Elaborate Selves

Reflections and Reveries of Christopher Bollas, Michael Eigen, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Samuel and Ev

E Mark Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317791539
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this fascinating volume, Anthony Molino interviews some of today's foremost thinkers in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Organized around the fertile and controversial concept of multiplicity, Elaborate Selves explores the life work and thought of a diverse group of therapists who have played key roles in furthering postmodern perspectives on self experience. Through five engaging conversations, readers discover how discontinuities in self experience reflect phenomena that are both fundamental to formations of human identity and central to an understanding of contemporary relationships. Throughout the strands of these interviews, theory and practice come alive in a multivocal exploration at the intersections of culture and history, ideology and instinct, biology and fantasy, nostalgia and hope, and, ultimately, of trauma and treatment.Elaborate Selves explores the postmodern concern with the notion of a "multiple" or "fragmented" self. In this context, the stories, lives, and "selves" of the very therapists interviewed are seen to reflect predicaments and tensions of the culture at-large. Each interview explores a therapist's unique contribution to the field while making connections between efforts and theories that at a first glance appear remarkably diverse. Among these are: the constructivism of Jungian Buddhist and feminist Polly Young-Eisendrath; the inspired object-relations theorizing of Christopher Bollas; and the mystic sensibilities of Michael Eigen. Readers will find that the depth and complexities of the following issues are rendered in a language that is at once both compelling and accessible:

• contemporary theories of the "self" and implications for clinical practice
• psychoanalysis and postmodernism
• psychoanalysis and spirituality
• myth and ritual as a basis for self-knowledge and group psychotherapyA fundamental text for clinicians and students of all schools of psychoanalysis, contemporary social theory, philosophy and religious thought, Elaborate Selves is a major contribution to the ever-growing genre of the interview. Indeed, the interviews collected in this unique volume offer more than an exciting exploration of a singular group of life experiences. They probe beyond the biographical to illustrate connections between personal and intellectual history and between life experience, culture, and the production of knowledge in an increasingly complex world.

Christopher Bollas

Yet (Freud) admirably abides by his sense that the doctor plays not an enchanted role, but one more hidden . . . that of a presence-absence over and against which some ancient drama, some profoundly forgotten event, real or imaginary, comes again to take form and expression, truth and actuality. The doctor, therefore, would be there not as himself but in the place of another. By his presence alone he plays the role of another, is other, and is the other before becoming an other.

-M. Blanchot, "The Speech of Analysis"

When I interviewed Christopher Bollas in his London home in January, it was the first time I'd been to England. And, much as I'd been forewarned, the weather was typically damp and cold and grey, with a prickly form of precipitation in the air that had the irksome quality of condensing around one's head and ears. When I arrived in the vicinity of Bollas' house, legs weary and chilled to the bone, I was already battling a numbing fever. Not the best way, surely, to present myself at the doorstep of a man widely regarded as one of the foremost psychoanalytic thinkers and writers of our time. So, with flu symptoms further compounding my original, deferential hesitation, I pushed up the hill to 42 Mount View Road, fantasizing outcomes, mostly catastrophic, to the work that lie ahead.

In the eternity of the dreary, one-block walk between my bus stop and now-dreaded destination, I would have been well-served had I recalled the words of Adam Phillips, who in his book, On Flirta- tion, writes of Bollas: "(He) gets us close to the ordinary but absolutely elusive experience of making a dream. " There was, indeed, something absolutely dreamlike about that walk, as if my body had somehow become suspended in a bleak and timeless space. Of much greater consequence, however, was the dreamwork to follow, around the amazingly ordinary exchanges that took place within the modest and comforting surroundings of Bollas' home and office.

Settled and warmed by a cup of tea, I spent the next four hours mindless of my body and its ills. The sense of suspension persisted, but in a transformed state. I began to understand why Bollas, who years earlier had inspired the idea of this collection, would only agree to an interview within the familiar confines of his own space. As he'd told me before, it had to do with a penchant of his for reverie: an atmosphere of fluid, unconscious germination, not unlike, again citing Phillips, "the sleep-walking a deux" of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Something similar, I believe, was unfolding, and enfolding me. As Bollas reclined and dipped into a treasure chest of memories and other psychic objects, the serene wealth and elegance of his answers made for an atmosphere of absorbing ease. So much so that twice in the course of our time together, we both forgot the presence of the tape recorder, and failed to heed the clicking sound signalling the end of the tape. On one such occasion, it was only after half an hour that we realized how an answer of his had radiated into an essay, and been lost. Just like that, in much the same elusive and ever so ordinary way in which a dream is made.

The following interview, which took place in London on January 9-10, 1995, explores themes taken up by Bollas mostly in Being a Character. His latest book, Cracking Up, was published soon after our conversations.

AM: In his book, The Postmodern Condition, J.-F. Lyotard, citing the work of Wittgenstein, writes: "The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games. The social bond is linguistic, but is not woven with a single thread. It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two (and in reality an indeterminate number of) language games, obeying different rules ... the principle of unitotality-or synthesis under the authority of a meta-discourse of knowledge—is inapplicable." In a similar vein, much of your work on the self also goes against the grain of any unitotality. And yet in an earlier book, Forces of Destiny, Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom, you put forth what you call a theory for the true self. Is there a contradiction here? As clinician and theorist, how does Christopher Bollas understand the self?

CB: It's a topic I take up in Cracking Up, where there's a chapter on this thing called self. Winnicott's concept of the "true self" and what we mean by the self are not the same. The true self was just his way of designating the presence of spontaneity: the true self as gesture. The false self, the only other "self" he wrote about in relation to the true self, indicates its presence through compliance: it describes a reactive attitude. My belief is that we have a sense of self that exists within an illusion of integration: an illusion essential to our way of life. Even those who see themselves as radical deconstructivists cannot, and do not, live a life without that illusion.

AM: Michel Foucault has also written about postmodernism and, more or less directly, about psychoanalysis, in the contexts of his "histories" and "archaeologies." In line with his thinking, where he argues for "the insurrection of subjugated knowledges," of what he calls anti-sciences, where and how do you situate your writing? Can psychoanalysis be something other than what Foucault calls a totalitarian theory?

CB: Already Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, in his writing of his self-analysis, and the reporting of his dreams to interpretation-in what was so remarkable an event, and so very fertile an occasion-doesn't support a totalitarian structure. If, like Freud, psychoanalysts write openly, if they provide enough detail, if there's enough saturation with the unconscious, then any reader will re-read and re-write a text in such a way as to undermine any thematic totality. It is those psychoanalytical writings, written with a greater degree of unconsciousness, that are, to my way of thinking, the more interesting. I include in this area the writings of Jacques Lacan, for example, where something primitive, something mythological and elusive persists, that leads one to imagine them, and open them up in so many directions. Harold Searles' writings are unconsciously rich. Each psychoanalyst must, no matter whether he or she does it consciously, re-invent psychoanalysis for themselves. It's those analysts who show the re-invention that sustain a level of creativity that's essential to the development of thinking. One can see this in certain contemporary analysts, like André Green, Adam Phillips, Michael Eigen, Harold Boris, James Grotstein, Joyce McDougall. All these people are recasting psychoanalysis, and re-creating it

AM: Along these lines, is there an element of a "project" in your work?

CB: I can answer that question only toward the end of my life, when I look back. I don't wish to develop a "Christopher Bollas theory"; nor do I wish to re-use or echo terms which first served simply to establish a point I was intent on making in a single, earlier essay.

AM: Speaking of archaeology, Freud had already used it as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. In your book, Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom, you seem to be inviting something new when you write: "perhaps we need a new point of view in clinical psychoanalysis, close to a form of person anthropology." In a postmodern world, where the self, for one, is described as fragmented, decentred, discontinuous, multiple . . . take your pick!-what would a "person anthropology" entail?

CB: It would be an analysis of any individual as a privately evolved but structured culture. It would mean that those signifiers that were currently important to an individual could be deconstructed; or, to think, when analyzing someone for the first time, that we're to enter a foreign country. It's like going into a different culture with a different language. Psychoanalysis then becomes in part a process for the translation of a person's different and changing perspectives, a way of deciphering all the many rules of foreign lives, of private cultures. . . .

AM: In Forces of Destiny you take issue with D. W. Winnicott's notion of the true self, where he links it with the id (in juxtaposition to the false self and its connection to the ego). Yet you rarely speak of a false self; it seems, rather, that there exist only degrees of realized potential of true self, owing to the interplay of trauma and what you later, in Being a Character, call "genera." Is this so? And if it is, why resort to adjectives like "true" and "core"?

CB: I resort to them because I come from a particular intellectual and analytical tradition, and have felt it important to indicate those origins.

As for Winnicott, I think my critique of the link you mentioned was an incomplete critique. I think I understand why Winnicott linked the true self up with the id, as he was trying to get to something viscerally powerful and primitive. He did not want it linked to the ego because of that. On the other hand, I believe the organizational density of the true self, what I call idiom-or, to reflect back on your metaphor, a language waiting to be spoken-I believe that density is too intelligent a phenomenon to be, as it were, ascribed to the id. As a seething cauldron of primitive urges, the id did not, at least in the Freudian structural theory, have the kind of dense intelligence to it that I think exists for the true self, or indeed for idiom. Conversely, when Freud theorized the unconscious ego, he got to something which had that kind of thick intelligence to it: something that really has to do with the aesthetic organization of the self, or with the self as an aesthetic organization. Ultimately I think it is understandable why Winnicott linked his idea of the self with the id; but too much of his concept of the true self would still have to find a place in Freud's theory of the primary repressed unconscious, or later, of the unconscious ego. So, it was a failed effort, I think, to link it up to the structural theory.

AM: Your reflections on the self, on idiom, have taken you to explore the realm of "character," a word which appears prominently in the title of your last book. It's not a concept usually invoked by psychoanalysts.. . .

CB: I think that "character" is an aesthetic. If our way of being refers to our very precise means of forming our world, both internal and intersubjective, then each of us is a kind of artist with his or her own creative sensibility. We know that the distinctiveness of that creation is the particular form we have brought to it. We will share many contents with other beings; we share many phenomena in common, but we render them differently, and it's the rendering of a life that is so unique to us.

It is a pleasure to express and articulate the self: there's an erotic dimension to that kind of representation. Indeed I think Freud's theory of the instinct with its source, its aim and its object is an arc ... a pure arc ... without any actual "Other" present in a way. But it's almost a pure arc of the pleasure of representation, because the erotics of the instinct drive is not simply in its final gratification through an object: it's the entire process ... In order for there to be the reduction of excitation, for there to be pleasure, representation is needed.

My own view is that in the formation of character we similarly have that arc: except I would say that, instead of there being a pure line from source through aim and object, there are many lines that fragment and break, in something like a vast symphonic movement which is, in and of itself, a pleasure. It is not the end point, not what we find at the end, not the objects that reduce the excitation, that constitute the pleasure. The pleasure is in the entire movement: which nonetheless remains something far too complicated and condensed, too thick, to be reduced to a single meaning, or even to two or three meanings, or two or three interpretations.

AM: What about Winnicott's distinction between the optimal progression of an ordinary human life and what he views as the superior development of the creative artist or artistic personality?

CB: I think by "ordinary" he means a return to the unformed existence of an unconscious. Certainly I think psychoanalysis, if it proceeds via the medium of free association, engages the analysand in a process of expression that leads consciousness to realize how extraordinary unconscious life is; in that respect, we must live dangerously, because we do take risks by allowing our unconscious life its freedom. It takes risk to speak what one thinks freely. Therefore, an analysand who is operating within the milieu of free association is living dangerously. And I believe there is a great deal to be gained from that kind of risk: not only is the free-associating analysand creating his analysis, he's creating his life. This is true to the extent that one is not operating through a process of carefully constructed narrative, which then leads the analyst to an equally carefully constructed interpretative narrative, i.e., interpretation of the transference, and so on and so forth. It leads to something more dense and unconscious ... more frightening, in a way, for both the analyst and analysand, in a sort of pleasurable way . . . One does not often know consciously what to make of this, even though one has quite an acute sense that these movements are essential, intriguing, mysterious, developing....

AM: There was an enormously small word in your last answer of some consequence. You said: "if a psychoanalysis proceeds via free association. ..." That seems to imply that an analysis could proceed differently.

CB: There is a fundamental divergence between analysts or schools who see the analysand's free expression of thought and feeling as a priority, and those who don't. There are, in a certain sense, two paths. Along the first, this fundamental expression would have to take priority over the psychoanalyst's interpretation: without this freedom of mood, of thought, of feeling, without this density, the analysand is not going to issue a license to the unconscious; he or she is not going to find a voice in the context of an analytical situation. For the analyst, this means remaining quiet when he or she can see certain things operating within the transference. The analyst's silence, then, is in the interest of that movement, of that evolution in the analysand which gives rise to meaningful, if limited, self-reflections, to self-generated insights. To insights, mind you, which proceed not only from the psychoanalyst, but from within the patient: insights which over time establish an intriguing relation between the analysand's production of his or her own existence, between the creation of a life through free association and the unconscious movement that informs those insights.

That's one theorization, one path psychoanalysis has taken. On the other path, which is very different but very popular at the present time, is the patient who speaks about his or her life to an analyst, who then translates that speech into a metaphor of the patient's relation to the analyst; or of a part of the patient's self in a here-and-now relation to a part of the analyst. This is something which is not difficult for well-trained psychoanalysts to do, and in my view is also very interesting and meritorious in some ways; but it offers psychoanalysts the opportunity to resolve the ambiguities of a session's unconsciousness through a kind of reliable interpretation of events as they see them taking place. This, I believe, forecloses free association in the analysand, although one could argue that the process is split off within the patient, experienced somewhere but not uttered. Still, the difference between that analysand and the one who's freely speaking is enormous. Well, this difference poses a problem. I have no idea what will happen but, perhaps as time goes on, there will be two substantially distinct traditions in psychoanalysis, and people choosing to have an analysis can have one or the other, and will then know more or less what country they're entering.

AM: It would seem that each of those paths carries with it, perhaps unconsciously, a very different sense of what a psychoanalytic cure would entail.

CB: The highly interpretative analyst is very embracing, and promotes a cure by object relationship, by narrative restructuring. Of course, in the best of times, the interpreting analyst is in fact illuminating important pathological structures, important transferential anxieties: and therefore there is enough truth to his exercise for it to be meaningful for an individual. A lot is gained in this kind of an analysis; if it were a complete waste of time people wouldn't stay with it. They might be drawn to it but wouldn't stay with it for such a long time. But unfortunately, there is as much lost as there is gained in this kind of an analytical procedure. What's lost is something truer to life, because in a life we don't have accompanying us, day-to-day, an interpretative companion. We do not have an analyst alongside us interpreting the interactive meaning of every one of our gestures. And so I don't see how, in the end, that kind of an analysis fits in with a human life. However interactive we are, we're living in a fundamentally solitary space where we will always be generating meanings unconsciously, and only partially understanding ourselves. It is, therefore, the first path of analysis I identified that I believe takes into consideration the full nature of a human life: in that it aims to increase unconscious creativity and to situate unconsciousness, or the interpreting part of the self, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Christopher Bollas
• Marie Coleman Nelson
• Michael Eigen
• Samuel and Evelyn Laeuchli
• Polly Young-Eisendrath