagination, psyche is not a single world. In embodiment, soul mirrors manifold worlds.… Even when they lie dormant.… they are present as a multiplicity of existences.… [A] multiplicity of subjectivities is the norm, not the pathology.… From this perspective, the main task of imaginal work is to let the variety of selves be aware of one another by networking them through the craft of imagination. In this model, a person with a multiple personality disorder is one who does not fathom the multiplicity of embodied imagination, and so is condemned to live out each self, oblivious to the simultaneous coexistence of dormant other selves. [Bosnak, this issue, p. 688]. TO SAY that I am a great admirer of Robert Bosnak is no secret to anyone familiar with my writing (Bromberg, 1999, 2000, 2003) following my first exposure to “dreamwork” through his ground-breaking book, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming (Bosnak, 1996). My admiration embraces not only his ideas about the untapped potential of the individual human mind, but equally his deep sense of purpose that leads him to test and shape these ideas by his actions in the real world, not simply “inside his head.” As did Harry Stack Sullivan (1953, 1964), Robert Bosnak believes that an individual can be truly known (or healed) only through engaging the multiplicity of self-other representations that shape his identity, including those contributed by the history of his culture. Thus his boundless passion for directly embedding himself in ancient societies in a way that most psychoanalysts (myself included) would be WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 697 - unlikely to put into action even if seriously considered—personally encountering the roots of dreamwork in remote civilizations and ancient epochs in human evolution where the permeability of boundaries between self and other have been a cultural given. So, perhaps it would be more honest to say that I'm not simply an admirer, but that a part of me still hanging around from boyhood—a part that in grown-up imagery might be called an Indiana Jones wannabe—yearns to go with him. That being said, let me attend, safely, to my piece of the dialogue. Joseph Campbell, I have been told, defined heroic deeds as comprising two types. The more familiar reading represents the hero as someone willing to courageously sacrifice his own life for the sake of a righteous cause or to spare the life of an other. The second presents the hero as one who has devoted himself to a spiritual quest, during the course of which he discovers hitherto unknown potential in the realm of human endowment and returns with a message. Robert Bosnak, in a quest that took him to the prehistoric caves of France, the outback of Australia (Bosnak, 1996), and the interior of the dreamworld, is in my view a “hero” in the latter sense. He has brought us to the threshold of being able to relate to dreams in a way that requires us to go beyond the theories that explain what we already know is possible. Bosnak's journeys have led him to enter cultures and remains of cultures that predate contemporary civilization, and return with a message that, fascinatingly, is similar to that brought back by Campbell himself. Though not studying the “dream” per se, Campbell's studies, like Bosnak's own quest, took him similarly to the prehistoric caves of France and the outback of Australia, where he arrived at conclusions that parallel those of Bosnak and, when the two are taken together, offer us a powerful message about the nature of human consciousness as an evolutionary phenomenon. The first Cro-Magnon skull was found in the Dordogne in France and dated from around 18,000 b. c. during the Magdalenian period (the same broad era represented by the paleolithic cave site explored by Bosnak and his companions). According to Campbell (1990, p. 12), the skull is believed to be that of the man who did “those beautiful works of art in those great caves.” Campbell then goes on: In the great cave of Lascaux, in the Dordogne … there is a frieze of animals. On the left corner there is this strange beast with these strange horns. No animal in the world looks like that, and yet these artists painted them WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 698 - in a way that no one's been able to paint them since. So what did they have in mind here? We will go to Australia. It is remarkable the continuity from these caves to Australia and what we can find. Here is an Australian elder in a ritual costume with the same “pointing sticks,” as they are called there.… The pointing stick is a negative phallus; instead of generating, it kills. With certain whispered magical charms it is pointed between the legs at the enemy, and the enemy will then be killed by being ripped open from the rectum to the genitals. At Lascaux, in the crypt, a lower chamber, a famous image appears. This is definitely a shaman. He's got the masked head of a bird on his baton de commandement. Here is the erect phallus, the negative phallus, the pointing stick; and by a miracle a lance has struck through the animal master here, which is a bison, and opened up his guts exactly as the pointing stick would have worked. The bison is invoked in the name of the covenant, animals giving their lives willingly through the power of the shaman. [pp. 16-18; emphasis added] It is hard not to think here of Berthe's bull giving up its “life” willingly—to become Berthe—in the name of the same covenant that led the bison to become one with man. Campbell's understanding of this seemingly “primitive” covenant clearly overlaps with Bosnak's understanding of embodied imagination as it takes place in dreamwork. In Campbell's words, We're in a magical field. When you go into a cathedral today, you are in a magical field. And the men who are in there are not this individual, that individual, another individual, they are in a role. They are the experiences of the energy of nature coming through them.… The imagery is that of dream. The imagery is that of myth. The imagery is that of reference to transcendence.… Here is a Maori chieftan.… His whole body is tatooed.… the stained glass windows and incense and all have been imprinted on him. He's in the cathedral all the time, you might say. His life is that of a mythological role. [pp. 18-20; emphasis added] Magical field, dream space, embodied imagination, potential space, transitional space, the analytic third—each a slightly different version of our efforts to symbolize in language what we cannot not yet fully comprehend. But is this not the essence of how we continue to evolve? In chapter I of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) suggested that waking and sleeping realities may not be as experientially unbridgable as one believes them to be when awakening from a dream, but the implications WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 699 - of his insight were not subsequently pursued by Freud with respect to working with dreams in the analytic process. He wrote, “The unsophisticated waking judgment of someone who has just woken from sleep assumes that his dreams, even if they themselves did not come from another world, had at all events, carried him off into another world” (p. 7). “Thus the dream experience appears as something alien inserted between two sections of life which are perfectly continuous and consistent with each other” (p. 10). Historically, most analysts have tended not to see a patient as potentially able to “re-enter” in a session what Freud called “another world,” and thereby access the self-state of “dreamer” without losing the one of “patient.” For the most part, analysts have tended to collude with their patient's waking experience of a dream as something alien. Erich Fromm (1951, p. 8), in The Forgotten Language, commented on how certain dreams are disturbing because “they do not fit the person we are sure we are during daytime,” a theme that was developed further by Charles Rycroft (1979), who stated that “dreams are messages from parts of the self of which the waking self is unaware” (p. 106; emphasis added). Bosnak is in the process of taking this to its next step. With him, I believe that a dream, in its essence, is a nonlinear reality and must be related to as such— not as a kind of story or a kind of movie, but as a real space in which the patient has been.