A Felt Sense

More Explorations of Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah

Michael Eigen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910289
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores the intertwining of myth, dream, and everyday reality, which mark the prose and poetry of both. It focuses on psychic reality, with psychoanalysis and Kabbalah tools in this great enterprise of learning to work with ourselves.

CHAPTER ONE

The first seminar

As is the custom of the NYU Contemplative Studies Project, we will begin with a short meditation, here a little guided meditation, a little quiet time in the beginning. I will speak some words. If you’re inclined, let them run through you. Feel them, taste them.

[Spoken slowly, many pauses]

There is a great radiance in this room, a light lighter than light.

It pervades your body, all through you. It is your body.

Light beyond light. So bright it can’t be seen.

An invisible light, your light.

Light everywhere.

* * *

There is a great darkness in this room.

Darkness darker than dark.

It pervades your soul. It is your soul.

A loving darkness.

A loving darkness that light can’t dim.

You are darkness, darker than dark.

You are light, lighter than light.

Sit for some moments, held by the quiet of the dark and the glow of the light.

* * *

[During the guided meditation, someone came in late.]

It is fitting that we began with an interruption. Interruption is part of beginning. Interruptions are part of the path.

If there is one thing I am good at, it is saying the obvious. I have a love of the obvious. I have a hunch today, whatever we do, it will all be very obvious. When I was a child, I loved hearing the same stories over and over. As an adult, I love reading the same passages over and over. So, I am a friend of the obvious, a lover of the obvious.

I am going to start by doing some passages from the first chapter of Contact with the Depths (2011) on the distinction–union structure. But before doing that, I would like to read a little from the introduction about surface and depth. We do not necessarily say what depth is, but live from it, with it, speak from it. I ask in the introduction (p. xiii). “What of surface–depth connection? So many possibilities of connection–disconnection. We are sensitive to new structures, emergence of capacities, discontinuity, evolution, gaps between dimensions, splits between affective attitudes, divisions. Yet, there is also a fit between surface–depth.”

In postmodern times, we are used to emphasising rupture, disconnection, lacunae, gaps, but there is also a fit between surface and depth. “A moment of beauty makes us quiver through and through, reverberates through our being, touches foundations, an experience that ripples through sensation, feeling, thinking, action, ethics” (p. xiii). A moment of beauty runs through it. In the very centre of the Sephirot, the Kabbalah tree of life (Figure 1), the very centre, the heart of the Sephirot, is Tiferet, usually translated as beauty.

Beauty ripples through us. As Keats says, a thing of beauty is a joy forever. “At that moment, the gap is bridged, suspended (not obliterated). Connection between outside–inside and inner layering permeates us and we realise how interlaced we are with what, at other times, might seem remote. Consciousness not only separates, it brings together, it turns possibilities around, interlocks, fuses” (p. xiii). Tendencies to distinguish and unite work together. Think of metaphor: in metaphor you have distinct elements and an unexpected link is made between them, perhaps a mixture of resonance and disjunction. Something new comes into being and for a time you cannot tell the difference between distinction and union. It just happens. A structure that both distinguishes and unifies, a union–distinction structure with double aspects, a double or multiple structure involving sub-structural processes. Sometimes we describe this as a “flash” or insight, perception of new relations and connections, vision of the “whole” (temporary whole), not quite seen before, not quite that way.

Figure 1. Ein Sof and the Sephirot (Tree of Life).

Interfusion of surface and depth characterises growth of sensitivity. Similarly, interfusion of word-wordlessness. A deep sense of unknowing often provides a background linking presence in daily life. We are creatures of diverse and paradoxical capacities. We need to make and break connections, start again, undo and redo, as if what we create makes us claustrophobic.

At the end of the introduction, I write, “Our mixed capacities can stymie us, cause confusion, a kind of centipede not knowing how to use its legs. But they also are a source of plasticity, ability to survive, and survive well if only we keep on learning how to use our evolving makeup, do not give up on it, or it on us.”

In the beginning of the book, I have a few sayings. The first two I wrote: “Whatever happens opens reality”. Of course, that cannot be true—or can it? The other saying is, “One never recovers from being human”. There are two more sayings, one by Dogen: “Its exquisite peel permeates everywhere”; one by Merle Molofsky: “… of trust and trembling fears, a spark, as in the beginning”.

* * *

Now I would like to speak more about distinction–union and say the obvious. We make distinctions and connect. One way Freud expresses this is by positing dual tendencies, a life drive that creates unities and a death drive that unties, breaks, or falls apart, integrating–disintegrating, building–destroying. I say “break or falls apart” because there seem to be different ways of talking about death drive, one a more active process of breaking apart, the other a more passive falling apart, collapsing, entropy. For Freud, libido is active. He depicts an active psyche even in passivity. Passivity is not usually passive for Freud. Yet, there does seem to be a passive dropping away connected with the death drive, as when character wears itself out by its lifelong conflicts and gives way.

Many depth psychologists have their own ways of expressing this double tendency, individuation–union, separation–symbiosis, towards dependency–towards independence, splitting–fusion, disjunction–conjunction, symmetry–asymmetry— you may have your favourites. An ancient set of capacities, but we might not be aware that they are always working together in varied ways. They can be dissociated, antagonistic, symbiotic, oppositional, mutually self-destructive, but they also can be co-nourishing, indistinguishable.

Sometimes I depict distinction–union as branches of a single trunk or parts of complex root systems. Freud, Winnicott, and Bion speak about indistinguishable origins of psychic tendencies. Our cognitive capacities often make binaries of what begins together and remains intermixed. We often speak of complementary and oppositional dynamics of discriminated differences.

Bion speaks of unobservable transformations and sometimes uses the notation T in O to signal unknown, unobserved transformational processes, O a notation for unknown, perhaps unknowable reality—in psychoanalysis, emotional reality. Buddhism also speaks of nameless Buddha lands suggestive of rapid transformational work outside awareness. This takes us to a place that is something other or more than making the unconscious conscious. Much depends here on quality of unconscious functioning, unconscious work. Bion speaks of making the conscious unconscious. By this he means making something part of us, letting life in, letting our own life in. Letting our own life seep deep into our unknown, unconscious substructures that support conscious living. The quality of the one influences the quality of the other.

The Holy Trinity is a good cultural example of difference-in-union. As the experience/concept began to be formulated there were doctrinal disagreements. Are these three substances? Three Persons? The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE decided it was one substance yet three Persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One-yet-three, three yet truly One. A union of indistinguishable–distinguishable. A mystery.

Similarly, the sh’ma Yisrael, which often is translated, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One”. Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai echad. Sh’ma—hear. Yisrael—Israel. Adonai—Lord is substituted orally for the written Tetragramaton, YHVH, a central name of God throughout much of Torah. As tradition developed, it became Unsayable, connoting God beyond conception, images, language. Adonai—Lord, is said in its place.

Elohenu is also a word for God—plural, gods. YHVH (“Yahveh”—singular, the One, God of God). Elohenu—plural. Echad—One. The One is the many, the many the One. Singular–plural, distinguishable–indistinguishable, distinction–union. A mystical sense of the Allness–Oneness of the God beyond representational capacity (Eigen, 2012a).

In the Bhagvad Gita, everything is Krishna. Arjuna, a warrior, argues with Krishna. Arjuna does not want to kill, especially those close to him. There appears to be a difference between the One and the many, but Krishna prevails, unleashing an awesome vision of his Oneness in Everything, including a forceful sense that Krishna is Arjuna as well. Difference gives way and Arjuna will do what he has to. Perhaps, as time goes by, this could reveal a conflict in Krishna between competing tendencies (war and peace), a conflict within the human psyche, as yet not resolved.

The one and the many is an ancient sensation taking different forms. In Saint Paul we are one body in Christ, yet many beings. You are just you. No one can be you but you—and yet…

David Bohm (1996), a physicist, distinguishes between explicate–implicate orders. In the implicate dimension, everything is connected with everything else, parts of unknown transformational processes. The explicate order has to do with individual distinctions, consciousness of this in contrast with that. They are two modes of being, double-in-one capacities: you are me and I am you; you are not me and I am not you. What we see, hear, think are handles of the pot, levers we grab on to and utilise. We can turn light switches on and off but do not now how the electricity really works. We are expressions of little known or unknown processes at work throughout the universe. Part of the feeling of creativeness we participate in reflects a sense of processes creating us, including a generative sense of self and other coming into being.

The psychoanalyst Matte-Blanco (1988) wrote of symmetrical and asymmetrical modes of being. In the former, all members of a set share a common identity. For example, the class of mothers: all mothers are women. By symmetrical reversal, the psyche yields identity spread: all women are mothers. In the asymmetrical mode, individual women maintain their individual differences, mothers or not. The symmetrical mode is given to psychic contagion and union, the asymmetrical mode to distinction. Sometimes I call the former oneness experiencing/thinking, the latter two-ness, three-ness, multi-individual, difference experiencing/thinking. Matte-Blanco feels both tendencies are part of every psychic act.

Bion (1994a, p. 169) writes of a woman deathly afraid of the urge to exist. She is deathly afraid of the urge to exist because it could kill her. She is thinking of the urge to be a mother but fears that becoming a mother will kill her. There is conflict between the individual and what Freud called the racial instinct, the drive to procreate or do what is necessary in order to perpetuate the human species, whether or not you want to. A tension between collective forces and a particular individual, between what is “good” for the collective and what is “good” for the individual. A social example: the group telling me to go to war when I do not want to go to war. My body does not want to go to war or, the woman Bion speaks of, I do not want to have a baby. Tension between individual and larger forces of existence that push one or, at least, exert enormous pressure.

There are many variations and tangles. For example, I may fight larger forces in order to preserve myself, yet lose out on fuller development because of the energy involved in fighting. I might become paranoid about my own nature, fighting myself in order to save myself, yet remain stunted in order to stay alive. In Matte-Blanco’s terms, there is asymmetrical me. Little me and you, very valuable to me and you, vs. symmetrical being pushing us towards self-destruction because of a “greater” cause. Bion’s patient remains shut in on herself to preserve herself. Bion notes the urge to exist does not care whether an individual lives or dies—as long as existence continues. He writes from experience. His first wife died in childbirth and, unknown to him, the child of that birth was to perish in a car accident in the Italian mountains a few years after she helped organise a meeting honouring the centenary of her father’s birth. We experience ourselves and live our lives in both creative and destructive keys. What does one do when one experiences one’s urge to exist as destructive? So much more complicated because symmetrical experience can be ecstatic, whether in destructive or life-giving mode. To feel one-with can go many ways.

Bion speaks of faith in face of destructive tendencies and calls faith the psychoanalytic attitude, which he sometimes describes as being without memory, desire, understanding, and expectation. Faith in the moment itself. Or faith in face of the moment. His notation for this: F in O. Faith in face of unknown psychic forces that can destroy you and/or give rise to what might be felt as catastrophic change. A psychoanalytic analogue to the mystic’s darkness that begets faith more brightly, a profoundly lived paradox.

F in O, T in O. Faith and transformation linked with psychical depths that defy usual kinds of representation. Coming through is sometimes expressed as a sense of at-oneness. A sense that opens realities one did not know possible.

In part, I think of Dogen’s (Tanahashi, 1995, pp. 76–83) portrayal of flowing time, present flowing into future, present flowing into past, past into present, present flowing into present, future into future—transformations of threeone. I am purposely writing three and one as threeone to convey a sense of reality working. In a lifetime, and in psychoanalysis, what we think of as past or present or future changes radically the more we open to time moments. Yesterday, today, tomorrow change each other as we wade more fully into our lived time field. As we peel off dead skin, all time comes alive. Or, as Dogen might say, this moment is all moments. Aspects of time: distinguishable–indistinguishable.

Let me ask what is probably an unfair question. In the Zohar, in the Kabbalah, what is the biggest tree in the garden? (No hands, pause.) The biggest tree in the garden is the Tree of Faith. The tree of knowledge (K) is a smaller tree, even if it gets us into a lot of trouble. Knowledge is power, so no underestimating it. Give the power and ecstasy of knowledge its due, so often it lights our lives as well as torments us. Perhaps in another seminar we can spend more time relating these two “trees”, K and F. Faith, in this context, is associated with life, the Tree of Life. We speak of faith in life or the role faith plays in life. We speak of disillusionment. So much therapy involves a crisis of faith in face of disillusionment. The Tree of Faith is the Tree of Life, the heart of the garden, connected with Tiferet, beauty that touches life. If we went into this, we would be led into discussion of what ways faith and life do and don’t go together, intertwining yes–no.

In “The area of faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion” (1981, 2004), I traced relationships between faith and knowledge. It would be interesting to bring together Bion’s grid (Figure 2) and O-grams (Figures 3 and 4), the Kabbalah Sephirot, or Tree of Life (see Figure 1. p. 3), and Kundalini chakras. Their differences and interplays open fruitful possibilities of experiencing. Perhaps we will try to do this in another seminar. There is relevant material in the Appendices of Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (2012a). Merle Molofsky (2009) has a paper online in which she talks about Qi Gong and the Sephirot and the chakras (“Some thoughts on synthesizing concepts in the chakra system, Jewish mystical tradition and Qi Gong”, 2009). She envisions Jacob’s ladder as the seven chakras. There is so much to touch and be touched by.

Figure 2. Bion’S Grid.

Figure 3. O-gram 1 (Bion, 1994b, p. 323).

Figure 4. O-gram 2 (Bion, 1994, p. 325).

For both Matte-Blanco and Bion, infinity is a basic part of their writing as it unfolds. In The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975), Matte-Blanco associates infinity with unconscious life. There are many levels and qualities of unconscious infinites. He says, in relation to psychoanalysis, “Infinity is here to stay”.

Bion (1994b, p. 372) writes, “The fundamental reality is ‘infinity’, the unknown, the situation for which there is no language—not even one borrowed by the artist or the religious—which gets anywhere near to describing it.”

We may not “know” O but we can live it, work with it as it lives us. Knowledge plays a role as well. I think of Buddha exercised by the fact of suffering, sitting with the fact of suffering. Sitting with the pain of life, staying with it, staying with it until something happens. The psyche perforates, a kind of wormhole, and you find yourself somewhere else. In Buddha’s case, Nirvana. How does that happen? Start here, find yourself there. You sit with an unsolvable problem, banging your head against a wall, then f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• Chapter One The first seminar
• Chapter Two The second seminar
• References
• Index