The Psychic Home

Psychoanalysis, consciousness and the human soul

Roger Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317807858
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Psychic Home: Psychoanalysis of Consciousness and the Human Soul develops, from a number of different viewpoints, the significance of home in our lives. Roger Kennedy puts forward the central role of what he has termed a 'psychic home' as a vital psychic structure, which gathers together a number of different human functions. Kennedy questions what we mean by the powerfully evocative notion of the human soul, which has important links to the notion of home and he suggests that what makes us human is that we allow a home for the soul. As an illustration of this concept he explores how it can help to understand a vital element of William Wordsworth's development as a poet.

The word soul is both abstract and yet also powerfully emotive. Kennedy shows that it can be approached from a number of different angles, from psychoanalysis, philosophy, religion, sociology, literature and neuroscience. The Psychic Home, discusses the mysteries and complexities of the soul, and aims to evoke some restoration of its place in our thinking. It illustrates how the word soul and similar key words, such as spirit and inwardness, express so much that is essential for humans, even if we cannot be too precise about their meanings.

Insightful, enlightening and broad reaching, The Psychic Home brings the concept of the soul centre stage as an entity that is elemental, an essence, irreducible, and what makes us human as subjects of experience. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, neuroscientists, philosophers and those interested in spirituality and religion.

Chapter 1
A home for the soul

Home is one of those simple yet elemental words that can convey powerful feelings of belonging and yearning. I was reminded of this when assessing a little boy with regard to his long-term future. He had spent much of his first year in hospital due to a condition which meant that he was unable to take food by mouth and that his vocalization was delayed. In addition, his parents had significant social and mental health issues, so that they effectively abandoned him in hospital. It took some months of trying various options before at last he ended up with very devoted foster carers; he needed constant care because of his disability. One of the issues was whether or not he should stay with the carers. There was a dispute about this, which necessitated a court process. The local authority had a view that he should be adopted, as they considered this would be in his long-term interests. However, if the foster carers were to adopt him, they would lose all the financial and service support they were entitled to as foster carers, and he needed 24-hour care.

By the time I saw him at the age of 3, he was beginning to become stronger. He could talk but only a word at a time, and he could walk but became easily tired. After half an hour or so of playing with some toys, which he did quite well, he was clearly tired. He had not said very much, and what he said was difficult to understand, although he seemed happy with his carer. But suddenly he uttered one word very clearly to his carer – ‘Home’. That one word seemed to convey so much – not only the simple fact of having had enough, but also about where he wanted to be after all the earlier instability. I have to add that when I then talked to his grandmother about possible options for this little boy, she became very distraught at the idea of him being moved from his current placement; she felt that he was alive thanks to his carers’ devotion. She described him as a ‘dear little soul’, who would not last a move from the carers. I felt that she was right, and it was the first and only time that I myself became visibly upset in an assessment. I had a sudden image of what it might be like for him to have to cope with a move, both psychologically and physically; I felt that such a move would be a terrible risk. It was as if his soul hung in the balance. I cannot give details of the ins and outs of the court process, except to say that, rather typically, information from the paediatricians was not obtained for court until the very last minute – I was prevented from contacting them, supposedly as I might bias their response – and they supported him remaining where he was, at the place which had become his home, and the court supported this view. His early life in hospital was a physical space where he could be kept alive but was obviously not a place where he could be emotionally sustained; it was not a home, not a place where he could develop an organizing and sustaining psychic structure.

Much of this book develops, from a number of different viewpoints, the significance of home in our lives. I shall put forward the central role of what I have called a psychic home as a vital psychic structure which gathers together a number of different human functions. Along the way, I shall also question what we mean by the powerfully evocative notion of the human soul, which has important links to the notion of home; indeed, I shall suggest that what makes us human is that we allow a home for the soul. The word ‘soul’ seems to be both abstract and yet also powerfully emotive. It can be approached from a number of different angles, from philosophy, religion, sociology, literature and neuroscience. No one discipline has the monopoly on understanding the soul concept. I shall certainly not have the final answer to the mysteries and complexities of the soul but hope to evoke some restoration of its place in our thinking. I shall explore how the word ‘soul’ and similar key words, such as ‘spirit’ and ‘inwardness’, express so much that is essential for humans, even if we cannot be too precise about their meanings.

This desire to explore this field began in earnest while I was visiting the National Gallery. One of my greatest pleasures is to spend time there contemplating a few pictures at a time. An hour or so is generally enough to make contact with a group of paintings, such as the Rembrandts and other Dutch masters, a few Renaissance masters, some of the Impressionists or some other group that may suddenly catch my eye. Rather than skim through loads of paintings in turn, I have learned to focus on a few, finding in them depths of expression and content by means of repeated visits. In some ways, this is like getting to know somebody, gradually appreciating aspects of their character over time. It may even be something like falling in love: opening up to the other and letting the other interpenetrate one’s own being.

Intimately linked to the artistic process for any artist or writer is, I think, their ultimate generosity of spirit, so that despite all their personal hesitations and doubts about their capacity to create a new work, there is a willingness to commit themselves, to put it down on canvas or on paper, in a brave and generous act of exposure. With the artist of genius such as Rembrandt, one can see a development of means and technical mastery, in his case, moving from the haughty confidence of youth to the reticent, almost ‘shy’ knowledge of maturity. In his last paintings, his self-exposure seems to come at a price – that seeing into the depths of one’s self, both the darkness and the light, is not possible without having to bear loneliness and suffering. Not everyone can bear such knowledge; few can find the means to express it so movingly and cogently.

As you contemplate a late Rembrandt self-portrait, his eyes seem to take you into the picture, into the depths. Unlike a mirror, which reflects your own image back to you, the Rembrandt urges you to reflect into yourself in the act of being drawn into his image. Repeated visits are like drawing from some primal source of light and intensity, leaving you changed in some way, both uplifted and more melancholy. There is, of course, the presence of Rembrandt’s own eyes as well, not only those you see in his self-portrait looking out at the spectator, or rather beyond the spectator to some other region, but also those eyes of his which look inwardly so poignantly at himself, scrutinizing and accepting what he saw with so few illusions.

The effect of such viewing remains, to me at least, something of a mystery. How is it that the portrait of a dead artist can have such life? How can marks of paint, however cleverly applied, still speak to us over and over, continuously drawing us both into the picture and into ourselves? It is as if we are witnessing some source of inner light in the picture itself. What is that elusive something that makes this happen? What is it in ourselves that is drawn out by repeatedly viewing the self-portraits?

I have no clear answer to these questions, but it does seem to me that we are here in the area of the human soul. It is what the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has recently called the ‘soul niche’, a ‘place where the magical interiority of human minds makes itself felt on every side’ (2011, p. 154). Though very much rooted in cognitive science, he quotes with approval the theologian Keith Ward from the latter’s book In Defence of the Soul. Ward makes the point that the whole point of talking of the soul is to remind us that we transcend the conditions of our material existence; we are not just molecules and genes. Thus,

to believe in the soul is to believe that man is not just an object to be studied, experimented upon and scientifically defined and analysed, manipulated and controlled. It is to believe that man is essentially a subject, a centre of consciousness and reason, who transcends all objective analysis, who is always more than can be scientifically defined, predicted or controlled. In his essential subjectivity, man is a subject who has the capacity to be free and responsible – to be guided by moral claims, to determine his own nature by his response to these claims.

(1998, p. 119)

Such a view about what makes us human resonates with the psychoanalytic view of the human subject. Sigmund Freud’s discoveries were very much about bringing back into the realm of the human subject elements of the mind such as dreams and fantasies which had been devalued as mere objects of, at best, some objective knowledge or, at worst, of no consequence, just debris of the mind. The psychoanalytic encounter is very much about helping the patient become a subject through a process of recovery, or discovery, of their unconscious subjective life; dreams and fantasies, for example, are precious signposts towards capturing the elusive human subject. As described in detail elsewhere (Kennedy, 1998, 2007), I mean by this that the analytic patient brings to their analyst all sorts of different stories, fixed patterns of relating or symptoms, hopes, expectations and resistances. Patients often come with a sense of isolation, of either being alone with suffering or suffering from being alone. And they come to analysis subject to various forces in their life, past and present. If the analysis works, then there is the possibility of their becoming subject of their experiences and ultimately their lives, with a sense of no longer feeling isolated, while being more in contact with others. Some patients have described this shift as finding themselves, or finding meaning, of feeling real, or of having a centre where before there was chaos or nothingness, and even occasionally that they have found their soul or that the soul has been put back into their lives, which until then had become ‘soul-less’.

Everyday language occasionally uses the soul concept in somewhat similar ways in order to express something alive in the human subject. Music can be described as having soul when it hits the emotional core of the listener. And of course there is ‘soul music’, whose basic rhythms reach deep into the body to create a powerful feeling of aliveness. People talk about occasionally finding their ‘soul mate’, the person to whom they feel especially close, with whom they can share their most intimate emotions with ease. On the other hand, music or literature can be described as lacking soul, lacking some essential quality of sensitivity or depth of feeling. A person can be described as lacking a soul in the sense of a deep moral sense; some people would ‘sell their soul’ in order to get what they want, if they have a soul at all.

Saul Bellow went so far as to write in his essay ‘A Matter of the Soul’ that ‘what novelists, composers, singers, have in common is the soul to which their appeal is made, whether it is barren or fertile, empty or full, whether the soul knows something, feels something, loves something’ (1994, p. 77). Here he was contrasting the world of the arts with the materialism and disenchantment of the new social, economic and technological order. He wrote that essay in 1975, but it seems even more relevant today, where technology, however useful, has created new dangers for the human soul, ever-new ways of alienating us from ourselves and from ordinary everyday contact with one another. For those who need convincing, I suggest observing passengers in an overground train at the end of day for a few moments. While not denying the amazing usefulness of the mobile phone, to see so many people playing with phones or tablets, needing to keep drawing out the phone from their pocket as if anxious that communication will otherwise cease, and once to even see a young man talking on his phone to his friend nearby rather than face to face, is deeply depressing. Anachronistic thoughts about our souls being sold to the devil even come to mind. We seem to be living in a fragmented new world, what Zygmunt Bauman (2004) calls the era of ‘liquid modernity’ (p. 12), with our mobile world being cut into fragments and disconnected episodes rather than providing stable experiences. Indeed, it was experiences such as that in the train that have led me wanting to return to the notion of the soul as something that involves an essential aspect of our subjectivity.

It was Bruno Bettelheim who reminded us that Freud himself considered that psychoanalysis was ultimately the treatment of man’s soul (German, Seele). Freud was not precise about what the soul was. Bettelheim suggested that Freud chose the term ‘because of its inexactitude, its emotional resonance. Its ambiguity speaks for the ambiguity of the psyche itself, which reflects many different warring levels of consciousness simultaneously. By “soul” or “psyche” Freud means that which is most valuable in man while he is alive… it is intangible, but it nevertheless exercises a powerful influence on our lives. It is what makes us human’ (Bettelheim, 1983, pp. 77–8).

Of course, as Bettelheim emphasized, the German use of the term soul is different from that in English and has less obvious religious overtones. Freud was also influenced by contemporary thinkers such as Franz Brentano, for whom psychology was the ‘science of the soul’, the whole domain of the inner world (1982, p. 163). For Brentano, the soul makes up the unity and particularity of a person but has multiple activities.

German does have another word, Geist, or spirit, which is common in German philosophy but which has different and again more religious resonances in English. Spirit seems to merge at times with ‘subject’, ‘mind’ or even ‘soul’. There can be a world spirit, a spirit of the times or a human spirit. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer wrote how the human spirit has created ‘symbolic forms’ (1955, p. 78) in the sciences and the arts as expression of its creative intellect.

The point is, I suppose, that there are a number of these powerfully resonant words aimed at capturing some essential human quality; they overlap to some extent in their meaning and history. They may be difficult to define, or their definitions may evolve, but they remain embedded in our culture and seem to speak to us in significant ways.

If we were to take Bettelheim’s view of Freud seriously, then it would be more accurate to talk about ‘soul analysis’ rather than psychoanalysis. The advantage then is that we would be approaching nearer to Freud’s human endeavour; the disadvantage in English is that the word soul still has more religious meaning that it has in German. This will not, however, prevent me from endeavouring to explore the use of the word soul in its manifold meanings.

The philosopher William Barrett, in his book pointedly titled Death of the Soul, commented that the notion of a soul is more encompassing than the reasoning self and that ‘we have a new and more powerful reason to be aware of this with the emergence of psychoanalysis… “Psyche” in Greek means soul – a meaning we should not let ourselves forget – and psychoanalysis, accordingly, is a therapy which deals with the individual soul… [W]ith the historical appearance of psychoanalysis it is as if the psyche, long submerged by our culture, has become very real and has resurfaced’ (1987, p. 19).

Two other areas of experience have recently led me to take up the soul theme: the death of my parents and then renewed thinking after those, and other deaths, about my daily clinical work as a psychoanalyst with patients, which I certainly agree can be seen as very much dealing with the care of the patient’s soul.

As a young doctor I often saw people die, particularly on medical wards, which are mainly populated with the elderly. However much one was supposed to remain unmoved and objective as a doctor in training, it was not possible to ignore the intense and complex cluster of emotions surrounding the dying patient. In those days there was relatively less focus on doing everything possible to keep someone alive, less use of technology and more attention to making the patient comfortable during the process of dying. Sometimes the family and patient took part in the death with full knowledge of what was happening; at other times it was clear that the patient had no wish to consciously know what was happening to them. There was usually a discussion with the relatives about what the patient wanted to be told, and a judgement made about what was thought to be bearable. Each person has his or her own death. Some fight to the very end, others give up quickly out of despair; some accept the inevitable with grace, others have no idea what is happening to them, particularly of course when their brain is severely damaged as with a stroke or in dementia.

One cannot escape the reality of the death of the body, but dying, as I have indicated by just a few remarks about the process of dying, is not just a bodily process. The body dies, but what of the person? The relatives have not lost a body but a loved one. Heartbeats and blood pressures can be monitored, but how do you monitor that love? Can you put a figure on the quality of attachment? The ancients distinguished diseases of the body, which can be observed and treated, from those of the soul such as passions, including happiness, misery and madness; the physician was concerned with the former, the philosopher with the latter. However, as Jackie Pigeaud (2006) has pointed out, this division is far from clear; there is considerable overlap and a complex interaction between the fields of the body and of the soul, even in these ancient writings. Thus, from early on in Western thought, the phenomenon of disease and dying brought to light fundamental dilemmas about the encounter between the material body and what it is to be human, and what is lost when dying.

Although I saw many deaths when I was young, it was only being present at my parents’ recent deaths that brought back to life some observations that had made no sense at that earlier time. I would summarize these experiences in terms of a ‘special light’ associated with the person’s aliveness going out. It is well known that as the person is nearing death, something goes in the eyes; the eyes no longer reflect back our own gaze. The dying person’s eyes may not be focusing well, their physiological functions may be failing and their expression loses its quality, but something else seems to be happening. The person’s gaze goes; they are retreating from the other’s gaze, becoming ever more distant, leaving us increasingly looking on, until at the moment of death, the light behind the eyes appears to go and there is only darkness; the person has gone, their special light extinguished; the link with us is broken. The end of the dying person’s gaze gives us a sense of what in life we call our soul, the place, wherever that is, where the other’s gaze gives back to us who we are, gives us a sense of our own identity. The focus of where this kind of intersubjective exchange takes place is between the eyes of the participants, but the source of the inner light remains a puzzle, much as it is when looking at a Rembrandt self-portrait. From these sorts of phenomenological observation, I would suggest that the soul is essentially an intersubjective entity, emerging from interactions between human subjects, not just an entity involved in a magical ‘interiority’. Such a view has resonances with Emile Durkheim’s notion of the soul as the ‘social principle’ (1912, pp. 242–75). On the one hand, one can see the soul as the best and most profound part of our being, and on the other hand, as a temporary guest that has come to us from the outside, that is from society, that lives inside us as distinct from the body, and that must one day regain independence. The soul in the latter sense represents something within us that is other than ourselves; it is the voice of society within.

This expe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A home for the soul
• 2 Psychic home
• 3 The importance of a psychic home in the life and work of William Wordsworth
• 4 Towards the soul: The identity issue
• 5 The soul and its home
• 6 Loneliness and solitude
• 7 Happiness and misery
• 8 Summary
• References
• Index