Illuminated Silhouettes—Freud, Bion and “I”: Psychoanalysis; Footnotes
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Illuminated Silhouettes—Freud, Bion and “I”: Psychoanalysis; Footnotes and a First-Person Work Derek Pyle Hampshire College A Division III May 2013 Annie Rogers & Mary Russo Contents Thoughts, Introduced 2 Acknowledgements.……………………………………………………………….3 1. Unconscious as Undifferentiated.………………………………………………5 2. Disturbing the Mental Life, Part I: Sleep.…………………………………….19 3. Disturbing the Mental Life, Part II: A “Revolutionary Hypothesis”.…………31 4. The Alimentary Model: An Application of Bion .…………………………….52 5. Thomas Ogden’s Dream………………………………………………………73 6. Meaning, Hot & Alive .……………………………………………………….87 7. Text as Transmission, Part I: Bion..………………………………………….100 8. Text as Transmission, Part II: Joyce…………………………………………113 References………………………………………………………………………135 Experience, Dreamt 151 1. Meeting Dr. Nelson…………………………………………………………..153 2. Appetite for Destruction……………………………………………………..165 3. The Joker……………………………………………………………………..183 4. (empty spaces) ………………………………………………………….197 5. The Watcher …………………………………………………………………205 6. What Remains………………………………………………………………..211 Endnotes..……………………………………………………………………….220 Thoughts, Introduced This Division III work exists in two parts, but I do not mean to use one to comment on the other. Rather, I see the different alleys of both parts lying along side each other to form a city, the way one analytic session relates to the others along nonlinear, weaving lines, creating a wildly incomplete “whole.” This purported whole does not represent some kind of resolution, but appears in the flux of some loose-ended associational process.1 I also imagine here an ever-present eclipse, following each person like a shadow. No matter where we look, no matter how hard we look, what if we could only see the peripheral light surrounding darkness? Would we even recognize that dark center as eclipsed? It seems inevitable that we will take this peripheral light as the sun itself; it is the continual process of re-directing our eye to the dark, over and over, that interests me. This is the work of analysis, which I here write about not from the perspective of analyst, but from the other side of the couch. In that sense, both the theoretical and experiential aspects of this Division III ask only the questions of a dreamer, dreaming life anew. 1 In this work the rolling joke, of course, is the footnotes—I often thought to a question proposed by David Dodd (2007) in an online introduction to his Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics: I've always wondered what would happen if, every time you ran into any kind of reference to a book or a person or a work of art you weren't familiar with, you had to go find out about that thing before you continued with what you were doing: would you ever finish anything? (Introduction to the Project, para. 6) Acknowledgements Thinking back to the year before my Division III began, I am indebted to Professors Lourdes Mattei and Gail Hornstein, for the ways in which working with them inspired the present endeavor. It was during two independent studies with Lourdes that I first discovered my capabilities for exploring analytic theory in the context of in-depth literature reviews; it was truly a pleasure working with her, and I benefited greatly from her vast theoretical knowledge within contemporary and classical psychoanalysis. Taking Professor Hornstein’s literature-psychology course, First-Person Narratives of Madness, impacted me in two powerful and related ways. Professor Hornstein encouraged us not to simply accept the theoretical perspectives espoused by doctors (including psychoanalysts) about what “madness” is. It was Professor Hornstein’s deep respect for first-person experience that inspired me to write of my own experiences, in what became the second half of this Division III. (In this same regard Annie Roger’s book, The Unsayable, also impacted me in a great way, and in turn provided the courage for me to write some of my own story, and it has been a real pleasure to work with someone I respect so much as my committee chair.) Professor Hornstein’s class also marked the first time I was really pushed to engage with literature in an academic way; she required us to read a book a week, demanding thoughtful reading. Likewise, taking classes from and working with Mary Russo, my committee member, helped me to further develop my process of literary analysis. I am grateful for Mary’s candor, providing a kind of honesty that was by turns painful, humorous, and encouraging, but always valuable. She was a wonderful complement to Annie’s somewhat quiet demeanor. It was a real pleasure to meet so frequently with both Annie and Mary; during the many cloudy days of this year’s long winter, the three of us would gather in Annie’s office to think and drink “real tea,” meanwhile laughing often. Annie and Mary provided incredibly useful feedback throughout this process. They showed great flexibility in accommodating the winding whims of my work. I certainly plan to stay in touch, but will nonetheless miss working in such close capacity with them. I would like to further thank the real-life Dr. Nelson and Dr. Reynolds (whose names’ here have been changed). They have been great guides, helping me charter the waters of Lethe, except this time away from hell; in this respect I am also indebted to the fearlessness of Michael Meade and Heather Sundberg. I am likewise thankful to Hampshire staff like Liza and Araiña, and to Hampshire friends like Gabby, Arianna, and Jake; and to Emma and Marie, who provided valuable comments on the fledging versions of my (at the time, quite self-conscious) writing. Lastly, I need to thank my parents, whom without, very little of the past eight years would have been possible. 5 1. Unconscious as Undifferentiated Requiring a tolerance for roundabout proceedings, this paper revolves around a series of images, surrounding an important question: how does one make an analytic interpretation about that which is not conscious? I propose that meaning is not set-in- stone, simply waiting to be revealed.2 It is the application of this notion, directed toward the individual psyche, which is one of the key clinical contributions of psychoanalysis.3 What does that look like? I hope that is clearer in my creative work, but as Bion once said to an analysand: I have just given you an interpretation about your anxiety, and you seem to feel that it was correct, but in fact we shall never know the source of it. It is not to be known. We can only approximate it—or really, learn what it is not. (Bion, as cited in Grotstein, 2007, p. 32) This work of approximation and “learning what it is not” is difficult to explain theoretically—but not entirely impossible—because in the course of analysis it is a 2 As an intellectual idea, this may seem obvious. But in our personal lives we are continually duped by that which seems obvious, and it is this realization—I have hitherto been duped by unconscious smokescreens— that leads a person to undergo analysis (to understand the meaning of particular symptoms). In other words, the problem may start with I know what this means—the problem may be rooted in that which seems certain (and is therefore static), as conscious narrative works to hide that which is unconscious. On the other hand, implicitly operating as if meaning were “set-in-stone” relates to the kind of object-based mental functioning that I address in later essays. 3 My paper also addresses a lay audience here, wherein the general (dismissive) opinion is that psychoanalysis does work with meaning as set-in-stone (i.e. by uncovering repressed material). This paper lends itself to a more contemporary understanding of the unconscious, wherein repressed material is no longer of central importance: whereas psychic material can only be repressed if it is first formulated (conscious), I am here concerned with unconscious psychic material that is unformulated (and has therefore never been formulated). 6 process that takes hour upon hour, adding up to many years.4 Donnel Stern (19835) does well to explain this constructive aspect of psychoanalysis, which can feel like building a house atop swampland: When a patient is finally about to think about a previously unaccepted part of life, seldom are fully formulated thoughts simply waiting to be discovered, ready for exposition. Instead, what is usually experienced is a kind of confusion—a confusion with newly appreciable possibilities, and perhaps an intriguing confusion, but a confusion or a puzzle nevertheless. Unconscious clarity rarely underlies defense. On the evidence of our observations of them as they emerge in awareness, the perceptions, ideas, and memories we prefer not to have, the observations we prefer not to make, are most often murky and poorly defined, different in kind than they will be when the process of completion has progressed to the level of words. (p. 71) This is quite different from the cartoonish image of an all-knowing psychoanalyst-oracle who simply cures by revealing the patient’s unconscious “secrets.” Whereas countless Psych101 professors (and subsequently, their students) have accused psychoanalysis of rather crudely interpreting everything as an unconscious manifestation 4 In the present paper I do not discuss how it is that was formerly unconscious unfolds over time (and is therefore difficult to explanation succinctly). Nonetheless I hope that in the present collection of papers, my style of writing (along with creative work) can transmit some spirit of this particularized unfolding process. 5 Although I make only one direct reference to the work of Donnel Stern in the present paper, my thinking here is indebted to his 1983 paper “Unformulated Experience, —From Familiar Chaos to Creative Disorder.” I would also refer the reader to Stern’s later (2003) theoretical developments in this arena, as found in his book Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis.