Contact with the Depths

Michael Eigen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855758476
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912207
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores ways we make contact with the depths in ourselves and each other. We are deeply moved by contact we make with life, yet also puzzled by a need to break or lose contact, and often suffer wounds by failure of contact to be born. Our sense of contact is tenacious and fragile, subject to deformations, plagued with a sense of jeopardy. Chapters focus on ways we make-and-break contact in the wounded aloneness of addiction, the wounded beauty of psychosis, the importance of not knowing and wordlessness, ways we transmit emotions, the need to start over, and harm we cause by trying to get rid of and misuse tendencies that are part of our makeup. Our contact with life, ourselves, each other is challenged. And through it all, we have need for deep contact, contact with the depths, fulfilling and suspenseful. Contact we never stop growing into, part of the mystery, care and love of everyday life.

Chapter One

Distinction–union structure

Over twenty years ago (1986, Chapter Four; see also 1992, 1993, 1995) I posited a distinction–union structure as a kind of DNA–RNA of experience. Every micro-moment or “cell” of experience is made of distinction–union tendencies. More, that distinction–union tendencies are parts of one structure or event, always mixed and working, although either may be more dominant or obvious at any moment.

It might help living one’s way into this by supposing distinction–union tendencies as branches of a single trunk, or roots in a complex root system. At some unobservable level, my hunch is that they are one, indistinguishable, but our representational cognitive language discriminates coincidence as two or more, often as binaries, opposites or complements.

What would it mean to posit them as indistinguishable and unobservable? Would this mean they are beyond knowing? I suspect there are vast “domains” we do not, and possibly cannot, know, yet they work and influence us, even structure us. Bion’s (1965, 1970; Eigen, 1998) nameless, wordless Transformations in O point to this, as do countless wordless Buddha-lands beyond conscious categories pointed to in many sutras (e.g., Goddard, 1932, p. 46).

This chapter dips in and out of mystery, is steeped in it, but, for the most part, tries to attend to more or less expressible depictions of tendencies that come into view in inner vision and thought, tendencies that have had a long cultural history and strong psychoanalytic presence as well.

Cultural background

The triune doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a dramatic example of a distinction–union structure. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one-yet-three. There was disagreement among Catholic thinkers as to whether the Father and Son were one or two “substances”. The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE settled on one “substance” yet three Persons. One-yet-distinct.

Critics might say such a reality or formulation is not understandable or beyond knowing. But one can venture a modern analogy by depicting different functions (respiration, digestion, circulation, etc.) of one body. The trope of one body to depict mystical connection or union between all people (even all life) has a long history. Saint Paul taught that all Christians were united as parts of Jesus’ body. Jesus is credited with saying when two people commune in his name, he is there: three-yet-one in communion.

The “Sh’ma Yisroel” of Judaism has a many-in-one or one-in-many structure. It is often loosely translated as “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”. This translation misses the fact that three names of God are used or implied in the famous dictum (or invitation): Sh’ma (hear, listen), Yisroel (Israel), Adonay (Lord, a substitute for the unsayable Ya-veh) Elokenu (God the many, many gods, plurality), Adonay (Lord, Lord God) echad (one). That is, God the many is one God. Ya is a name of God often meaning God Almighty (the one) in everyday talk, as in Hallelujah: Hallel (praise)—ya or ja (God).

It is hard to open an ancient text without finding some reference to the one-in-many. The Bhagavad Gita, for example: Krishna as all there is, one that is not only in but is all plurality. Here, the many-one are indistinguishable.

The way we so often think of or experience time is triune, past–present–future, three-yet-one. We speak of a stream of time, a flow, using liquid as a trope for a sense of duration, movement, enduring, an implicit sense of going on being. In inner reality, we experience ebbs and flows of time, heart time, pulse time, hunger time, breathing time. Our body is a mysterious field of experience that provides psychic time with many currents.

A modern physicist, David Bohm (1996), writes of implicate–explicate orders. Explicate refers to experiencing and thinking difference, the distinctness of beings, discriminated reality. Implicate points to unseen (unobservable?) connections, implicit oneness of reality where differentiation does not reign. The “wholeness” of the implicate order connects with Matte-Blanco’s “symmetrical unconscious” and Bion’s “transformations in O”, which I will turn to in a moment. For now, I want to point out that a modern physicist created his own translation or amplification of the one-yet-many structure and saw it in ways the universe works. For Bohm (2004), the implicate order, by its unknown creative nature, gives rise to our own creative sense in work and life. We are expressions of creative processes that permeate the universe.

Psychoanalysis

The above cultural sampling has counterparts in psychoanalytic thinking, which we now dip into briefly. Matte-Blanco (1975, 1988) writes of a symmetrical unconscious and asymmetrical consciousness. As his work unfolds, he comes to mean two modes of being and thinking that permeate psychic life.

An example of symmetrical experiencing is the equality or identity of members of a set. All mothers in the set of mothers are identical in being women (symmetrical thinking), whatever their individual differences (asymmetrical thinking). By a spread of symmetrical thinking, awareness that all mothers are women can come to mean all women are mothers: that is, all women are seen as mothers. Symmetrical spreads characterize emotional contagion, where members of a set or across sets are reduced to characteristics that define the sets. Such melding can be part of the basis of prejudice but also a basis for mystical experience (e.g., all individuals in the set of humanity are alike in being human beings; therefore (in symmetrical spread), all people are one).

Symmetrical experiencing tends towards infinity, where anything can be anything else or nothing or everything. Asymmetrical experiencing puts the brakes on, emphasizing distinctions, individual differences, not-one. Of course, the differentiation tendency can proliferate, go haywire (as in infinite splitting), and we get into difficulties that parallel the identity tendency. Matte-Blanco describes many ways these two tendencies—movements towards identity or oneness and movements towards distinctness—are expressed in every psychic act. How to work with complex tendencies that add to existence is a perennial task, never more important than now.

Bion (1994) writes about fusion and splitting tendencies as simultaneous, oscillating, or alternate ways of organizing experience. At the deepest levels, they are indistinguishable, coincide (akin to Matte-Blanco’s symmetrical). They are discriminated on a phenomenological level as perceived, conceptualized, or imagined tendencies. Something approaching a kind of indistinguishable “oneness” is seen in Bion’s last words of A Memoir of the Future (1991, p. 578): “Wishing you all a Happy Lunacy and Relativistic Fission”. Fission here combines splitting and fusion, as in the splitting of the atom in such a way that an earthly holocaust is feared: all as one tending towards zero.

Bion takes us still deeper when he speaks of K-transformations and O-transformations. K stands for knowledge, or knowing, and O for unknowable ultimate reality. He gives Freud as an example of rigid K transformations and Klein as an example of more fluid ones. Transformations in O remain a mystery approachable by F (faith, the psychoanalytic attitude). K transformations involve logic, narrative, words or mixtures of words and affects, numbers, drama. Transformations in O are wordless, imageless, ineffable. K can feed O and O can feed K, but O remains unknown and unknowable, although we try to learn about approaches to living O and ways of representing it.

For Bion, akin to Matte-Blanco, O is infinite: “The fundamental reality is ‘infinity’, the unknown, the situation for which there is no language” (Bion, 1994, p. 372). Nevertheless, we cannot exactly call O one or say it is not-one. Milner (1987) refers to it as 0 (zero). A lot goes on in O or 0. Transformations in O may be inscrutable and ineffable, but they matter. They contribute deeply to what we call growth. Transformations in O may be unobservable and inconceivable, but they are lived and contribute to living (James Grotstein has written deeply and imaginatively on O-processes and a primary subject–object of identification allied to distinction–union structures, e.g., 2000, 2007).

On the negative side, Bion posits a destructive force that goes on working after it destroys everything (1965, p. 101; Eigen, 1998, Chapter 3). How can destruction keep destroying after everything is destroyed? Much goes on in zero land.

Bion suggests we meet absolute destruction with Faith (F in O), faith in face of ultimate reality, an attitude of absolute openness (as open as one can be). Sometimes, when meditating on the faith that meets total destruction that goes on destroying, I think of Job: “Yea though You slay me, yet will I trust You”. Job and Bion’s F in O share a common core.

Bion calls F in O the psychoanalytic attitude and describes it as being without memory, desire, understanding, or expectation. A kind of zero or radical openness, letting go of self and mind-operations that maintain the latter, freedom from self and mind, a waiting on O. K formulations result and can prove important, but waiting on O, and not prematurely closing it off with K, can open transformational possibilities that may not happen without F. Part of waiting on O in F can be at-onement with oneself or, simply, atonement, with or without self.

What goes on in O we do not know, but we sense impacts, hints, intimations, some kind of contact with the unknown, although we cannot say what it is or is not. As a physicist once said, perhaps Eddington, something unknown is doing we do not know what. Its impacts affect us and we work with what we can. We, too, are that unknown or part of it. We are the unknown responding to itself.

Many psychoanalytic writers have views of how distinction–union develop and I have written about several of them in The Psychotic Core (1986, Chapter Four). Notions such as identification, primary, secondary and tertiary processes, projective identification, symbiosis–individuation, dual track, conjunction–disjunction, transitional space, use of object and primary aloneness are some of the important ones. More can be added. All share a sense that distinction–union tendencies are basic movements in experience and we read them in forces of nature as well.

Often distinction–union tendencies work unconsciously and become semi-visible in unexpected ways. I think of an early case near the beginning of my practice. I will call him Abe.¹ He was a serious alcoholic, binging to the point of waking up on the street after three or four days that were blank and never fully remembered. This was chronic, intermittent, reliable behaviour. He was in Alcoholics Anonymous, which helped, but he needed something else as well.

When he was sober for periods, his friends cheered him on. Inevitably, the fall would come and his friends tried to pick him up, expressed sadness, anger, disappointment, held out helping hands, encouraged him to come back and start again. But downspins came, as if blackout periods were needed, part of overarching up–down movements.

I, too, felt something like a Greek chorus, happy when he was all right, sad and scared when he dropped down. Happy–sad–scared was an implicit part of the therapy atmosphere. Through it, I tried to keep something of an even keel. Unlike his friends, I did not go overboard one way or the other. Something in me kept a bit apart and noticed the pattern. I did not do much more than provide a background affect field while noticing that both sides of the up and down might be part of one system, a see-saw unit over time. This might not seem like much, but it brought together climb-and-slide as a single movement, rather than splitting them into opposing choices (the counsel of friends was to pick one and reject the other, a “you can do it” frame).

I suspect this bit of “transcendental” vision had an impact in our being together, although I would be hard put to say how. In my imagination, I could see a baby tossed to and fro from heights of joy one moment to depths of agony the next, each state lasting forever. In the depths of my imaginings, there was a still point of awareness, a witness or seer who goes on seeing in the midst of emotional storms, even in the depths of madness.

Abe knew a good deal about his trauma history from AA, so interpretations I might make seemed redundant, although he appreciated my sense of his pain and faith in his potential. Perhaps he also appreciated my fear. I did not do anything special except try to be with him and say what I could.

The turn came little by little. He began to withdraw more and more from his life, from his girlfriend, work, AA. It took some time for me to notice he also was withdrawing from alcohol. It was a long and scary “dry” period. He became silent in sessions, although for a time he gave me some compass bearings, telling me that he was holed up in his room and did not feel like going out or doing anything. After a time, ever deepening silence, no compass, free fall. It felt less like a fall than being drawn down, sucked into the earth by an unidentifiable x.

I was scared not just for him but me. A young therapist, what would colleagues think if my patient killed himself? Would I get sued by relatives? Would I be brought up on malpractice charges? How could I let him fall this far? Shouldn’t he get medical help? What was I doing? Was my practice on the verge of going through a version of Abe’s pattern: just as it was getting started, it would end and I would wake up on the street, having to start from scratch or worse? Together, our lives would be ruined or ended.

After about eight months of going down the tubes and waiting, an amazing thing happened, something I was not trained for, an experience outside the domain of psychoanalytic therapy at that time. Abe began to report a radiant, compressed I-point. If it had a location, maybe somewhere in his chest. An ineffable, mysterious, pulsating point that he identified as his I. An indestructible I-kernel that went on I-ing. There was a certain amount of fear because of strangeness and unfamiliarity, but the overall feeling was reassurance, care, comfort, peace, permeated by radiant thrills, a core of pulsating aliveness in the centre of being. In months ahead, the experience expanded to include the outside world. Nature, people—aglow, pulsating, a caring centre everywhere. It was as if finding the safety of an indestructible I-kernel made generosity possible.

In time, I would learn more about spiritual experience and develop a broader mystical frame for psychoanalysis. I would not exactly call what I do mystical psychoanalysis, but it is not psychoanalysis deprived of mystical/spiritual sensitivity. Patients like Abe helped open me up, but it is also true that something in me needed this opening and was asking for it without my awareness. As this happened with Abe, I was out of my depth, or perhaps brought into it.

From my current perspective, I can probably pick out a few threads worth noting, but it is important to stress how at sea I was. One thread was my presence as a background subject. I was minimally intrusive, and although afraid, basically supportive. This is not an experience Abe had much of.

There was a lot of noise in Abe’s life. He was picked on and abused by parents, although his mother provided moments of warmth. Her ups-and-downs paralleled his own later in life: warmth one moment, hell the next. His father was a heavy drinker who could piss on the living room floor in a stupor and not be aware of his cruelty. Neither daytime nor night brought Abe peace. Either was subject to violence in sudden shifts. The atmosphere he took in and adjusted to was one that included major doses of abusive care, cruel warmth. Abe’s spirit remained trapped in his house, long after he abandoned it to save himself as a young man. You may guess that he, too, had an explosive temper that could turn on a penny, a hot rather than cold temper. He was not without heart. But that did not make living with himself or others easier.

I was a quieter person than he was used to, a quiet caring person. For him, it was like coming in out of the storm on the one hand, and an intimation that anything could happen on the other. If I was in unfamiliar territory, so was he. We had to find ways of being together. The unknown and unfamiliar was part of the basis of our relationship.

My being there for Abe in the background allowed something to pass between us. While I kept open as best I could while we were together, the impacts we had on one another were largely unconscious. While he and I were in the room and conscious of ourselves as separate people, I felt that most of our contact was unconscious. Part of this unconscious contact involved formation of a therapy bond, a bond made up of both of us which had an impact on both of us. Akind of mutual permeability worked within, behind, and under us, outside the margins of awareness. Perhaps within the margins as well, for, over time, we sensed something happening, although we could not say what. It became manifest, for one thing, in the surprise of his near-total withdrawal and surfacing of a radiant-I.

Related to the first thread was a second component. One thing inherent permeability can do is absorb good feeling over time. Surely, my attitude of quiet waiting had something to do with it. I was not entirely a negative background/foreground presence. I tried not to piss on his floor too often. And if I fell into stupor, I hoped it was not too oppressive. Bad as I was, I was generally a milder traumatic presence than his parents. Invisible good feeling in the background of our beings did me good as well. In a profound sense, we were supportive presences for each other, whatever else was in the mix (for a parallel later in my practice, see a list of therapy ingredients in Toxic Nourishment, 1999, Chapter Three, “Miscarriages”, pp. 46–55).

Winnicott (1988, e.g., pp. 73, 76, 127–128) depicts variations in the emotional surround, variable, vibratory effects of changing emotional weather. Moment to moment shifts in the surrounding emotional weather for the infant make waves that spread through the infant’s being. The way life feels shifts spontaneously, automatically, like instant to instant shifts in barometric pressure. So-called outside and inside worlds permeate and resist each other, forming part of unconscious life that supports and overturns. Buffeted by intermittent waves, we may not know why or how things happen or what they are. We do our best to ride them out, often going under, disappearing for a time that may seem eternal. The emotional seas that move through our being, supporting and dashing it, blend into a vast unit that forms the background of our lives (Eigen, 1986, Chapter Four, p. 154).

In Abe’s case, inherent permeability and unconscious background emotional support were wounded. He was wounded as personality began to form: beginnings met with damage (Eigen & Govrin, 2007, pp. 44–58; Winnicott, 1992, p. 122). A pattern of damaged beginnings characterized important aspects ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE Distinction–union structure
• CHAPTER TWO Spirituality and addiction
• CHAPTER THREE I don’t know
• CHAPTER FOUR Wordlessness
• CHAPTER FIVE Ring–hang up, start–stop, on–off
• CHAPTER SIX Tears of pain and beauty: mixed voices
• CHAPTER SEVEN Arm falling off
• CHAPTER EIGHT Music and psychoanalysis
• REFERENCES
• INDEX