Psychoanalysis and Other Matters

Where Are We Now?

Judith Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138494640
• eBook ISBN: 9781351025966
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Can we 'stand inside' new thoughts, rather than outside, looking at a closed box? This innovative and interdisciplinary collection aims to answer this question by broadening the way we look at and work with psychoanalytic ideas. By examining these ideas through the lenses of other disciplines, the contributors reveal what can be found when 'boundaries' are breached and bridges are built in psychoanalytical thought.

Judith Edwards here calls upon international analysts, psychotherapists and other professionals to explore the concepts of 'inside' and 'outside' in psychoanalysis, boldly challenging existing boundaries. In this unique and ground-breaking collection, chapters are written by a mathematics professor, a sculptor, film-makers, anthropologists from Australia and Canada, an Ofsted inspector, a neuroscientist and two Chinese psychotherapists. The book emphasises the importance of listening across disciplinary lines, and crossing frontiers within psychoanalysis itself, by integrating psychoanalytic elements with poetry, music, literature, quantum physics, cultural studies and education. Edwards presents this original and global research with authority, showing us how these fields intersect and produce new understandings in us all that allow us to grow and benefit from new perspectives.

This collection is unlike no other in its interdisciplinary and international approach. It will be an essential tool for all psychoanalysts, including those in training, as well as psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars. It will also be of immense interest to academics and students of interdisciplinary studies, psychosocial studies, cultural studies and film studies.

1

FROM PRIMITIVE FEARS TO THE SAFETY OF METAPHOR

Josie Oppenheim

Psychoanalytic reconstructions of primitive mental states describe the infant’s fears of “falling forever,” fantasies of omnipotent control and dread of an “endless void.” I suggest that such primitive anxieties represent the result of an evolutionary loss that was visited upon our species as we hovered between non-human primate and human being. It is an essential feature of our species that we must turn away from the concrete in favour of a metaphoric engagement with self and other. Within this paper I have written a myth-like narrative which, with its condensing of evolutionary time, suggests how metaphoric thinking might reasonably have become, through the processes of natural selection and adaptation, a safe haven, critical to the survival of our species.

Metaphor, so ubiquitous in language, is a slippery fish, a fluttering butterfly, elusive and never straightforward by its very nature, alighting upon our everyday speech with moments of dream-like imagery. But metaphor’s charm masks, I suggest, its essential function, just as an elegant cuisine masks the raw necessity for food. I am proposing that metaphor’s essential function is to promote survival; that metaphoric thinking emerged into prominence during our evolution because it furthered survival in our hominid ancestors and so became the key that unlocked the door and set us on the path to humanness, for better or for worse. I begin with a case vignette to give you an idea of how I became interested in metaphor within a psychoanalytic framework, and how that led to a fascination with non-human primates and human evolution. I attempt to show that my hypothesis, while very much and necessarily in the realm of speculation, appears, nevertheless, to provide explanatory support for our understanding of some of the key psychoanalytic reconstructions of primitive mental states.

Let me begin with Reba, as I call her, a patient who had a conscious and unconscious preoccupation with skin. I discovered, in time, that Reba suffered from a deficit of psychic skin (Bick, 1968).

Psychic skin is a metaphorical representation of the functional properties of skin. Biological skin titrates exchanges between the organism and the physical environment. Psychic skin titrates exchanges between the individual and his or her social environment. Psychic skin evolves through the ministrations of the mother, which provides the infant with experiences of its skin and of being contained by it. The baby also gains the fantasy of an inside and an outside through the mother’s handling. Esther Bick (1968), who first put forth this theory, maintained that Klein’s early psychical processes, such as splitting and projective identification, could not proceed before this fantasy of inside and outside developed. Later, Bick (1986) referred to these pre-Kleinian processes as related to an adhesive identification, rather than a projective identification. Adhesive identification refers to the baby’s desperate need for a two-dimensional adhesive connection to the outside of the mother’s body.

Bick (1968) also described what she called “second skin formations,” which occur if there is a derailment of primal psychic skin development. In such a case there is, as Bick stated, “a pseudo-independence arrived at through certain muscular tensions or the inappropriate use of certain mental functions, or … innate talents” (p. 483).

It was through Reba’s second-skin formations that I began to see that a metaphoric psychic skin was deficient in Reba and that the metaphors for skin functioning were, in fact, rooted in her body. These second-skin formations themselves (which I will describe presently) represented, perhaps, the pseudo-independence Bick speaks of, but in addition Reba was a savant, often recounting an endless stream of seemingly irrelevant dates, street numbers, addresses and names of people, sometimes from decades earlier. I no longer believe that this often (to me) maddening talent was merely an odd gift. Rather, I believe it was developed as an autistic shape, as Tustin (1984, 1988) describes.¹ Reba’s numbing use of minutiae formed what seemed like an indigestible rind,² or thickened skin around her narratives, protecting her and her listener from any emotional cargo the body of the story might carry. Within the analysis, over time, Reba’s use of this “mental talent” all but disappeared.

Reba’s clothes and person seemed to be always unwashed. The palms of her hands were actually black with dirt. Her too-large skirt was pinned together in such a way that patches of her naked stomach showed through. When at home, as she reported, Reba wore a moth-eaten jacket in winter and in summer; a necessary covering of her skin, which reflected the gaps in the insulating properties of her psychic skin. She had been afraid to move her bowels as a child, being, as I understood, so inadequately contained. Yet as an adult she became addicted to laxatives, thereby communicating, I thought, that her skin container was faulty, allowing everything to flow away from her.

She foraged for food in dumpsters and collected refuse from garbage cans. Subsisting on government allowances, she helplessly gave whatever money she was carrying to panhandlers or other program participants who asked. Solicitations for unwanted appliances or foam mattresses exerted a magical power over her, as she seemed forced to comply with any request, whether from a person, a TV screen, or a printed page.

In time I was able to understand that being unwashed allowed the build up of grime to be used by Reba as a second skin providing a sense of insulation from the world. Reba’s naked stomach and other exposures of her body that occurred in the treatment, I saw as an unconscious request for her skin function to be acknowledged and contained by another. Julia Kristeva (2001) speaks of “metaphors incarnate,” a felicitous term for Reba’s situation. Similarly, Gaddini (1982) describes fantasies in the body, which remain unavailable for mental work.

Reba’s dirtiness, the naked skin, the haemorrhaging of her money and her bowels, were all metaphors incarnate; metaphors expressed concretely that did not leap into her mind to become a functioning component of her psychic structure. Without a metaphorical representation of skin properties Reba was unable to find protection from the persecutory onslaughts of her social environment and her surroundings in general. When a car alarm went off nearby, Reba roamed the streets at 2:00 am desperately hunting down the source of a persecution she felt was intended specifically for her.

McDougall (1974) writes of a “mysterious leap” from the body to the psyche (reversing Freud’s trajectory in hysteria) that is relevant to primitive psychosomatic disturbances. Reba and patients who suffer from similar deficits have shown me that when an abstraction of the body does not leap into the psyche as a metaphorical representation of bodily experience, one cannot live in the human realm as a fully participating individual. It is the transposition from one modality of experience to another that occurs in metaphorical processes that would seem to be the medium of human cognition and interchange (Modell, 1997). Without it one is left with a concrete reality that does not further the human enterprise.

Metaphor so pervades the language, it is hard to say a sentence without employing a metaphor. But this is so because metaphoric processes—the firing of synapses in several perceptual, motor and gestural areas at once—are ubiquitous in brain activity.

Babies, as recent research has shown, are able to transfer information from one modality to another and think abstractly from birth (Wurmser in Katz, 2013). This ability is there for all of us. In other words, we all have synesthesia to a greater or lesser extent. Leon Wurmser (in Katz, 2013) puts it succinctly: “Metaphorical process is an inborn readiness and manifests itself independent from language” (p. 42). Contemporary studies of metaphor consider that metaphors arise from bodily experience (Feldman, 2008; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). As Shepherd suggests, “We project from our body to make analogies with the ‘external’ world. We see through the lens of the body” (M. Shepherd, personal communication, December 3, 2014).

That is the main point I want to get across, today. I am talking about metaphors in language as an outgrowth of metaphoric processes, which precede language. We might call the metaphoric processes that precede language proto-metaphors to distinguish them from the metaphors in language. Recent research is turning to the idea of a more fluid, interpersonal system of metaphoricity as a way to understand that metaphors evolve out of an emergent doubleness, a moving in and out of literalness in communication with the self and others (Jensen & Cuffari, 2014). Seen this way, metaphor can be understood as related to symbolization, which also has a doubleness, a connection and a separation between the symbolized and its symbol. “Metaphor,” says Wurmser, “is a special form of symbol and metaphorical processes are paramount forms of symbolic processes” (p. 45, in Katz, 2013). The word “symbol” derives from the Greek expression for putting together two parts of a broken object, which originally referred to a seal broken as host and guest separated, to be put back together when they reunited (Wurmser, in Katz, 2013). “Thus,” says Wurmser, “the symbol fits together two disparate realities; things and their significance, concrete and what we call abstract” (p. 45, cited in Katz, 2013).

Rising into consciousness unbidden, metaphors usually convey a visual image of an abstract concept for which there is no concise description. Like the answers in a Magic 8 Ball, they appear out of the darkness of the unknown to offer a picture of a reality too complex to describe in words. Dreamlike, metaphors condense several thoughts into an image and as such are waking dreams; they are the images of what we think. If we can’t think metaphorically, we cannot dream while awake, as Bion would have us do.

Reba’s unliberated metaphors had me dreaming awake about how it was that we human beings became a species so enveloped in metaphor. And I wondered at the irony that it is precisely metaphor, in its poetic non-literalness, that is required for a common-sense competency in the real world.

I began to think that perhaps it was our metaphoricity that separated us from the animals. Language and tool making, after all, have been discredited as marking that divide with the discovery that chimpanzees fashion tools for hunting and that whales communicate in group languages or dialects. Bees communicate where the flowers are, and chimpanzees plan organized hunts that seem to need some language.

And so, unbidden, like a metaphor or a dream, a myth floated up to me from the Magic 8 Ball. It was a myth about how metaphor came to be so central to human life. But before I relate this myth to you, I want to go back to Reba for a moment.

I first met Reba in her outpatient program, where I was doing the field study portion of my psychoanalytic training. At the completion of my field study, to my surprise, Reba agreed to continue to work with me, which meant she would be a psychoanalytic patient under supervision for the continuation of my training. Upon entering my office for her first psychoanalytic session, Reba immediately, on her own, expressed great interest in the couch but wanted me to move it around to face the other way, that is, to face me. I made a split-second decision to leave the couch and my chair where they were but to move a smaller chair to a position facing her while she was on the couch. And that was how her treatment was conducted, face to face on the couch. It was in this period that I was struck by the following passage by René Spitz (1983):

The nursing baby does not look at the breast. He does not look at the breast when the mother is approaching him, nor when she is offering him the breast, nor when he is nursing. He stares unwaveringly, from the beginning of the feeding to the end of it, at the mother’s face … the infant, while nursing at the breast, is at the same time staring at the mother’s face; thus breast and face are experienced as one and indivisible.

(p. 218, italics in original)

I was struck by this passage because an insightful supervisor had noted that due to the placement of couch and chair, Reba and I were replicating the angles of the nursing couple.³ In this mode of treatment, which lasted for years, Reba would look up at me from the couch, and all that flowed between us, if one were to judge from the beatific look on her face, was good. It has occurred to me while preparing thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Primitive Fears to the Safety of Metaphor
• 2 Linking Mathematics to Psychoanalysis
• 3 Borderland Territory in Developmental Creativity
• 4 Future Perfect: Some Reflections on the Sense of Anticipation in Ordinary Infants and in Psychoanalytic Work
• 5 Womba : The Yagwoia (Cannibal) Complex
• 6 Body Positive: Bodies, Minds, Trauma and Becoming Easeful
• 7 Matching, Attunement and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue
• 8 Inside: Sculpture, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis; A Conversation
• 9 What You See is What You Get: Observation, as Opposed to Inspection, as a Means of Organizational Change
• 10 The Right Start in Life: The Politics of Learning and Mental Health in Schools
• 11 The Mourning Process of Ancient Chinese Women Since the 11th Century Song Dynasty: Cultural Influence and Universality
• 12 Literature, Psychoanalysis, Chaos Theory: Iteration, Re-Iteration, Recursion
• 13 Looking, After, the Future: Conversations with Central Australian Indigenous Thinkers
• 14 Where are We Now? How do WE Look and What do We See?
• Index