Living Moments

On the Work of Michael Eigen

Stephen Bloch, Loray Daws, Stephen Bloch, Loray Daws

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429915765
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Michael Eigen is widely regarded as a significant and increasingly influential figure in contemporary psychoanalysis. This collection of papers, by contributors in the USA, Israel, Australia and South Africa, reveal how his works yield creative and generative possibilities with profound clinical and cultural implications. Writers include well-known authors such as Mark Epstein, Anthony Molino and Brent Potter. The papers are divided into three sections: Reflections (psychoanalytic and philosophical concerns, such as Heidegger, the Hindu Goddess Kali, Buddhism, the sense of Time); Refractions (clinical implications, papers on murder and aliveness, the nature of the analytic interaction, addiction and work with the mother-infant relationship), and Responses (personal impacts of his works, as well as poetry and the thoughts of a creative writer on Eigen's oeuvre). There are also papers on the experience of supervision with Michael Eigen as well as on his weekly seminars on Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, ongoing for more than forty years, in New York.

PART I
REFLECTIONS

CHAPTER ONE
Bion, Eigen, and the dreaming of Kali

Stephen Bloch

Seeking out an old hermit

I climb the snowy peak to find his thatched hut empty.

As I descend empty hearted,

Suddenly, a wild singing, like murmurs of a dragon,

Echoes from the cloud-shrouded peak

(Sat Chuen Hon, 2003)

There are many images of the terrible mother, the dark goddess (Morrigan, the Black Madonna, Lilith, Medusa), but none strikes us as deeply as Kali. Kali is a personified archetypal image of terror and trauma and, at the same time, one of awe, fascination, and vitality. Her image evokes a ferocious aliveness, a terrible vitality, and, in every representation, a pulsing combination of annihilatory and life-giving properties—nullity and plenitude. Learning about Kali’s symbolism and exploring her mysteries is experienced as an act of recognition, the rediscovery of something that has always been there. We know her name.

Jung (1959) speaks of Kali’s paradoxical nature as being that of the loving and the terrible mother and, similarly, Zimmer (1972) writes of her creative and destructive principles as being one and the same. A more radical interpretation is suggested by Spielrein. In a paper entitled “Destruction as a cause of coming into being” (1912), she declares an originating primacy to the destructive dimension.

Kali’s necklace of skulls, her long fangs, and her sword all point to the nature of existential suffering in what Rhode has called “an agony at the core” (2008, p. 147), as though she personifies the first noble truth of Buddhism, the actuality of suffering. In classical Indian symbolism, most of Kali’s aspects refer to the sacrifice and necessary destruction of the ego in order to reveal non-dual awareness. We can, however, imagine her symbolism refracted though the prism of psychoanalysis. Here, her garland of skulls represents the unrepresentable: experiences that are unthinkable, destroy thinking, and that we cannot get our minds around. These are the primitive places where damage has occurred before thinking and image-forming capacities have developed. The skull garland comprises psychoanalytic understandings of the destructive object (Eigen, 1996), the persecutory object (Klein, 1946), the boundless object (Eigen, 1986), the obstructive object (Eaton, 2011), and the undreamable object (Eigen, 2000). Kali represents unprocessed catastrophic realities that have to be experienced before transcendent or meditative states of consciousness can be reached or, indeed, tolerated. Grotstein (1996) emphasises that whether the experience of O is ecstatic or one of horror is contingent on psychodynamic maturity, specifically, transcendence of the anxieties of the depressive position and the associated resolution of the mourning of object loss.

In this chapter, I intend to explore the imagery of Kali as it presents itself in the writings of Bion and Eigen. Although not mentioned directly by either writer, one can sense her presence as a backdrop to the work of both. In tracing a theme of Kali through aspects of Bion and Eigen, I hope to avoid a reductive “nothing but” approach. Rather, I intend to hold Kali up as an imaginal resonance and overtone to their work, to let her impact play off against their writings and enhance its significance, and to lift awareness to an implicit theme. And it is Bion and Eigen in Kali, for it is a contemporary hubris to view the deities as within, as part of us. As Christou writes, the psyche is not in us, but “it is we who are inside psyche” (1963, p. 75).

Kali in Bion

Bion’s traumatisation in the First World War functions as a crucial bedrock of experience for, and root of, his writings. Its influence can be felt in both his clinical and autobiographical works, and there is now a significant body of papers that deal with this formative experience and its emergence in his theoretical concepts such as containment, beta and alpha functioning, and thinking under impact (see Brown, 2012; Souter, 2009; Szykierski, 2010). His emotional working through of this period continued throughout his life, as he attempted to digest an experience that was essentially unbearable; for example, in three different texts he works and reworks his abandonment of the dying Corporal Sweeting, on August 8 1917.

Bion’s autobiographical works provide a major channel for narrative metabolisation. Yet, it may also be true that the grotesque experience of the war provided him with the content and form with which to dream even earlier experiences that were beneath and before representation, for which there was no name: annihilatory states for which there were no words, images or sounds—the “nameless dread”.

* * *

A fantasy

Bion in no-man’s land, in no-thing. He dies on August 8 1918 at Amiens. And never ceases dying, never ceasing to recover from his survival.

Never have I known such a bombardment like this

Never, never

Mother, Mother, Mother—

And then came the sound which came in gusts against the skin of face and hands as well as ears.¹

Different silences. Tanks as containers—collapsing and exploding. Annihilatory flowering.

Hard, bright flames, as if cut from tinfoil, flickered and died, extinguished by the bright sun.²

Bion felt sick. He wanted to think … He wanted to think … He tried to think.³

Across the blasted landscape, at the edges Indian stretcher bearers, and through the fog Bion is calling to his ayah. A rising Black Sun. Gloss black against matt black. And a glimpse, the flash of an image from his childhood: Kali.

Urga-Kali, “the fierce Kali”.

Something very beautiful—and very deadly.⁴ She who dwells in the cremation grounds and battlefields.

An inverse flame opening into vastness.

He goes under, sinks down, beneath the capacity to think. And an old chant, a mantra, drifts through him. And the voice of his ayah: “om hrim shreem klim adya kalika param eshwari swaha.” The sound swells and disappears, carrying him, losing him, finding him. An ancient chant offering the possibility of coherence.

Bion is remembering a crude understanding of the chant, though the meaning is less consoling than the cadences of its sound: “Honour to She who is the originating one, her essence is an elemental blackness, the primordial feminine, who pierces illusion to the uncorrupted truth of existence.”

* * *

It is not known if Bion knew of Kali from his ayah, or experienced an image of her at Amiens. We do know, however, that his Indian childhood remained with him throughout his life and that his ayah had recounted Indian mythological tales to him (Bleandonu, 1994). One can, however, sense the broad sweep of the mantra’s meaning in his descriptions of O as the unknowable and unsymbolizable “ultimate reality”; “it is dark and formless” and “absolute truth” (Bion, 1970, p. 26). The experience of O is in some aspects one of dread, written in the key of terror, as Eigen has added.

Although not named as such, Kali can, in my understanding, also be seen as a background image to other of Bion’s core themes. Bion is concerned with how thought happens at the edge of turbulence and catastrophe—Kali in her disruptive, dissolving aspects. His tracking of destructive processes in the psyche, elements which subvert thought and emotional growth, are essential aspects of his work. At the same time, Kali may be the catastrophic that needs to find a way to alpha dreaming. And when Kali reveals the Void, she is an expression of aspects of O, the beam of intense darkness, the awe of the dark and formless infinite. Bion asks us to tolerate both doubt and infinity.

Bion’s arc passes from his ayah through Amiens and onwards; culminating in a vision of acute vulnerability and exquisite rapture:

You would not know that the direction in which I was robbing you would lead from nothing to unconsciousness to sleep to dream to waking thoughts to dream thoughts to nothingness to O = zero, from O = zero to O which is Oh! = O which is a picture which is a picture of a hole or greedy mouth or vagina which offers perfect freedom which is death which is perfect freedom which is perfect pitch or absolute colour or Eternal Life or Eternal Death or Perpetual Motion or Perpetual Inertia or Absolute Space or space like mental space in which there are objects so compact they are like white dwarfs or so sparse and rare they can only be grasped by finite means … or so absolute a space that your mental life is itself destroyed … (1991, p. 38)

Kali in Eigen

Echoing Bion, Eigen writes, “Darkness becomes a mixture of menace and ecstasy … An electrified blackness and self-other awareness pass into one another” (1986, p. 167).

To become aware of Kali as an underlying image in Eigen’s writings is to sense her traces everywhere. I suggest that she is an imaginal backdrop to his oeuvre, appearing in many of his books and papers, including Rage (2002), Psychic Deadness (1996), “Killers in dreams” (in Eigen, 2005), “Wordlessness” (in Eigen, 2011b), and Ecstasy (2001). Indeed, the titles of his two Seoul Seminars (2010, 2011a), “Madness and murder” and “Faith and transformation”, would have been immediately recognisable to the great poet of the dark goddess, the eighteenth century Bengali poet, Ramprasad Sen.

I will trace the theme of Kali in four areas of Eigen’s work:

1. Catastrophe and faith.
2. The unbearable.
3. Psychic deadness.
4. Destruction, creation, and aliveness.

Catastrophe and faith

In his seminal paper, “Toward Bion’s starting points: between catastrophe and faith” (1985), Eigen traces a core trajectory in Bion’s writing. Commenting that Bion’s conclusions are difficult to hear, bear, or believe, Eigen explores further the clinical implications of the catastrophic origins of personality. Bion holds that our earliest experience can be likened to a Big Bang in which “primitive” and “incoherent” beta elements explode outward towards infinity with increasing velocity. The struggle of the infant and maternal container is to transform this disintegration into manageable experience. This involves the role of the containing mother in her reverie and the rudimentary alpha functioning of the infant. The crisis at the point of origination remains as an invariant and may be mapped into many other places of catastrophe, such as in failure, disease, castration, and falling. Just as the sound of the Big Bang can be discerned across great lengths of time, so, too, do the effects of psychological birth remain. According to Eigen, it is “an explosion that seems to go on forever, an ongoing catastrophic process expressed in the butcher’s meat, wastelands and bleeding flowers of schizophrenic dreams” (2005, p. 38).

The faith that Bion is referring to is that radically open attitude that waits upon the impacts of experience. It involves the suspension and bracketing of memory, desire, and understanding. This surrender and relinquishment of knowing (K) allows a previously unborn image to emerge. Faith (F) is the psychoanalytic attitude that allows the selected fact, the selected image, to reveal itself. Eigen also states that it has a great deal to do with aliveness, a living of one’s reality no matter the circumstances (Eigen, 2011a). The Pali word sadha carries with it meanings of faith, trust, and confidence: the gesture of placing your heart upon; of offering or giving over your heart (Salzburg, 2003). Similarly, Eigen evokes the biblical injunction of loving God with all your heart and mind in articulating the essential qualities involved in a lived relationship with the rawness of reality. In the context of this chapter, this requires an openness in relationship to its Kali aspects.

The movement from catastrophe to faith is the Kali explosion that struggles to find its way into form; the experience is redeemed because it has found the grace of containment and representation. The psychological gesture that allows this redemption is captured in Bion’s Faith. With her stark imagery, Kali opens and develops the experiential capacity that this surrender demands.

T in O, F in O. T in Kali, F in Kali.

Kali connotes the primal catastrophe, its undreamable, unthinkable nature. At the same time, she is a portal to the great unknowing, the unforeclosed O, creative emptiness, and the transformations that occur here. These transformations in O are, in Eigen’s elaborations, mysteries that are “wordless, imageless, and ineffable” (Eigen, 2011b, p. 4), in contrast to K transformations, which involve words, numbers, beliefs, and concepts. In this way, approaching the unknowable, ultimate reality involves an encounter with a destruction of knowledge, akin to the traditional symbolism of Kali’s swords, which leads to the stripping away of mental constructs. O is involved in the “unobservable” and “inconceivable” domains captured by Eigen’s citing of Buddhalands, a boundless silence as background support. There are transformations that occur in these wordless dimensions, beneath and unknown to our usual modes (see Eigen, 2011b, pp. 57–72). O is inexhaustible, “unknown and beckoning” (Eigen, 2012a, p. 45).

The unbearable

The need to endure unbearable experience is a leitmotif that runs through all of Eigen’s work, and is perhaps the selected fact that emerges from the creative turbulence of his concerns. In Damaged Bonds (2000) he probes the difficulties of dreaming, which is, in Bion’s use of the word, the way in which raw, beta elements are processed and digested by alpha functioning. Eigen’s exploration reveals the full implications involved in this process: undreamable experience, damaged dreamwork, and an anti-dream object that subverts dreaming capacity. Where the impacts of experience and trauma are too overwhelming, the individual is unable to reach the necessary alpha dreaming capacity to digest and metabolise this experience. Dreamwork alpha cannot perform the psychological work necessary to recall, store, and process the material. The issue is that dismantled or corrupted dreamwork then results and therapy needs to support the development of dream-work alpha capacity.

According to Eigen,

[t]he patient is terrified to assemble a dream in which the dreaded object or object beyond dread may appear … yet it is precisely the depths of death and shards of madness and the mad/maddening object that dream-work must endure or, at least, express. (2000, p. 38).

Here, Eigen highlights the place where broken dreams characterise the individual’s experience and broken aspects of our sense of self (Eigen, 2010). Dreams depict interrupted, fragmented experience—processes which are in tatters and incomplete. Undreamable objects. Absence and no-thing. Broken dreams.

Kali is the problematic in the dream—

fragile alpha meeting

the undigested beta impacts of O

brave alpha wrestling

the anti-dream object

Bion is concerned with the intersection of the infinite O and the lived emotional reality of every session—indeed, every moment and every dream. The impacts of O reach for the metabolisation and digestion through alpha dreamwork. Grotstein (2007) points out that these raw inchoate beta-elements are produced by the evolving O and its interaction with the emotional processing capacity of the subject. Like the Hadron particle accelerator, which creates ultra-high veloci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTORY NOTE by Michael Eigen
• FOREWORD by James S. Grotstein
• EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
• PART I: REFLECTIONS
• PART II: REFRACTIONS
• PART III: REVERIES
• APPENDIX: Michael Eigen: bibliography of main works
• INDEX