Psychic Deadness

Citation preview

PSYCHIC DEADNESS

M I C H A E L

E I G E N

PSYCHIC DEADNESS

PSYCHIC DEADNESS

Michael Eigen, Ph.D.

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First published in 1996 by Jason Aronson Inc., NJ, USA

Reprinted in 2004 with the author's permission by H. Karnac (Books) Ltd, 118 F i n c h l e y Road, London NW3 5HT

Copyright © 2004 by Michael Eigen

The rights of Michael Eigen to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted in accordance with §§77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CLP. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN; 978 1 85575 386 0 www.karnacbooks. com

Printed & bound by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne

T o all who strive to make this w o r l d a place the heart can live i n . *

* This dedication is inspired by Edward Dahlberg's, Can These Bones Live.

Come f r o m the f o u r winds, O breath, and breathe u p o n these slain, that they may live. Ezekiel 37:9

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

PART ONE: THEORETICAL SOUNDINGS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Psychic Death The Destructive Force Goodness and Deadness Bion's N o - t h i n g M o r a l Violence Two Kinds of N o - t h i n g The Area o f Freedom: The Point o f N o Compromise

PART TWO: CLINICAL PROBES 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

The I m m o r a l Conscience The Counterpart , Counterparts i n a Couple From Attraction to Meditation Primary Process and Shock Being T o o Good I n Praise of Gender Uncertainty Emotional Starvation Disaster Anxiety W i n n i n g Lies

xi xiii

1 3 25 37 45 49 55 69

89 91 101 115 127 139 149 159 173 187 201

18 Boa and Flowers

213

Epilogue

225

Credits Index

227 229

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the editors who published some o f these chapters i n journals and books while this work was i n progress: Jerome Travers, Mark Stern, Otto Weininger, Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Chris Farhood, Jay Greenberg, Stephen Levine, Emmanuel Ghent, Stephen Mitchell, and M a r t i n Rock. W r i t i n g a book like this becomes more tolerable when one feels there are people who want to read it. W o r k i n g w i t h psychic deadness is, at best, difficult, and it helps to have lines o f communication "out there." Many people have asked me to speak o n this s u b j e c t — t o o many to mention. But please know that I am grateful for these opportunities and that I think o f you. T h e g o o d words o f many colleagues—including Jessica Benjamin, Mark Epstein, M a r i o n M i l n e r , A r t Robbins, Jeff Seinfeld, Adam Phillips, and H a r o l d Boris—have fueled faith i n work that thrives i n dark nights. Members of my seminars and my patients provide daily b r e a d — t h e challenges and the stimu­ lations that nourish life. So do my wife, Betty, a n d my c h i l d r e n , without w h o m none o f my books could have been written.

Introduction

IV^any i n d i v i d u a l s t o d a y seek h e l p b e c a u s e t h e y feel d e a d . A sense o f i n n e r d e a d n e s s m a y persist i n a n o t h e r w i s e f u l l a n d m e a n i n g f u l l i f e . D e a d n e s s c a n b e r e l a t e d t o e m p t i n e s s a n d m e a n i n g l e s s n e s s , b u t is n o t i d e n t i c a l w i t h t h e m . I have seen i n d i v i d u a l s w h o a r e f i l l e d w i t h e m o t i o n s a n d m e a n i n g , b u t s o m e h o w r e m a i n u n t o u c h e d by t h e i r experiences. T h e y r e m a i n impervious a n d i m m u n e t o t h e p o t e n t i a l r i c h n e s s o f w h a t t h e y u n d e r g o . T h e y c o m p l a i n o f a deadness t h a t persists i n t h e m i d s t o f p l e n t y . S a m , d e s c r i b e d i n C h a p t e r 12, " P r i m a r y Process a n d S h o c k , " c h a n g e d ca­ reers f r o m science t o w r i t i n g i n a n a t t e m p t t o b r e a k t h r o u g h h i s deadness. H e f e l t t h a t science e x a c e r b a t e d a n i n n e r d e a d n e s s a n d h o p e d p o e t r y a n d f i c t i o n w o u l d h e l p h i m c o m e alive. T o h i s c h a g r i n , h e l e a r n e d t h a t o n e c o u l d b e d e a d as a w r i t e r t o o . H e h a d g i r l f r i e n d s a n d e m o t i o n s g a l o r e . W h e n h e w r o t e , h i s b e i n g was s a t u r a t e d w i t h m e a n i n g . H e m a d e h i s w r i t i n g s b r i s t l e w i t h t h e alive­ ness h e w i s h e d h e h a d . H i s w o r k c a m e alive, b u t i n h i s p e r s o n t h e deadness c o n t i n u e d . H e gave t o h i s w r i t i n g s w h a t h e w i s h e d he c o u l d have. S a m ' s l i f e was n o t a h o r r o r story. H e l i v e d a g o o d l i f e blessed w i t h m a n y advantages, p h y s i c a l h e a l t h , m e n t a l gifts, a n d t a l e n t s . H i s p a r e n t s c a r e d f o r h i m , t r i e d t o n u r t u r e h i m . S a m f e l t t h e y o v e r d i d i t . H e p i c t u r e d h i s m o t h e r as sexu­ a l l y s e d u c t i v e a n d h i s f a t h e r as a r a g i n g b a b y , a l t h o u g h t h e y w e r e b o t h profes­ s i o n a l p e o p l e w h o s h o w e d c o m p e t e n t a n d w e l l - m e a n i n g faces t o t h e w o r l d . T h e y t r i e d t o d o a g o o d j o b w i t h Sam too. T h e y c o u l d n o t realize w h a t a t o l l the daily b r e a k d o w n s o f t h e i r " o f f i c i a l selves" t o o k o n t h e i r c h i l d r e n , o r i f t h e y r e a l i z e d this, they were helpless t o stop. S a m ' s was n o t a case o f successful p a r e n t s b e i n g u n i n v o l v e d w i t h t h e c h i l ­ d r e n . I t was m o r e a case o f successful p a r e n t s w a n t i n g t o b e successful w i t h t h e i r c h i l d r e n t o o . T h e y p o u r e d themselves i n t o t h e i r c h i l d r e n l i k e they p o u r e d themselves i n t o t h e i r w o r k . H o w e v e r , t h e c h i l d r e n w e r e n o t able t o deal w i t h the f l o o d o f feelings that t h e parents p o u r e d i n t o t h e m . Sam's parents t r i e d to give h i m a l l t h e n o u r i s h m e n t t h e y w a n t e d themselves. I t was as i f S a m w e r e

xiv

Introduction

their proxy. They gave him what they wanted—or some version of what they imagined they wanted. I n their minds, Sam was getting everything they wanted to get. Most of all, he was getting them—vastly nourishing, giving, caring par­ ents. Sam was getting the childhood and parents they had always wanted. They tried to give Sam more than life could offer. Thus they lived beyond themselves emotionally, and broke down throughout the day. They could not be supernourishing beings. His father yelled so loudly at daily frustrations that Sam cringed with contempt and terror. His mother tried to cajole and seduce Sam out of his bad feelings. She could not tolerate his fear and hate. She needed a happy and successful child, one who thought the world of her. Her husband's rages were more than enough for her to deal with. Her child should give her pleasure. T o deal with a child's destructive urges seemed overwhelming: she tried to love and soft-talk them away. She was frequently depressed and weak. Her dreams of a perfect family were shattered, although she kept hoping things were better than they were. Sam learned the hard way and early that he would have to take care of him­ self emotionally, but he was not a very good substitute caretaker. He felt more depleted than nourished by his parents* attention and lacked the psychic equip­ ment to genuinely process their and his turbulence. He became smart and adept at scanning states of mind and developing verbal formulas for them. But the better he became at figuring out what others or he were feeling and why, the unhappier he felt. He could not buy happiness by becoming successful or smart or talented or caring, no more than his parents could. A sense of deadness developed as he grew into adulthood. At first, he could not believe it was there. He felt so much and had so much in life. How could he, who was so alive, so full, be dead? Yet the deadness did not go away. It be­ came persistent, and he monitored it. He put a mental barium tracer on it and could locate it virtually at will. In time, he did not have to look for it. It was in the background, spoiling his experiences. Against his will and outside his con­ scious control, he deadened himself as a form of self-protection, a shield he wished he did not have. He came to therapy for help in freeing himself from self-deadening processes. Sam is one example of a successful person feeling deadness in an otherwise pleasurable life. Mr. Y., described in Chapter 3, "Goodness and Deadness," is another. Like Sam, Mr. Y. lived an apparently good life from childhood on. He was a good student and athlete and was well liked by his peers. Unlike Sam, he felt his parents were too restrained in their display of attention and feel­ ings, although they were proud of his accomplishments. Whereas Sam felt his parents were overinvolved with him, Mr. Y. felt his were underinvolved. They cared for him, but were low keyed and reticent. They expected him to be the competent person he was. Sam grew up in a steamy and stormy emotional atmosphere, whereas Mr. Y. described a temperate, orderly one. Mr. Y. enjoyed his relatively easy life. People gravitated toward him, and things went his way. He was a "nice" guy, good at what he did. But he had long

Introduction

xv

been aware of a lack of passionate intensity, and as time went on, his tepid emotional life increasingly bothered him. For many years, the challenges of work and relationships kept him busy. But as he grew in status and position, his inner deadness grew in importance too. It was easier to advance in work and make new friends than to meet the deadness he feared could derail him. By the time I met him, he was beginning to feel that if he did not do some­ thing with the deadness within, nothing else he did would be worthwhile. People who meet Sam or Mr. Y. would not guess they are dead. In certain regards, they even seem enviable. Neither Sam nor Mr. Y. lacked friends or opportunities for self-realization. Not all people who have gone dead are so lucky. On the other end of the scale is Deborah, who looked like a corpse and is described in Chapter 1, "Psychic Death." She was living a horrible life and looked horrifying. No one would envy her. She seemed almost beyond help. Deborah was raised by professional parents in the suburbs, who alternately doted on her and attended to their careers. Deborah experienced extremes of parental attention and self-absorption, a mixture of emotionality and vacancy, of too much and too little. Many children are subjected to such a regime. Why did it take such a toll on Deborah? Are there more Deborahs, perhaps in less extreme form, than are realized? Deborah's very presence was a critique of a world that could produce her. Her corpse-like body seemed a cruel finger pointing at a world that did not know what to do with children. Her visage and bearing signaled meaningless, useless suffering without end. And yet she was looking for help. In spite of the death that possessed her, she was trying to find someone to help her or, per­ haps, someone to help her help herself. However, she was dangerously near the edge and was sliding. It was a real question whether she could find help before the end. Lucy was someone in between (see Chapter 10, "Counterparts in a Couple"). She found it difficult to partake of the pleasures of life, but she did feel deep joy. She feltjoy in her children, her art, her husband. But she also was depressed and was even more than depressed. A deep deadness threatened to suck up her existence. It often seemed that the deadness in her being was her most intimate companion. For many years, she felt most herself and knew herself best when she hid in the center of her deadness. She spent many sessions rag­ ing against her deadness and crying, but she never felt more at home than when she crawled into it and disappeared. In a way, she valued deadness more than life. We will see that, for someone like Lucy, deadness is not something that will go away. It is a very real counterpart to her existence, a part of her life. We can trace it back to a suppressed, sometimes depressed mother and a guilt­ inducing father. But her deadness has become a habit, away to soothe, i f also torment, herself. It has become second nature. Over the years, Lucy learned to use deadness as a source of nourishment. It would be cruel and wasteful for therapy to try to eradicate her deadness, her most intimate complaint and

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Introduction

f r i e n d . B u t therapy can help aliveness grow. What emerges is n o t an end to deadness, b u t a new and better movement between aliveness and deadness, a r h y t h m or oscillation. The psyche cannot do away w i t h its states, b u t i t can grow to make more r o o m for them. The above sampling of individuals plagued by deadness suggests that the sense o f deadness varies i n f o r m and background. I t can cripple an entire life or only part o f a life. I t occurs i n individuals who have been overstimulated or understimulated or a combination of the two: parents can erratically overstuff or deprive a c h i l d of emotional transmissions. Often a parent, especially the mother, has suffered depression, although it is n o t clear that this must be so. I n any case, understanding the background o f psychic deadness is n o t suffi­ cient to ameliorate it. For example, M r . Y. and Deborah had been i n various forms of analysis for years and had extensive understanding o f their psycho­ social backgrounds and personality patterns w i t h o u t o b t a i n i n g relief o f their deadness. O n the contrary, self-deadening processes increased over time for b o t h o f them and, i n Deborah's case, dangerously so. Some patients do benefit f r o m catching on to how they shut down i n face o f pain. The shutting-down process can sometimes be caught i n the act. Pa­ tients can be helped to connect shut down with distressing moments. Repeated failures i n relationships and work, a w o u n d i n g rejection or loss, f r i g h t e n i n g emotions that become destructive: many kinds and combinations o f precipi­ tants are possible. Often the therapy relationship becomes a k i n d o f labora­ tory, i n which varying states o f deadness-aliveness can be tied to what is going o n between patient and therapist as well as i n the patient's life. Nevertheless, understanding and practicing better response patterns do not do the trick with many individuals. T h e i r deadness tends to overwhelm under­ standing and resolve. For some individuals, whatever they do to help themselves gets lost i n the deadness. Something more or else is needed, and no treatment formulas may do. I n many cases, the growth o f knowledge must be coupled with adequate emotional transmission by the therapist. The emotional tone o f the therapy can be the most i m p o r t a n t element. Yet an atmosphere that works i n one case may n o t i n another, even when the background o f b o t h seem similar. I n the end, n o t h i n g may save the patient and therapist f r o m w o r k i n g to discover what the patient is l o o k i n g f o r — t h a t is, the precise c o m b i n a t i o n o f psychic n u t r i ­ ents, responses, attitudes, and tones required for a given individual, or even a given m o m e n t , so that a person can begin to open and the deadness may lift. A l t h o u g h theoretical and clinical formulas may add to the deadness, the vast reservoir o f theoretical ideas and clinical wisdom can be used as stimuli or probes or resources to sensitize one to issues and concerns i n a given case. I f theory is useless or even harmful without the "right" clinical tone or touch, one's tone and touch can become more finely nuanced and richly communicative i f i n f o r m e d by a background o f theoretical groping.

Introduction

xvii

There are so many psychological schools and theories today that it is useful to describe briefly the tapestry of ideas that inform my clinical intuitions. Thus the first part of this book "Theoretical Soundings," is devoted to sketches of m a j o r t h e o r i s t s w h o h a v e h a d the

m o s t to say to m e a b o u t p s y c h i c d e a d n e s s .

These chapters are not meant to be exhaustive, systematic explications. Rather, t h e y are soundings. At times t h e y become dialogues, reveries, arguments, q u e s ­ tions—part of a search to bring someone's thought to its limits, a search for what can be useful or enlightening or sensitizing. To an extent, a walk with any theorist is like walking the plank. Sooner or later we reach the end of the walk for now, with nothing l e f t but the l e a p into the ocean of l i f e . The second part of this book, Clinical Probes, portrays attempts to be in the ocean. It explores clinical realities with a variety of patients and brings out in detail what it is like to immerse oneself in work with psychic deadness and related problems. What happens when deadness lifts or fails to lift, and a person opens or fails to open? In these chapters patient and therapist struggle with factors that maintain psychic deadness, as they try to find and support whatever in a person seeks life. Some of these struggles are related to larger social realities as well as deeply personal ones. THEORETICAL SOUNDINGS The major theorists I write about in Part I are Freud, Klein, Bion, and Winnicott. These are authors I have wrestled with for many years and who themselves have wrestled with problems related to psychic deadness. Each of these authors has threads to pull that go in many directions, open many vistas. One cannot readily get to the bottom of their work: one exhausts oneself before exhausting them. After being immersed in the work of these authors and the terrible clinical realities with which they deal, popular representations of their thought seem appalling. At the same time, these authors have played a role in generating some of the most interesting recent writings on psychic deadness (Boris 1993, 1994, Emery 1992, Green 1986, Grotstein 1990a,b). O t h e r m a j o r w r i t e r s t h a t h a v e b e e n i m p o r t a n t to m e i n c l u d e L a c a n , Reich, J u n g , and Kohut. But limits m u s t be set, and I h a v e chosen for discussion a sampling of writers among those I use most, all of whom burrow deeply and fiercely into the deadness that many individuals bring to the consulting room today. Freud

Freud often seemed more interested in why psychoanalysis failed than in why it succeeded. In an amazing three pages, written near the end of his life, he flashes a kaleidoscopic array of images of therapeutic failure, clustered around an obscure inability or resistance to change (1937). He writes of people whose

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Introduction

libido is either too sticky or mobile, too slow or quick, to change objects, so that the growth of relationships is stillborn or short-circuited. He characterizes another group of individuals by an attitude that shows "a depletion of the plasticity, the capacity for change and further development." He says of this group that "all the mental processes, relationships and distributions of force are unchangeable, fixed and rigid." He associates images of "inertia" and "entropy" to this state of being. He notes that although once he thought of this inability to develop as "resistance from the id," he now envisions something more pervasive, if obscure: "some temporal characteristics are concerned—some alterations of a rhythm of development in psychical life we have not appreciated" (1937, p. 242). In yet another group of individuals, Freud has the impression of a "force which is defending itself by every means against recovery" ( 1937, p. 242). This force is something more than a sense of guilt and need for punishment. For Freud, it is traceable "back to the original death instinct of living matter" (1937, p. 243). Regardless of the questionable scientific status of Freud's concept of a death instinct, its poetic and heuristic power is striking. He no longer attributes widespread masochism, resistance to recovery, or even neurotic guilt to permutations of the pleasure principle. T h e fact that many people cling to suffering leads him to imagine a darker desire, wish, drive, or instinct: a pull or even flight toward death. T o be sure, Freud's work had always envisioned some push-pull of forces. Even on a bare neurological level, he early envisioned old brain excitations inhibited by cortical functions. Excitations had to be modulated, dampened, controlled, channeled, insulated: a barrier was required to regulate the flow of internalexternal stimuli and to protect against untoward surges and excitatory flooding. In his later writings he continues to refer to a tendency to tone down stimuli, even reduce stimuli to zero, a kind of on-off double movement in the psychoorganism: aliveness is increasing-decreasing at the same time toward its maximum-minimum. By the end of his life, the image of a psyche that could not change, that fought recovery, that succumbed to inertia and entropy, that was mired in useless suffering, that zeroed itself out, became prepossessing. His conceptual equipment may or may not be up to the task required by self-cancelling/nulling processes, but his writings circle around phenomena critical for us today. He focuses our gaze on an array of self-deadening processes and makes us wonder what we can do with them. Chapter 1 focuses on aspects of Freud's life and writings that give us a sense of what we are up against when we attempt to lift the deadness.

Ferenczi Almost as soon as Freud wrote of a death drive, Ferenczi (1929, p. 104) was quick to add that "aversion to life" can arise as a result of "signs of aversion or

Introduction

xi x

i m p a t i e n c e o n the par t o f the m o t h e r . " H e e m p h a s i z e s the effects o f early t r a u m a i n cases w h e r e life s e e m e d impossible . Yet, o n e o u g h t n o t oversimplify a n d polarize F r e u d a n d F e r e n c z i , p o i n t i n g to F r e u d ' s e m p h a s i s o n drives a n d F e r e n c z i ' s o n the quality o f care. S u c h a stark contrast w o u l d be unfai r a n d misleading . B o t h writers have extremel y c o m p l e x a n d s e a r c h i n g views o f what m a k e s a d e c e n t life possible. I n d e e d , F e r e n c z i feels that, becaus e o f the weight o f the d e a t h drive in infancy, m a t e r n a l c a r e is all the m o r e i m p o r t a n t . T h e c h i l d n e e d s s u p p o r t i n carryin g h i m o r h e r over into life. ' T h e c h i l d has to be i n d u c e d , by m e a n s o f a n i m m e n s e e x p e n d i t u r e o f love, tenderness , a n d care, to forgive his parents for havin g b r o u g h t h i m int o the w o r l d , " lest h e s u c c u m b to the destructive u n d e r t o w . F e r e n c z i depict s a state o f affairs i n w h i c h the p a r e n t s m u s t ally themselves with the life force o f the infant, lest it slip into the n o n b e i n g to w h i c h it is so close. A g o o d dea l o f weight is p l a c e d o n the p a r e n t s ' responsibilit y to mediate the infant's j o u r n e y into life, b u t the rewards also are great, since "tactful treatmen t a n d u p b r i n g i n g graduall y give rise to progressive i m m u n i z a t i o n against physical a n d psychica l i n j u r i e s " (1929 , p. 1 0 5 ) . F e r e n c z i ' s wor k forms a n i m p o r t a n t par t o f the b a c k g r o u n d given ne w turns by K l e i n , B i o n , a n d W i n n i c o t t . E a c h o f these author s digs d e e p int o processes that constitute "aversion to life." I m e n t i o n F e r e n c z i n o w becaus e h e stands as a b e a m o f light, explicitly e m p h a s i z i n g th e i m p o r t a n c e o f the analyst's love i n c o u n t e r a c t i n g destructive forces. F r e u d seem s to take this rol e o f the analyst for granted , a n d writes m o r e o f the in s a n d outs o f the patient's difficulties i n loving. H e does n o t e m p h a s i z e h o w the analyst's difficulties i n lovin g contribute to the destructive force i n treatment . Nevertheless, F e r e n c z i ' s e x p e r i m e n t s t e a c h us that love is no t e n o u g h . T e n d e r , tactful care i n the treatmen t situation doe s no t always yiel d g o o d results. S o m e t i m e s therapist love stimulates greater destructive urges (see C h a p t e r 13, " B e i n g T o o G o o d " ) . W h a t if s p o i l i n g t e n d e n c i e s are so great that they overw h e l m the forces o f good? W h a t about situations i n w h i c h goodness incites m o r e i n t e n s e destructive frenzies? W h a t i f the i n d i v i d u a l lacks the capacity to use a n o t h e r p e r s o n for growth , a n d therap y is abou t h o w s u c h a capacity b e c o m e s constituted? W h a t does a therapist d o i f therap y is u n u s a b l e by a n i n d i v i d u a l w h o nevertheless is (possibly literally) d y i n g to be h e l p e d ? K l e i n , B i o n , a n d W i n n i c o t t , e a c h i n thei r o w n way, closely e x a m i n e what m i g h t be h a p p e n i n g w h e n destructive forces a n n i h i l a t e the possibility o f seeki n g a n d o b t a i n i n g h e l p a n d w h a t m i g h t be n e e d e d i n o r d e r to be able to use a n o t h e r p e r s o n for growth purposes .

Klein K l e i n focuses o n ways i n w h i c h i n t e r n a l objec t relation s organiz e a n d m o d u late the deat h drive, the destructive force within ( K l e i n ' s phrase , 1946, p. 2 9 7 ) . F o r K l e i n , anxiety is mos t essentially a n n i h i l a t i o n anxiety, a signal o r expres-

XX

Introduction

sion o f the death instinct, and psychic deadness or motionlessness is a defense against the anxiety that means the death instinct is operating (see Chapters 2 a n d 3). I n a way, d e a d n e s s is a defense against d e a t h .

I n Klein's work, l i b i d o tends to f u n c t i o n as a defense against death work. Love circulates i n the psyche i n the f o r m o f good feelings/good objects, which try to offset bad feelings/bad objects. The psyche develops a k i n d o f fantasy p u m p , attempting to use fantasies o f good objects (with good affects) to coun­ teract bad ones. The m o d e l makes use of respiratory/digestive/circulatory images. Bad affects/objects are expelled; good objects/affects are taken i n . But things are never so simple, and the reverse also happens (e.g., bad in-good o u t ) , along w i t h other possibilities and combinations. I n a way, Klein p i n p o i n t s processes w i t h i n the psyche that replicate the mother's f u n c t i o n . Freud notes that an elemental f u n c t i o n o f the mother is to respond to the infant's distress and to make i t feel better. The mother, among other things, is an affect or m o o d regulator, taking the edge o f f destructive spins. Ferenczi sees this as a basic f u n c t i o n o f the therapist: the therapist's lov­ i n g care helps the patient over destructive agonies, i n c l u d i n g and especially those maintained by early, persistent, or cumulative trauma. For Klein, there are internal psychic processes that operate like a mother, attempting to wash bad feelings away w i t h good ones. Internal attempts to regulate bad feelings can r u n amok. T o o m u c h split­ ting and projection o f bad objects/bad feelings can t h i n the personality through dispersal, so that one passes f r o m rage/dread t h r o u g h progressive phases o f deadness. O n the other hand, f i l l i n g or stuffing oneself w i t h g o o d objects/ good feelings can be deadening too, especially i f one uses g o o d feelings to seal oneself off f r o m one's spontaneous affect flow and the natural impact o f events. Klein is a k i n d o f specialist in showing the consequences o f different ways that the psyche deals w i t h the death drive. She traces movements o f destruc­ tive urges t h r o u g h o u t the psychic universe. For her, deadness is an epiphe­ n o m e n o n or defensive outcome o f ways that the psyche tries to w o r k w i t h destructive anxieties. I n Chapters 2 and 3, "The Destructive Force" and "Good­ ness and Deadness," I examine how far her account can take us and where i t seems to leave off. As w i t h Freud, it pays not to dismiss her writings, even i f the conceptual status o f a psychobiological death drive is d o u b t f u l - H e r detailed focus o n the dynamics o f destruction makes her work relevant for o u r clinical and social concerns today.

Bion Bion intensifies the stakes darkly i m p l i e d by Freud's "force against recovery" and Klein's "destructive force w i t h i n . " He writes o f a "force that continues after . . . i t destroys existence, time, and space" (1965, p. 101, see Chapter 6,

Introduction

xxi

"Two Kinds of No-thing"). This is a ghastly vision or construction. Can such a force be possible? How can x destroy existence and still go on working? Bion tends to use affect rather than drive language. He does not use formal concepts such as life or death drive, but speaks of enlivening-deadening processes. How does the psyche deaden itself? What is the dread of aliveness that can ruin a life? In some individuals, the psyche seems to undo itself, work in reverse, reduce itself to nothing. Can such extreme self-damage be reversed? Can one who has died come alive? Bion is less interested in polemics than in discovering what psychoanalysis is and what it can do. The formal status of a destructive force is less important than its function as a marker, a way to note, focus, and trace destructive processes. The notion of a force that goes on working after it destroys existence stands as a barrier against underestimating the horror of self-nulling processes. Whether the cause is genetic or environmental, once the destruction of personal existence gathers momentum it can blight any help extended to it. What can a clinician do in the face of such total negation? Chapters 4 to 6—"Bion's No-Thing," "Moral Violence," and 'Two Kinds of No-thing"—present variants of nulling processes that Bion charts. The idea of a self-cancelling psyche is chilling, but Bion helps us tag some of its workings, so that we can extend the range of what we can do. Winnicott

Winnicott's work is a kind of biography of the sense of aliveness as it unfolds in infancy and throughout a lifetime. He depicts different forms that aliveness takes at various developmental phases. He charts waves of aliveness. In Chapter 7, "The Area of Freedom," I organize concepts that Winnicott uses to depict aliveness around an experiential navel he describes as "the chosen area" where "there is no room for compromise" (1964, p. 70). I call this navel Winnicott's "area of freedom" since feeling free is at the core of the movement of his thought. The waves of aliveness that flow from Winnicott's point of no compromise or area of freedom evolve through his writings on transitional experiencing, object usage, unintegration, madness, and the incommunicado core. His writings add successive layerings to what it feels like to be alive, how precious core aliveness is, and how fragile it can be. A most awful deadness arises when violence is done to the point of no compromise. Winnicott's writings about the evolution of aliveness have, as background, a clinical concern with individuals who feel terrible deadness and unreality arising from violence done to the area of freedom. His work repeatedly takes up the thread of what is needed for individuals to be alive in a genuine and viable way. As his work unfolds, he explores what interpersonal attitudes and nutrients are necessary conditions for the growth of aliveness and what conditions lead to deadness.

xxii

Introduction

Winnicott's work joins Bion's, as both depict ways that aliveness can be too much for people—either oneself or others. Bion's emphasis is on ways the psyche is too undeveloped (embryonic), deficient, and/or malevolent to support its own aliveness. Winnicott, in addition, emphasizes an external factor, an incapacity in the Other to support the child's aliveness. He feels that so much depends on the quality of response that the destructive aspect of aliveness meets. The destructiveness inherent in aliveness is so important to Winnicott that he credits it with the very creation of the sense of externality. T h e external world becomes alive and real if it survives one's destructive aliveness. T h e Other becomes real and alive by surviving the impact of one's aliveness. Winnicott is extremely sensitive to how the inherent aliveness of the infant/child can break the parent down. The aliveness of the infant/child can be very threatening. A parent may rejoice in the baby's aliveness, but also be envious, afraid, enraged, and smothering. A parent may hot be able to take the full force of the baby's aliveness in all its forms and may need to tone it down, modulate it, even spoil and deaden it. For Winnicott, much depends on how the parent comes through the impact of the baby's aliveness. Whether and how the Other survives destructive onslaughts becomes crucial for how the world will be experienced, and perhaps whether there even will be a world. To what extent can a parent come through a child's onslaught relatively intact? T o what extent does he or she become retaliatory, "gone," collapse into reactive fury or spiteful/fearful withdrawal, or become suffocating? Winnicott does not believe in a psychobiological death drive, but is concerned with the deadness that results from the failure of innate aliveness to create/discover a sense of Otherness or externality, a world to live in—a world that can tolerate aliveness. T o put it dramatically, there can be no Other if no one survives one's impact. T h e evolution of one's sense of aliveness depends partly on the quality of responsiveness versus retaliatory reactiveness of one's milieu. Winnicott tries to convey his meaning with a grim, yet apt example: You will see what I mean, and allow for oversimplification, if I refer to the way in which one of two worlds is waiting for the child, and it makes all the difference which you and I were born into. One: a baby kicks the mother's breast. She is pleased that her baby is alive and kicking though perhaps it hurt and she does not let herself get hurt for fun. Two: a baby kicks the mother's breast, but this mother has a fixed idea that a blow on the breast produces cancer. She reacts because she does not approve of the kick. This overrides whatever the kick may mean for the baby. T h e child has met with a moralistic attitude, and kicking cannot be explored as a way to place the world where it belongs, which is outside. [1970, p. 287]

This does not mean Mother must always go along with or give in to the child. Not at all. Mother will feel the whole spectrum of aliveness herself. She will be

xxiii

Introduction

annoyed, hate the baby, feel boundless j o y and peace, fatigue, and hell. B u t this is n o t a fixed, moralistic, life-despising attitude, b u t an alive stream o f feel­ ings, i n c l u d i n g an adequate responsiveness to the baby's needs. There is a p o i n t at which "destructive aliveness o f the individual is simply a symptom o f being alive" (Winnicott 1968, p. 239). T o what extent can we sur­ vive, enjoy, tolerate, and use each other's aliveness? For an individual who is used to being dead, a therapist's aliveness may be horrifying. Part o f the art and luck and skill i n w o r k i n g with psychic deadness is discovering what combi­ nation o f aliveness-deadness is manageable and eventually usable by a person.

CLINICAL PROBES T o enter the consulting r o o m w i t h a f i x e d idea is akin to the second mother W i n n i c o t t describes above (1970, p. 287), who fills her baby w i t h anti-life mor­ alism, rather than allows f o r an alive m o m e n t - t o - m o m e n t flow. We cannot say exactly what therapy is or what i t can do, any more than we can say exactly what a person is: b o t h are subject to processes o f discovery. The theoretical soundings we have taken do not provide rules or recipes. There is n o guaran­ tee that i f we follow a, b, and c, that t h e n x, y, and z must happen. People are more baffling than that, as are the intricacies and intangibles o f the clinical encounter. O u r theoretical soundings are part o f a broader j o u r n e y o f clinical sensitiv­ ity. T h i n k i n g sensitizes us to nuances o f feelings, to imaginative possibilities. B u t we keep c o m i n g back to what i t is like being with a particular person at a particular time. We keep d i p p i n g i n t o the impact someone is having o n us, the sensations, feelings, imaginings, and thoughts that grow f r o m mute impact. I n the second part o f this book, I describe impacts that patients have had o n me and my struggle to process aspects o f those impacts. This is especially difficult when an impact is deadening. But i f one stays with a deadening i m ­ pact, one begins to experience different sorts o f deadness. One begins to note varieties o f deadening processes, as o u r eyes get used to seeing shadowy forms i n the dark. My work tends to be an impressionistic-expressionistic, evocative psycho­ analysis, one i n which subject-to-subject impact speaks. The clinical probes i n Part I I emphasize growth o f the capacity to tolerate the b u i l d - u p o f experienc­ ing, and the breakdown or inability to j u m p s t a r t this capacity. The p r o b l e m can be h o r r i f y i n g when the experience that threatens to keep b u i l d i n g u p is some f o r m o f deadness. I n some o f the chapters, such as Chapters 16 and 17, "Disaster Anxiety" and "Winning Lies," society becomes the patient, since individual deadness involves a violent process and violence runs t h r o u g h the social fabric. Violence is n o t only an attempt to enliven the self: it also deadens the self and often is part o f

xxiv

Introduction

self-deadening processes. T h u s the clinical study o f deadness is also a small attempt to make social life better. Each clinical encounter touches f u r t h e r nuances o f psychic deadness. Each chapter turns the kaleidoscope a bit to see what deadness can c o n t r i b u t e to growth or how it swallows existence. I n Chapter 10, "Counterparts i n a Couple," we discover a deadness that is part o f psychic binocular (multi-ocular) vision, part o f o u r doubleness or multiplicity, part o f the over-undertone o f experi­ ential resonances. I n Chapter 12, "Primary Process and Shock," we discover a deadness that is a hole or a blank where the primary processing ability should be. Chapter 14, " I n Praise o f Gender Uncertainty," explores relationships between deadness and gender identity difficulties, w h i c h can become life­ threatening w i t h o u t help. Chapters 13,15, and 1 6 — " B e i n g T o o G o o d , " "Emo­ tional Starvation," and "Disaster Anxiety"—show ways that the deadening i m ­ pacts that life has o n patients spill over i n t o therapy and are transmitted to the therapist's supervisor and, t h r o u g h the supervisor, to the therapy f i e l d in general. As the chapters u n f o l d , the importance o f psychic deadness and re­ lated phenomena takes on new life and meaning. We develop a better sense o f what we are u p against, o f the sorts o f materials with which we work. O u r appreciation o f facets o f psychic deadness grows as we keep d i p p i n g i n t o it, as we keep opening to it. It may be a truism that no two therapies are identical, n o two snowflakes the same. But i t is a truism with.dramatic consequences. Chapter 18, "Boa and Flowers," brings home how h i g h the stakes are i f we fail to f i n d the precise set o f therapeutic experiences that an individual may need. When we w o r k with intractible psychic deadness, we are w o r k i n g with our own capacity to evolve. I heard somewhere o f a k i n d o f baby b i r d needing to peck its m o t h e r i n a cer­ tain spot i n order to elicit an adequate maternal response. I t strikes me there are certain patients w h o keep pecking away at the therapeutic field, trying to elicit the as-yet u n k n o w n responses needed for their development. T h e rage of a psychically dead person can be terrifying. Yet I cannot help feeling that his or her fury is an attempt to peck or stimulate the evolution o f a missing capacity i n the therapist and i n the therapy field. This b o o k is an attempt to help peck that capacity into being. Patients and therapists w h o must deal with persistent deadness are partners i n a psychic evolution that is very m u c h alive. REFERENCES Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations. London: Heinemann. Boris, H . (1993). Passions of the Mind. New York: New York University Press. (1994). Envy. Northvale, N J . : Jason Aronson. Emery, E . (1992). O n dreaming of one's patient: dense objects and intrapsychic isomorphism. Psychoanalytic Review 79: 509-533.

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Ferenczi, S. (1929). T h e unwelcome child and his death instinct. I n The Selected Papers of Sandor Ferenczi, M.D: Problems and Methods ofPsychoanalysis,

vol. 3, pp. 102-107.

New York: Basic Books, 1955. Freud, S. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. Standard Edition 23: 216-253. Green, A . (1986). On Private Madness. L o n d o n : Hogarth. Grotstein, J . (1990a). Nothingness, meaninglessness, chaos and the "black hole." I: the importance of nothingness, meaninglessness and chaos in psychoanalysis. Contemporary Psychoanalysis

26:257-290.

(1990b). Nothingness, meanihglessness, and the black hole I I . Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26:377-407. Klein, M; (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Developments in Psychoanaly­ sis, ed. M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, and J . Riviere, pp. 292-320. London : Hogarth, 1952. Winnicott, D. W. (1964). T h e concept of the false self. I n Home is Where We Start From, ed. C . Winnicott, R. Shepherd, and M. Davis, pp. 65-70. New York: Norton, 1986. (1968). Comments on my paper, "The Use of the Object." I n Psychoanalytic Explorations, ed. C , Winnicott, R. Shepherd, and M. Davis, pp. 238-240. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (1970). Individuation. In Psychoanalytic Explorations, ed. C . Winnicott, R. Shepherd, and M. Davis, pp. 284-288. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

PART I

THEORETICAL SOUNDINGS

1

Psychic Death

T h e sense o f being dead has become a popular clinical theme. M o r e people than i n the past now seek help for feeling dead. A l t h o u g h feeling dead is a central complaint o f many individuals, it is not clear where this deadness comes f r o m or what can be done about i t . i There are many variations o f psychic deadness. For some people, deadness does n o t consume m u c h psychic space. I t is a circumscribed counterpole or sub­ theme i n a fuller, richer existence. I t comes and goes or nags i n the background. At times it becomes prepossessing, and one wonders, with a chill, what one would do i f i t swallowed existence, i f it became all there was. One waits for i t to fade and usually it does. I t moves along with a variety o f moods and states o f being. Some people have pockets o f deadness that are relatively constant. They become used to living w i t h areas o f deadness. They wish they were m o r e alive, that life offered more, b u t they make do with their p o r t i o n . I f life is decent enough, a bit o f deadness is n o t too m u c h to pay for satisfactions. One adapts to being less than one m i g h t be, to feeling less than one m i g h t feel. One talks oneself i n t o i m a g i n i n g one is about as happy as one can be, as happy as one is going to be. One more or less succeeds i n believing oneself, since one fears (rightly) that things could be worse. For some people, the sense o f deadness is pervasive. They describe t h e m ­ selves as zombies, the walking dead, empty and unable to feel. A n extreme example o f massive deadness was an anorexic-bulimic woman, Deborah, who passed t h r o u g h my office several years ago. She weighed under eighty pounds and looked like a corpse. H e r bones were like piercing icicles that stung and r i p p e d me apart. I wept u p o n hearing her story, a familiar one b u t yet a story shocking i n its outcome. Deborah's parents were successful professionals. There was a history o f neglect, a m i x t u r e o f over- and understimulation, the usual story o f emo­ tional poverty i n a luxurious setting. Overeating-vomiting-starving parodied the too m u c h - t o o little that characterized her life.

4

Psychic Deadness

Deborah's parents both indulged and deprived her. They catered to her fears and pushed her aside. A t times i t seemed as t h o u g h she had two sets o f par­ ents: one that spoiled her and catered to dependency and another that required her to be healthy and independent and to act as i f she d i d n o t need them. Deborah was left w i t h a double imperative: she c o u l d n o t live w i t h o u t her par­ ents, a n d she should leave them alone. Each time Deborah sought help, she got worse. H e r therapists tried to fos­ ter and support her independence, b u t her dependency needs were too great. One therapist i n college was so stimulated by her neediness that he began an affair w i t h her. Deborah relished, yet feared their closeness. The outcome was devastating. When he backed o f f and became colder, her sense o f forlornness intensified. Ordinary therapy d i d n o t f i l l the hole i n her being A f t e r college Deborah d r i f t e d i n and o u t o f therapy and i n and o u t o f jobs. She felt helped by some therapists more than by others. The therapy situation itself was tantalizing and frustrating. I t offered the hope o f contact and elic­ ited l o n g i n g , yet at the end o f sessions, therapist a n d patient parted. H o p e and l o n g i n g went u n f u l f i l l e d . Intense neediness met a void. N o a m o u n t o f tran­ sient contact seemed adequate. The very structure o f therapy annihilated the desire i t elicited. Having an affair w i t h a therapist made things worse; n o t having an affair also made things worse. Contact was overstimulating, and lack o f contact was too depriving. I n time, Deborah f o u n d an analyst w i t h w h o m she c o u l d stay. They w o r k e d many years together. He was a highly respected man i n the field, one o f the best. Yet i t was d u r i n g this treatment that Deborah's downward plunge accelerated and seemed to become irreversible. H e r analyst ended up refusing to continue treatment w i t h her, apparently h o r r i f i e d by the t u r n o f events. He t o l d her, she said, that had he known what was going to happen, he would never have started w i t h her. How c o u l d he have known? W h o w o u l d have known? Once more the pattern was repeated: a promise o f too m u c h and then the d r o p t h r o u g h the hole i n the b o t t o m o f the universe. Perhaps any therapy w o u l d have been a promise o f too much for Deborah had a dual attitude toward it: therapy solves n o t h i n g and ought to solve everything. The wish for therapy to be more than i t is can be overwhelming. Part o f Deborah's tragedy was that she f o u n d an analyst who was good enough f o r her to want to be w i t h . His very goodness overstimulated her. She wanted more f r o m h i m than he could provide. His skill and caring heightened her u n f u l f i l l e d longing, and at some p o i n t her whole system shut down. Therapy could n o t support the intensity i t fueled. Yet Deborah c o n t i n u e d to seek help. This must mean that she believed change was possible, hope was alive, b u t i t also c o u l d mean that she was stuck in a pattern, a sort o f sticky free fall, like a p i n b a l l b o u n c i n g t h r o u g h therapy slots u n t i l movement stopped and the game ended.

5

Psychic Death

Therapy was a chronic part of her life; she clung to it, then d r o p p e d it, over and over again. Some o f her therapists d i d the same w i t h her. T o some extent, she regulated the dosage of therapy she was able to take. She usually left therapy before i t or her feelings overwhelmed her. Was she better o f f d i p p i n g i n and out? Staying i n may have killed her. Normally therapists like i t when a patient comes more often, stays longer, and works more deeply. One assumes that dedicated work leads to better out­ comes. I n Deborah's case, the attempt to work more intensely broke open a hole i n her psyche. She became n u m b and far away f r o m herself. Her life got caught o n a trajectory that moved f r o m deadness to deadness. Therapy no longer was life calling to life, b u t a magnet drawing out depths o f deadness. What can be said about such psychic deadness? How can we meet it? We do not know why a person like Deborah falls so far out o f life, while another simi­ lar to her pulls out o f i t and builds a satisfactory existence. Deborah vanishes through a hole i n her psyche, while another finds a way to swim i n the empti­ ness. A t times it seems as though a toss o f the dice determines whether the hole one falls i n supports life or not.

FREUD Freud's work is rich with ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities. Freud may say there is no death i n the unconscious, yet he writes of unconscious death wishes. By unconscious death wishes he usually means that / w i l l live forever, but you will die. The unconscious acts as a magnifying machine. My hostility toward you becomes absolutized i n the wish for you to die. C o m m o n speech bears witness to this passion i n the phrase, " I wish you were dead!" The Freudian w o r l d is one of high (or low) drama. T h e " I versus you" runs deep i n Freud's picture o f psychic life. The Freudian ego originally reacts with hostility to the external world. Externality creates discomfort. The ego tries to avoid it, to wish i t away. F r o m the outset one escapes, even annihilates reality. The you is partly an enemy f r o m the beginning. T h e Freudian you follows the track o f pain. Pain is O t h e r , alien, n o t - I . Wherever pain is, you are. I f pain comes f r o m inside the body, then the inside of the body becomes Other, not-I, something that is happening to me, an alien, hostile, or indifferent you. The boundary o f I-feeling shifts. I-feeling tends to identify with pleasure and react against pain. One tries to set pain outside one's boundaries: I try to exclude pain f r o m myself. Pain may be the most intimate fact o f existence, b u t I make believe it is a stranger. Above all, d e a t h — t h a t stranger o f strangers, other of others, alien of a l i e n s — wells up f r o m my body, seizes me, takes me away. Processes that constitute me and support my life are also enemies. Death wipes meaning out of life. I n the

6

Psychic Deadness

middle o f a beautiful experience a voice mocks, "What g o o d is it? You will be a corpse someday." People live with an eye glued to death; i n Deborah's case, w i t h two eyes. Deborah's knowledge of death swallowed her up. She became a parody of death, a living corpse. Perhaps she imagined she could control death by aping it, by becoming its proxy. Perhaps she wanted to stuff death i n t o people's (her par­ ents') faces to show them the lie they lived. She became i n her body a haunting critique o f self-absorbed luxury, a physical image o f psychospiritual starvation. I n Freud's writings there are death symbols as well as sexual symbols. A n obsession with dying ran t h r o u g h Freud's life and work. Freud's attempt to reduce death anxiety to castration anxiety was never fully convincing. L i b i d o theory could not wish death away. Death kept p o p p i n g u p i n its own right, and finally Freud legitimated it i n his theory by declaring death an instinct or drive. I n Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud writes o f a death instinct that is initially turned inward. There is a drive toward death f r o m the beginning, and there are many facets to this faceless drive. Freud emphasizes the conservative p r i n c i p l e o f instincts, the tendency to regress to earlier states, to repeat a position. The logical conclusion o f the slide backward is zero. The earliest state is n o state at all, zero stimulation, zero complexity. I n semi-biological, physical terms, Freud depicts organic life becoming i n ­ organic again, because the inorganic state was original, the p o i n t o f departure and point o f return. Life sustains its complexity only so long and then collapses. Cellular units are b o u n d together and then fall apart. T h e b i n d i n g o f any sort o f unity is precarious, subject to u n b i n d i n g . Life feeds on death and death o n life. Life deflects death outward for a time. A m b i t i o n , the will to power and mastery, sadism, and destructiveness, are some indications o f variable life-death drive fusions. Life holds death captive, directs its attention toward objects, makes death want things, persons, places, positions. I t is as i f l i b i d o attracts death's interest, fascinates death, busies death with 1

1 Through much of his psychoanalytic career, Freud gave a certain primacy to castration anxiety in clinical neuroses. Perhaps he felt that if it were possible to "resolve" castration anxiety, one would not be pathologically afraid of death. Thu s he tended to filter death anxiety through castration anxiety. Yet death retained a certain autonomy (e.g., going on a train journey as a death symbol or the third woman in ' T h e Theme of the Three Caskets" [1913, pp. 291-301]). Even after Freud introduced the death drive, castration anxiety exercised a privileged position: T believe that the fear of death is something that occurs between the ego and the superego. . . . These considerations make it possible to regard the fear of death, like the fear of conscience, as a development of the fear of castration" (1923, p. 58). I n the last decade, Freud still gave centrality to castration anxiety, yet wondered whether the death drive did not play a crucial role in the individual's inability to change. T h e full relationship between castration fantasies and the death drive has yet to be worked out.

7

Psychic Death

diversions. The deception, masquerade, and rerouting take effort. Systems wear themselves o u t by the work o f sustaining themselves. O n e dies, i n part, f r o m exhaustion. Yet i t is not enough to speak of inertia, collapse, or the wearing down of sys­ tems. I f death is a drive, it exerts force or pressure i n a certain direction. When the life drive does not bind the death drive, the latter unties sentient unities. Psycho organismic being is dismantled, broken apart, reduced to chunks o f inorganic material. Death is more an active breaking down than a passive falling apart. I t is t e m p t i n g to dramatize Freud's vision w i t h mythic language and phrases f r o m everyday speech. We speak o f life or death as taking or losing h o l d or its grip. We speak o f life's victory over death or death's over life, as i f the two were gods eternally wrestling, at war. We say death or life wins or loses. Freud also uses the language o f struggle, combat, tension, and difficulty. W h e n an i n d i ­ vidual dies he is i n the grips o f a process that has won out. F r o m F r e u d ' s p o i n t of view, i t is d o u b t f u l that there can be such a t h i n g as an easy death or an easy life. A n individual like Deborah makes one feel the force o f Freud's death drive. Deborah is a symbol and e m b o d i m e n t o f death. One death w o r k i n g in her. One feels a dark force taking her more and more o u t o f life, sucking life dry. One feels a negative process w o r k i n g even after life loses the battle.

feels

I t was n o t only Deborah's body that lacked flesh and fullness; her psyche had undergone an enormous reduction. T h e r e was n o t m u c h left o f her. Per­ haps she never had been too f u l l a person, but I have n o d o u b t that there was more to her, that there were more possibilities. Death had eaten away almost all i t could eat away. T h e shell o f D e b o r a h — a b u n d l e o f reflexes—persevered. She moved f r o m office to office l o o k i n g for therapists to feed the death w i t h i n or to miraculously stop i t . She c o u l d n o t die before the death inside her devoured every c r u m b o f potential aliveness i n every corner o f her being. I t was as i f she had to stay alive u n t i l there was n o t h i n g m o r e f o r death to eat. Deborah's life is carried away by something deadly that accelerates over time. Does Freud's f o r m u l a t i o n adequately depict the death momentum? Is it enough to say a drive toward tensionlessness won out? A r e n ' t there explosive tensions i n inorganic matter? Explosive processes seem to be part o f the universe. What would a tension-free universe be like? W o u l d a tension-free universe be a pro­ cess-free universe, n o universe at all? Deborah's life is a silent scream stretched over time. I t is an explosion that no one can hear because i t occurred and goes o n o c c u r r i n g i n a place where no O t h e r is. Deborah explodes i n a vacuum. No one hears Deborah cry. She does n o t hear herself crying, yet quiet crying o f her insides continues. A l l the loudness has gone i n t o her visual appearance: her skeleton rips the eyes o f the Other, tears the Other's heart. The more she vanishes the m o r e f u l l o f impact the place where she was becomes. The blackness she leaves b e h i n d or falls i n t o is n o t t e n s i o n free, b u t a heightened, c o n d e n s e d , blank, magnetic-like f i e l d

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increasing i n force. What processes govern this force? What can be said about the black hole consuming Deborah's life?

MAXIMUM-MINIMUM It is i m p o r t a n t to note that notions o f m a x i m u m - m i n i m u m states are part o f the fabric o f Freud's writings. For Freud the primal trauma is flooding, a maxi­ m u m state o f excitement. Freud pictures a system that can generate more stimu­ lation than it can handle. A one is too much for oneself paradigm can be applied to many facets o f psychophysical b e i n g — n e u r o l o g i c a l , sexual, social, emotional, and cognitive. Freud posits mechanisms that dampen and regulate the psycho-organism's tendency to become overwhelmed. A stimulus barrier offers resistance to the promiscuous streaming o f excitations. Psychological defenses resist the rise o f libidinal promptings. Freud's picture is always o f systems with double or oppo­ site tendencies, one offsetting and regulating the other. I n an i n f o r m a l fashion, one can speak o f being overwhelmed or flooded by energy, stimuli, drives, emotions, ideas. A t such moments, filter or containing systems break down or are inadequate. One may enjoy the flood, b u t one may only be able to take so m u c h o f it and no more, or i t may be too dangerous to begin with. I n response to massive flooding, one may massively shut down. I t is as i f the psycho-organism short-circuits, turns off, being unable to bear its sen­ sitivity. The blankness o f too m u c h is replaced by the blankness o f n o t h i n g . Instead o f too alive, we have too dead. Which is the greater anxiety i n Freud's w o r k — t h e dread o f aliveness or the dread o f death? The Freudian ego lives this double anxiety. There is n o end to the permutations. W h e n one is dead, one fears aliveness; when alive, one fears death. There are sublime moments of aliveness when there is n o r o o m f o r the fear o f either life or death. There is a deadness that fears b o t h life a n d death and a deadness that fears neither. There are two t e n d e n c i e s — t o w a r d m a x i m u m aliveness and toward total deadness, toward b u i l d i n g u p and tearing down, toward increasing tolerance o f energy and complexity, toward a zero p o i n t o f sensitivity and stimulation. For Freud all life is made u p o f these two tendencies, summarized u n d e r the rubrics o f Eros and the death instinct, a doubleness that marks all psychic p r o d ­ ucts. Whether or n o t one likes Freud's double instinct theory, issues related to the theme o f psychic aliveness-deadness cannot be wished away. >

A QUANTITATIVE FACTOR The play o f aliveriess-deadness runs through Freud's work. H e is concerned with the raw presence-absence o f sexual energy, its rise and fall, reroutings, rechannelings, its fate as it meets with internal-external obstacles and resistances.

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Psychic Death

As his work developed i n t o "official" psychoanalysis, with an emphasis o n conflicts between and w i t h i n psychic systems, and between psychic systems and the external world, his interest i n sheer presence-absence and i n the s t r e n g t h ­ weakness o f raw sexual energy persevered. Remarks o n psychaesthenia a n d actual neurosis are sprinkled t h r o u g h o u t his work. For Freud, psychaesthenia is a c o n d i t i o n marked by low sexual vitality, by weak life energy. Freud believes there is a physical c o n t r i b u t i o n to this psycho­ logical depletion. Perhaps the i n d i v i d u a l is congenitally endowed w i t h less vitality or perhaps energy loss is t i e d t o the actual d a m m i n g o f l i b i d o . I n so­ called actual neurosis, the d a m m i n g o f l i b i d o results i n anxiety rather than depletion. Freud suggests that masturbation o r the use o f condoms c o u l d reflect or provoke psychaesthenia, actual neurosis, or mixtures o f the two. Physical actions have psychological effects and vice versa. 2

Libido sluggishness/blockage can reflect/lead to states o f low/high psychic arousal (variations o f m i n i m u m — m a x i m u m states). Either depletion o r anxi­ ety may be dominant, may seesaw, or be mixed indistinguishably. Individuals can feel helpless when faced by either extreme. O n e can fade o u t via deple­ tion or be obliterated by anxiety. Perhaps sluggish or blocked sexuality is different f o r individuals w i t h a low or h i g h energy endowment. W h e n more sexual energy meets a barrier, more tension is created, w h i c h is reflected i n a higher anxiety level. L o w sexual energy may be more readily pacified by i n n e r - o u t e r barriers and yield to iner­ tia o r weakness. T h e idea o f an innately l o w - h i g h fixed quantity o f energy, interacting with i n n e r - o u t e r barriers-openings, can be used to describe a wide variety o f conditions. Freud's work is a tantalizing m i x t u r e o f phenomenological description and insistence o n a quantitative factor beyond phenomenology. T h e two levels o f discourse often interact and fuse. O n e feels the quantitative factor i n everyday life. H o w m u c h energy one has f r o m m o m e n t t o m o m e n t and over time, how alive or wasted one feels: one is o n intimate terms w i t h one's level o f energy. One feels rushes o f energy, its waxing a n d waning. Now one is u p l i f t e d by the flow o f energy, now one is flooded, cast down, o r feels too little energy ("no wind i n one's sails"). Such terms as " d r i f t i n g , " "stagnant," "flow," and " f l o o d , " are among the plethora o f ways i n which language spontaneously gives a r u n ­ n i n g account o f o u r felt pulse, o u r energic moods. There is n o obvious f i t between the felt quantitative f a c t o r — h o w m u c h or how little energy one feels—and the fixed quantity o f energy beyond conscious­

2 Since many readers associate conflict within psychic systems with the development of ego psychology, it is useful to point out that it is an inherent part of Freud's thinking: e.g., eros/death drive as id forces, ego as hallucinatory and reality tester, superego as persecutory and inspirational. See my book, The Psychotic Core (1986), for selected portrayals of Freud's intrasystemic complexities.

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Psychic Deadness

ness that fuels psychic systems. High-energy individuals can suffer massive depressions and depletion, while low-energy individuals persevere. W h e n the hare, when the turtle? A l l combinations a n d reversals are possible. Freud's writings are a meditation o n the plasticity-fixity o f psychic life. T h e hidden snake o f energy takes myriad f o r m s — n o w evanescent, now intractable. The idea o f a fixed quantity o f energy variously distributed t h r o u g h psychic subsystems informs Freud's depiction o f t h i n k i n g - f e e l i n g splits i n hysterical and obsessional states. I n obsessive states, ideas are substituted f o r affects; i n hysteria, diffuse emotionality is substituted f o r ideas. M a x i m u m t h i n k i n g ­ m i n i m u m feeling, m a x i m u m f e e l i n g - m i n i m u m t h i n k i n g : both the f o r m and intensity o f neurosis depend o n how m u c h energy is where. The variable fluidity-fixity o f energy bounces i n and o u t o f different boxes o f t i m e , u n i t i n g - d i v i d i n g different developmental moments. For example, hysteria is more advanced because i t is genital; obsessiveness is more primitive because i t is anal. Yet Freud likens hysterical emotionality to the diffuse and global affective storms o f infancy, whereas obsessive t h i n k i n g marks an advance i n interiority. A rise i n energy can increase t i g h t e n i n g or expiosiveness, so that hysterical-obsessive operations, so radically different, slide i n t o each other or shift positions i n a broader field.

T O O L I T T L E - T O O M U C H : A NEED FOR INTENSITY E m p t y i n g o u t feeling, emptying o u t t h o u g h t , e m p t y i n g o u t energy versus hyperfeeling, h y p e r t h i n k i n g , hyperenergy: g o i n g t h r o u g h extremes is an i m p o r t a n t part o f life. Extreme states a d d intensity, diversity, and richness to living. T h e poet William Blake celebrates this aspect o f life i n his aphorism, "Enough or too m u c h . " Winnicott's patient i m p l i e d this when he eschewed the midway path i n favor o f a "blend that includes b o t h extremes at the same time" (1986, p. 133). Blake and Winnicott's patient express a hunger f o r intensity. We need to feel and t h i n k intensely. Intensity nourishes us, waters o u r bodies and beings. T o go t h r o u g h something intensely and enjoy the afterglow is akin to or bet­ ter than an infant's good feeding and sleep. Extremes o f intensity ( e m p t y - f u l l , r a d i a n t - d u l l ) fuel wonder, awe, and curiosity.

IMMOBILITY I t is n o t the presence-absence o f duller or more heightened states that vexes Freud so much as when something is off with the movement between or through them. Individuals who r u n through states or objects too quickly and easily, who have too much mobility o f libido, may n o t be affected by what they go t h r o u g h .

Psychic Death

11

N o t h i n g sticks or builds. They have a lot o f experiences, but do n o t deepen or grow through them. Even more disturbing is too little movement. Freud notes i n certain i n d i ­ viduals "a depletion o f the plasticity, the capacity f o r change and f u r t h e r development" (1937, p. 241). M o r e forcefully, he notes that i n these people "all the mental processes, relationships and distribution of force are unchange­ able, fixed and r i g i d " (1937, p. 242). Freud's image here is death, the immobility and rigidity of the corpse. When Freud wrote this he was an o l d m a n , soon to die. I t is easy to think that Freud's writings surged with fluctuations o f l i b i d o theory when he still felt w i n d i n his sails. Jung implies as much (1943, 1945) when he suggests that Freud's psy­ chology is most apt for the first half o f life. Freud's daily walks t h r o u g h the city, his summer hikes i n the country are an indication that he enjoyed vigorous movement well into his sixties. As his mobility decreased, the image o f death came to occupy a greater place i n his work. It is not that deadness wasn't important to Freud earlier. As noted above, Freud had been keenly aware of the ebbs and flows o f energic moods, o f being now more alive, now more dead. However, he tended to understand deadness as the loss or weakness o f life energy, n o t as the positive work o f death. Deadness was a sort o f privatio bonum, of too little libido, whether constitutionally, the result of changing i n n e r - o u t e r conditions, or through energy drain connected with con­ flict. He was more concerned with the fear o f death or the loss of aliveness than with death as a force working i n personality, especially a force working against change. I t was not u n t i l Freud's last two decades that death achieved explicit, formal, conceptual status as a major actor on the psychoanalytic stage. I t was, of course, always a part o f Freud's associative flow and informal usage. As age and illness took their toll, the display o f fireworks f r o m Freud's l i ­ bido theory slowed down. T h e slippery, sliding fluid, the electrical dance o f libido that sprayed vast arrays o f symptoms, character scenarios, and cultural productions was rendered immobile, fixed, and r i g i d by death work. Death work was responsible for the personality's inability to develop. For Freud (1937, p. 242) "a k i n d o f psychical entropy" i n o l d people and "a certain amount o f psychical inertia" (fear o f change, reluctance o f the l i b i d o to enter new paths) at any age are n o r m a l . What struck h i m was the d e p t h and insistence of an inability or refusal to change that went beyond age and usual hesitation. The individual's wish to grow met an impasse, an unbudgeable x. Change or growth or development stopped. T h e source o f the blockage was deeper than ego or character. I t seemed to come f r o m the very foundations o f personality and faded into the depths o f the individual's prehistory. I n his later life, Freud writes o f a "force . . . defending itself by every pos­ sible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to h o l d o n to i l l ­ ness and suffering" (1937, p. 242). This force has "different and deeper roots" than ego-superego resistances. The intensity and pervasiveness o f the sense

12

Psychic Deadness

o f g u i l t and need for punishment (for instance, superego punishing ego for libidinal wishes), far f r o m explaining immobility, are an example o f it. Why should guilt g r i n d personality to a halt? Why should the need for punishment have such extravagant effects? One imagines that therapy w o u l d mobilize enough personal elasticity to enable work with g u i l t and punishment. What Freud n o t e d was that i n certain individuals, elasticity itself is i n question. A k i n d o f psychic rigor mortis sets i n . The need to punish the wish for pleasure does n o t account sufficiently for the enormity o f stagnant rigidity. Pleasure does n o t seem to be the bottom-line motivater o f personality i n such cases. The personality seems driven by unplea­ sure. I t is the death drive or unpleasure principle that gives such force to guilt and punishment. Freud implies that inelasticity is rather widespread. H e writes o f a masoch­ istic core i n many people that is l i n k e d with the negative therapeutic reaction and sense o f guilt. T h r o u g h o u t most o f his career he saw such recoils against life as reactive prohibitions against libidinal strivings. Now he threw i n the towel, admitting a darker, primary force, with roots i n "unspecified places." The darker primary force was anti-life yet b u i l t i n t o life: "the original death instinct o f liv­ i n g matter" (1937, p. 243). The i m p o r t a n t structural change i n his theory is that resistances to change or growth or cure or development do not originate primarily f r o m the top down (superego against ego against id) b u t f r o m the b o t t o m up. T h e unbudgeable rigidity that Freud points to is rooted i n the very foundations o f psychic life and i n the very nature o f matter. Freud (1937, pp. 240-247) notes that his entire life's work must be reinterpreted i n light o f this revision. No amount o f psychoanalysis can wish immobility away. The play o f i m m o ­ bility-mobility is a structural given. Moreover, i f "the concurrent or mutually opposing action o f . . . Eros and the death-instinct" (1937, p. 243) makes up the phenomena o f life, death work goes into the making o f psychoanalysis as well. Freud is more concerned with why psychoanalysis does n o t work than why it does. "For the m o m e n t we must bow to the superiority o f forces against which we see our efforts come to n o t h i n g " (1937, p. 243). Yes, for the moment, a moment stretched over time. Yet, as we stare into the darkness, our eyes see shapes and movements previously unnoticed. Death work is n o t u n i f o r m . There are many death worlds. A person like Deborah goes f r o m death to death. She experiences many sorts of death i n one lifetime, many variations i n the death her lifetime is,

FREUD'S SENSITIVITY Was Freud's death drive sour grapes, the revenge o f an o l d man on youth? Was it the outcome o f aging processes, illness, a w o r l d war, the death o f a child? A l l these factors may have contributed to the growing significance o f death i n the later Freud.

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Psychic Death

Freud is exquisitely and agonizingly sensitive to the w a x i n g - w a n i n g o f energic moods. He is hyperaware o f shifts i n energy states on a daily and hourly basis. Freud's theoretical interest i n the flow o f energy dovetails w i t h his sensi­ tivity to energic moods. Freud's sensitivity to somatic shifts covers a variety o f states. H e possessed a comesthetic/interoceptive/proprioceptive/kinesthetic sensitivity that magnified his cardiac, respiratory, and digestive sensations. H e could alarm himself with a catalogue of shifting somatic symptoms, so m u c h so that he was convinced he would die i n his fifties. His letters to Fliess (Masson 1985) are quite open about his somatic/sensory anxieties and moods. His sensitivity included an array o f psychic sensations. He experienced psych­ aesthenic depletion, sexual d a m m i n g and anxiety, hysterical emotionality and diffuseness, and obsessive passions. He had a talent for tolerating and com­ plaining about manic-depressive swings i n creative work. He had an intuitive conviction that mood shifts played an important role i n creative processes. He could be mentally active and try out hosts o f possibilities i n a trial-and-error fashion, but he also was gifted w i t h an ability to wait. H e seemed to have an innate respect for shifting emotional states and moods, a belief i n their alter­ nation or periodicity i n larger rhythms o f development. Freud's sensitivity to r h y t h m led h i m to t h i n k that death work probably involves "some temporal characteristics," "some alterations o f a r h y t h m o f development i n psychical life which we have not yet appreciated" (1937, p. 242). We do not know what Freud had i n m i n d , what alterations o f developmental rhythms he m i g h t have charted. H a d Freud lived another twenty years, what would he have f o u n d i n the death drive? What would his dynamics o f i m m o b i l ­ ity look like?

MOVEMENT BETWEEN Let us b r i n g together some o f Freud's expressions o f i m m o b i l i t y , strung together f r o m a telling two pages i n Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937, pp. 241-242). Adhesiveness o f l i b i d o , a depletion o f plasticity and the capa­ city f o r development and change, psychic inertia and entropy, something unchangeable, fixed, and rigid, a force against recovery: Where does such i m ­ mobility come from? By 1937 Freud no longer localizes this anti-development force i n the ego. The n o t i o n o f localization is called i n t o question. The anti-growth force does not have any specific locale. I t pervades the psyche, depends on u n k n o w n fundamental conditions i n the mental apparatus, and works i n unspecified places. I t is part of the individual's inherited equipment and so antedates his historical struggles. Since we cannot map this force i n terms o f its psychic co­ ordinates, the "distinction between what is ego and what is i d loses m u c h o f its value" (1937, p. 241).

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Psychic Deadness

T o describe the anti-growth force i n terms o f its i m m o b i l i z i n g effect is not strong enough. Entropy implies increasing disorder. T o speak o f entropy and inertia is to suggest a psyche working i n reverse, n o t only n o t growing but also u n d o i n g growth. Can we speak o f a psyche u n d o i n g itself? What sort o f pro­ cess eats itself up, nulls itself, nulls everything? There is something transpersonal in a force f i e l d that wipes everything out. A n analyst may feel attacked or poisoned by the patient's anti-growth tendency. The analyst may feel unable to move or breathe; therapy may feel suffocating. H o w can one endure this? A force field that wipes everything o u t also wipes o u t the analyst's sense of his own anti-growth tendency. A n analyst who cannot sense his own anti-growth tendency may become overly absorbed or polarized by that o f the patient. The analyst loses balance and perspective; anti-growth is everywhere. The patient's and analyst's anti-growth tendencies fuse and suck the life out o f the situation. Analyst or patient may fight or withdraw to salvage some semblance o f i n d i ­ viduality, b u t the amorphous p u l l to oblivion is n o t assuaged easily. I t is impor­ tant that the analyst find his own anti-growth sense. Focusing o n his own anti­ growth tendency, paradoxically, makes r o o m for the patient's. Countertransference literature is filled w i t h reference to the analyst's use o f his paralysis, weakness, contempt, and fear-rage. The analyst struggles to stay alive, to maintain a viable psychic existence, but the odds are against it. A t times the best one can hope for is that the entropy/inertia/inelasticity—the constant wipe-out—forces one to stare at limits o f one's capacity. Intense, persistent, and heightened experience o f incapacity may spur movement at the edge, at l i m i t points, always with a certain unpredictability, as the song goes, "on a w i n g and a prayer." What is unnerving is n o t simply that the patient is stuck, but that he or she seems to be falling i n t o the stuckness. Images o f quicksand, suction, black holes, o f d r i f t i n g and vanishing beyond the p u l l o f h u m a n gravity prevail: all movement seems to be aimed at taking one f u r t h e r and f u r t h e r outside exis­ tence. The ability to move here and there, to zigzag, to correct one's position is lost. I n life, one movement corrects another. One tries this, then that. A slow­ m o t i o n film o f Matisse drawing a line shows his hand oscillating, although the line seems straight. A f i l m o f a baseball player making a great catch shows his glove tracking the ball, correcting one movement with another. Such moment­ to-moment estimates escape the naked eye. Yet it is precisely the lack o f open­ ended searching and zeroing i n on a target (a new l i n e , a good catch) that makes the patient's fall o u t of existence so lethal and heavy. I n the fall out o f existence, one movement does n o t seem to qualify another. There is simply the leaden fall. A m o m e n t u m quietly builds that cannot be deflected. The patient's whole life gradually becomes b u i l t around insidiously m o u n t i n g lifelessness. By the time she came to my office, Deborah's existence was consumed by details o f taking care o f herself: strategies for physically get­

Psychic Death

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15

ting t h r o u g h the day, h o u r by hour, m o m e n t by moment, were all that was left, and they were fading. T h e monotonous oneness o f her concern was deadly. She had become a macabre proxy for the total care she always wanted and failed to break f r o m . Freud earlier wrote o f an "alteration o f the ego" that made personality growth difficult (1937, pp. 238-240). By this, i n part, he meant the defensive deforma­ tions that the ego suffered, so that the ego treats recovery as a danger and analysis as an enemy rather than ally. Now Freud locates a deeper source o f resistance to recovery, n o t i n the ego b u t i n "some alterations of a r h y t h m i n development i n psychical l i f e " (1937, p. 242), an alteration that makes the distinction between ego a n d i d relatively useless (1937, p. 241). This alteration characterizes the foundations o f psychic life. I t cannot be localized, p i n n e d down. I t is structural and atmospheric; it taints the very "space" and "air" in which the psyche moves and breathes. I t means something more than a defor­ mation o f the i d or a warp i n instinctual life. Freud pins the warp n o t i n place b u t i n r h y t h m . The focus here is n o t psy­ chic topography, b u t t i m i n g and movement. The music o f the psyche is off. A rhythmic rather than a structural warp is crucial. A r h y t h m i c warp results i n struc­

tural alterations. Structure depends o n rhythms (as well as the reverse). One wonders what psychoanalysis would look like had Freud chosen time rather than space as his organizing analogy. He d i d what was expedient. Space is more accessible than time. The idea o f psychic space enables one to locate motivations and capacities, to speak o f the psyche as i f i t had c o n t a i n i n g or structural properties (see Freud 1940, p. 145 for an elaboration o f the use and meaning o f mental space, see Matte-Bianco 1975, Part I X ) . One can make spatial diagrams; yet, when facing bedrock resistance to c h a n g e — a n apparently immutable force against recovery, an unyielding r i g i d i t y — t h e idea o f psychic space reaches a point o f diminishing returns. The idea of psychic space is fruitful as long as Freud can use i t to stage l i b i d i n a l dramas. Space was the place o f movement. When movement ceased, space was useless. What could space teach us about a world where movement stopped? What could space mean i n a world without movement? Is it odd to say that time begins where space leaves off? Philosophy and com­ m o n sense teach that space and time go together, and they do. However, i n psychic reality one may leap i n t o time after space dies. I n average life, space and time constitute each other. A person moves and rests, goes about the busi­ ness o f living, takes space-time interweaving for granted. I f psychic movement dies and space falls away or hardens, a person may cling to time to escape the grave o f space. T h e psyche does n o t die evenly. Space may die before time. For Deborah, time was still more alive than space. T i m e haunted her. She was going to die. She was already quite dead. Yet temporal anxieties stirred her. She d i d n o t have m u c h time left. W o u l d she die before she lived? W o u l d it be over before she had a chance? There was n o t h i n g left for her b u t the care o f

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her dying body, yet time pressured her. T i m e was dreadful. Perhaps she would come alive i n time! Perhaps there was still a chance for a m o m e n t o f sensitiv­ ity, a time o f heightened aliveness. T h e r e was no body or place left for this to happen. I f it ever would happen at all, it could only be in time. She m i g h t be saved i n time. T i m e m i g h t redeem space. A m o m e n t o f re­ newal m i g h t b r i n g her body back, spread t h r o u g h space. A good moment, a heightened moment, a moment of aliveness could warm existence, thaw space. The likelihood was that time would die while she was still alive. I t would be eaten by death work, the way that space was. Still, time nursed a bit o f hope. Deborah's great cynicism and despair were tied to space, b u t time's badly clipped wings had n o t dropped her entirely.

WINNICOTT Winnicott fights against deadness in his writing. He wants his writing to be alive, to be moving. He says explicitly that he wants his concepts to convey movement, process, paradox and not to deaden (Eigen 1992a; Rodman 1987, p. 42). His "transitional experiencing" and "use o f object" notions express movement between persons, between dimensions o f self, between worlds. He d i d not want to fight deadness i n his office only to die i n his writings. W i n n i c o t t is concerned that his writings n o t simply convey ideas but also evoke experience. W r i t i n g creates/discovers/opens experience. I t is the edge o f what is happening, n o t merely a r e p o r t o f what has come and gone. W i n n i ­ cott's work is an adventure i n psychoanalytic imagination, the creative self in action. Above all, he wants to convey a sense o f creative aliveness, to be alive when he wrote. To an extent, he uses w r i t i n g as Kafka d i d , to "crack the frozen sea w i t h i n . " A t the same time, he tries to speak f r o m the place o f aliveness, to let the sense o f aliveness speak. W i n n i c o t t is always digging i n t o an experience and o p e n i n g i t up. Speaking and writing are forms o f movement. Words pop out o f nowhere, out o f an implicit sense or feeling or premonition, now more gut, now more heart or head. They spill or fly into the air or across a page, sometimes agonizingly slowly and sometimes too rapidly to keep u p with. A t his best, Winnicott links clinical experience with clinical writing. A creative thread runs through both. It is i m p o r t a n t to say this because so m u c h psychoanalytic w r i t i n g has been dead and deadening, a disease. I f psychoanalysts are as dead as their writing, for what can a Deborah hope? A dead analyst may calm an individual who is beset by throbbing impulses, but an anhedonic spirit melds with Deborah's fall out of life, s c a r c e l y c r e a t i n g a r i p p l e o f d e a d n e s s .

The movement between is the i m p o r t a n t m o m e n t i n Winnicott's writings. I w o u l d add the movement through. T o move between or t h r o u g h experiences, to

Psychic Death

17

let an experience b u i l d , to go t h r o u g h something: this is what Deborah can not do. Deborah's between or through is n o t working. Deborah had an affair w i t h a therapist, b u t it fell flat. Impulse led nowhere. The affair collapsed, a n d Deborah was alone, deader than before. The shock of having and losing led to weakening and eventually to the collapse o f impulse. Her learning was that impulse led to deadness. There were little moments when impulse lived, when she was propelled i n t o contact, b u t they d i d n o t last nor did they amount to anything. They were n o t strong or f u l l enough to warrant the pain and emptiness that surrounded t h e m . Deadness was a relief u n t i l it took on a life o f its own. H e r affair with her therapist was doomed f r o m the outset. She and he knew it would come to n o t h i n g . I t would be good to say that she lived i t o u t anyway, but neither he nor she fully lived it. T h e impulse that drove her had failure written on it. I t happened, b u t n o t w i t h all her m i g h t and being. She floated through it, more ghostlike than impassioned. She d i d not love h i m , nor he her. There were n o illusions o f desire. They fell i n t o i t and d i d it. The p u l l , the undertow drew t h e m i n . They sank i n t o i t , and after tasting the sensations, he pulled out. Exploitation? Abuse o f power? I t w o u l d be g o o d to say that they went w i t h the flow, b u t there was n o t m u c h flow. Neither party got m u c h out o f the experience: there was not m u c h experience to get something out of. The hole was already there, and they fell t h r o u g h it. Impulse led to death. B u t no impulse was death as well. T h e r e was m a r k i n g time, treading water, sinking, trying to stop sinking. Over the years there was less and less except for sinking, and finally, only the sinking was left. Deborah's affair w i t h her therapist was a more condensed version o f what happened or failed to happen w i t h her "boyfriends." She never really had a boyfriend. The r h y t h m that goes i n t o making a relationship was n o t there; that is, the rhythm o f relationship was n o t there. N o t h i n g grew or b u i l t on itself. There were moments o f almost contact, but no hits. She could not get m/othings or be swept away. She could n o t let life play on her, uplift her, lift her o u t o f herself. T o have glorious moments one needs to be able to move between states, between selves, between worlds. The rhythmic movement between self and other never quite evolved or took h o l d . By the time college ended, Deborah sensed she was i n trouble, b u t had no idea what the trouble was. She still was h o p i n g things w o u l d r i g h t themselves, that therapy would help, that life w o u l d come to her aid. She never thought her life would become as bad as it d i d . She always thought that she w o u l d p u l l out o f it, that something w o u l d happen. As time went o n , the entropy-inertia swelled u n t i l little was left outside it. A brittle yet tenacious rigidity made i t impossible to flow or float or fly. Deborah's life sank like a dead weight. She brought the sinking weight to my office and cried, "Catch me, catch me! Stop the dying!" I reached out, b u t she stared and demanded what behav­

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ior recipes I c o u l d offer. I c o u l d offer m y m i n d , heart, a n d soul, m y strength,

my a b i l i t y — b u t no recipe. I was n o t enough for her. She wanted what I could no/offer, something that I wasn't, something I d i d n ' t have. She left after our first few weeks o f sessions. I n such a short time, there was such a deep i m p r e s s i o n — o n me, n o t her. W i n n i c o t t counsels that it is i m p o r t a n t to recognize limits to therapy and that there are people who cannot be helped. H e wants therapists not to hate themselves too badly because o f failure. Failure is part o f living. There can be no therapy without failure. It saves time and energy to know who cannot be helped, since i t enables us to give more time to those who can. Yet it is important to try to work w i t h a Deborah, i f she wants to or stays, i n therapy. Does one know who may be helped and how? I have helped Deborahs o n occasion. A n d there have been Deborahs with w h o m I thought I failed, only to find out years later that our work had been valuable. One may need to sink a l o n g time i n t o the limits o f capacity, i n t o what cannot be done, for bits o f movement to begin, for unexpected openings to occur. What w o u l d have hap­ pened i f Deborah gave me a chance? W o u l d i t have been her most horrible experience o f all, or w o u l d something have happened? By her leaving before we started, she stopped my potential movement to­ ward or away f r o m her. I/she could n o t get i n or p u l l out. There w o u l d be n o movement at all. I would not have the chance to let something b u i l d , or to fall with her, or to sink together. I would n o t have the chance to withdraw, intrude, abandon, die out, come back. My chance, my freedom to move between states was stifled, killed off, aborted. I w o u l d never get the chance to find out how bad we could be together. I would n o t find o u t how she m i g h t murder me. I w o u l d never get to dip into the ways I could n o t take her, how unbearable being w i t h her could be. T h e r e would be no finding out, no chance, no opportunity, n o loss, no fail­ ure, n o learning. There would be no time. Perhaps n o t getting a chance, n o t having time, was the experience Deborah meant me to have. I was to taste a bit o f her death. Perhaps my j o b was to somehow begin to metabolize the unmetabolizable—the death o f time, the death o f promise. She could not move f r o m one state to another, f r o m world to world, self to self, self to other, and back again. Yet I could move i n and out of death. 1 could sink and rise. I could let her state and w o r l d touch me, her monomanic sinking, dying, falling, fading. I could sink, die, fall, fade. But there is a rhythm that takes me i n and out o f these states, a flow between states, a flow t h r o u g h states. I do get something going through worlds o f deadness. I get something i n the fall. Something sticks, grows, a b l i n d appreciation o f what we are up against, what we are, what we can go through. The b o t t o m is as important as the top. Deborah's inability to move between t o p - b o t t o m or i n - o u t must be taken i n by someone, be given some gestation process. For Deborah to be helped, the impossible must happen: the indigestible must be digested, worked over,

19

Psychic Death

processed. Perhaps better, movement between the digestible-indigestible needs to get stimulated a n d sustained. That no one knows how to do that is precisely what must be lived w i t h .

A NOTE ON BIG BATTALIONS:

WHERE DOES PROCESSING START?

It is an oddity i n Freud's work that he enjoys sticking pins i n h u m a n narcis­ sism, yet lobbies f o r ego c o n t r o l and mastery. Freud saw psychoanalysis as mortifying the Western ego, a Copernican revolution i n which the ego is no longer master i n its own house. His writings a b o u n d i n instances i n which instinct, like an impish, irrepressible child, sticks o u t its tongue at ego, evades control, makes ego f l o p o n its backside, is clown more than crown. Yet Freud admires Michelangelo's Moses for the intensity o f ego's victory over instinct. The hallucinatory, anxious, conflict-ridden ego is also the site o f the still small voice o f science, the light o f consciousness. The clown is hero; the hero is clown. Yet Freud is quite serious i n his admiration o f ethical, esthetic, and scientific achievements i n w h i c h the ego makes the most o f its e q u i p m e n t , does n o t succumb to inertia-entropy, channels instinctual drives, and pushes past its deformations. Near the end o f his life Freud writes that the business o f analysis "is to se­ cure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions o f the ego" (1937, p. 250). This is a more tempered view than the war cry, "Where i d is, let ego be." The wish f o r ego mastery and dominance is chastened. I t is enough for ego to have r o o m to function. The j u n g l e grows quickly; ego's achievements are fragile. Death work undoes the culture i t helps b u i l d . Yet there is still i n Freud the tone o f struggle, warfare, the b l o o d o f the warrior. Analysis secures the best possible conditions for ego, as i t m i g h t secure a beachhead or fortify a strategic position. Analysis is n o t i m m u n i z a t i o n f r o m life. Positions can be overrun and achievements reversed. One does the best one can w i t h the materials at hand. O u r modest battle to secure the best possible conditions for functions o f the ego is a fight against odds: " i t seems as i f victory is i n fact as a rule o n the side o f the big battalions" (1937, p. 240). "Hostile forces" have the greater share o f energy. Freud, partly, has i n m i n d instinctual drives, especially death work. But the ego is n o t only besieged f r o m without. I t is its own enemy. T h e ego inflates-deflates, hallucinates, splits, adopts critical perspectives, seeks t r u t h , mixes t r u t h and delusion. Now we side with ego, now w i t h i d ; now with one ego f u n c t i o n , now w i t h another. We move back and f o r t h between positions. The ego is partner, n o t only fighter. We enter i n t o partnership w i t h pro­ cesses that constitute us, support us, u n d o us. We try to get to know what we are made of, perhaps over many millennia. What is the I t or T h o u or O that

20

Psychic Deadness

we are part of, that we stand o u t f r o m , that we feel w i t h i n us and around us, that we fight with, that we immerse ourselves in? What sort o f beings are we? O f what are we capable? Freud's vision is not only one o f battle between and w i t h i n psychic elements b u t also o f u n i o n . The psyche is one fabric. There is connection, nourishment, and support between psychical divisions. A sense o f connection-division char­ acterizes psychical work. What is most alive i n Freud is his portrayal o f a flowing psyche, x t u r n i n g i n t o y, interchangeability, polarization, one t h i n g becoming-standing against-standing f o r another. Equivalence, interchange­ ability, reversal, polarization, all manner o f mixtures and antagonisms: Isn't this what draws us to Freud, this restless flow o f energy, affect, and meaning? For Freud this flow is fundamental. H e felt he never d i d better than his "dream book" (1900), i n which he portrays primary process work, wriggling displacements, condensations, incessant r e s h u f f l i n g o f forms expressing unconscious concerns. As his sense o f the plasticity o f psychic life developed, his work depicted myriad reversals and substitutions: reversibility of affect (e.g., love ** hate); substitution o f meaning f o r affect, meaning for meaning, idea f o r idea, idea f o r affect, affect f o r idea; reversibility o f persons ( I you); reversibility o f tendencies (active *-» passive); reversibility o f direction o f ten­ dencies (toward the self ** toward the o t h e r ) . Freud had one eye on mobility, another on barriers. The psyche was alive with pulsating movement. Yet the flow met i n n e r - o u t e r resistances, had its own inertia, stickiness, backflow (re­ gression), and finally emptied i n t o the river o f death. Perhaps the emphasis o n structuring tendencies, ego integration, and mastery kept analytic atten­ tion too riveted o n dichotomies between free and b o u n d energy, drive dis­ charge and realistic delay, wish f u l f i l l m e n t and disguised rerouting, impulse and control, irrational—rational, pleasure-unpleasure. N o t enough credit was given to what primary process flow achieves, the work it does. Freud overemphasizes the contrast between pleasure and pain and places primary process work firmly o n the side o f pleasure. I n the end, this dichotomy broke down. A psyche fundamentally devoted to pleasure could n o t explain the pervasiveness of pain i n human affairs. Nevertheless, Freud's work possesses resources that contribute to revisualizing what primary process does. Primary process works on the pain it tries to wish away. Even the wishing away o f pain can be a first approach to working w i t h it. O n the one hand, primary process may try to cushion or r i d the psyche o f pain, reroute pleasure around pain, or try to circumscribe and l i m i t pain. I t searches o u t pain and begins to weave webs o f meaning around i t , a psychic wound-licking, cocooning, secreting pearls around irritants. Even as i t tries to delete pain, i t acts o n it, does something to or with i t , alters it. Primary process begins the transformation o f pain. Freud (1920) calls attention to cases i n which primary process focuses re­ lentlessly on pain. Mythic images and literary narratives give the fact o f suffer­

21

Psychic Death

i n g privileged emphasis. Dreams are filled with catastrophic moments. Repeti­ tive p a i n f u l dreams, like the traumatic war neurosis dreams Freud notes, sug­ gest that the psyche is u p against more pain than it can process. Pain breaks t h r o u g h the cocoon o f wishes, shatters pearls o f meaning. There is a break­ down i n the psyche's ability to begin the processing o f pain. Mastery o f pain is too m u c h to expect. But perhaps primary process can bite o f f bits o f painful impacts, rework painful injuries i n fragmentary ways. Rework­ ing o f pain is always partial. One cannot make savage wounds go away. But little by little, primary process can absorb more o f the impact, keep t u r n i n g shock around, make r o o m for the shock. Growth o f even a little digestive capacity goes a l o n g way. Sometimes primary process effectively shrinks a p a i n f u l mass, like a psychic radiation treatment. The images, fantasies, primitive narratives i t secretes can partially break u p and dissolve the pain o n which they act. A t times the subject may so enjoy exercising primary process capacity that the painful moment takes second place to the t h r i l l o f using one's equipment intensely and fully. A poem may be m o r e i m p o r t a n t to a poet than the pain that occasioned it. T h e self a patient finds while speaking about injury can alter one's experience o f what injury is. O n the o t h e r hand, primary process may never catch u p to the sense o f injury. Sensitivity to wounds may always be steps ahead o f processing ability. The growth i n ability to live with this assymetry is a k i n d o f wisdom. One learns to give pain time. I t takes time for pain to d i m i n i s h enough for processing to begin n i b b l i n g at it. The seasoned personality is steeped i n time. Primary process is attracted to wounds. I t begins the b i n d i n g and process­ i n g o f wounds. I t not only attempts to sneak pleasure past f o r b i d d i n g eyes but it also tries to heal. I t tries to r i g h t the psyche, to make one feel better and actually be better. The double tendency to avoid a n d to work over pain is i m p l i c i t i n primary process. O n the one hand, there is shock, blanking out, n u m b i n g , t u r n i n g off, getting r i d of, wishing away, trying to substitute plea­ sure or fullness or oblivion for pain. But there is also recovery, nursing wounds, p r o d u c i n g images and proto-narratives that coat, lubricate, and begin break­ i n g down and metabolizing chunks o f h o r r o r . We t u r n wounds i n t o dreams, poems, religions, art, laws, and social institutions. By feeding injury i n t o dream work, primary process begins the endless task o f m a k i n g something o f suffer­ ing, o f w o r k i n g with pain t h r o u g h images, o f discovering the j o y o f symboliz­ i n g what cannot be e n d u r e d . 3

3 For alternative, related portrayals of the work that primary that process does, see Ehrenzweig (1971) and Bion (1970). This theme runs through my earlier work (Eigen 1986, 1992b, 1993, 1995) and is part of a strong imaginative current of psychoanalytic writers (e.g., Matte-Bianco 1975, 1988, Milner 1957,1987, Noy 1968, Rycroft 1968).

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Psychic Deadness

Primary process does its work i n better and worse ways. Primary process i t ­ self can be wounded and be unable to work well. Something can go w r o n g w i t h the psyche's ability to process injury f r o m the outset. I f primary process is dam­ aged, i t cannot properly begin the task o f processing catastrophic states. I t is part o f the catastrophe. T h e images and proto-narratives it feeds the psyche lead nowhere, perpetuate damage, and lam movement. Primary process tries to r i g h t itself, to heal itself, b u t may n o t be able to do so. I t may become preoccupied w i t h signaling its own damaged state, its own b l o c k e d processing ability. I f i t does n o t get h e l p and is left to its f a i l i n g devices, its images and proto-narratives can become ever m o r e damaging to itself and the psyche generally. The image-making process becomes part o f a process o f injury, a vicious spiral o f imaging damage that acts i n such a way that more damage results. This spiral can reach a p o i n t where images o f dam­ age are less symbols than they are instances o f the damage itself, momentary glimpses o f the damaging process i n progress. I n extreme instances, the dam­ age is so severe that images are no longer produced or are inaccessible, and the individual begins to vanish as the w o u n d closes over h i m o r her. This is the sort o f trap i n t o which Deborah has fallen. H e r psyche has closed in around her, has failed to support her. Primary process is n o t processing. I t is n o t w o r k i n g o n her sense o f injury, b u t is swallowed u p by it. T o speak o f penis envy or castration anxiety does n o t make sense when one has fallen o f f the edge o f the psychic universe, when the psyche itself seems o n the verge o f vanishing. When Freud writes that the business o f analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions o f the ego (1937, p. 250), a well-enough functioning

primary process must be included among these conditions.

Deborah slipped

through her own primary process foundations, and they became deadening. We can only guess how this happened. Obviously, the Other failed to help her, but she also was unable to use what help m i g h t have been offered. How d i d this happen? What makes this work? Again, we are back to square zero.

REFERENCES Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1983. Ehrerizweig, A. (1971). The Hidden Order of Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, Eigen, M. (1986). The Psychotic Core. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, (1992a). T h e fire that never goes out. Psychoanalytic Review 79: 271-287. (1992b). Coming through the Whirlwind. Wilmette, I L : Chiron. (1993). The Electrified Tightrope. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. (1995). Reshaping the Self. New York: Psychosocial Press. Freud, S. (1900). T h e interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition 4/5:1-361. (1913). T h e theme of the three caskets. Standard Edition 12.

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(1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition 18. (1923). The ego and the id. Standard Edition 19.

(1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. Standard Edition 23. (1940). The outline of psycho-analysis. Standard Edition 23. Jung, C. G. (1943, 1945). Two essays on analytical psychology. In The Collected Works of C. G.Jung. Bollinger series, vol. 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. Masson, J. M., ed. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess

1887-1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Matte-Bianco, I. (1975). The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. London: Duckworth. (1988). Thinking, Feeling, and Being. London: Routledge. Milner, M. (1957). On Not Being Able to Paint. New York:. International Universities Press, 1973. (1987). The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men. London : Tavistock. Noy, P. (1968). The development of musical ability. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,

vol. 68. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rodman, R. (1987). The Spontaneous Gesture: Selected Letters ofD. W. Winnicott. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press. Rycroft, C. (1968). Imagination and Reality. New York: International Universities Press. Winnicott, D, W. (1986). Holding and Interpretation. New York: Grove.

2 The Destructive Force

It is difficult to overestimate Melanie Klein's impact o n psychoanalytic t h i n k ­ ing. So many o f her locutions and concerns are part o f psychoanalytic daily life. She shares with nineteenth-century psychiatry, poets, and gothic literature an obsession with splitting. I n Klein's writings, splits i n personality become splits in ego, object, and affect. She embarks o n what may well be one o f the most detailed portrayals o f psychological splitting in the history o f ideas. She shares this preoccupation with Freud and Jung, but gives i t her own t u r n , takes i t to places the founders o f depth psychology d i d n o t quite get to. I f the idea o f splitting is popular today, Melanie Klein is a background influence. Klein shares w i t h existentialism a preoccupation w i t h death. O u r sense o f self, other, a n d time is stained by death on the horizon. For Freud and Klein, death is n o t only a definitive event approaching us b u t also something work­ i n g i n every psychic pore now. K l e i n spins variants o f Freud's death drive t h r o u g h o u t her work. She takes seriously Freud's insistence that Eros and the death instinct permeate every fiber o f psychic life. H o w death work and life work contribute to every psychic event involves "problems whose elucidation would be the most rewarding achievement o f psychological research" (Freud 1937, p. 243). By immersing herself i n death and life processes, Klein contrib­ utes toward the elucidation that Freud invites. Klein makes psychoanalysis more honest by m a k i n g explicit its implicit con­ cern w i t h psychosis. I n an earlier c o n t r i b u t i o n (Eigen 1986, pp. 5 - 3 1 ) , I show how an u n d e r l y i n g concern w i t h madness contributes to Freud's structural concepts and descriptions o f psychic processes. He applies notions drawn f r o m psychotic phenomenology to the treatment o f neurotics. Klein tears the veil away and focuses o n psychotic anxieties, mechanisms, and defenses that make their way t h r o u g h infancy and remain active all life long. She gives credence to the i n t u i t i o n that madness runs t h r o u g h h u m a n affairs and plays a role i n everyone's life. The Kleinian analyst expects to work w i t h psychotic processes and is n o t

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surprised by psychotic transferences. O n the contrary, analysts touched by Klein are suspicious i f psychotic depths are bypassed i n analytic work. W i n n i c o t t (1971, p. 87) muses with black h u m o r o n the value o f analytic work that goes o n at neurotic levels for years, never t o u c h i n g issues o f madness or a deeper malaise. Fairbairn (1954) describes neuroses as ways o f b i n d i n g deeper frag­ mentation. T h e titles o f two recent books by authors touched by Klein (via W i n n i c o t t and Bion) bear witness to the n o t i o n that b e h i n d a neurosis lies a hidden psychosis: Green's On Private Madness (1986) and Milner's The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987). My own book, The Psychotic Core (1986), deals with aspects o f madness that characterize the h u m a n c o n d i t i o n . Melanie Klein does n o t believe infants are psychotic j u s t because there are psychotic processes i n infancy. However, she does l i n k madness with very early processes and is obsessed with the quest for origins. Madness is n o t simply an aberration, something extrinsic to the h u m a n . Rather, something approximat­ i n g madness is intrinsic to the way the h u m a n psyche works, although it would be brash to define man as mad. I f i t is brash to define man as mad, i t would also be mad to exclude madness f r o m one's sense of the h u m a n . We leave open what to make o f this knot, as i t is beyond our powers to untangle now. This chapter connects Melanie Klein's interest i n psychotic processes with psychic deadness. Klein's portrayals o f psychotic anxieties f o r m a nexus o u t o f which her views o f psychic deadness u n f o l d . To feel the f u l l force o f Klein's views o n deadness, i t is necessary to tease apart m u l t i p l e currents o f her work. My points o f entree are the many times she repeats the l o c u t i o n , " f r o m the beginning o f life." I t is a phrase she repeats with different meanings. One might conclude she holds contradictory views o f psychic origins or that all the originary processes she speaks o f go together in fertile, complex ways. I espouse the lat­ ter view. I t is i m p o r t a n t to give f u l l development to Klein's m u l t i p l e perspec­ tives i n order to see how far her picture o f deadness takes us a n d where i t leaves off.

F R O M T H E B E G I N N I N G OF LIFE Melanie Klein's essay, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" (1946) is a richly condensed summary o f her picture o f psychic life, yet one cannot get the f u l l flavor o f Klein f r o m this essay. Her book, Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961), shocks one i n t o awareness o f Mother's body as war zone. T h e drive to get con­ trol o f Mother's insides, meeting u p with rivals i n her body, psychic dramas played out with body materials: all this receives more graphic treatment i n her account o f moment-to-moment analytic interactions. But the bare bones o f her vision shine with special brightness i n "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" (1946). I t is a h i g h p o i n t i n her writings and is my focus here.

The Destructive Force

27

Klein uses the phrase " f r o m the b e g i n n i n g " eight times i n pp. 293-298; the variant, "at the beginning", appears once (p. 296). There are other references to the beginning o f life i n this essay as well. Apparently reference to origins is part o f Klein's style. I t is interesting that she does n o t say " f r o m the beginning o f psychic life," but " f r o m the beginning o f life." I would imagine she meant f r o m the beginning of psychic life, b u t her repeated references to the begin­ n i n g o f life take on a certain power. One begins to t h i n k she really means the beginning o f life itself or at least the infant's life. Does she really i n t e n d us to t h i n k that the infant's mental activity begins concurrently with bodily activity, that the two grow up at the same time and are inseparable? That she asserts the first object is the breast suggests that the beginning o f life she means is life f r o m b i r t h . Are there objects i n the womb? The fact that i n her writings the womb becomes an object to seek, control, and possess leaves the question open. Melanie Klein is very Freudian i n her emphasis on active mental processes. She is perhaps more Freudian than Freud himself i n her emphasis on active ego processes everywhere. The fantasy o f passive u n i o n with the womb is less i m p o r t a n t than the ego's womb-oriented activity. For her the w o m b is n o t merely a safe harbor, a place to withdraw a n d hide b u t also a place o f creativ­ ity, power, appropriation, a status symbol. T h e Kleinian w o m b is a busy place filled with weapons, struggles, battles; i t is a site o f hyperactivity. I t certainly does n o t provide the rest and respite that regression seeks. I n the Kleinian w o r l d , there is no safety anywhere, n o t for l o n g . What is i t like to undergo the changes an embryo or fetus does? Ocean waves and roller coasters seem tame by comparison. I can well imagine n o t moving m u c h w i t h so m u c h going o n . A regressed person i n a fetal position may be trying to ride out the storm. Melanie Klein also may be true to the mother's experience, who must somehow come t h r o u g h a lifetime o f changes i n nine months and perhaps still greater changes i n being with a live infant and child. Nevertheless, it is n o t helplessness i n the face o f immense change that Klein emphasizes. The ego is part o f growth processes, and ego activity adds to the dramatic alterations i n progress. T h e ego helps shape the processes by which it is shaped. Still the ego is driven. Its fierce activity is tied to momentous changes it does n o t control. Like the embryo or fetus, i t develops along a timetable, with characteristic structural and dynamic shifts. Is Klein's ego, like Freud's, partly a mastery ego, dedicated t o m a k i n g the passive active, emphasizing integration and synthesis? Does passivity exist i n Klein's world? What sorts o f relationships are possible between ego and the greater psychic field? There are different sorts o f deadness. Deadness can result f r o m t u r n i n g o f f i n the face o f overstimulation or an o v e r w h e l m i n g situation. I n extreme instances, one may passively die out. I n contrast, Kleinian deadness seems more l i n k e d with active mastery attempts gone w r o n g . T h e ego stifles e m o t i o n i n

28

Psychic Deadness

order to stay o n top, a sort o f rising above oneself. Klein emphasizes the ego's manic defenses and self-hardening processes, attempts to stay above or fortify oneself against painful realities. These attempts result i n emotional depletion or the loss o f contact with emotional reality. One o f Klein's specialties is her delineation o f ego defenses—splitting, idealization, manic denial, projection, and i n t r o j e c t i o n — i n the face o f psychotic anxieties. One wonders whether part of psychic deadness is tied to the ego's attempts to do too m u c h . Doesn't the Kleinian ego ever simply tire itself out or get t i r e d o f itself? I n this chapter, we will t u r n the Kleinian "beginning o f l i f e " kaleidoscope and superimpose some o f the configurations that appear. We move between the ego's relations to objects, affects, and drives and their intertwining. O u r starting p o i n t is Klein's famous emphasis on the death drive as a nucleus o f ego activity.

FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEATH INSTINCT More than most analysts, Klein places Freud's death drive at the center o f psy­ chic life. N o t only does she share Freud's conviction that the death drive plays a constitutive role i n psychic phenomena but she also contributes original varia­ tions on the theme. She nourishes, extends, and amplifies the ways i n which death currents spread t h r o u g h and m o l d psychic activities. Klein makes the strong assertion that "anxiety arises f r o m the operation o f the death instinct w i t h i n the organism" (1946, p. 296). We do n o t know exactly what she means by "operation" or "death instinct," b u t we have hints. She speaks o f "the primary anxiety o f being annihilated by a destructive force w i t h i n " (1946, p. 297). Whatever the death instinct and its operations may be, it issues i n annihilation anxiety, which is linked to a destructive force within. This linkage marks a radical amplification or shift o f emphasis i n psycho­ analysis. Primary anxiety is n o t tied to libido, b u t to a destructive force within. We are less anxious about sexuality than about destruction. I n his personal life, Freud seemed more obsessed with the fear of death than castration (see Chap­ ter 1). As he moved toward old age, death finally got its due i n his formal theory (libido i n youth, death i n o l d age). Standing o n Freud's shoulders i n his o l d age, Melanie Klein looks squarely i n the face o f death. What makes Klein's emphasis o n death psychoanalytic, i n part, is the way death spreads t h r o u g h the personality and works indirectly. The destructive force w i t h i n , like l i b i d o , undergoes a series of displacements or deflections. It is (1) "felt as fear o f annihilation (death)"; (2) "takes the f o r m o f fear o f persecution"; and is (3) "from the beginning felt as being caused by objects" (1946, p. 296). This is death drive's centrifugal movement ( i n - o u t ) . A t the same time, there is a centripetal movement ( o u t - i n ) , whereby outer persecuting

The Destructive Force

29

objects are i n t r o j e c t e d and become i n t e r n a l persecutors. They t h e n draw on and reinforce "fear o f the destructive impulse w i t h i n " (1946, p. 196). Projection-introjection f u n c t i o n as filters or funnels for the death drive. They provide shapes, forms, arenas o f objects: pathways for the death drive. Melanie Klein maintains that a destructive force within is felt as the primary source o f danger at the same time that one encounters i t t h r o u g h deflections (projective—introjective funnels). The p r i m a l destructive force w i t h i n is more global and formless than its projective—introjective manifestations. Melanie Klein has m o r e to say about the latter than the former. H e r specialty is to delineate ways i n w h i c h the ego channels and binds the death d r i v e — v i a p r o j e c t i o n - i n t r o j e c t i o n and such associated mechanisms as splitting, idealiza­ tion, and denial. B i o n (1965, 1970, see Chapter 4) focuses o n the raw, f o r m ­ less destructive force and its radical u n b i n d i n g o f what ego builds. For Melanie Klein, the formless, originary death drive and its projective­ introjective shapes work f r o m the beginning. There is an originary simultane­ ity o f multidirectional movements toward more or less f o r m and more or less stability. The ego is always under pressure to deal w i t h death drive's twists and turns. Can it possibly be up to this task?

FROM THE BEGINNING: EGO AND OBJECTS To understand Melanie Klein's depiction of early ego-object relations, we can start f r o m four o f her assertions about the b e g i n n i n g o f life: (1) "that object­ relations exist f r o m the b e g i n n i n g o f l i f e " (1946, p. 293); (2) that " f r o m the beginning object-relations are m o l d e d by an interaction between introjection and p r o j e c t i o n " (1946, p. 293); (3) that " f r o m the b e g i n n i n g the destructive impulse is t u r n e d against the object" (1946, p. 293); and (4) "that the i n t r o ­ jected good breast forms a vital part o f the ego, [and] exerts f r o m the begin­ n i n g a fundamental influence on the processes of ego-development and affects both ego-structure and object-relations" (1946, p. 295). For Melanie Klein the first object is the breast, which is split i n t o a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast. Affects (love and hate) associated with good and bad experiences also are split f r o m each other. One m i g h t imagine too that there is a g o o d ego and bad ego severed f r o m each other. The destructive impulse is turned against the object ( i n - o u t ) while goodness is taken in ( o u t - i n ) . This scheme has many threads to p u l l o n . Melanie Klein's Genesis reads, " I n the b e g i n n i n g was splitting, and splitting divides good f r o m bad: good and bad objects, good and bad instincts, good and bad affects, g o o d and bad egos." Other readers o f Genesis wonder i f she missed earlier elements o f c r e a t i o n — t h e formlessness, chaos, n o t h i n g , breath, emergent life and w o r l d — a n d perhaps missed Eden before the apple is eaten.

30

Psychic Deadness

She begins not simply by dividing light f r o m dark, b u t w i t h the Tree o f Knowl­ edge (good and bad). Is the first object the breast (the apple rather than God)? Is there a first object? Is there life before splitting? What is the breast that gets split into good and bad? Is there a primal swim o f experience i n which well-being and distress variously alternate, fuse, commingle? Do we begin with variable mixtures of agony, bliss, and ordinary just-so states? Are there elements o f polarization at the out­ set, or does polarization take time to crystallize, or both? Is the bipolar self nec­ essarily a split self? When do divisions become splits? I t is easy to question Melanie Klein, but it would be facile to discount her. Bion (1970), Winnicott (1971), and Elkin (1972) are among those to creatively imagine alternative points of depar­ ture while making use of, rather than dismissing, Klein's insights. A region Klein guides us into involves ways that the psyche splits inner and outer worlds to handle the death force. A n overall framework o f Klein's work is that psychic agencies and objects f u n c t i o n to delimit, channel, and dampen what otherwise would be an overwhelming and lethal flow o f death currents. This is more than a hydraulic metaphor. The h u m a n implications are enor­ mous and heart wrenching. I n a time when the news media are saturated w i t h reports o f child abuse, explosive victimization o f every sort, terror o f the streets and b e d r o o m , and terror w i t h i n and between nations and when cheap, denuded violence becomes the language o f entertainment and the currency o f psychic exchange, the dikes against waves o f death force are leaky indeed. A parent repents after blowing up at a child: " I t happened i n a flash. I ex­ ploded. I lost it. I t b u i l t up. I held it i n . T h e n i t happened, like a flame igniting gun powder or gas." C h i l d explodes, and then parent explodes—orgasmic de­ struction. Sometimes blowing up clears the air, b u t often it has devastating results. As the parent continues, i t sounds a b i t like masturbation or other addictions: " I tell myself T i l never do it again, b u t it builds, and has its way." So many people blowing up, having tantrums, inflicting and sustaining serious injury: we seem obsessed by destruction. What it means to regulate aggression is a paramount issue of our time. Klein's work is so i m p o r t a n t because i t does n o t offer an easy way out. Explosions, attacks, rage against the other: these are deflections o f a force that would o t h ­ erwise consume one's self and body. They are signs o f a deeper force one tries to dodge, juggle, play for time w i t h , and make something of. Any victory is par­ tial and is subject to loss, breakdown, starting over. One cannot get r i d o f the death force, but one may to some extent take i t into account. Perhaps (to some extent) one rides the waves, learns body English tricks. One does (to some extent) learn to spot and live w i t h reversals (in » out, love ** hate, self o t h e r ) , instead o f merely playing one side against the other. By gazing at one's predicament, one m i g h t even become more open to a deeper, fuller flow o f life.

31

The Destructive Force SPLITTING OF EGO-AFFECT-OBJECT

The more one looks at the splitting mechanisms Klein depicts, the denser they become. O n e imagines the psyche w i l l take i n goodness (introjection) and get r i d o f badness (projection), a digestive/respiratory model. This is a main line o f her vision, but variations thicken. Since the death force is deflected outward, i t also gets introjected. I n t r o ­ j e c t i o n ** projection flows b o t h ways ( i n ** o u t ) . Similarly, the life force may be projected, resulting i n experiencing objects as better than they are (ideali­ z a t i o n ) . A quite c o m p l e x a r r a y o f p r o j e c t e d — i n t r o j e c t e d g o o d n e s s — b a d n e s s

(life—death t r a n s f o r m s ) r e s u l t , i n c l u d i n g m u t u a l c o n t a g i o n , w h e r e i n g o o d — b a d spill i n t o each other i n confusing ways. T h e g o o d o r bad may refer to drive, affect, object, o r ego. Melanie Klein uses the t e r m "projective i d e n t i f i c a t i o n " to indicate that an object is identified w i t h g o o d o r bad parts o f the self. Similarly, "introjective identification" suggests that good o r bad parts o f the object are i d e n t i f i e d with self. T h r o u g h o u t her major writings she takes f o r granted that identificatory processes are at work i n the projection i n t r o j e c t i o n flow. A powerful array o f psychic possibilities emerges f r o m Klein's meditations o n connections be­ tween identificatory p r o j e c t i o n - i n t r o j e c t i o n and splitting. Good o r bad aspects o f the selfcan be identified w i t h g o o d o r bad aspects o f the object, and good o r bad aspects o f the object can be i d e n t i f i e d w i t h g o o d or bad aspects o f the self. I f one adds dislocations a n d amalgams o f affect, the clinical possibilities become mind-boggling. Ego, object, a n d affect can be taken apart and p u t together i n myriad permutations. Bad ego can hate good ego, g o o d ego can love bad ego, bad object can hate g o o d object l o v i n g g o o d ego, bad object can love bad ego hating good object, bad object can hate bad ego loving good object, good ego can hate bad ego hating g o o d object, a n d o n and o n . This enables mappings o f dazzling arrays o f i n t e r n a l - e x t e r n a l object-ego-affect relations. Freud's vision o f instincts variously d i s t r i b u t i n g (attaching-detaching) them­ selves w i t h regard to objects a n d psychic agencies is here a m p l i f i e d i n ego­ affect-object relational terms.

ROOTS O F DEADNESS Excessiv e Splitting

I f splitting proliferates, i t leads to "impoverishment o f the ego" and "dispersal o f emotions" (1946, p. 316). T h e result is e m o t i o n a l deadness, lack o f emo­ t i o n , a n d unresponsiveness. Bion (1970) works over this material i n spatial t e r m s . E m o t i o n a l d i s p e r s a l or t h i n n i n g i s p a r t l y a f u n c t i o n o f t h e s p a c e i t o c c u ­ pies. A s p a c e m a y b e t o o b i g or s m a l l f o r t h e e m o t i o n o c c u p y i n g i t , a n d v i c e

32

Psychic Deadness

versa. The problem o f space—whether there is too much or too litde space f o r an e m o t i o n — i s less important to Klein than the connection between deadness and latent anxiety. She believes that emotional deadness is a measure o f unconscious anxiety. Emotion is present, but is dispersed by splitting. Deadness is only apparent, a reflection o f splitting processes that stifle emotional life. Klein is committed to a conflict/anxiety model. A central difference between her theory and that o f traditional Freudians is that she focuses o n early split­ ting mechanisms as anxiety producers/regulators, antedating oedipal repres­ sion; i t is unclear what she makes o f p r i m a l repression. S p l i t t i n g r u n amok becomes a cancer eating u p the psyche, substituting itself f o r the emotions o n which i t acts. T h e patient may feel disintegrated, emotionless, i n pieces, and depleted. I n effect, the individual experiences something o f the defense a n d its result (split a n d vacant) while losing contact w i t h the cut-up e m o t i o n . Part o f the enormous valence that splitting has f o r the subject is its func­ t i o n as a l i n k w i t h the emotion i t severs. T h e subject may become attached to feeling c u t i n pieces, fragmented, and severed f r o m himself, because o f the unconscious association o f splitting with the emotion i t disperses. One holds on to splitting because of its unconscious connection to emotional life. One multiplies splits i n vain attempts to capture o r make contact with emotions they disperse. I t may be unclear whether an individual trapped i n splitting is trying to recapture or annihilate contact w i t h his emotional life. Usually b o t h are true. For Klein i t remains possible i n theory to gather and synthesize dispersed emotion. W h e n this happens the patient feels "his i n n e r and outer worlds have n o t only come more together but back to life again" (1946, p. 316). Klein seems to associate splitting-dispersal w i t h death and synthesis w i t h life. Anxiety is associated w i t h life, the r e t u r n o f emotion. She makes a strong case f o r the omnipresence o f anxiety, which now is more dispersed, now more focal. W h e n the patient comes together and alive again "it appears i n retrospect that when emotions were lacking, relations were vague a n d uncertain a n d parts o f the personality were felt to be lost, everything seemed to be dead. A l l this is the equivalent o f anxiety o f a very serious nature. This anxiety, kept latent by dis­ persal, is to some extent experienced all along, b u t its f o r m differs f r o m the latent anxiety w h i c h we can recognize in other types o f cases" (1946, p. 316). The therapeutic task is to b r i n g together split aspects o f self, a n d w i t h cohe­ sion comes more emotions, especially anxiety. Note the therapeutic optimism. Splitting induces deadness. Synthesis, the healing o f splits, recovers aliveness. Deadness is only apparent. Emotions o f anxiety were present all along; they were only dispersed. O n e is n o t dead, only split. Assemble the dry bones and a living, anxious b e i n g appears again. W h e n d i d Kleinian a n x i e t y — i n d e x o f the death d r i v e — s l i d e i n t o Freudian anxiety, the index o f libido? Freud and Klein agree that psychic acts include life and death drive components. N o act is without either. Yet Klein explicitly ties anxiety to death. For the schizoid personality, one who lacks the feeling o f

The Destructive Force

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feelings, it is a sign o f life. I do n o t t h i n k Klein was aware of this slippage, and I do not want to criticize her for it. B u t we can learn f r o m i t , as anxiety floats, freely or not, between death and life. Anxiety may be enlivening for one who lacks emotion and is unresponsive, and often this is so. Yet i t is also the case that many dead individuals cannot bear any rise o f emotion, i n c l u d i n g anxiety. Melanie Klein does n o t take u p the possibility o f death work going so far that anxiety is left behind. She holds fast to the belief that anxiety underlies deadness. I t is n o t simply that dead­ ness dampens anxiety, but that deadness results f r o m attacks on anxiety. A n x i ­ ety may get cut up and dispersed, b u t does n o t die out. Scratch deadness and get anxiety; the opposite possibility is n o t meaningful to her. Klein notes that analysis typically wins the patient's alliance when he or she experiences the relief f r o m anxiety that interpretations b r i n g . W o u l d the tech­ nical corollary for the emotionless patient be that interpretations, w h i c h increase anxiety, b r i n g relief? Klein is n o t naive enough to believe this, b u t she does feel that interpretations that synthesize splits i n the self and dispersal o f emotion will lead to the experience o f anxiety (emotion). She seems to take for granted that the capacity to have feelings is intact, but is temporarily p u t out o f play by active defenses. The consideration that attacks against emotion (or self or object), m i g h t damage (disperse) n o t only emotion b u t also the capacity for emotions is n o t compelling for her. B i o n (1965) raises the problem o f damaged or undeveloped equipment or capac­ ity. I n such a patient, emotionlessness is not simply a reversible c o n d i t i o n — synthesize splits to obtain e m o t i o n — s o m u c h as an index of damage or the lack of development. Maximal and m i n i m a l emotional states may flip-flop, n o t only as substitutes for each other b u t also as signs o f apparatus/equipment mishap and mayhem (a catastrophe the personality has undergone or is u n d e r g o i n g ) . The idea that the lack o f e m o t i o n is as m u c h or more a sign o f the death drive as anxiety is n o t congenial to Klein's theoretical style. Yet one could see both anxiety and emotionlessness as fluctuating arms o f death work i n certain contexts. One can be obliterated by anxiety or the lack o f emotion, by too much or by too little. Anxiety may collude with and express death, life, or both. Anxiety is floating, colorless, at home with many masters. There are threads i n Klein's formulations we could pull o n to link emotional deadness w i t h a death force. I t is worthwhile to do so, bearing i n m i n d that Klein took another path.

A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE WITHIN Earlier, I called attention to Klein's references to a nuclear "destructive force w i t h i n " (1946, p. 297). She focuses o n ego reactions to an inner destructive force. Anxiety, splitting, projective-introjective identification, denial, and dis­

34

Psychic Deadness

persal are some o f the ego's responses to the destructive force. T h e nuclear destructive force works b e h i n d the scenes silently, b u t its deflections can make a lot o f noise. The destructive force remains u n k n o w n (unknowable?), an hypothesis or construct, b u t for Klein it is very real. The ego's primary anxiety is of being annihilated, n o t by external danger but by a destructive force w i t h i n . The ego cannot localize the danger. I t cannot p i n down where i t comes f r o m or what it is. I t has no frame of reference for the destructive force w i t h i n . There are no boundaries, limits, or place: just the raw anxiety o f annihilation, the originary dread (Bion's "nameless dread"). Klein traces the biography o f annihilation anxiety via ego attempts to split and disperse its dread. The results o f successive acts o f dispersal can be dead­ ening, and Klein focuses on this sort o f deadness. Her emphasis is o n splitting— integration mechanisms, rather than on ways that the death force m i g h t permanently alter or damage the ego or paralyze, j a m , warp, and damage u n ­ conscious processing ability. Yet she feels that the ego splits and disperses itself, as well as affects and objects; apparently she felt the ego could more or less pop i n t o shape via the interpretations o f splits. Klein does not seriously consider the possibility that there are cases i n which psychic damage is so extensive that splitting is ineffectual or unavailable. I n such instances, the personality has n o t followed the path of anxiety, b u t has taken another route. K l e i n hints this when she says that emotionlessness can be equivalent to anxiety. By this she means that anxiety is h i d d e n by emo­ tionlessness or that emotionlessness is a f o r m or signal o f anxiety. B u t one can add that emotionlessness, like anxiety, can act as a signal o f the death drive. A n d , to be strictly congruent, emotionlessness, like anxiety, can be an expres­ sion o f death work. It is i m p o r t a n t to note that in my reformulation, neither side o f a polarity (emotionlessness anxiety) is made primary at the other's expense. T h e double arrow expresses the possibility that either can transform into the other, or oppose the other, or meld together i n various ways. Surely Klein's vision that emotionlessness is a f o r m o f anxiety is significant. M u c h mileage can be gained f r o m understanding deadness as frozen e m o t i o n , defense against e m o t i o n , e m o t i o n i n disguise (attacked, denied, split, dispersed e m o t i o n ) . But such a view can be cruel i f the capacity to support emotion is missing or damaged. Analytic work can have a moralistic or blaming tinge i f emphasis is placed o n the ego's active complicity and defensiveness, when the problem is actually deeper. There are individuals who have difficulty generating emotions or sus­ taining and processing emotions once they are generated. I t is as i f emotions belong to a universe that does not exist or fall o f f the edge o f the universe into nowhere. For such individuals it is not a matter of p u t t i n g together what was split, so m u c h as creating conditions f o r growth of capacity. T o use a m o d i f i e d Bionic (1965, 1970) f o r m u l a t i o n , emotionlessness takes

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the place where emotion m i g h t have been. Lack o f capacity is experienced as emptiness. The opposite also occurs: emotion takes the place where emptiness might have been. There can be n o t only the lack of capacity to generate, sus­ tain, and process emotions but also the lack o f capacity to sustain and process gaps, empty times, nothingness moments. Ideally, one is able to move be­ tween states, now f u l l and now empty, using all the organ stops one can. But individuals get trapped by emptiness, or addicted to fullness, or wiped o u t by oscillations. A n advantage to a more open-ended f o r m u l a t i o n is that one can consider the possibility o f a relatively defensive or undefensive use of feeling or lack of feeling, depending on the context of the moment. Klein is c o m m i t t e d to view­ ing anxiety as primary, emptiness as derivative. The possibility that anxiety could arise as a response to e m p t i n e s s — b o t h as a dread o f emptiness and an attempt to fill emptiness—is n o t meaningful to her. Perhaps she d i d n o t know how to empty out or value blankness for its own sake as a life-giving state. Hers is an anxiety theory, and for her emptiness is a f o r m o f anxiety. T h a t anxiety could be a f o r m o f emptiness was unimaginable: it would n o t make analytic sense. Yet i t is precisely a radical openness to what emptiness or anxiety m i g h t mean in a given instance that is crucial i n work w i t h individuals who need to learn how to tolerate the build-up o f states and o f movement between states. B o t h emptiness and anxiety may enliven or denude existence, depending o n how they f u n c t i o n i n broader psychic contexts. Bion's depiction o f a destructive force is more devastating and open than Klein's and gets more clinical mileage. He imagines "a force that continues after . . . i t destroys existence, time, and space" (1965, p. 101). I t is n o t neces­ sary to decide which is primary, anxiety or emptiness. Either can be obliterat­ ing. Yet the destruction Bion contemplates goes farther. A force that goes o n working after i t destroys existence, time, and space includes the destruction of anxiety and emptiness. O b l i t e r a t i n g states can be obliterated. There is no end to n u l l i n g . This possibility fits many individuals who are too damaged, collapsed, or rigidified to support workable splitting processes. I n such individuals b o t h emptiness and anxiety function to wipe out personality. Both are arms o f a force that gathers m o m e n t u m and may become unstoppable. I f collapse goes far enough, neither primary emptiness nor primary anxiety is available, nor are their transforms, displacements, or reversals of m u c h use. I f degradation (de­ struction) is advanced enough, any affect or lack o f affect may further promote degradation and collapse. I n the context of such massive destruction, even anxiety and emptiness lose their impact and die out. Anxiety and emptiness become denuded o f f u n c t i o n other than being results or parts o f destruction that keeps on going. A t this p o i n t individuals are too far gone to be concerned about anxiety or emptiness. They are so gripped by the fall into deadness that they scarcely notice or care about fluctuations o f anxiety-emptiness.

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Psychic D e a d n e s s

REFERENCES Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations. London : Heinemann. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock, 1983. Eigen, M. (1986). The Psychotic Core. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Elkin, H . (1972). O n selfhood and the development of ego structures in infancy. Psy­ choanalytic Review 59:389-416.

Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1954). An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality. New York: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. Standard Edition 23. Green, A. (1986). On Private Madness. London : Hogarth. Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. I n Developments in PsychoAnalysis, ed. M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, a n d j . Riviere, pp. 292-320. London: Hogarth, 1952. (1961). Narrative of a Child Analysis. London: Hogarth. Milner, M. (1987). The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men. London : Tavistock. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books.

3 Goodness and Deadness

FROM THE BEGINNING, THE GOOD CORE What gives Melanie Klein's work its special power is n o t simply that the ego defends itself against annihilation anxiety but that i t does so with whatever sense o f goodness it can muster. Is the Good u p to this task? Can i t survive (triumph?) i n the face o f endless waves o f destruction? W h a t does Melanie Klein add to this ancient theme? For I hold that the introjected good breast forms a vital part of the ego, exerts from the beginning a fundamental influence on the process of ego-development and affects both ego-structure and object-relations. . . . T h e gratifying breast, taken in under the dominance of the sucking libido, is felt to be complete. This first internal good object acts as a focal point in the ego. It counteracts the processes of splitting and dispersal, makes for cohesiveness and integration, and is instrumental in building up the ego. . . . Projection, as Freud described, originates from the deflection of the death instinct outwards and in my view it helps the ego to overcome anxiety by ridding it of danger and badness. Introjection of the good object is also used by the ego as a defense against anxiety. [Klein, 1946, pp. 295-298]

Freud early notes that the m o t h e r regulates distressful affects o f the infant. The m o t h e r comforts, soothes, cares for, a n d feeds the infant a n d makes the bad feelings go away. Melanie Klein takes a gratifying o r ideal feed as the privi­ leged paradigm o f m a k i n g the infant feel good. The m o t h e r contributes the gratifying object (breast), b u t there is an innate tendency o n the infant's part to make this gratifying o r good object an ideal a n d complete one. T h e good breast becomes a heavenly one. Instead o f good, beatific. Melanie Klein does n o t make m u c h o f what the i n f a n t or m o t h e r contrib­ utes, b u t takes the amalgam as a nucleus o f the ego. She takes f o r granted that

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Psychic Deadness

the infant associates the goodness i t feels w i t h the object (breast) and perhaps attributes causality to the object, so that i t is the introjected good breast that is a pole or core o f ego experience a n d f u n c t i o n i n g . Melanie Klein does n o t spend time t h i n k i n g about what good feelings the infant m i g h t experience outside o f introjection, an omission that bothered B i o n , Winnicott, and Milner. H e r focus is the ego's use o f the introjected good breast as a defense against annihilation anxiety. T h e experience o f goodness (introjected goodness) is used to offset, d i m i n i s h , and regulate bad feelings primarily associated with a destructive force w i t h i n . T h e infant relies o n use o f the object to regulate the death instinct. I t is i m p o r t a n t to note that Klein's discourse slides across many levels and dimensions w i t h o u t overly worrying about problems her amalgam may pose. She mentions, i n passing, that the mother's love and understanding are i m p o r t a n t to the infant i n going t h r o u g h disintegration and psychotic anxi­ eties. Klein is n o t oblivious to M o t h e r as regulator, transformer, and holder. Yet she seems to regard the mother as something o f a safety net or back-up system, "the infant's greatest stand-by" (1946, p. 302), as most i m p o r t a n t i f the infant's introjective-projective systems fail. I n Klein's work there is a slippage a n d confluence between reality and fan­ tasy, w i t h variable shifts o f emphasis. H e r hallmark is her emphatic insistence o n the real effects o f fantasy. Introjective and projective identification are great fantasy pumps. They put bad stuff and feelings i n t o the mother and take good things and feelings f r o m her. A l t h o u g h one projectively fantasizes bad into the other and introjectively fantasizes good i n t o the self, the consequences o f these fantasies are very real. " I t is i n phantasy that the infant splits the object a n d the self, b u t the effect o f this phantasy is a very real one, because i t leads to feelings and relations (and later o n thought-processes) being i n fact cut o f f f r o m one another" (1946, p. 298). As far as the ego is concerned the excessive splitting off and expelling into the outer world of parts of itself considerably weaken it. . . . T h e projection of good feelings and good parts of the self into the mother is essential for the infant's ability to develop good object-relations and to integrate his ego. However, if this projective process is carried out excessively, good parts of the personality are felt to be lost . . . ; this process too results in weakening and impoverishing the ego. [Klein 1946, p. 301] *

A l l sorts o f combinations o f projective-introjective fantasy involving good­ bad ego/affect/object are possible. Optimally, fantasy regulates the balance o f g o o d a n d bad feeling: p u m p i n g o u t the bad p u m p i n g i n the good. For Klein this is more than fantasy regulation o f m o o d and well-being. Fantasy plays an * Quotations from this source reprinted by courtesy of the Estate of Melanie Klein and T h e Hogarth Press.

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i m p o r t a n t role i n regulating the death drive. Well-being, w h i c h f o r Klein is associated w i t h the good breast or introjected good object, is a t o o l i n this fan­ tasy regulation. The good ego-object-afFect-breast combination keeps saving the personality f r o m death. Fantasy—or failure o f fantasy—has very real conse­ quences for the life a n d death o f the self, and possibly the organism. I t is part o f Klein's genius to depict ways that this simple scenario o f expel­ l i n g bad and taking i n g o o d is ever i m p e r i l e d . One gets r i d o f the good and takes i n the bad, as well as the reverse. I n a d d i t i o n , good and bad elements o f self-affect-object spill i n t o each other. Excessive splitting a n d contamination go together. The ego fantasy p u m p cannot keep up w i t h the death drive and frequently is commandeered by it. W h e n it is, b o t h good a n d bad feelings can be part o f and f u r t h e r death work.

Excessive Goodness and Deadness One o f psychoanalysis's most i m p o r t a n t contributions to understanding the h u m a n c o n d i t i o n involves the various ways it explores relationships between idealization and violence (Eigen 1986,1992,1993). Melanie Klein adds varia­ tions to this theme a n d also links idealization to deadness. Klein takes for granted the infant's natural tendency to idealize the good object, whether it is inner or outer. This tendency seems to be an in-built, spon­ taneous one. W h e n frustration a n d anxiety m o u n t , the i n f a n t takes refuge i n the internal, idealized good object. The infant seeks to b u r r o w i n t o , h o l d onto, and e n f o l d i t s e l f w i t h its s e n s e o f w e l l - b e i n g a n d g o o d n e s s . T h e i d e a l i z e d good object is a b u f f e r a g a i n s t death f o r c e a g e n t s , i n t e r n a l p e r s e c u t o r s , b a d states. I f persecutory fear becomes too great, idealization may be overused to defend against or balance i t . In extreme instances, the ego becomes a shell around a split-off idealized core, which is working overtime to blot o u t the onset o f horrific states, whether invasion by split-off anxiety, menacing presences, or persecutory affects-objects-ego bits. Ego f u n c t i o n i n g becomes vastly t h i n n e d and curtailed inasmuch as its focus gets reduced to revving u p contact with the idealized core. The ego may experience its loss o f f u n c t i o n i n g as a growing deadness: the ego is really dying. The idealized, introjected good core may get projected o n t o external ob­ jects to such an extent that the ego feels i t has no goodness o f its own. I t may feel utterly at the mercy o f others for anything good: only the object is good. The ego may lose faith i n its ability to love and create, as idealization takes the place o f the capacity to love, think, and perceive. T o use some o f Melanie Klein's expressions, "good parts o f the personality are felt to be lost" (1946, p. 301), and there is "a feeling that the ego has no life and no value o f its o w n " (1946, p. 302). Thus excessive idealization, whether o f internal or external objects, leads to "weakening and impoverishing the ego" (1946, p. 301). The ego loses

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Psychic Deadness

spontaneity and aliveness as i t clings to idealized i n n e r or outer objects for salvation. T h e sense o f deadness suffered correlates with the very real loss or constriction o f ego functions. Idealization and Hallucination The correlation o f deadness with the loss o f ego f u n c t i o n is heightened by Melanie Klein's linking o f idealization with hallucination. "Idealization is b o u n d up with the splitting o f the object, for the good aspects o f the breast are exag­ gerated as a safeguard against the fear o f the persecuting breast. W h i l e ideali­ zation is thus the corollary o f persecutory fear, i t also springs f r o m the power o f the instinctual desires which aim at u n l i m i t e d gratification and therefore create the picture o f an inexhaustible and always b o u n t i f u l breast—an ideal breast" (1946, p. 299). Melanie Klein takes off o n Freud's picture o f the infant hallucinating a breast when i t is hungry: hallucinated f u l f i l l m e n t takes the place o f painful hunger and n o breast. She imagines that the infant hallucinates an ideal breast (an ideally good state) while omnipotently denying frustration, pain, persecutory feelings, and bad states. For K l e i n , denial equals a n n i h i l a t i o n i n the u n c o n ­ scious, and bad states are tied to an image o f a bad object—the frustrating, absent, persecutory, or u n f u l f i l l i n g object. Thus what gets denied and a n n i h i ­ lated is n o t just a state or an object, b u t an object relation and, more, the ego's capacity for an alive object relation: " O m n i p o t e n t denial o f the existence o f the bad object and o f the painful situation is i n the unconscious equal-to anni­ hilation by the destructive impulse. I t is . . . n o t only a situation and an object that are denied and a n n i h i l a t e d — i t is an object-relation which suffers this fate; and therefore a part o f the ego, f r o m which the feelings towards the object emanate, is denied and annihilated as well" (1946, p. 299). The suggestiveness o f Klein's descriptions goes far beyond her actual vocabu­ lary. H e r descriptions seem to treat denial and annihilation as i f differences between them were insignificant. Yet denial o f psychic reality may differ i n i m p o r t a n t ways f r o m the obliteration or annihilation o f psychic reality. Denial may be equivalent to annihilation i n the deep unconscious, but one cannot say that a n n i h i l a t i o n is equivalent to denial. Similarly, although denial a n d splitting go w i t h p r o j e c t i o n - i n t r o j e c t i o n , i t is not clear that they are always salient or primary factors i n hallucination. There is a suggestion i n Klein that annihilation and hallucination o f u n l i m ­ ited gratification go together. H e r overreliance o n splitting and denial as death drive regulators obscures other ways i n which annihilation and hallucination relate to each other. Hallucinating a beatific state when, i n fact, there is p a i n is an amazing capacity. I n such a state there is no r o o m f o r bad feeling. Bad feeling is obliterated o r b l u r r e d by g o o d feeling. O n e may cling t o a n d become

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addicted to the ideal good state. In such a case, the onset of bad feeling may trigger an intensified clinging to the beatific moment. T h e bad feeling may not be split off and denied so much as overwhelmed, flooded, blacked or whited out by addiction to an annihilating, totally filling blast of light or other ideal state. That is, uniting with an ideal object can have an annihilating impact in its own right without the use of denial and splitting, although these mecha­ nisms also may be present. Even denial and splitting are washed away by the annihilating beatific flood, which leaves no room for anything else. If flooding is more primordial than splitting-denial, one can imagine seis­ mic shifts of affect, with the ego trying to hold on to or to let go one or an­ other state. Various mixtures and alternations of holding on-letting go may come a little closer to depicting some responses to the flow of blissful-distressful moments, prior to splitting-denial.

TOO MUCH GOODNESS Even such terms as holding on-letting go may be too activist to convey a sense of the atmospheric problems involved. There are individuals who feel dead­ ened by too much good feeling, and others who feel killed off by too much bad feeling. In the former, too much good feeling has a numbing effect. These individuals may complain that they cannot feel themselves. These are "nice" people who do not feel real. They ordinarily feel all right, but lack intensity. They cannot crack the shell of good feelings and get to themselves. One such person, Mr. Y., lived a charmed life. From childhood on he was good in everything; he was a star athlete, at the top of his class academically, and everyone liked him. His charmed existence continued through adulthood; after attending the best schools, he got the best jobs, and people gravitated to him and made life easy. Yet he felt he wasn't living his life; he wasn't " i n " it. It was as if his life took off without him. It was not that he was an observer or that someone else lived for him. It was more that his life took off without consult­ ing him. It never felt bad enough, long enough, for him to call it into ques­ tion. Yet as time went on he missed himself. He came to therapy for help in slowing his life down so he could get aboard, Mr. Y. felt good, but complained of deadness. T h e good feeling he felt numbed and deadened him. Such notions as splitting, repression, or empty parenting did not seem to fit Y.'s world. They did violence to it. What seemed more apt were notions having to do with timing, pace, and connection. How could Y. and his life connect with each other? What would each have to do to develop a partnership? Y.'s life didn't seem to leave much room or time for him. How could Y. and his life learn to take each other into consideration? Like sex partners who missed each other, could they develop a better sense of timing? Apparently Y. and his life

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Psychic D e a d n e s s

neve r h a d a c h a n c e to be alon e together, to e x p e r i m e n t with e a c h other , to l e a r n about e a c h other' s n e e d s a n d tempos. T h e y d i d not wait for e a c h o t h e r o r fin d a c o m m o n pace. T h e g o o d feeling that Y. felt was hi s life's, not his. I t s p e d h i m along, m a d e it impossible to c o m p l a i n . A s the years w e n t by, the g o o d feeling b e c a m e deade n i n g , cloying, a n n o y i n g . I t got i n the way, like a veil a r o u n d possible experi e n c e . Y. was k i d n a p p e d by his life, c a r r i e d a l o n g by g o o d feeling. H e c a m e to therapy for h e l p i n finding , c l a i m i n g , a n d c o n n e c t i n g with his life. A s time w e n t o n , p e r h a p s his life w o u l d also want to f i n d a n d be with h i m . Y. was a relatively healthy e x a m p l e o f a process that c a n be lethal. I have see n p e o p l e w h o are little m o r e tha n shells o f g o o d feeling. T h e y live i n tepi d pools o f well-being. W h e n q u e s t i o n e d they say they feel fine, but d o n o t do m u c h with thei r lives. I n e x t r e m e cases, it is as i f b l a n k g o o d feeling ate t h e i r insides away. S u c h p e o p l e c a n s p e n d t h e i r lives g o i n g i n a n d o u t o f hospitals. T h e g o o d feeling periodicall y wears off a n d violenc e may threaten , o r the pers o n may b e c o m e i n c o h e r e n t a n d confused . N o t i o n s like splitting or repressio n d o n o t h i t the m a r k with these individu als. T h e y are less split o r represse d t h a n d r u g g e d . It is as if thei r system gives itself p e r i o d i c shots o f m i l d e u p h o r i a , w h i c h gradually dies out. B a d states are less d e n i e d a n d represse d than b l u r r e d , b l a n k e d , or blissed out. A c l o u d o f wellb e i n g envelops the personalit y for a time a n d t h e n thin s a n d disperses. T h e psychophysica l system p r o d u c e s n a r c o t i c states that act as p a i n killers. T o a n extent, s u c h individual s l e a r n h o w to m a n i p u l a t e the use o f g o o d feeling as a p a i n killer. It is as if they f i n d a secret set o f b r a i n implant s a n d l e a r n what buttons to press. W h e n so e n g a g e d , they often have a mildl y cryptic, c h e r u b i c , z o m b o i d look. A t som e p o i n t they b e c o m e distracte d a n d s e e m to forget w h e r e the buttons are, o r forget to press t h e m . P e r h a p s the g o o d feeling b e c o m e s too engagin g a n d the stupo r too extensive. I n e x t r e m e cases, b l a n k g o o d feeling gobbles m e m o r y , thought , i m a g i n a t i o n , p e r c e p t i o n , a n d , finally, itself. O b l i t e r a t i o n by goodnes s periodicall y wears thin , a n d the onset of b a d states may m a r k the onset o f b r e a k d o w n a n d the n e e d for hospita l care o r m e r e l y the break-up o f the marriage , relationships , or work. B a d feelings may be as b l a n k a n d meaningles s as g o o d feelings: they j u s t i n c r e a s e as g o o d one s wea r out. H o s p i t a l care (or a n e w r e l a t i o n s h i p o r j o b or c h i l d ) m a k e s the b a d feelings go away, a n d the i n d i v i d u a l c a n o n c e m o r e coast a l o n g o n g o o d o r better feelings f r o m m o n t h s to years. I often find that s u c h peopl e were u n a b l e to tolerate b e i n g a disturbanc e to their parents, n o r c o u l d thei r parent s tolerate the d i s t u r b a n c e a c h i l d naturally brings. I n s o m e way, these c h i l d r e n b e c a m e the facsimile o f g o o d feelings that thei r parent s w i s h e d to e x p e r i e n c e . Parent s like to see thei r c h i l d r e n feel good . B u t these patients lost thei r m i n d s i n o r d e r to m a i n t a i n a n a t m o s p h e r e

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of stuporous good will. Did their parents exhibit an emotional frailty that was too much for an infant to bear? Why do good feelings dissolve functioning in some people and support it in others? Freezing a n d Dissolving

Some individuals are frozen in bad feeling, others in good. It is as if they are sealed in blocks of affect ice of one or another valence. One can imagine that the originary affect flow got frozen in a limited sampling of positions by inhospitable climatic conditions. The personality contracts around affects it is used to, home-base affects that govern the tone and emotional atmosphere of one's life. Most people seem to take for granted and somehow work around or with the dominant affect nuclei that set the tone of their lives. A certain personality hardening makes life livable. Kleinian hardening involves defensive processes, such as splitting, denial, projection-introjection, and repression, that deflect and distribute affect pools in characteristic ways, e.g., in typical arrays of ego-object dramas. There are individuals also whose lives seem reduced to a preoccupation with raw affect sensations. One or another affect blots out or becomes their entire sense of being. They seem to fall into affect states as into quicksand. The emotion may be intense and enlivening for a time, but eventually becomes monotonous or consuming. What ought to be a rich and varied stream of emotions becomes a series of monotones or holes. The sense of one feeling playing off and enriching others is missing. Each affect becomes the world for a time, and the self dies out with each one. Such individuals do not seem able to utilize splitting, denial, or projection—introjection to funnel and rework affect. These defenses would make for a more variegated emotional terrain. They could pit feelings against each other, pit a feeling against itself, develop comparisons of feelings. The quicksand state is characterized more by sinking and dissolving than by dissociative processes. One affect sinks in or is dissolved by another: there is dissolution rather than dissociation. Perhaps, in such individuals, there is an inability to maintain dissociations (dissociations dissolve) and a correlative splitting deficit. It is clinically important to recognize forms of disappearance other than dissociation and repression. Expressive terms like contraction, freezing, sinking, and dissolv-

ing keep the clinical atmosphere open. There are individuals who seem to sink and dissolve in fathomless affect pools that finally dissolve themselves. Many of these individuals challenge our ability to think and feel and push us over the edge of what it is possible to imagine. We ought not make believe we know too much about such null states, especially if we lack the ability to help these people.

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Psychic D e a d n e s s REFERENCES

Eigen, M. (1986). The Psychotic Core. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. (1992). Coming through the Whirlwind. Wilmette, I L : Chiron. (1993). The Electrified Tightrope. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Developments in PsychoAnalysis, ed. M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, a n d j . Riviere, pp. 292-320. London: Hogarth, 1952.

4

Bion's No-thing

A he term no-thing in Bion's work is embedded i n a r i c h network o f associa­ tions and moves i n several directions at once. I t points to a general charac­ teristic o f mental life as s u c h — i t s intangibility, invisibility, immateriality, or spacelessness. I t also points to "specific no-things," w h i c h may f u n c t i o n as mental aches akin to hunger or gaps that call for accretions o f meaning. Mean­ ing itself is a no-thing, n o t a t h i n g . Bion's introduction of terms like no-thing and no-thingness into psychoanaly­ sis indicates that the d o m a i n o f psychoanalysis cannot be exhausted or even approached properly by means o f a medical model (Bion 1970). Like Lacan, Bion refuses to understand psychoanalysis i n exclusively naturalistic terms. T o treat the psyche like a t h i n g is to k i l l i t . U n l i k e Lacan, B i o n does n o t shy away f r o m the ineffable as a t e r m and reality that may promote or destroy growth.

INTOLERANC E OF NO-THING For Bion the term no-thing functions as a guardian o f psychic life. I t protects the psyche f r o m overconcretization, literalization, or objectivization. Once no­ t h i n g becomes central i n awareness, one cannot i n good conscience make believe that the psyche can be reduced to the status o f a t h i n g . T o say that n o - t h i n g is seems to be a contradiction i n terms. Yet the "is n o t " o f n o - t h i n g that keeps space o p e n for development or for u n d o i n g develop­ ment is, f o r Bion, a crucial psychological reality. How one relates to what is not plays an i m p o r t a n t role i n how one relates to what is. The temptation to f i l l i n , to thingify, or otherwise to nullify n o - t h i n g is u b i q ­ uitous. The natural p u l l o f perception ties us to objects, and when our gaze turns inward we are attracted to or frightened by fantasy objects. Mental sets or habits become part o f a gravitational p u l l w i t h chronic ways o f thingifying no-thing. B i o n also notes that a certain rigidity, tied to a defective or embry­

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onic mental apparatus, can prevent no-thingness from playing a fuller role in our development. To escape the difficulty of interacting with no-thing, we not only fill no-thing with things but also relate to no-thing as a thing. Representations and thoughts are no-things that lend themselves to thingification inasmuch as they are easily confused with and reduced to their objects. Such confusion not only characterizes psychosis but also common sense—it is natural for the common-sense attitude to take the object world for granted and not inquire into how objects are psychically given. In the following quotation Bion, typically, keeps his vision on the cutting edge of extremes: Intolerance of a no-thing, taken together with the conviction that any object capable of a representative function is, by virtue of what the sane personality regards as its representative function, not a representation at all but a no-thing itself, precludes the possibility of words, circles, points and lines being used in the furtherance of learning from experience. They become a provocation to substitute the thing for the no-thing, and the thing itself as an instrument to take the place of representations when representations are a necessity as they are in the realm of thinking. [1965, p. 82]

Bion emphasizes intolerance and conviction as ways of preventing no-thing from having a basic say in personality. Intolerance and conviction are facets of rigidity. Conviction alone need not reflect rigidity, but may arise out of a concern for experience. However, this passage couples conviction with intolerance to show that filling in nothing is not necessarily a neutral action. For Bion sanity includes respect for polar terms of experience. I f an object has a signifying function, one can credit the object and its meanings. One touches a tree but not its meanings, yet relates to both dimensions. In madness, respect for the tension between dimensions slips, steps are skipped, end terms are fused, and mediating terms exaggerated. An object that can function as a representation is taken as a no-thing itself, and a no-thing (e.g., a system of meanings) is taken as an object. By making objects into nothings and vice versa, the mind practices a decisive evasion. No-thing as a term of experience is nulled by being converted into objects of common sense or nightmare. One soothes or scares oneself into oblivion and tries to soothescare others as well. For Bion the tolerance of no-thing is linked with modulated openness and learning from experience. Conversely, the eradication of no-thing, by treating objects as no-things and no-things as objects, makes it impossible to use symbols as vehicles for experiential learning. He associates this state with murder. The above quotation continues: "Thus actual murder is to be sought instead of the thought represented by the word * murder,' an actual breast or penis rather than the thought represented by those words, and so on until quite

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complex actions and real objects are elaborated as part of acting-out" (1965, p. 82). If action is substituted for thinking, murder may take the place of a murderous thought. This can and does happen in a literal way, just as promiscuity or addiction canfillthe space where erotic and nourishing reverie might have been. However, Bion means something more than literal murder and sexual enactment as results of short-circuited thinking. Murder is not confined to or perhaps even primarily concerned with bodies. Short-circuited thinking is already a kind of murder, a murdering of the mind. When words are used to evacuate rather than to build meaning, meaning is murdered. No-thing is murdered insofar as it is treated as an object. The realm of experiencing as such is lost or aborted: physical things or thoughts as things are substituted for the evolution of experience. Actual murder is substituted for thoughts of murder. That is, the capacity to think about murderous feelings is killed off. Instead of learning from experience, one kills experience or rather kills the capacity to support experiencing. Actual psychic murder is substituted for meeting oneself and others. A playwright may use scenes of rape or murder to express violation and death of the self or personality. His portrayal may achieve greater or lesser success depending on his ability to sustain the build-up and unfolding of emotional intensity and the dramatic representational world with which he is working. Possibly he may slip so that his scenes become part of and even further the death process he wished to illuminate. A play may kill or heighten experiences with which it grapples. Similarly, an analytic interpretation may kill or support the growth of experience, including the experience of violation and dying out of self. Much depends on the analyst's ability to sustain the build-up of the patient's impact until the realities at handfindvoice. Inability to achieve this build-up may murder the experience of the patient's psychic death and perhaps the possibility of life as well. That the murder at stake includes the killing of mind, psyche, self, and personality is underlined by Bion's emphasis on stupor. The passage continues: "Such procedures do not produce the results ordinarily achieved by thought, but contribute to states approximating to stupor, fear of stupor, hallucinosis, fear of hallucinosis, megalomania, and fear of megalomania" (1965, p. 82). Hallucinosis and megalomania do not always play a negative role in Bion's thought and perhaps at times stupor has a positive function as well. Stupor can be a going blank, into a state of emptiness. Hallucinosis can be trancelike intuition. Megalomania may be giddiness or dizziness upon seeing too much at once, a godlike moment of revelation. Fear of such stupor-hallucinosismegalomania can be inhibiting. One sides with common sense at the expense of alternate states of consciousness. One refuses the risk of becoming too unfamiliar.

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Psychic Deadness

I n contrast, stupor associated w i t h the k i l l i n g o f f o f mind-psyche-self­ personality is n o t patient blankness or mute gestation, b u t an attempt to r i d oneself o f no-thing, to blank n o - t h i n g out, or to f i l l i t w i t h numbness. Instead o f waiting o n the living m o m e n t , one throws oneself away. I n this context, hallucinosis is n o t a gateway for i n t u i t i o n , but a d u m p for the debris o f what m i g h t have been mental activity. Megalomania is n o t a " h i g h " l i n k e d w i t h tra­ versing the immeasurable awesomeness o f the psychic universe, b u t an empty pretension closing door after door. One cannot rest i n a dead m i n d . One finds no repose i n stupor-hallucinosis­ megalomania. One is afraid o f one's mental death, even if one is very far along the death process. One is trapped between stupor-hallucinosis-megalomania and the fear o f i t and oscillates between them. One is unable to use or relate to either fear or stupor, but is arrested i n a k i n d o f narcotic electrocution. T o an extent, the conviction that n o - t h i n g does n o t exist or that an object is n o - t h i n g itself rationalizes the inability to tolerate n o - t h i n g . This is akin to behaving badly i n school because one is ashamed that one cannot read. One masks deficits with bravado when the simple admission o f inability m i g h t lead to learning. A n individual's difficulty is c o m p o u n d e d by the inability to a d m i t inability. There seems to be a tendency to b l u r the p a i n f u l experience o f inability and to fill this space w i t h stupor-hallucinosis-megalomania and fear. This is akin to F r e u d ' s fantasy o f the infant hallucinating a breast when i t is painfully hungry. Eventually p r o p e r skills, motivations, and m a p s develop, but the tendency to

blot o u t painful emotional realities remains. T h e ability to play down emotional pain is necessary for the healthy enjoy­ m e n t o f life. The difficulty B i o n writes about arises when the need to d u l l pain hardens i n t o an anti-representational attitude, a conviction that representing painful emotional realities is useless. This conviction is tyrannical. I t does more than rationalize and mask deficit or inability. I t immobilizes the psyche i n face o f its task to increase the capacity to connect w i t h experience i n f r u i t f u l ways.

REFERENCES Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations. London: Heinemann. . (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London : Tavistock.

5 Moral Violence

B i o n characterizes psychic m u r d e r as moral violence. The conviction that the object is n o - t h i n g itself acts as a coercive demand that the object be more and less than what is possible. The psyche becomes entangled i n the reductionistic misuse o f basic categories and f u n c t i o n s , e.g., space, t i m e , causality, and definition.

SPACE AND T I M E The crime against the object or n o - t h i n g or personality is also a crime against space and time. I n one clinical example B i o n shows how space and time can be used i n a shell game o f identities: "His presence shows that he knows that I am present. This fact is used . . . to deny my absence. H e reacts i n the session as i f I were absent. This behavior . . . is i n t e n d e d to deny my presence" (1965,

p. 53).

The patient's presence indicates that he knows the analyst is present and that he is present as an I , a person. The fact o f presence is t u r n e d i n t o a denial o f absence, which annihilates the analyst's person, since no person can be fully and only present. T h a t is, the analyst's presence is taken as a sign that he ought n o t be absent. He must be there totally for the patient. This means that he cannot have his own m i n d or history or unconscious (which can never be total presence). I t is as i f the presence the analyst can give whets the patient's appetite for what cannot be given. I n this context what is missing fuels the hatred o f emo­ tional reality rather than inspires the urge to grow. The analyst is then angrily reacted to as i f he were wholly absent, so that the k i n d o f presence he m i g h t provide is wasted. The slipperiness or fluidity o f psychic space and time is used to trap and p i n the object. The object can be accused o f being somewhere else, i n the w r o n g place, and unable to f u l f i l l impossible demands.

50

Psychic Deadness

"The state o f m i n d I have described is represented for me by a m o d e l — t h a t o f an adult who violently maintains an exclusively primitive, o m n i p o t e n t , help­ less state. The m o d e l by which I represent his 'vision* o f me is that o f an absent breast, the place or position, that I , the breast, ought to occupy b u t do not. The *ought* expresses moral violence and omnipotence" (Bion 1965, p. 53). I n this tyrannical state o f m i n d there is n o r o o m for a place or position where the object is not. The n o - t h i n g is filled, deformed, or k i l l e d o f f by the demand or conviction that an object ought to be there. T h e r e mustbe n o place where an object used to be or m i g h t be, only total presence. W i t h this affective ideol­ ogy o f absolute c o n t r o l , there can be no spontaneity. The personality cannot endure the tension o f openness. Space a n d time mean there is always elsewhere, another place, another t i m e — t h e space and time for thinking, feeling, imagining, and acting. I n p r i n ­ ciple, space a n d time are developmental concepts: something more can hap­ pen. Processes are at work; experience builds on itself. T h e r e is an u n f o l d i n g , gaps, leaps, something new, something o l d , m u l t i d i r e c t i o n a l pulls and move­ ments, tensions between continuity-discontinuity. T h e closing off o f n o - t h i n g places severe restrictions o n developmental or m u l t i r e l a t i o n a l processes. For example, time must be reduced to "now" or "never" (in this instance, now = never): "The factors that reduce the breast to a p o i n t reduce time to 'now.' T i m e is denuded o f past and future. T h e 'now' is subjected to attacks similar to those delivered against space, or more precisely, the point. I t is b o t h exhausted and split. This leads to expression which can mislead for such a patient will say 'at the m o m e n t ' when he means 'never* and 'yesterday* or ' t o m o r r o w ' when he means a split-off fragment o f * now*" (Bion 1965, p. 55). Someone may seem to be communicating when i n fact he is signaling that his w o r l d is extremely reduced and that he lacks the tools that make c o m m u ­ nication possible. He swings between omnipotence-helplessness i n a black hole now, using words and behavior to signal his conviction that n o development is possible. The flow o f time and history is stultified by an impossible demand: to have or be everything w i t h o u t being capable o f tolerating anything. Evacua­ tive activity, especially getting r i d of self, becomes an obsession and psychic m u r d e r a way o f life.

CAUSATION A t a higher level a person may be able to "have" and "use" thoughts and even use them to t h i n k about emotional reality. However, his t h i n k i n g process may aim more at tying u p emotional reality than c o n t r i b u t i n g toward its evolution. Causal t h i n k i n g readily lends itself to hardening psychic arteries. A n individual may develop a version o f his life that acts as a barrier against f u r t h e r discovery.

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He "knows" what happened and why. I f the analyst enters the knowledge game, a fight for superior omniscience may take the place o f the quest to deepen and enrich experience. (See my book, The Psychotic Core, 1986, chapter 8, f o r a sys­ tematic distinction between omniscience and omnipotence.) T h i n k i n g through emotional problems is hard work involving swings between depression, anxiety, and excitement. T o learn f r o m experience requires the tolerance o f gaps that exert force o n the f i e l d o f meaning. Fertile meaning grows o u t o f experience and gaps i n experience a n d is n o t imposed i n a dis­ connected way. One stays open to f u r t h e r nuances, shifts, corrections. More upheaval is always possible. The difficulties inherent i n sustaining affectively relevant t h i n k i n g and com­ municating may, at times, n o t only seem oppressive b u t also persecutory. One may feel attacked by natural limitations and barriers, such as deficiencies i n one's mental equipment. T h e challenge o f sustaining t h o u g h t processes may itself be felt as a persecution: one is persecuted by the persistence o f unsolved, possibly unsolvable problems. O f t e n one cannot solve difficulties head o n , b u t must regroup, try various approaches, wait, and rest. The same p r o b l e m may re-emerge i n a new light, or new ways o f relating to a p r o b l e m may develop. I n such instances the sense o f persecution may act as a spur. A problem grips one, will n o t let go, and forces f u r t h e r movement. M e a n i n g grows organically f r o m the press a n d t u g o f experience. However, the sense o f persecution may escalate so that one "is persecuted by the feelings o f persecution" (1965, p. 57). O n e becomes too impatient and intolerant o f working with difficulties and the concomitant waiting, resting, and resetting. Experience itself becomes too persecutory to bother w i t h , and one develops the conviction that respect for experience is futile The sense o f per­ secution becomes too depressing, a n d depression becomes too persecutory. The rhythmic pattern o f breaking down and b u i l d i n g u p inherent i n mental life is aborted or runs amok, and the individual tries to r i d himself o f his psyche as m u c h as possible. Causal t h i n k i n g can facilitate psychic evacuation or play a role i n short­ circuiting psychic processes. I t binds the sense o f persecution with rationaliza­ tions, "reasons" that explain away pain. One flies over difficulties with a k i n d of scanning that does not allow a closer look. One substitutes pseudo-coherence for the hard-won coherence that grows i n the struggle to give experience a voice. The source of anxiety in the patient is his fear of depression and an associated PS ** D interchange, the mechanism of the selected fact. I categorize the idea of cause, in this context, as D , that is, a relatively primitive pre-conception used to prevent the emergence of something else. The patient's communication in so far as it is to be described as logical, is a circular argument, supposedly based on a theory of causation, employed to destroy contact with reality, not to fur­ 2

Psychic Deadness

52

ther it. I n this respect it qualifies for one of Freud's criteria for psychosis— hatred of reality. But the reality that is hated is the reality of an aspect of the patient's personality. [Bion 1965, p. 59]

I t is n o t necessary to give a detailed explanation o f Bion's " g r i d " a n d such terms as " D " to understand the gist o f what he means here. I n the present context " p r e - c o n c e p t i o n " functions as a barrier against the e v o l u t i o n o f psychic life. T h e pretense o r conviction o f "knowing the reasons" stops dis­ covery. Instead o f using maps to explore, one substitutes maps f o r wrestling with oneself. B i o n contrasts causal t h i n k i n g with learning via the selected fact. I n the lat­ ter process some aspect o f a situation triggers the growth o f meaning. One experiences differences i n ways that terms o f a situation are interrelated. There is a spontaneous redistribution o f processes, a series o f transformations. One develops t h r o u g h shifting relational networks. T h e growth o f meaning triggered by the selected fact is l i n k e d w i t h a rela­ tively free PS « D interchange. Groupings o f phenomena f o r m , break apart, and re-form. One gradually builds more tolerance for various tensions, i n c l u d ­ i n g affective states, which are associated w i t h splitting a n d creative b r i n g i n g together. I n this context paranoid-schizoid a n d depressive mechanisms con­ tribute to the overall growth o f experience, meaning, and personal being (Eigen 1985). B i o n stresses the moral c o m p o n e n t o f causal t h i n k i n g as especially destruc­ tive o f experience a n d imaginative reflection o n experience. A moralizing attitude may pervade causal t h i n k i n g and act as the l i n k between objects or between parts o f the patient's o r analyst's constructions. T h e shift o f emphasis will be away f r o m letting experience b u i l d to making i t f i t a moralistic bias. The observation o f the constant conjunction o f phenomena whose conjunc­ t i o n or coherence has n o t been previously observed, and therefore the whole process o f PS D interaction, d e f i n i t i o n , a n d the search f o r meaning that is to be attached t o the c o n j u n c t i o n , can be destroyed by the strength o f a sense o f causation a n d its moral implications. Patients show that the resolution o f a p r o b l e m seems to present less difficulty i f it can be regarded as b e l o n g i n g to a moral domain; causation, responsibility, and therefore a c o n t r o l l i n g force, as opposed to helplessness, provide a framework within which omnipotence reigns (1965, p p . 6 4 - 6 5 ) . 2

2

1 Bion's symbol PS * * D represents a spontaneous oscillation between nulling and creating meaning. This bipolar capacity is part of our equipment, and we evolve as we enter new relationships with it. Perhaps it too evolves as we use it. PS, D, and PS D represent different ways of relating to no-things and different ways that no-things are constituted. They signify particular attitudinal contexts, psychic capacities, and operations or ways that psychical objects (specific sets of no-things) are given and used.

53

Moral Violence

Moralistic, causal t h i n k i n g substitutes for the open growth o f meaning. For example, assigning blame ("You are the cause o f my problems"; " I t is all my fault") may be an attempt to c o n t r o l rather than suffer an experience. H i d ­ den i n this attitude is the demand that absolute control ought to be possible, that this whole mess is caused by someone. I t is easier to p i n the tail o n the don­ key than to experience difficulties requiring solution. The individual's demand for o m n i p o t e n t causality organizes life, instead o f b u i l d i n g capacities needed to work w i t h experience and its evolving PS D interactions.

DEFINITION D e f i n i t i o n , like causal t h i n k i n g , may be used to b i n d or organize experience i n overly restrictive ways. B i o n contrasts d e f i n i t i o n w i t h notation as ways of marking a constant c o n j u n c t i o n or newly perceived relationship. N o t i n g and attending to a newly observed g r o u p i n g o f phenomena leaves the question o f definition open. I t may be argued that even notation requires a certain a m o u n t o f i m p l i c i t definitional activity. T o mark x o f f f r o m y implies the observation o f different groupings o f characteristics. T o understand or perhaps even observe a fact, one must have a hypothesis about i t . However, the urge to define is n o t the same as the practice o f opening oneself u p to the spontaneous arrangement o f phe­ nomena. D e f i n i t i o n may close as well as open observation. T o o often, d e f i n i ­ tion is substituted for exploration. Definitions give one the illusion o f know­ ing more than one actually does, especially with regard to emotional life. One may become trapped by d e f i n i t i o n a l biases and lose contact with the domain that gave rise to the observations u p o n which explicit definitions are based. One can define phenomena out o f existence. Bion especially notes problems associated with the negative aspect o f defini­ tions. Definitory hypotheses work by marking a constant conjunction and exclud­ ing others. A field marked o f f by definition may gain meaning through constant conjunctions outside the defined area. A too-rigid dedication to the definitory field may mitigate against the perception of deeper and broader sets o f relations. Freud notes that t h i n k i n g is work. Bion focuses o n the work aspect o f t h i n k ­ i n g and o n problems i n b u i l d i n g a psyche capable o f sustaining the tension o f such work. I n many instances the psyche may n o t have evolved enough to sup­ p o r t healthy primary process t h i n k i n g . Often precocious secondary t h i n k i n g masks deficits i n the ability to d o adequate primary process work. I n such an instance "definition can be used to i n h i b i t t h o u g h t " (1965, p. 99). Definition maybe substituted for the task o f b u i l d i n g primary process t h i n k ­ ing that is capable o f w o r k i n g w i t h affective states i n f r u i t f u l ways. B i o n calls attention to transformations involved i n constituting the k i n d o f primary pro­ cess that can do viable work, such as t u r n i n g raw or cataclysmic affective states

54

Psychic Deadness

into usable dream images. Emphasis on t h i n k i n g as i n h i b i t i n g action draws attention away f r o m the problem o f constituting productive primary process work. Higher-level t h i n k i n g may work overtime to cover defects i n affective processing. The individual, for example, may use naming and definition to b i n d or contain persecutory feelings rather than to explore them. I n Bion's words, " I f persecutory feelings are strong the constant conjunction o f elements can lead to a naming o f the conjunction with intent to contain it, rather than mark it for investigation" (1965, p. 99). I n such an instance the individual has all he can do to keep u p w i t h his self­ attacks or nameless dreads and intimations o f catastrophe. H e has all he can do to try to cauterize his sense of fragmentation or to p u t a verbal tourniquet around disintegration. Here the aim of n a m i n g is to stop h o r r i b l e movement. The result is the proliferation o f elements meant to tie the psyche up rather than to enable i t to evolve. A less extreme b u t still serious use o f t h i n k i n g to exclude growth capitalizes o n one's ability to take n o t h i n g for granted. One can use "cat" n o t only to exclude "dog" b u t as a letter g r o u p i n g that also excludes animal characteris­ tics. The "smart" subject can p e r f o r m a series o f reductions i n order to be left with as little meaning as possible. What remains o f the word "cat" with its sen­ suous reverberations is simply a visual sign indicating the place where the f u l l word used to be, a "no-cat." The m i n d bent on destroying meaning can denude a term "to the p o i n t which is merely a position without any trace o f what used to occupy that position" (1965, p. 99). Such a m i n d , although filled with a hatred o f emotional reality, is very ac­ tive. The subject may take perverse enjoyment i n twisting meaning inside out, in reversing and reducing the significance o f things. He is adept at beating meaning at its own game. H e sees meaning at every t u r n and is ready to knock it down, to keep as closely as possible to a baseline o f pure meaninglessness. The subject thrives o n meaning i n a backward way. H e can define the thera­ pist and himself out o f existence by emphasizing what they are not. The thera­ pist who sees this h a p p e n i n g may be terribly frustrated. Nevertheless, w i t h patience and painstaking work, one may see the day when this mental "live wire" takes himself seriously.

REFERENCES Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations. London: Heinemann. Eigen, M. (1985). Towards Bion's starting point: between catastrophe and faith. Inter­ national foumal

of Psycho-Analysis

66: 321-330.

(1986). The Psychotic Core. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

6

Two Kinds of No-thing

O n e can use symbols to represent or get r i d o f emotional reality. Symbols usable i n a process o f discovery express gaps susceptible to investigation. Fer­ tile symbols m i x the k n o w n and u n k n o w n i n productive ways. They h o l d the u n k n o w n (no-thing) open so that g r o w t h is possible. The same image, sound, movement, or letter g r o u p i n g can be part of an attempt to evacuate and n u l l emotional reality. Perhaps one cannot take the build-up o f tension involved i n the growth o f a t h o u g h t or feeling. Perhaps life has taught one to hate emo­ tional reality: one may have learned f r o m bitter experience that emotional reality is worthless or impossible. A n individual, for example, may experience a sense o f r e b i r t h f o r which he is willing and able to struggle. However, the sense of r e b i r t h may also be used to evaporate emotional reality. A n individual may n o t go t h r o u g h what is nec­ essary i n order to make his vision more real. One must evaluate a r e b i r t h sym­ b o l w i t h regard to its f u n c t i o n i n a particular context. A t times i t is n o t a sym­ b o l at all, but rather a sign that the individual is i n trouble beyond his capacity and control. The same r e b i r t h symbol may help open or close emotional real­ ity, depending o n such factors as attitude and capacity. A mixture o f deficit a n d hate may make i t exceedingly d i f f i c u l t to bear the rise o f complex emotional realities. A n individual may collapse to the p o i n t o f least resistance and f i l l the deficit w i t h hateful actions. H a t e f u l actions often involve hateful d e f i n i t i o n s and the assignment o f blame, as i n the case o f racial prejudice. Bion's references to violence and m u r d e r evoke a sense o f unbearable intensity that is escaped by short-circuiting psychic life. A reduced psyche incapable of supporting affective growth takes the place o f an individual reaching t h r o u g h a n d beyond difficulties. A truncated time and space, moral­ istic causality ( b l a m i n g ) , and definitions that cancel rather than open life are r i g i d r e m a i n s o f w h a t m i g h t h a v e been a r i c h a n d o p e n p s y c h e . Bion uses various sets o f signs and symbols to evoke a sense o f the two main no-things at stake. T h e a i m o f his notations is to facilitate the g r o w t h o f

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experience. He traces a hair-breadth l i n e between creative a n d destructive attitudes. The life and death o f the psyche are at stake. I f we develop ways o f experiencing and representing life-and-death processes, we may stand a chance o f acting less destructively and find ways o f m a k i n g the most o f ourselves.

T H E P O S I T I O N A N OBJECT DOES N O T OCCUPY: P O I N T (.) A N D L I N E ( )



) to represent the breast and phallus. B i o n used the p o i n t (*) and line ( A (•) may stand for what is left o f the breast after attacks and denudation^ or i t may f u n c t i o n as a sign for what is u n k n o w n about the breast, to be amplified by experience. I n the first instance one cannot tolerate the growth o f mean­ i n g and relationship. A deficient mental apparatus or too m u c h hate reduces the breast or object to its bare m i n i m u m , to what m i g h t be manipulated or controlled or made to fit i n t o the subject's megalomanic-helpless position. I n the second instance the u n k n o w n elicits curiosity a n d learning. For Bion the breast and phallus are highly significant subsets o f what the (•) and ( ) may be used to represent. The signs have a more general func­ t i o n than the terms "breast" and "phallus," since they can be used to represent transformations typical o f many kinds o f objects. They can be used to signal that processes o f denudation or growth o f meaning are at w o r k and to mark creative or destructive phenomena for exploration. Thus (•) and (; ) are signs w i t h a genetic history or d i r e c t i o n . They indicate that meaning is being b u i l t u p or t o r n down. I f meaning is b u i l t up, i t may enable the f u r t h e r growth o f experience or act as a r i g i d organizer that reduces experience to its m o l d . Similarly, tearing down meaning may clear the way for new meaning or be an attempt to undercut the possibility o f meaning altogether. A value o f using signs like (•) and ( ) is to emphasize the u n k n o w n i n every situation. We do not know a p r i o r i what is f u n c t i o n i n g and how. Bion is concerned that psychoanalysts prematurely leap i n t o the why when the what and how are also inexhaustible; * and are unknowns to be approached by observation. B i o n writes, "The p o i n t (*) or the line ( ) and all sub­ stantival terms m a y . . . be regarded as unknowns having two values: one, a sign for a constant c o n j u n c t i o n and the other, a sign for the position, unoccupied, o f the object" (1965, p. 100). A n i m p l i c a t i o n of B i o n ' s f o r m u l a t i o n is t h a t t h e u n k n o w n is a p e r m a n e n t p a r t o f e x p e r i e n c e . A l l t h e s o m e t h i n g s i n t h e w o r l d c a n n o t Fill i n t h e n o - t h i n g .

The p o i n t and line will always resist meaning and meaninglessness. They can always signal something more or something less. They cannot be reduced to m e a n i n g — t h e y cannot be made totally m e a n i n g f u l . N o r c a n they be placed, try a s one m i g h t , totally o u t s i d e the d o m a i n o f m e a n i n g .

Two Kinds o f No-thing

57

I n some sense Bion's work might be criticized as being surprisingly sopho­ moric. He takes a commonplace, the u n k n o w n , seriously. The sense of the u n k n o w n plays an i m p o r t a n t role i n mental health. How we relate to the u n ­ known is crucial. Bion's apparently complicated work is embarrassingly simple; it guards the u n k n o w n i n human experience. Intellectual imagination probes the limits o f intellect i n order to keep experience alive and open. Upheaval, horror, and deadness are met along the way. They are challenges that human sensitivity faces. I n the example above, a p o i n t is a sign for a constant conjunction, and a sign for the position that an object does not occupy. A n object may be regarded as a constant conjunction or as open sets o f relations. I n this regard, Heidegger (1957, pp. 25-42) writes that "identity is a relation." A n object is a relational f i e l d that grows i n meaning. I t is known and u n k n o w n . I t gains i n meaning i n many ways, including by being part of larger constant conjunctions or relational fields. The known about an object emerges as a figure out o f a larger unknown. M o r e l i m i t e d and specific unknowns are carved out o f gaps i n knowledge. T h e position an object does not occupy may be understood i n common-sense terms as the place where an object was or will be. The object's absence is felt against its past or future presence. I t is i n this d o m a i n o f c o m m o n sense that one becomes trapped by longing. One imagines the object was there i n a way that may be duplicated. What is missing is attributed to the missing object, and one believes that the object's presence w i l l make all the difference (or u n d o the difference). Often enough, the object's actual presence becomes sorely disappointing, and one's longing becomes a source o f confusion. For B i o n the position an object does not occupy includes b u t goes beyond common-sense terms. T o view the object i n terms o f constant conjunctions that grow i n meaning means that one never sees exactly the same object twice, that the object is experienced i n terms o f what i t is n o t yet or is no longer, and that the very is-ness o f the object includes references to movement, lacu­ nae, incompletion, possibilities. T o see the object solely i n terms o f what i t i s — or what one imagines i t to b e — i s a tyranny. One is boxed i n by the concrete demand for absolute presence or immutability. The position that an object does not occupy leaves r o o m for movement and requires giving u p an ideology o f c o n t r o l or mastery. I f the object may be treated as a constant c o n j u n c t i o n , so may the position it does not occupy. T h a t position is inherently l i n k e d with the object as the background o f felt meanings against w h i c h i t stands o u t as figure. One's rela­ tionship to silences that riddle and sustain an object grows. The position that an object does not occupy clings to the object and is n o t a simple fact o f absence that can be undone. Only by going t h r o u g h the object to what it is not can one appreciate what i t is. T h e relationship between an object and the position it does n o t occupy is akin to the structure o f metaphor. N o presence can fill i n the position an

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object does n o t occupy, not any more than literal meaning can satisfy the de­ mands o f metaphor. Metaphor creates new realities by b r i n g i n g together terms that make a difference. Bion points o u t that i t is precisely the difference be­ tween terms that is generative. I f the terms were identical or too similar, n o t h ­ i n g creative w o u l d occur i n their interaction. The fact that one t e r m does n o t take the place o f another is crucial: a new place o f interaction is created. For Bion a central task o f h u m a n k i n d is to grow a psyche capable o f sustain­ ing the evolution o f new places o f interaction o f diverse terms o f experience. A l l too often one or another term collapses or bullies others so that each fails to make its c o n t r i b u t i o n to the growth of metaphor, psyche, individual, group, or society. I t is d i f f i c u l t to sustain the tension o f interaction o f viewpoints and the c o n t r i b u t i o n each makes to the growth o f experience. L e a r n i n g f r o m experience involves learning not to take oneself or others literally. We make our contributions like terms o f a metaphor and become parts o f new unities that make life m o r e m e a n i n g f u l . By b u i l d i n g a tolerance f o r what we and others are not, we make r o o m for positions we do n o t occupy, so that there can always be more interactions that make a difference. Bion's use o f a p o i n t to represent an object, the object's directional thrust, and the position that an object does n o t occupy warns us against taking sub­ jective processes literally. A literal mark does n o t tell us what i t may mean i n a given situation, since the same sign can p o i n t i n many directions. T h e p o i n t is a condensation packed with possibilities. I t gains meaning as experience o f i t grows. Bion notes that a p o i n t is indestructible (1965, p. 95). T h e r e is n o end to the fragmentation i t can endure. A p o i n t is a representation, a construction, not simply a literal mark. This product of m i n d may be used by m i n d for a variety o f purposes, i n c l u d i n g portrayals o f agonizing clinical realities. For example, an individual may be bent on d o i n g away w i t h psychic life as m u c h as possible, yet be unable to do away with i t altogether. H e seeks a p o i n t o f absolute pointlessness. He cuts himself ad i n f i n i t u m , yet the pieces act like so many subjective points that turn against h i m . H e undergoes massive n u m b ­ ing or b l a n k i n g out, yet his m i n d works at top speed i n the interstices o f the blankness and numbness. Even as he j u m p s out the window he fails to r i d h i m ­ self o f his t o r m e n t i n g m i n d . I n his fall a heightened p o i n t o f consciousness mocks h i m (Eigen 1973). A p o i n t may represent a n o - t h i n g , yet an individual can neither reduce himself to a p o i n t n o r a no-thing. H e can n o more convert n o - t h i n g to a p o i n t than he can make the p o i n t vanish forever. Strictly speaking, a p o i n t is a n o - t h i n g insofar as i t functions as a represen­ tation or construction. I n the psychic domain, the subject works w i t h different kinds o f no-things, such as a point, a line, fantasy objects, and intuitions. Any representation may be multidirectional and polyvalent. For example, a p o i n t may fade or grow larger. Only by living with a particular p o i n t can one tell

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whether i t expresses a movement toward zero, toward one, or toward m u l t i ­ plicity. A p o i n t may also be used to represent a static n o - t h i n g , a dead rather than fertile void.

MINUS SIGNS Bion refines his f o r m u l a t i o n by using minus signs to signify the position that an object does not occupy (1965, p. 100). He does this f o r convenience, so that we have a shorthand for distinguishing the object (+ *) f r o m the position i t does n o t occupy ( — ) . This is a transitional f o r m u l a t i o n that he later replaces w i t h arrows i n reverse t )• I t serves the purpose o f visually representing the idea/experience that every object has a position that i t does n o t occupy. For Bion, the position that an object does n o t occupy is a generic part o f the con­ cept o f object, a c o n d i t i o n for the growth o f object experience, an invariant structure or principle that makes experience o f the psychoanalytical w o r l d o f objects possible. Each (psychological/psychoanalytical) object (a no-thing) represented by a p o i n t (another k i n d o f no-thing) has plus and minus aspects. The plus and minus aspects may have various meanings depending o n what sort o f processes they represent or are part of. For example, the growth o f meaning can be used dogmatically and rigidly to close o f f f u r t h e r growth o r as a bridge leading to bridges. U n d o i n g meaning may open doors. I n certain instances an individual may misuse the capacity to u n d o meaning, i n which case the n u l l i n g capacity snowballs and the c r e a t i n g - n u l l i n g r h y t h m gets lost. Ideally, an individual entertains what B i o n calls a "binocular" perspective. H e experiences an object i n terms o f what i t is and is not. B i o n relates the fail­ ure to distinguish positive and negative aspects o f a or to the personality's relationship to the • and aspects o f itself. One fails to live with a particular • or i n ways that disclose its d i r e c t i o n , meaning, or f u n c t i o n i n a given situation. Insofar as one can relate to • or aspects o f self, a more global • or will transform i n t o f u r t h e r positive and nega­ tive facets as possible meanings develop. A t a near common-sense level — * or "retain meaning, as does the n o - t h i n g (because at least there is a trace o f whatever it is that does n o t occupy the position) so l o n g as time itself is n o t reduced to the m o m e n t w i t h ­ o u t a past or a f u t u r e " (1965, p. 100). T h e place that an object does n o t occupy may be rich i n reverie, longing, hope, expectation, irritation, desire, or openness. + - and — • go together and qualify each other as experience evolves, w i t h varying emphasis o n one or the other i n a particular instance. ( I will continue to focus o n + and — rather than for ease o f exposition). I f the psyche is n o t capable o f supporting a coherent temporal flow, • may

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Psychic Deadness

represent "a position w i t h o u t d u r a t i o n " and so be meaningless. I n such a case — • (positions unoccupied by * )would also be meaningless and indistinguish­ able f r o m . . As suggested above, such a position represents a developmental failure. I n some way the psyche collapsed or failed to constitute itself as viable. For B i o n i t is i m p o r t a n t to explore the nature o f the collapse or deficiency and its consequences. I n earlier work (1985, 1986), I b r o u g h t o u t ways that Bion approached a less accessible dimension o f psychosis than Melanie Klein. He explored realms masked by projective identification and by its relatively structured and r i g i d use o f space. For some individuals the hatred o f emotional reality is so intense or their mental apparatus is so defective that they cannot use projection to organize experience. Even when projective identification is achieved, i t may be used to b i n d a more formless h o r r o r o r nameless dread. T h r o u g h o u t his writings Bion explores the sense o f catastrophic formless­ ness a n d its role i n creativeness and psychosis. H e cannot rest with any o f his formulations and keeps trying to strip the skin away f r o m a catastrophic dread that can undergo transformation into personal development or contribute to the personality's living death. The n o t i o n o f a • that represents position w i t h ­ o u t d u r a t i o n is one such attempt to describe the r e d u c t i o n o f life to utter meaninglessness. T o the degree that a patient has come close to achieving the position rep­ resented by the meaningless • , he may try to "manipulate the analyst to give interpretations so that the session is used to deny complete meaninglessness a n d thus to provide reassurance against the dread that all meaning, all source o f meaning, has been annihilated. This dread is associated with belief i n the breast as the source o f meaning as, physically, i t is felt to be the source o f m i l k " (1965, p. 101). T h u s a patient who has more or less managed to achieve a meaningless existence may develop a parasitic relationship w i t h the analyst's meaning­ creating f u n c t i o n . Hope is n o t lost i f one is still frightened by the approach o f total meaninglessness and the analyst is used as a source o f reassurance that life is n o t as bleak as the patient fears i t is. T o the extent that the analyst falls victim to his good w i l l and soothes mean­ inglessness away, he may be hated for j o i n i n g a lie. H e becomes a thief who steals the patient's meaningless self. H o p e boomerangs and becomes too great a b u r d e n : it adds to meaninglessness i f it leads to dishonesty. Patient and ana­ lyst dread the vista o f utter meaninglessness. I t does n o t seem possible to main­ tain integrity and humanness i n such a situation. B i o n offers no way out o f this problem, b u t he does offer more ways into it. H e calls attention to the patient's delusional confusion o f the source o f mean­ i n g w i t h the breast as the source o f n o u r i s h m e n t . One comes to confuse a meaningful experience—intense satisfaction at the b r e a s t — w i t h the source o f meaning itself. Meaning, which is not simply physical, is understood i n terms

Two Kinds o f N o - t h i n g

61

o f a physical m o d e l — t h e breast as the source o f milk. A physical object can be treated like a t h i n g and destroyed. However, neither meaning n o r meaning­ lessness can be destroyed. They are immaterial, invisible, u n r e a l i z a b l e and, in p r i n c i p l e , i n f i n i t e . I f - is used t o represent a meaningless position (e.g., position w i t h o u t dura­ t i o n ) , — • may express directionality w i t h i n a one-dimensional w o r l d o n the way toward zero dimensions, a movement o f meaninglessness toward more meaninglessness. — * represents meaningless positions that are n o t yet occu­ pied o r the p r i n c i p l e that there is always a f u r t h e r meaningless p o i n t to which one has n o t yet come. I f this is so, suicide may n o t be an effective way to e n d the course o f meaning a n d meaninglessness, since there does n o t appear to be a one-to-one correspondence between physical a n d mental domains. A patient who knows this may stay alive i n order to force the analyst i n t o mean­ ingless positions that remain beyond h i m . T h e therapy d u o may become col­ lectors o f meaning-less points, b u t c o n t i n u e to search beyond the points collected. I f patient a n d analyst succeed i n using the analyst's ability to i n t e r p r e t as reassurance against the loss o f meaning, a stalemate results. T h e patient is protected against the challenge o f b u i l d i n g the capacity to tolerate the inter­ play o f meaning a n d meaninglessness. Fear o f meaninglessness has the last word. M e a n i n g is used to ward o f f experiencing the loss o f meaning and loses value as a vehicle f o r expression a n d e x p l o r a t i o n . M e a n i n g itself becomes meaningless, an evacuative technique or cosmetic. Dread is b l u n t e d or lost as skill i n cynically treating meaning like a thing increases. A t r i u m p h a n t use o f one's own or the other's cognition is substituted f o r experiencing one's con­ d i t i o n . O n e k i n d o f cipher is superimposed u p o n another. I n contrast, i f spurious mastery is avoided, patient a n d analyst may explore hitherto unsuspected realms o f no-thing. They begin t o tolerate glimpses o f a fierce n u l l i n g will and a tendency that continues after will fades. Different tones and functions o f n o - t h i n g can be discriminated a n d partly l i n k e d to attitudi­ nal contexts. Bion's focus o n n o - t h i n g led t h r o u g h a series o f signs that represent the growth o f awareness o f what n o - t h i n g can mean, (e.g., • a n d ). T h e use­ fulness o f these signs as tools for e x p l o r i n g transformations o f n o - t h i n g is far f r o m exhausted. Nonetheless, Bion reaches a p o i n t i n his discussion where he 1

Bion's symbol, PS **• D, represents a spontaneous oscillation between nulling and creating meaning. PS, D, and PS D represent different ways of relating to no-things and different ways that no-things are constituted. They signify particular attitudinal contexts, psychic capacities, and operations or ways that psychical objects (specific sets of no-things) are given and used. Since I discussed these symbols more fully elsewhere I n t m s 1 a m (1985), my present emphasis is on • , — • , and tracking a specific line that runs through Bion's portrayals of no-thing. 1

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feels the need for signs that represent more purely the directionality, dyna­ mism, and movement o f n o t h i n g . H e uses reversed arrows ( * ~ t ) indicate that the movement toward, i n t o , or t h r o u g h no-thingness is infinite. This is true n o t only i n the realm o f meaning but also i n the realm o f meaninglessness. t

o

A R R O W S I N REVERSE ( o - f ) Bion's two backward arrows (*—t) must be understood w i t h reference t o his g r i d , which can be f o u n d o n the inside covers o f Transformations (1965) a n d related works. The grid's vertical axis (from top to b o t t o m : i ) marks the growth o f a raw affective impact i n t o elements usable for dreams and myths, and f r o m there to progressively more differentiated and abstract levels o f thought. T h e horizontal axis (left to right:—*) discriminates ways i n which the m i n d works on affects, images, a n d thoughts at successive phases o f their development (or maldevelopment). My simple summary needs qualification and refinement, b u t serves the purpose o f indicating that Bion's backward arrows (*— |) represent the g r i d working i n reverse. ( f ) represents the u n d o i n g o f meaning, its move­ ment backward toward a mute affective impact and beyond that t o w a r d zero. («—) represents the u n d o i n g o f psychic work or mental capacities, so that what we ordinarily mean by mental activity—the mind's use o f meaningful o b j e c t s — becomes n u l l and void. Bion conveys the character o f the n u l l i n g movement i n the f o l l o w i n g quo­ tation: " I f we use the g r i d we may replace and by «TT a n d . Such signs represent objects that are devoid o f characteristics a n d lack dura­ t i o n , or p o s i t i o n — a n d , therefore, existence. But the sign * ~ t indicates that the object is n o t static. «—f represents a force that continues after • has been a n n i ­ hilated and i t destroys existence, time, a n d space" (1965, p. 101). A few pages earlier Bion writes that the p o i n t is indestructible (1965, p. 95). Now he conceives o f its destruction and o f an annihilating force c o n t i n u i n g after point, existence, time, a n d space have vanished. H e adds i n a footnote, " I d o n o t wish to c o m m i t myself to the theory that there is a realization approximating to this force" (1965, p. 101). Bion is n o t saying that there is a psychic state i n which there is n o t h i n g b u t pure destruction. However, con­ ceiving o f such a possibility can help one observe vast n u l l i n g processes i n cer­ tain clinical realities; this is a little like postulating a pure vacuum to help one understand falling bodies. Bion's depiction o f a destructive force that is n o t l i m i t e d by existence, time, and space may be theoretical, b u t i t is n o t an arbitrary fancy. I t grows o u t o f clinical and personal experience and is rooted i n the conviction that i t is our evolutionary task to develop a psyche capable o f working better w i t h its capaci­ ties, i n c l u d i n g destructive tendencies. One ought n o t t o assume one knows more about destructiveness than one does, n o r explain i t away too easily. B i o n

Two Kinds o f N o - t h i n g

63

sets a barrier against precocious a n d facile attempts t o "explain" destructive­ ness by n o t i n g how illimitable and inexhaustible i t may be. T h a t < - f represents a force that continues after a n n i h i l a t i n g existence, time, and space indicates that i t continues its work o f f the g r i d after the g r i d has been annihilated, bypassed, reversed, o r otherwise p u t o u t o f play. The arrows p o i n t past the grid's o r i g i n , t h r o u g h zero, i n t o a sub zero dimension. They lead t h r o u g h n o - t h i n g after n o - t h i n g after n o - t h i n g , one k i n d o f nonex­ istence after another. T h e r e are many different kinds o f no-things, some leading i n t o existence and some out o f it. Bion makes sure that the realms o f n o - t h i n g associated with * ~ t are n o t mistaken f o r more usual no-things associated with t h i n k i n g about objects i n their absence. He writes, "The state represented by *7f is different f r o m th£t represented by • or . I f these signs merely represent the place where t h e object was or could be there is n o t h i n g inherently difficult i n sup­ posing that they could be used for t h i n k i n g about objects in their absence" (1965, p. 101). T h i n k i n g about objects i n their absence characterizes n o r m a l representa­ tional thought. T h e place-that-an-object-is-not invites reverie, science, writing, or art. Such actions f o l l o w o r discover rules that enable no-things to be communicated. Emotional, spatial, or musical realities may be expressed, dis­ covered, created, or elaborated by points and lines arranged i n telling patterns. T o an extent, the author exerts control over the points a n d lines he uses and c o m b i n e s a n d rearrange s t h e m u n t i l h e is reasonabl y satisfied with the results

or feels i t unlikel y o r too difficult to d o better. Where * ~ t replaces the manipulation o f p o i n t a n d line, such esthetic, sci­ entific, o r common-sense control slides away a n d veers toward zero rules and limits. What remains is a force outside existence, an inexistent force that con­ tinues gathering momentum after it has annihilated existence. I w o u l d say that it is a force that clears o u t all resistance (and thus d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n ) , b u t Bion means i t to represent resistance as such, an active force that stops and undoes growth i n psychoanalysis, a force w i t h i n a n d between personalities that pre­ vents their u n f o l d i n g . For B i o n i t is a force that continues after h u m a n per­ sonality is totally eradicated. B i o n makes i t clear that he is trying to investigate an inexistent force or inexistent dimensions populated by inexistent objects. H e writes: T h e problem posed by *-f can be stated by analogy with existing objects. «—f is violent, greedy and envious, ruthless, murderous and predatory, without respect for the truth, persons, or things. It is, as; it were, what Pirandello might have called a Character in Search of an Author. I n so far as it has found a "character" it appears to be a completely immoral conscience. This force is dominated by an envious determination to possess everything that objects that exist possess including existence itself, [Bion 1965, p. 102]

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Existing no-things may be used to p o i n t to inexistent no-things, b u t the two realms o r categories are distinguishable. As w i t h Freud, Bion uses analogy as a tool f o r psychic exploration. A language has grown u p to give expression to murderous, greedy, envious, ruthless, and predatory no-things that lack respect for t r u t h , persons, or things. We experience these no-things as real and exist­ i n g , although they are attitudes and systems o f psychic propensities that can­ n o t be touched like a chair or dissected like a b r a i n . We speak o f a bad atti­ tude and l i n k i t to destructive actions i n daily life, although the bad attitude is n o t a t h i n g that can be located i n spatial terms. For B i o n an existing n o - t h i n g , such as an evil attitude, may be the outcome o f work done by a n o - t h i n g outside existence. A n existent n o - t h i n g may func­ tion as a home for a nonexistent no-thing. B i o n gives " i m m o r a l conscience" as an example o f an existing n o - t h i n g that may house a nonexistent n o - t h i n g or systems o f no-things. I n this case what we call character is the result o f and/or a place o f residence o f a force beyond existence. T h e nonexistent force i n f i l ­ trates existence i n order to proliferate and annex all o f it and t u r n i t i n t o n o n ­ existence. I n such a case o f "possession" the aim o f character is to annihilate existence. This happens as a matter o f course when character f o r m a t i o n is too r i g i d a n d stops aliveness. The o l d saying that a psychopath (sociopath) has no conscience is grossly misleading i n l i g h t o f Bion's insights. The p r o b l e m is that he has too m u c h o f the w r o n g k i n d o f conscience: an immoral conscience. A m a l i g n a n t k i n d o f superego (de) f o r m a t i o n replaces ego development. The psychopath is driven by i m m o r a l imperatives and autistic righteousness. H e feels wronged and aims to set things right. The world owes h i m better, his just deserts. He recoils against life's injustice and takes life i n t o his own hands to supply the necessary correc­ tive: his t r i u m p h . So-called i d and mastery demands become rights o f charac­ ter: " I must take/have/be what I ( t h i n k I ) want or else." To whatever crimes or sins he commits, his superego whispers or, more likely, shrieks or cackles, " I t is only j u s t . " Ego analysis is futile w i t h o u t addressing the nonexistent force that underwrites the persistent self-congratulatory, m o c k i n g superego. O n one level, wronged existence demands more existence, often i n the key o f vengeance and greed. I m m o r a l no-things make use o f things for their own purposes, pleasure, or power. Space, time, t r u t h , things, and people become occasions for manipulation, scheming, amoral t r i u m p h . Bion penetrates fur­ ther to the sense of nonexistent no-things that act parasitically and swallow existent no-things and things. I t is as i f nonexistent no-things are n o t satisfied not to exist. They cannot bear that anything should be what they are n o t — that any t h i n g or n o - t h i n g should be at all. They can tolerate neither the one­

sided fanaticism o f immoral conscience nor the complexity of flexibility. They use existence to feed nonexistence rather than the reverse. I f nonexistence envies existence, i t cannot be satisfied by existence. Exis­ tence remains a tantalizing, i f alien, Other. The term "possession" is a buzzword

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for Bion. T h r o u g h o u t his work he sees i t as part o f a c o n t r o l l i n g attitude that blocks the flow o f life. Here i t is associated with envious d e t e r m i n a t i o n — t h e i m m o r a l conscience, character stifled by relentless will. As an analogy f o r the nonexistent force that swallows existence, Bion depicts a personality reduced to will or determination. T h e " I have a r i g h t t o / I must get" o f psychopathy is character reduced to inflexible determination, a will intolerant o f resistance or limits. Yet this will is a barrier par excellence, an enemy o f m a t u r a t i o n . N o t h i n g outside i t qualifies or balances its determination to reduce life to a single purpose, to food f o r itself. Everything exists to feed its nonexistence. The patient caught between existence and nonexistence often uses what existence he has to signal that he does n o t exist. T h e force o f nonexistence acts as a k i n d o f undertow that existence can scarcely resist. Yet there may still be enough alive negativity to compel helpful attention before the personality goes under. The case is far worse when existence is something the patient made up i n order to have a take-off p o i n t f o r feeling that he does n o t exist.

SPACELESS SPACE A n individual may identify m o r e w i t h nonexistence than with existence, i m ­ pulsively oscillate between them, or experience paralyzing conflict. He may exist enough to feel nonexistence as genuinely painful or be so m i r e d i n nonexis­ tence that almost any k i n d o f aliveness is excruciating. A person may go so far out o f existence that existence appears as an hallucination or as something conjured up. Each o f these cases is characterized by some ratio o f nonexistence to existence. What sense does i t make to postulate a nonexistent force or n o - t h i n g that swallows up psychic reality o r existent no-things and things? Bion notes that he is extending use o f Freud's discovery o f "the other space," a space n o t gov­ erned by common-sense perception a n d the law o f contradiction. The rule that a t h i n g cannot b o t h be a n d n o t be is inadequate.

p.

102]

[1965,

The p r o b l e m is simplified by a rule that "a t h i n g can never be unless i t b o t h

is and is not." [1965, p. 103]

B i o n gives Falstaff as an example o f a n o - t h i n g that is an existing t h i n g . Falstaff may be more real than some people we meet i n daily life. I n what sort o f place does he have his reality and make his impact? No-things do n o t exist like actual people, b u t people cannot truly exist w i t h o u t no-things. Rules that apply to things do n o t apply t o no-things. W h e n Bion writes that "the invariant under psycho-analysis is the ratio o f no-thing to t h i n g " (1965, p. 103), he does n o t merely p o i n t to relationships

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between abstractions and physical reality. H e is a t t e m p t i n g to describe the variable realness o f no-things. Some no-things are more real than others. Not all characters embodying Falstaff's traits are as real as Falstaff. Falstaff is closer to "the t h i n g itself." Falstaff is a nonexistent n o - t h i n g that achieves existence and a certain k i n d o f t h i n g status as a convivial representation o f i m m o r a l conscience. He gives pleasure, entertains, instructs, illuminates, makes life more real. Bion expresses this by indicating that + • and can coincide. I n Shakespeare's play the no­ t h i n g is enriching, the nonexistent force or element or object makes a posi­ tive c o n t r i b u t i o n to our lives. A n o t h e r favorite o f Bion's was M i l t o n ' s Paradise Lost I n Transformations (1965) he quotes this work only once and i n a different context, b u t i n conver­ sations he often quoted whole sections o f this poem. M i l t o n ' s Satan represents the negative no-thing's agony at its failure either to achieve or swallow u p existence. I t portrays the envious determination, self-pity, and sense o f injus­ tice that drives i m m o r a l conscience toward t r i u m p h at any cost. Satan's woe and hate fuel a character that is a r i g i d distillation o f something more f o r m ­ less. Bion's reversed double arrows (*~T) represent the purely negative opera­ tion o f the formless f o r c e — a dynamic state denuded o f character, beyond the ruthless operation o f i m m o r a l conscience. I t achieves different sorts o f exis­ tence i n Falstaff and Satan, who simultaneously represent stages i n the break­ down o f existence. As noted earlier, the force represented by