The Wisdom of Lived Experience

Views from Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Metaphysics

Maxine K. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367329129
• eBook ISBN: 9780429922770
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is an exploration of contemporary understanding from philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and metaphysical studies, which seem to verify the value of the Epicurean sentiments in terms of the wisdom of lived experience. It portrays the authoritarian culture of the Rome.

Part I
Gathering Perspectives on Lived Experience

Introduction to Part I

Part I examines some of the concepts about coming alive, the birth of the experiencing mind.

Chapter One reviews philosophical (McGil christ, Hegel) and psychoanalytic (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Civitarese, Ogden, Bass, Siegel) views about the birth of subjectivity, the birth of the experiencing “I”.

Chapter Two considers neuropsychiatric views (McGilchrist, Feinberg, Solms, Friston, Siegel, Bolte Taylor) that are verifying the importance of sensory-based functions as essential for the deepening integration of the subjective self. It also reviews the paradigm shift in the neuroscientific work of Solms, Damasio, Pank sepp, and others, which emphasises the primacy of consciousness inevitably accompanied by intrinsic emotion. This shift prompts one to ponder why, for over a century, there was a general agreement amid psychology and psychoanalysis that consciousness itself required cortical deciphering. The assumption has been that wisdom of experience lay with the cortex. Later chapters try to address this myth of wisdom residing only in cognition, which might be due to the propaganda that left-brain functions broadcast.

Chapter One
Dialectic origins

We each face a paradox: our adult selves want to grow, but we hate to be disturbed. These differing basic tendencies, encountered by most living things, it seems, have apparently triggered a response which embraces both poles of the paradox. That is, openness to the new alternating with a closed-ness to maintain stability and continuity. In our human experience we have an ongoing to and fro that allows growth and differentiation within the limits of what is bearable. We are open to the new until anxiety and fear of discontinuity intervene. And then, once closed, the continuing wish in health to grow eventually overrides the anxiety of change leading to an opening of the system again. When harmonious, this to and fro may be considered as part of the ongoing process of coming alive, or what Wilfred Bion notes as “becoming”.

He reminds us that, while we rely much on “knowing about” in order to learn about the world and ourselves, it is only through immersing ourselves in lived experience, what he calls at some points being, and at other points becoming, that we can approximate the complex multi-faceted experience of the wider, deeper reality which Bion denotes as “O”.¹

Bion (1970) and others, such as McGilchrist (2009), suggest that emphasis on intellectual endeavours often brings imbalance, for our tools of knowing can hamper the wider wisdom that emerges from living in the moment, a wisdom that allows us deeper access to reality.

Becoming involves the often courageous registrations of encounters with emotional truths and other painful experiences, such as suffering the guilt which attends one’s becoming responsible, facing the loss and mourning the wastage when confronting one’s entrenchments and destructive behaviours, and facing the unknown, unshielded by the illusions of certainty or seeming possessions of the truth. All of these facings and livings involve disturbances to our everyday selves. Bion stresses that becoming involves those indescribable, multi-dimensional experiences that can only be lived in ongoing ways (Bion, 1970, p. 28).

In this regard, I am reminded of my experience of being with a patient, or, indeed, with a close friend or family member in which there is deep resonant interchange, much of which is out of awareness, and then of my trying to write up the hour or take verbal note of the deep discussion. My efforts at this notation often feel like sorting through a heap of dried leaves. The multi-dimensional experience cannot be adequately captured by words or retrospective thought. Only in resumption of the contact, as in the next analytic hour or the renewed conversation, can the fullness of the lived experience be resumed.

In trying to think further about lived experience, I found it useful to look to new, unsaturated views and several authors especially caught my attention, as they were each speaking about a similar theme: of nature as an active process in which reality is created via a continual dialectic process of differentiation. I will try to outline these viewpoints as they relate to the underlying processes of becoming.

McGilchrist: the dialogue between the hemispheres

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009) richly depicts the effects of the harmonious to and fro of the right and left cerebral hemispheric functions in the evolution and elevation of man’s emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development. While this work is intriguing for several reasons, I try here to focus on its relationship to lived experience. His work also directed me to the writings of the German philosopher Hegel, and especially his concept of Aufhebung. In addition, I also found the recent work of Alan Bass and the more current work of Giuseppe Civitarese, as well as the reflections of Tom Ogden on the dialectics of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, and Dan Siegel’s work on the integrating function of emotion very informing about what vitalises lived experience. I shall try to summarise my understandings, that is, my own dialectical process, in considering these works.

McGilchrist might be at the forefront of the emerging literature of interest to psychoanalysts on the significance of cerebral lateralisation. Drawing upon many careful clinical observations of normal functioning, as well as the disruptions of bilateral harmony through stroke or disease, he richly demonstrates the complexity of the ever-flowing interchange between right- and left-brain functions. However, he also raises the question of whether it is more appropriate at this point in our understanding to consider these opposing, and yet complementary, functions as metaphors about the different ways of being which comprise human experience. In my own studies for this book, encountering various neuroscientific viewpoints about laterality, while also appreciating the danger of proclaiming an absolute reality, I have felt it best to generally refer to right- and left-brain functions and ways of being. This stand, I feel, respects the complexity involved in the complementarity while also noting the clear distinctions that each hemisphere brings to lived experience.

Briefly, the right hemisphere involves the intuitive, implicit, mostly unconscious, sensory-based experience, in the moment, which remains open, receptive, and wide-ranging. It comes online in development before the left hemisphere and remains orientated to the input from the body but also to otherness in terms of the world beyond the bodily self. This otherness includes care from and of others.

In addition, it is attentive to the many levels of affective experience which emanate from within the individual as well as from the outside world and it seems to be instrumental in the unconscious origins of thought as noted in unconscious gestural and affective expressions (McGilchrist, 2009, pp. 41–44). These functions, which offer orientation to oneself and the world from earliest infancy, play vital roles in the individual’s lived experience, probably comprising the “ongoingness of being”, concept basic to Winnicott (1960).

However, the left hemisphere is also important in this regard. Its functions, which become active from about eighteen to twenty-four months of age, are those which link to the realm of conscious control of oneself and environment as it relates to the world. These include focused attention, fine motor co-ordination, development of language, manipulation of objects—in short, those qualities that allow for the exploration and the conquering of nature and her secrets. With regard to the interplay between the two hemispheres, the left seems to have the capacity to render explicit, that is, to bring to consciousness, the implicit unconscious messages offered by the right hemisphere. It brings clarification in symbol and language to that which emerges from the unconscious, but, in doing so, it separates the clarified and the symbolised from the dynamic in-the-moment experience. It will be up to the vast associational networks of the right hemisphere that foster metaphoric function to animate the symbol that the left brain has established. An example of this interplay is a sensitive, accurate interpretation: the labelling function of the interpretation helps to establish and strengthen the symbol (left hemispheric function) while the experience of the receiver feeling deeply seen and understood provides enlivenment (right hemispheric function). Finally, it will be the right brain that reintegrates the newly animated symbol to become part of the unconscious roots for the next intuitive processes (McGilchrist, Chapter 2, p. 5).

Relating to the different views about self and the world, McGilchrist and others (Bolte Taylor, 2008a) mention that each hemisphere, perhaps because of its neural circuitry and the information it processes, seems to have developed a specific attitude: that of the right (which processes input simultaneously) as open, compassionate, nonjudgemental, and patient, reminiscent of a sturdy compassionate parent, probably linked with the primary tasks of assessing and responding to the environment in a patient, receptive, reliable fashion. The attitude of the left hemisphere appears to be very different: processing input in more sequential fashion, rather like a child searching for mastery and caught up with its own productions, this attitude tends toward focused exploration, domination, and power, relating to anything outside of its own efforts as something to master, to manipulate, or to dismiss. In addition, as McGilchrist and Jill BolteTaylor (2008a, p. 53) emphasise, the left treats its efforts and inventions as non-living specimens. Just as its approach to the world is mechanical and manipulative, it cannot bring the spark of life to its efforts. The left clarifies what emerges from the unconscious realms monitored by the right. Bringing vitality, what is commonly thought of as heart, remains a function of the right hemisphere. Further, it has also been observed that the left hemisphere appears contemptuous of anything it has not created, including the softer, less articulated integrative functions of the right. This is probably due to the intensity of its declarations, which come with language and the ever-present so-called evidence of its products (things, ideas, would-be certainties), which we are likely to find so alluring because these evidences and intensities are so familiar and so front and centre in our everyday experience.

In health, then, McGilchrist presents evidence that the right brain senses and presents implicit messages that the left brain then clarifies and symbolises. However, as mentioned, it is up to the right to bring vitality to what has been symbolised, which occurs as that message is enfolded back to become the root of the next intuition. This enfolding back into the implicit is the most vulnerable step in this dialectic because the left brain resists giving up the products of its so-called invention (thoughts). Giving up for the left requires faith that the overall product (ideas that nourish the next intuition towards ongoing growth of the organism) will be worth the surrender of the prize. The right hemisphere, relating to integration, has the faith, but the left, which is more orientated to control than surrender, may override that faith, out of the grasping certainty that it is foolish to not hold tightly to what one has invented.

Hegel: transformations from bud to flower to fruit (Aufhebung)

McGilchrist (2009, pp. 203–207) suggests that the co-ordinated effort between the hemispheres is an elegant example of the concept of Aufhebung, a concept introduced in the early 1800s by the German philosopher, Hegel. This concept provides a guide for a universal process of evolution and transformation involving the simultaneous alteration and preservation of vital aspects of what has gone before. Hegel suggests the model of the flower bud transformed into the blossom and then into the fruit as suggestive of the model of alteration and preservation in the carrying forward of vital biological processes.

A number of papers by Jon Mills (1996, 2000, 2002) make Hegel’s work quite accessible and psychoanalytically relevant. My comments come mostly from Mill’s papers.

Hegel wrote several volumes on the growth of the spirit, his term, which approximates our modern term, ego. One of the most influential aspects of this work that has come down over two centuries is his concept of a dialectic form, Aufhebung, that apparently applies through out nature. It is often paraphrased as involving “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”, a triad of terms which might be misleading in that one may surmise that there is a complete cancellation of thesis and antithesis by synthesis. This assumption would neglect the subtle but essential preservation and elevation of aspects of each phase by the process. What is truly important in Aufhebung is the sense of creative elaboration and growth, rather than the more reflexive annihilation of the opposition, the latter being a pattern that might seem painfully familiar in certain political, philosophical, and, indeed, psychoanalytic discussions where there is no wish to learn from the other or to change one’s position.

Hegel’s attribution to the growth of spirit or ego towards Truth involves this process of ongoing experience of thesis (the new idea or experience of truth), which, when submitted to the opposition of doubt, or antithesis (bifurcation and division), is mediated so as to allow it, after sufficient examination, to be viewed as an aspect of truth worth noting, rather than as a frozen absolute or universal which was probably the ego’s first response to its otherness. The final stage of this cycle is synthesis, when the examined foreign object, seen now to be potentially enriching rather than threatening, is welcomed as part of the self. During this and subsequent cycles, the self is learning about itself and the world, advancing towards truth, in Hegel’s terms.

A brief reference to the familiar theatre of our own experience might add clarity to this concept. To my quiescent self, any disturbance, such as a new idea, initially feels like a threat that I reflexively treat as an alien, not-me element in order to examine it and also to maintain my repose. This means that I externalise this seeming threat (via a left brain function), making it a devitalised foreign body (a “threatening” idea) against which I erect a clear, rigid boundary. This now externalised disturbance may remain as a frozen, unchanging foreign body (an ongoing threatening Other) unless I (or someone) can employ the left brain function of examination and clarification and come to realise that this foreign-seeming element can become an informing piece of new information (an idea that can offer new insights), which I can then reincorporate via right brain functions. My realisation and reclamation revitalises that former threat, as it becomes part of my newly enriched self.

There are several important elements in this dialectical cycle: disturbing difference triggers tension, rigidity, and disavowal, which give rise to a distancing from, and scrutiny of, this now deanimated specimen. Examination and clarification (left-brain functions) can only be done from afar. The right-brain function is necessary for the vital-ising reincorporation and enrichment by the now digested disturbance. This might be the most vulnerable aspect of this process, for, as mentioned, it is difficult for the left brain to surrender its hard-won prize (the examined specimen); it wishes to grasp and to hold on to what it feels it has created, oblivious to the wider task of reintegration for the growth of the entire self. Another very important aspect of Aufhebung involves the birth of subjectivity (“I-ness”), which occurs as the self can come to see itself not just as reactive to the perceived threat, but as an agent, an observer, of the foreign object.

For Hegel, this continually enriching process is self-generated and self-revealing. For clarity, the negation at work here is seen in the alienating not-me functions of projection, deanimation, and examination, all left-brain functions. The process of examination, however, especially while it freezes and, thus, renders the alien into a de-animated specimen, also alters the experience of the disturbance by allowing it to become just one aspect of ongoing experience rather than a tsunami of disturbance. In addition, the mediation fosters the burgeoning awareness of the self as agent, as an observer of this process, and this self-awareness ushers in the birth of subjectivity.

Ogden: the birth of the “I” in psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is replete with examples of the dialectical processes exemplified by Hegel and McGilchrist. Tom Ogden has written several significant articles reviewing Freudian, Kleinian, and Winni cottian perspectives on the birth of subjectivity (1992a, 1992b). His descriptions vividly suggest that coming alive, that is, the birth of the subject, requires the space created by, and within, a vitalising dialectic.

Regarding Freud’s contributions to this coming alive, Ogden (1992a) mentions how the conscious and the unconscious realms represent two different ways of being, each defined in terms of its opposition to the other. He makes the repeated point that the unconscious–conscious dialectic is in constant oscillation, giving the illusion of a unity of experience, as does the interplay of id, ego, and superego in their constant dialectic dialogue. His succinct descriptions deserve quotation:

In Freud’s schema, neither consciousness nor (dynamic) unconsciousness holds a privileged position in relation to the other: the two systems are “complementary” (Freud, 1940[a], p. 159) to one another, thus constituting a single, but divided discourse … (Ogden, 1992a, p. 518).

Freud’s final model of the mind recalls three aspects of the self: the id as the original erupting force which cannot be directly known but whose force is ever impactful; the ego, which is that aspect of this force which becomes the conscious “I”; and the superego, as an emergence from interaction of the primary force and the external environment which aims to guide, but often torments, the self. In this model, the subject, that sense of “who I am” comprises the ongoing dialectic between these three aspects which creates “a stereoscopic illusion of unity of experience” (Ogden, 1992a, p. 520).

Regarding the Hegelian emphases on negation and transformation, Ogden reminds us that Freud’s paper “Negation” (1925h) illustrates the dialectic at work, where a repressed idea or image can become conscious if it is negated, that is, not accepted (e.g., “I am not concerned about X”). He also emphasises that the fullness of experience, from a psychoanalytic view, necessitates the to and fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I GATHERING PERSPECTIVES ON LIVED EXPERIENCE
• PART II VARIETIES OF COMING ALIVE
• PART III BECOMING AND BEING
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX