Eigen in Seoul

Madness and Murder

Michael Eigen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913105
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book contains an eighteen hour seminar - given over a three day period - presented by Michael Eigen in Seoul, Korea, in 2007. The seminar traces transformations of madness and faith in psychoanalysis - particularly Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott - emphasizing basic rhythms of experience steeped in clinical details, social issues and personal concerns, and takes up problems of madness and faith besetting the world today. It is filled with clinical portrayals and discussions of personal and social issues. Eigen describes ways we live through challenging experiences in therapy relevant for how life is lived. Discussions go back and forth between clinical details and cultural dilemmas, touching the taste of life, how one feels to oneself. This work is at once personal, learned, and down-to-earth. One gets the feeling that a lifetime of dedicated work is being condensed and transmitted, mind to mind, person to person, soul to soul. The reader will feel he or she is a member of an ongoing seminar alive today, this moment, carrying the work further.

Chapter One
Day 1

Madness in psychoanalysis: Freud and Klein

First let me get the feel of the microphone. Is the sound OK? I was told that there are some twenty art therapists here. My wife is an art therapist in addition to being a more general child and adult therapist. So I’m happy to welcome art therapists and everyone else.

I was saying earlier today that I’m happy if in a meeting one sentence or one phrase that I manage to utter is significant to one person. If that happens I will be happy and if more than that happens even better. Meaning is very hard to transmit. Meaning is very hard to communicate and there is so much noise in our psychic systems, in our heads, in our souls, that it is very hard to understand each other, certainly even to understand ourselves, but we’ll give it a try. I welcome the chance to communicate with you, or try to, and for you to communicate with me.

I’m going to speak about madness in psychoanalysis. There will be time for questions, for responses, for your thoughts and feelings. I like interruptions so feel free to interrupt me anytime about anything as the spirit moves you. Nothing I’m saying is so important that it can’t be interrupted. Maybe the interruption will be much more important. We don’t know. So I will talk but if you don’t interrupt me, I’ll just keep on talking.

I’m going to talk about madness in psychoanalysis and I’m going to begin with Freud. Most of what I am saying today in this first session will be about Melanie Klein but I want to pave the way by beginning with Freud. Madness was very important from the beginning of psychoanalysis. Freud’s formal or official theory is about neuroses. But if you look closely and examine the concepts he uses, he draws his main concepts from a phenomenology of psychoses. The concepts he uses are drawn from experience of psychosis, which he applies to the neuroses and cultural phenomena.

Freud spent time in a mental hospital not as a patient but with other doctors. He was exposed to psychotic behaviour and learned a lot about psychosis from poets and from his own self. I write about this extensively in my first book, The Psychotic Core. If any of you get the urge to take a look at it, you will see some of this material there. Look at his concepts. For example the id. The id is portrayed as quite mad: the law of contradiction does not hold, common sense does not hold, and space and time collapse, reverse, turn inside out. In a way, Freud poeticized aspects of the id (The It), romanticized aspects of madness in the id.

The link between psychosis and Freud’s ego is a little harder to see, but I will point it out. Before moving on to the ego, my thoughts just interrupted themselves, so I’m going to share the interruption. At the end of Freud’s life, in one of the last notes he wrote, he commented that mysticism is the ego’s perception of the id. I was thinking, after I told you that the id has various structures of madness, that many of these structures are also true of mystical experience. Common sense may not hold, the law of contradiction doesn’t hold, space and time are transcended and have different laws and so on. So there seems to be some resonance between Freud’s depiction of the psychotic id and Freud’s association of that with mystical experience. I’m not going to reduce one to the other. I’m just noting an affinity that appeared in his work.

For Freud the ego begins quite mad. He says that the ego begins as a hallucinatory organ and that the first cognitions are hallucinatory. The early (and not so early) ego moves in and out of hallucination. Hallucination is one of its modes of cognition. Associated with this is the thought that the ego is a wish-fulfilling organ. It hallucinates fulfillment of wishes.

As a hallucinating wish-fulfilling organ, the ego can temporarily hallucinate pain away, hallucinate pain as not there, and substitute pleasure where there is pain. The ego overcomes distress by hallucinating it not there and hallucinating bliss or pleasure or a heavenly, beatific state as there. In this “madness” of the ego early in life, there is a double hallucination, a negative hallucination and a positive one. Negative hallucination: hallucinating something there, as not there e.g., hallucinating pain away. Positive hallucination: hallucinating something not there as there, e.g., hallucinating bliss when there is distress.

Freud creates an example, a thought experiment, a psychoanalytic fantasy: when the baby is hungry, the baby hallucinates a breast as there. Insofar as the baby lacks clear time perspective hunger may feel boundless, distress without end. The baby doesn’t know that soon the hunger will be satisfied and the distress will end. For the moment, distress goes on forever, infinitely, hellishly. Freud imagines the baby hallucinating a breast; a fulfilling feed to stop the fear and agony for a time. The baby substitutes an imaginary feed in his mind to quell very real distress, very real hunger. A propensity to make believe and substitute fantasy for reality begins.

This is one way the human race is crazy—a fundamental tendency, according to Freud, to believe that one’s desires are fulfilled in order to make the pain of unfulfillment disappear. To take this farther, saying it a little differently, we become used to making ourselves disappear in order to survive ourselves. We make aspects of ourselves disappear in order to endure living with ourselves. We are self-disappearing creatures.

This is not the whole truth about our nature and who we are. It is but one tendency, but an important one. If we don’t catch on to it, feel our way into it, taste, smell and live with it, then it is going to come at us from outside. If we don’t catch onto our self-disappearing nature from the inside, it will come at us from outside. We will make ourselves disappear from the outside, by what we do to each other and to the world. So much human violence is an attempt to make this fact about ourselves clear to us. Unfortunately, we obliterate this information by mechanisms like blame, as if blaming will make the pain go away. Blame is often part of wish fulfillment. We point to sources of violence out there and miss the internal mechanism that disappears us. Outer violence is important as a source of pain but we must not allow it to blot out ways we disappear ourselves because of inherent pain. It’s almost as if aliveness is too much for us. It’s too much to be alive. We can’t endure the pain we go through. We can’t take the full intensity of our feelings. Freud spoke of primal trauma as flooding. Flooded by intense feeling. Waves of feeling, we say, and they appear in dreams of drowning. We disperse, drown, and go dead in face of feelings that are more than we can take. We get flooded by the rise and fall of experience and go under.

What does a baby do when experience gets too rough, after screaming? He stupors out, goes into a trance, goes to sleep, loses consciousness. We do this too in our own ways as adults. How we make ourselves, our feelings, aspects of inner reality disappear in face of painful intensity is a happening that requires recognition and reflection. To make ourselves disappear, to make pain disappear, is a mad state. It occludes or obliterates aspects of reality, inner and outer. The ego in such moments is an unreality machine.

You’ll find out in the next three days that I don’t really expect you or me to do anything about such states. Its best not to try to do too much. But it’s good to develop what I call psychic taste buds, to taste the psyche and psychic processes, smell it, taste it, feel it. Don’t try to make it go away. Try to taste a little bit more of it, live your way into it and see what happens.

As the ego goes on, for Freud, it develops socialized ways of living with self disappearing as a way of handling aliveness, a way of handling stimulation it can’t bear. One of the best portrayals he has of this is in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). There he talks about transference and idealization. Particularly idealizing authority figures—parent, teacher, religion, nation, whatever. He talks about self-idealization and he talks about idealization of different groups. And he sees in idealization the working of hallucinatory processes through which one tries to escape the pain. I personally find many positive things in our idealizing tendency. So I’m not cancelling it or putting it down or making it disappear. It is very real and we have to learn to live with it like we learn to live with breathing. But we also have to see how it is a cocoon for hidden madness and hidden pain.

Now Freud performs a magician’s trick, a sleight of hand. He says that the ego, while starting out psychotic, is a double agent because it is also involved with the perception of reality. It has a double capacity. It has hallucinatory origins and also is dedicated to perceiving reality. It’s almost as if Freud is asking the question, ‘How does a hallucinogenic organ develop anti-hallucinogenic properties?’ He doesn’t solve this. No one has ever really solved this, at least not in the terms it has been asked. But from another point of view, Freud is honoring a double capacity we have, although our ways of talking about it leave much to be desired.

When Freud was younger, he developed his theory of sexuality and libido. He was very into the experience of vitality. When he was older he developed a theory about a destructive drive, Thanatos, a death drive. When he was younger the life drive carried the aggression in the personality. The life drive wasn’t sweet and meek. The life drive was hungry. The life drive was acquisitive, aggressive and ambitious. It was driven. The ego was driven by a hunger for life. It wasn’t a sweet and withdrawn thing. It sought to maximize life. And we know from human history that the life drive kills. One kills out of the life drive. Give me yours. I want yours. I want to take your part of life and add it to mine. So the life drive is highly dangerous. There is really not much to check it. The ego doesn’t do a terribly good job in the course of history knowing what to do with the fact that we are killers and that our life drive is dangerous. Some of us try to withdraw from it, play it down, tone it down. And it becomes a question of how much life we can stand and how to begin modulating it. To begin somehow finding a way to not be so alive. Tone it down a little. Be a little more dead. Deaden the life drive because it will kill us. The life drive will kill us. It will kill others. It will kill us in our desirous hungry modes. So we try to develop a trade-off, a compromise with life, so that we can get through it, live it. In order to live the life drive we have to kill it a little bit.

Now as he got older and near the end of his life, he lived through the First World War and the Second World War was on the horizon, he had to leave his country. He had no idea just how horrible things were going to be, but he already had a glimpse. He had the death of a daughter and he had cancer. And he began to wonder more about certain patients who didn’t change in the way he thought they should. He tried to stay with the libido theory. Maybe the libido is too sticky. Maybe the libido is too inert. Maybe there is something wrong with the libido. Eventually he had to add what he called the destructive drive, the death drive. A drive that tends toward disappearing, making the human creature go back to inorganic life. A drive that can’t support the tensions of life, that must undo the conflicts, tensions, the irascibility of life, and tend back toward zero.

Now we know that there are many problems with the death drive as a biological theory, and I wouldn’t present it as that. And maybe even the death drive is part of the life drive. That’s also possible. But as a description, as a poetic description, as a majestic description of human self-destruction, it’s like a notation; it’s like a flag. It says, “Look at this. Something is going on here.” Maybe this isn’t the best way to talk about it, but we’ve got to talk about it some way because it is lethal and it is us.

So far I’ve presented aspects of Freud’s concepts of the id and the ego, which are permeated by some kind of madness. I haven’t mentioned the superego because most analysts understand that the superego goes mad very easily and over-persecutes the rest of the personality. It’s as if the destructiveness of the id or the ego gets recycled through the superego and then re-channeled against the ego and the id. So that an overly ambitious destructive persecutory superego is aimed at the rest of the personality and is quite mad. What I’m trying to bring out is not only that the superego is mad, or the id is mad, but that the ego is mad too. All three of Freud’s main structures are permeated with threads that are on a psychotic level.

I’m beginning by painting this grim picture because it is too easy to think that Freud simply says “Oh we have to compromise, we have to think about reality, we have to live our sane common sense or logic.” Because in the depths of his theory sanity can be mad or tinged with madness. What seems sane to one group is insane to another group and hostility between groups is rationalized by ‘My way is right and your way is wrong.’ Institutionalized murder, as in war or execution of supposed criminals, operates under a cloak of “sanity.”

Now we will begin Melanie Klein. Melanie Klein (1946, 1957) picks up where Freud’s death drive left off. She is a death drive analyst and her concepts developed within a cultural context of warfare. Her picture of the psyche is a war psychology. It’s a psychology concerned with a destructive drive, what she calls a destructive urge within. Mystical Judaism speaks of a good inclination and an evil inclination, and Melanie Klein’s analysis focuses very much on the evil inclination, on our destructive drive. She also makes explicit what’s implicit in Freud. She taps the concern with madness that’s implicitly hidden in Freud’s concept. It’s all there like fools gold on the surface. You just have to see it, like the purloined letter—all of the madness that’s in Freud. It’s almost as if he changed the discourse from focusing on sin to focusing on madness. But in Melanie Klein it becomes explicit. Because her psychology is explicitly about psychotic conflicts and psychotic agonies. I think it’s the first systematic, so to speak, systematic/unsystematic psychoanalytic psychology that focuses solely—no, that’s not quite true—I’m omitting Federn (see Eigen, 1986). Federn was probably the first and we’re leaving him out. But no one has focused on the destructive drive in psychotic conflict as fiercely as Klein has.

When Klein started speaking about psychotic conflicts, psychotic agony, she released a stream of creative writers to begin talking about psychosis. Bion’s work, Winnicott’s work, Andre Green’s work, Marion Milner’s work all have Klein in the background. And they disagree this way or that way with Klein. But it’s as if once she says it, once she taps it, it opens up energy that had been bottled up and one begins to see, one begins to contact, one begins to perceive and envision all sorts of ways that madness works.

At the center of her theory is a simple dynamic vision or observation or imagining or taste that fits in with aspects of existential psychology. She feels that the core psychotic anxiety is annihilation, annihilation anxiety. She calls it annihilation dread. And it spans many levels. For her it is quite physical. It’s in the body but it’s also mental. It’s a fear of loss of mind, a fear of loss of self, a psychical annihilation as well as a physical annihilation. With a little introspection, some of you know that psychic annihilation is much more dreadful than physical annihilation. She began talking about annihilation dread and psychotic ways of handling it, responding to it.

She envisioned two main ways to go crazy. In all cultures, in all times, people have gone crazy either by being what we call schizophrenic or what we call depressed. She noted that these two ways of going crazy are also ways of defending against annihilation anxiety. It’s as if one goes crazy in order to avoid being annihilated. She took those two ways of going crazy and turned them into defenses. What she calls the paranoid-schizoid style or mode or position is one way of dealing with psychotic anxiety, annihilation anxiety, and the depressive position is another. She took the two main ways that people go crazy and turned them into psychoanalytic defenses, ways of handling conflicts over annihilation anxiety.

Now each of these two positions or modes of handling annihilation anxiety are made up of many complex processes, micro processes, and Melanie Klein hit on a few of them. She elaborated aspects of Freud’s thinking about how the ego works. In the paranoid-schizoid position, she saw the ego try to rid itself of pain by putting it somewhere else, e.g., putting one’s own pain in the other person or in empty space, getting the pain outside the self. The usual way it does this is by projecting it into the other. In the United States a lot of people do not like the term projective identification. It may be an awkward term, but touches an important reality. That is, we are identified with what we project. We might try to get rid of painful elements by putting them in someone else, but we are unconsciously identified with them. Our identity is hooked up with what we put into others. We don’t get rid of what we throw out of ourselves. We are deeply invested in it even if we try to kill it off out there. Then she notes that what you put into the other comes back to you, it boomerangs. You project out scary things, you see scary things. You project out nightmarish elements, you see nightmarish elements. And you become paranoid. You become more withdrawn. You try to hide from the monstrous formations, the painful formations you are trying to rid yourself of.

She speaks of splitting and idealization. Freud wrote that the ego idealizes authority figures, in part, to get rid of one’s own psychic disturbances. Splitting, projection, idealization are ways to blunt disturbance, displace it, exile it. Besides splitting, projection and idealization, Klein also wrote about denial and manic defense. Those of you who read Kernberg will note that his descriptions of the borderline personality use the same defenses that for Klein are part of psychotic operations in face of annihilation anxiety.

It is interesting and I think important to note the strong role paranoid processes have played in both Freud’s and Klein’s thinking about psychotic states. Most of Freud’s writings on psychosis were on paranoia. He classified psychosis into two categories: paranoia and everything else. For Freud, paranoia was extremely important in understanding the ego and Klein picked up on that. Klein’s paranoid-schizoid mode of operation links in to the way the ego idealizes, hallucinates, splits and defends itself from pain, as described by Freud. The main pain for Klein is annihilation anxiety and her emphasis on the latter constitutes a shift in the center of gravity for psychoanalysis.

An interesting thing about Klein’s use of splitting is that she uses it to explain deadness or unfeeling. If you keep on splitting in order to keep away annihilation anxiety and keep on splitting, the splitting proliferates a little like the sorcerer’s apprentice. It proliferates and disperses the ego instead of saving the ego. Splitting tries to save some domain of the ego by dispersing it. The psyche gets dispersed and as the psyche gets dispersed, it thins out and loses contact and stops feeling itself. It’s as if splitting carried far enough into dispersal leads to the loss of the capacity to feel oneself fully alive or fully present and one begins more and more to feel not there or dead or unfeeling.

The other mode depression, the depressive position, is a way of handling anxiety, persecutory anxiety, annihilation anxiety and Klein and Bion both talk about depression as persecutory. Depressi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE Day 1
• CHAPTER TWO Day 2
• CHAPTER THREE Day 3
• REFERENCES