On the Lyricism of the Mind

Psychoanalysis and literature

Dana Amir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317553588
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

On the Lyricism of the Mind: Psychoanalysis and Literature explores the lyrical dimension (or the lyricism) of the psychic space. It is not presented as an artistic disposition, but rather as a universal psychic quality which enables the recovery and recuperation of the self. The specific nature of human lyricism is defined as the interaction as well as the integration of two psychic modes of experience originally defined by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: The emergent and the continuous principles of the self.

Dana Amir elaborates Bion's general notion of an interaction between the emergent and the continuous principles of the self, offering a discussion of the specific function of each principle and of the significance of the various types of interaction between them as the basis for mental health or pathology. The author applies these theoretical notions in her analytic work by means of literary illustrations showing how the lyrical dimension may be used to teach psychoanalytic readings of literature and explore the connection between psychoanalytic and literary languages.

On the Lyricism of the Mind presents a new psychoanalytic understanding of the capacity to heal, to grieve, to love and to know, using literary illustrations but also literary language in order to extract a new formulation out of the classic psychoanalytic language of Winnicott and Bion. This book will appear to a wide audience to include psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists. It is also extremely relevant to literary scholars, including students of literary criticism, philosophers of language and philosophers of mind, novelists, poets, and to the wide educated readership in general.

1

BION, WINNICOTT AND THE LYRICAL DIMENSION OF THE POTENTIAL SPACE

The question concerning the foundations of psychic movement and psychic change is probably the very basis for every attempt to define the human experience. Two theoretical approaches touch on this issue, attempting to define mental dynamics in terms of the interaction between two aspects of the self: one is D.W. Winnicott’s theoretical viewpoint, which casts light on the complex dialectic between inside and outside, and the other is Wilfred Bion’s perspective, which clarifies the relations of containment between an emergent aspect and a continuous aspect of the personality as a whole.

Winnicott and the playground of the potential space

Winnicott argues that at the start of an infant’s life, mother and infant constitute a new psychological entity that exceeds the mere sum of its parts, much like an interaction between two mutually responsive components that yield a kind of compound or overlap. Where this overlap occurs, an aspect of the mother merges with the infant to create a state that Winnicott (1951) calls primary maternal preoccupation, where the self is lost in the other. This does not refer to the infant’s experience, as he or she doesn’t own a self that can be lost at this stage. It refers to the mother’s part in the mother–infant dyad, a part that constitutes a continuum whose respective end points are pathological: while in one pole there is no aspect of the mother that is available to unite with the infant – the other pole is demonstrated by the mother of whom no aspect exists outside the experience of primary maternal preoccupation. A mother who finds herself in the first pole experiences her baby as an alien, perhaps even an attacking object. A mother who finds herself in the second pole, on the other hand, uses the mother–infant unit as a type of psychotic shelter: her fusion with her baby comes at the expense of her sense of reality and of the experience that she exists at all in a reality beyond that of the mother–infant unit.

Where maternal preoccupation is undamaged, the illusion of a subjective object is provided by the mother: the illusion that inner and outer realities are one and the same. In fact, the mother “suspends” the infant’s consciousness of separateness by responding to his or her needs before they escalate into a desire.

Winnicott (1945, 1971a) repeatedly emphasizes that at the beginning of the child’s life the mother must be responsive to him or her in this way in order to avoid a premature consciousness of separateness. Yet at the same time, mothering must not be too perfect. Once each and every one of the infant’s needs is anticipated and met, even before he or she has experienced the need as such, the essential experience of desire becomes well nigh impossible (Winnicott, 1954–1955, p. 268). Paradoxically – and Winnicott’s writings are not only replete with paradoxes, but also identify them as a necessary feature of the human experience – while the mother must shield the infant from premature consciousness of desire and separateness, she must at the same time allow the infant the opportunity to experience desire along with its concomitant sense of separateness.

Whether the infant will be able to make use of the experience of impulse depends on the extent to which the mother has succeeded to suspend – yet also to preserve – the infant’s consciousness of desire until he or she reaches the point at which they can experience feelings as their own. Before this time, the infant is likely to experience any impulse as an external attack; an experience that might damage his or her self-generated desire. The instincts can be experienced as much externally as can a clap of thunder or a hit, claims Winnicott: “The infant’s ego is building up strength and in consequence is getting towards a state in which id-demands will be felt as part of the self, and not as environmental” (Winnicott, 1960, p. 141). Once a clearer sense of self begins to emerge, the experience of impulse serves to organize and focus the infant’s feeling of him or herself as the authentic creator of his or her experience. The infant’s being is formed as he or she learns to feel their desires and act upon them (Winnicott, 1967). When there is an ongoing and severe failure in providing a good enough holding environment, the infant is hurled into a chaotic state in which he or she experiences a disturbed sense of continued existence, namely of his or her “going on being” (Winnicott, 1963, p. 183).

When this dysfunction of the holding environment is less severe, the infant may develop a defensive personality structure, constituted by transferring the function of protection and caring from the mother to him or herself. Winnicott (1960) calls this personality structure, which evolves under a sense of danger, the false self. In this kind of organization, what develops instead of the rich mutual relationships resulting from the differentiation between the conscious and the unconscious and the emergence of a semi-penetrable repression barrier allowing a partial trickle of unconscious material to pass from the unconscious into consciousness – is a complete or partial alienation between one aspect of the self and another. The false self comes into being in order to ensure the defensive isolation of the true self (which enfolds the infantile potential of psychological individuality). But this isolation of the true self inevitably leads to a sense of emptiness, barrenness, uselessness and death. This raising of a wall around the self runs counter to the double and vital function of the unconscious in the course of normal development. On the one hand, such a function includes the censoring of charged contents and, on the other, their camouflaged and selective diffusion into consciousness. While the intact defense system allows not merely for organizing and denying the experience, but also for preserving the denied desire in the unconscious, the personality structure of the false self does not enable the development of the singular aspects of the self.

In the course of the development of the capacity to be alone (as opposed to being lonely), the infant’s capacity to create the space in which he or she lives (the potential space) matures as well (Winnicott, 1958). This is an extremely personal space; one that is not circumscribed by the body, without being quite identical to what we experience as the psyche. In fact, this is the space within which we create, dream and play. It evolves under a paradoxical condition: the child must be allowed to play alone in the presence of the absent mother and in the absence of the present mother. What Winnicott meant by this paradoxical formulation was that the mother is not present in this stage as an object, but as an environment, or as the holding space in which the child is at play. Most notably, this environmental space is imperceptible as long as it is actually there. At this point, if the mother overemphasizes her presence, she causes her child to become addicted to her as an omnipotent object. As the child’s capacity to be alone develops, the mother’s role as the additional creator of the potential space (up to that point) passes to the child himself (Ogden, 1986).

Michael Balint (1968) compared the relation of the infant to the environmental-mother with the adult’s attitude to air: it is only when we are deprived of air that we realize how shockingly total our dependence upon it is. Accordingly, when the relations with the environment-mother collapse, this brings about a terrifying realization of the child’s dependence upon the mother who is absent as an object. When this happens, the infant develops a defensive, artificial separateness and mobilizes all his or her powers to mature as soon as possible, so as to anticipate the threat from a less vulnerable position. Falling asleep, as well as the ability to dream, are both connected with our ability to rely safely upon the internalized environmental-mother, since they are associated with our ability to trust that we shall continue to exist even when we surrender our conscious control.

At this early developmental stage of the transitional phenomenon, the infant should not be suddenly confronted with the fact that he or she has a psyche of their own. They must be given respite so as to discover this by themselves. What enables the infant to become weaned from the mother’s psychological support is the very existence of the paradox: the mother and the infant are one and simultaneously two. The baby created the object that was there to be discovered. According to Winnicott (1951), the baby should never be asked whether he or she created the object or found it. Both possibilities are equally true. Maintaining the emotional truth of union with the mother along with that of separateness from her is what allows for play within the potential space.

There is an essential difference between the experience of absence of the mother as an object and the experience of absence of the environment-mother. The former experience characterizes the phase during which relation to the mother as a whole object emerges (this phase, in a sense, is identical to the depressive phase, as Melanie Klein [1935, 1940] defined it). Hence, while the reaction to losing the mother as an object may involve grief, loneliness and guilt; since the ability to be alone has already been attained – i.e. the environment-mother has been internalized – the infant can cope with this loss. The loss of the environment-mother, by contrast, is a catastrophic event attended by a sense that the infant himself is in a severe danger of being lost. Here the infant feels on the verge of total evaporation. At stake is not how the infant exists but whether he or she exists at all. This is why patients who are in a parallel condition to the above infantile state may develop autistic regression as a way of coping with the sense of psychic catastrophe.

During the period of whole-object relatedness, the infant is not engaged in the subjective creation of the mother, but in discovering her as an external presence. His or her continued emotional development, including the ability for object usage (Winnicott, 1969), depends on the mother’s ability to survive over time as such an external object. The fact that the infant destroys the object (in phantasy) while the maternal object survives this destruction is what makes it possible for him or her to discover the object’s external nature (Winnicott, 1969). Objectively seen, the external mother has been there all along and it is she who, together with the infant, created the illusion of the subjective object. But it is exactly because this illusion was created and successfully maintained that the infant could remain unconscious of the mother’s external existence. This is probably the crux of the Winnicottian paradox: the infant met the mother, but did not perceive her as a separate object. He saw the mother as his or her own creation. The process of giving up the internal object (which is under the infant’s ultimate control) in favour of an external one (which exists outside of such a control) is not obvious. To a great extent it is an expression of trust, since it depends on the external object’s readiness to be there for the child:

From now on the subject says: “Hello object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.” “You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” “While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.” Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived.

(Winnicott, 1971b, pp. 89–90)

So far, he or she was unable to grasp the real qualities of the object, or the fact that the object is rooted in a world outside the self. This is also why he or she could not use the object. In fact, the illusion of the subjective object puts in abeyance the discovery of the world of objects – namely the discovery of the people with whom the infant will be able to share experiences in the outside world. The object’s persistence is expressed in the mother’s presence as an external object over time, while the infant tries to release his or her grip on the mother as an internal object.

What are the conditions for a situation of an inability to release the internal object? Such a situation arises when the mother, as an external object, fails to be there when the infant allows him or herself to surrender to her, or when the infant’s experience with the illusion of the subjective object has not evoked the trust that he or she needs to be able to surrender to the external object. Once the survival of the external object fails (when it provides neither the physical nor the psychological presence that the infant needs), the infant will tighten his or her grip on the omnipotent internal object, which thus becomes his or her one safe haven. Imprisoning him or herself in the magical inner world of objects, and rigidly clinging to it, the infant evolves an extremely limited ability to either identify or use the external world of objects.

In the process of discovering the external nature of objects, the infant is also led to recognize his or her own influence on the external mother–object that has just been revealed. So far, the child has been treating his mother with a degree of selfish cruelty, namely without compassion or care (Winnicott, 1954–1955). This is not the result of an omnipotent urge to hurt her, but because the infant has not yet developed an awareness to the object as a subject, and hence has no empathy towards it. On discovery of the externality of objects, the infant feels the cruelty that accompanies his or her using them to satisfy needs, thus develops an unconscious fear that this demandingness may damage them. The maternal function during this period is to maintain the situation over time (Winnicott, 1954–1955; 1969) so that while in the infant’s unconscious phantasy he or she hurts the mother – it becomes obvious that the mother is alive and present independently. This simultaneous experience of the destruction of the internal mother-object and of the ongoing relations with the mother as an external object that is not vengeful is what affords the infant two forms of further experience: internal and external. The distinction between internal and external reality is not the result of one instant act, but rather of a dynamic process in which the internal object must be incessantly destroyed in the unconscious phantasy, so as to again and again make space for discovering the external one.

Winnicott speaks of three types of infantile dependence: in the earliest developmental stage, the infant can survive and develop only under the protective and suspending wrap of a holding maternal environment. During this phase, the mother supplies the illusion of a subjective object (the illusion that internal and external reality are identical), thereby protecting the infant from knowing about his or her separateness. When the transitional phenomenon sets in, the developmental task of the mother–infant dyad becomes the infant’s non-traumatic weaning from the maternal supplement. This is achieved in part when the infant plays alone in the presence of the absent mother and in the absence of the present mother – or perhaps in the presence of the environment-mother and in the absence of the mother as an object. An over-intervention of the mother in the infant’s play, in this phase, will lead to extreme dependence on the real external mother. The third type of dependence is the infant’s reliance on the mother’s ability to survive over time during the period of whole-object relatedness. Until this point, the world of internal objects overshadowed that of external ones. Now, the infant undergoes a process of renouncing the internal mother-object, thereby making space for the discovery of the real mother. In contrast with the object that was allegedly “created” by the infant, the now revealed external object turns out to be open to a totally different usage, since the relations with it are grounded in a world that is beyond the child’s omnipotent control.

Though the potential space arises from the physical and psychological space between mother and child, an unimpaired course of development allows each individual the opportunity to create his or her own potential space. The ability to do so is based on a set of psychic moves and their dialectic relations. Winnicott (1971a) describes the transitional space as the hypothetical field which may (or may not) come into existence between infant and object (the mother or part of the mother), by the end of the period marked by the infant’s merging with the object. Elsewhere he refers to the transitional space as a middle area of experience situated between internal and external reality. This, in fact, may be understood as the space spread between the subjective object and the objectively perceived object, between “me-extensions” and “not-me”, between our own existing as objects and our existing as subjects.

In his book The Matrix of the Mind (1986), Thomas Ogden relates to human subjectivity in terms of the ability to maintain several levels of self-consciousness, starting from intentional self-observation (a very late achievement) and ending with the most subtle sense of “being myself ” – where experience is suffused with a faint quality of “I am the one who thinks my thoughts and feels my feelings”, in contrast with a form of reflex-like responsiveness. While subjectivity is connected with consciousness, Ogden argues, it is not identical to it. The experience of consciousness results from having achieved subjectivity. No consciousness, that is, can exist without subjectivity and it is doubtful whether subjectivity is possible in the total absence of consciousness (Ogden, 1986).

The very focus of Winnicott’s work on the notion of the potential space is formed by the developmental stage during which the earliest awareness of separateness emerges. To prevent a tra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• On the Lyricism of the Mind
• Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Bion, Winnicott and the Lyrical Dimension of the Potential Space
• 2 The Emergent, the Continuous and the Lyrical
• 3 The Philosophical and Human Meaning of the Lyrical Dimension
• 4 The Emergent Self and the Continuous Self in the Mirror of Development
• 5 Asleep with all Five Senses Awake: Octavio Paz’s “As One Listens to the Rain” as an Illustration of the Interrelations Between the Emergent and the Continuous Principles of the Self
• 6 The Influence of the Continuous/emergent Interaction on the Development of Schizoid and Borderline Personalities
• 7 “Attacks on Linking” as Attacks on the Formation of the Lyrical Dimension
• 8 The Line that Divides Sleeping from Waking: The Malignant Interaction between the Emergent Principle and the Continuous Principle in My Michael by Amos Oz
• 9 Melancholia as Mourning over a Possible Object
• 10 From the Earthly Jerusalem to the Heavenly City: The Lyrical Dimension of Mourning in A.B. Yehoshua’s novella A Woman in Jerusalem
• 11 On Lyricism, Knowledge and Love
• Index