Image, Sense, Infinities, and Everyday Life

Michael Eigen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781782203728
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914751
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Image and sensing have been underrated in Western thought but have come into their own since the Romantic movement and have always been valued by poets and mystics. Images come in all shapes and sizes and give expression to our felt sense of life. We say we are made in the image of God, yet God has no image. What kind of image do we mean? An impalpable image carrying impalpable sense? An ineffable sense permeates and takes us beyond the five senses, creating infinities within everyday life. Some people report experiencing colour and sound when they write or hear words. Sensing mediates the feel of life, often giving birth to image. In this compelling book, the author leads us through an array of images and sensing in many dimensions of experience, beginning with a sense of being born all through life, psychosis, mystical moments, the body, the pregnancy of "no", shame, his session with Andre Green, and his thoughts related to James Grotstein, Wilfred Bion, and Marion Milner.

Chapter One
Being born

Is psychoanalysis in process of being born? Is it in gestation? Gestation and birth together? Bion speaks of psychoanalysis as embryonic, sometimes a baby, and wonders what it may become. He speaks of the embryonic aspects of personality. But at times goes further, emphasising the relationship with what is not conceived, our relationship to the unknown. There is an unknown quality to an embryo, a penumbra of birth, movement ahead, and a rich feeling of possible happening. To meditate on what is unknown, not conceived, yet developing, a future coming towards us, an Ein Sof of the psyche.

In Jewish mysticism (Eigen, 2012), Ein Sof represents the unknowable infinite mystery beyond duality, existence, time, and space. A boundless infinite that, I feel, is part of human personality, at least in intimations. The God of creation, Yahweh, emanates from divine mystery, emanations that give birth to experience. I suspect when we try to describe such sensations, we touch what Winnicott (1992) calls an “incommunicado core” linked with Ein Sof within.

It is not far-fetched to link Kabbalistic portrayals of the birth of experience with psychoanalysis. Bion once told me, “I use the Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis.” If one looks deeply, one finds convergence as well as difference. Here is a bit of applied “Kabbalah” in Bion’s (1994, p. 214) approach to analytic sessions:

“I am concerned in a session with what I do not know. The session is the only time when I can have contact with what I do not know; at any other time I can only have contact with, or think about, phenomena which I believe—rightly or wrongly—that I have already observed. But in the session I can have contact with phenomena that I have not so far observed, or have observed only partially. It is an opportunity that is not to be missed, for if it is it can never be repeated.”

He goes on to write of the core of a session and core of a dream as an emotional experience seeking the best descriptions we can find, often given to us in seemingly unrelated fragments that a “selected fact” brings together in significant ways.

We may have convictions about what this emotional experience is. Sometimes, some of us are sure of what it is. It may be experienced fully, intensely or in hints, whispers, echoes. A meaning making processes attaches significance to it and that significance can change, grow, dissipate, look differently in different contexts, modified by further experience. An experience or significance can change size, seem big at one time, small another. It may take on different shapes, colours, tones, and spirits. An emotional sense threads through life, assuming different values.

In the quotation above, Bion gives special value to a session. Each session is a once in a lifetime happening, although we will have other once in a lifetime chances. Bion emphasises linking up with the unknown of the session, the emotional “ein sof” of the moment. A special opportunity for discovery, creative participation, healing, and growing. William Blake (Eigen, 1993) writes of creativity happening in the pulsation of an artery, special moments. For Bion, the session itself is a special moment. I don’t think one would be mistaken to attach something of sacral significance to the chance it gives us.

Sensitivity to the unknown, absorption in the unknown is partly cultivated by dreaming: “I believe that the analyst may have to cultivate a capacity for dreaming while awake, and this capacity must somehow be reconcilable with what we ordinarily conceive of as an ability for logical thought of the mathematical kind” (1994, p. 215).

Dream-work in sessions and in poetry, art, logic. In Cogitations Bion drew what I call O-grams, a diagram or idea-o-gram showing culture (including art, science, religion) growing out of an unknown O, an unknown ultimate reality. In psychoanalysis, unknown emotional reality (1994, pp. 323, 325; Eigen, 2012). For Bion the core of a dream is an emotional experience, which is also a core of creative-destructive culture (Eigen, 2001a, 2002). In his last extended written work, A Memoir of the Future (1991), Bion gave expression to psychoanalysis as a dream, the dream of psychoanalysis.

Kumar Shahani (1983) directed a movie drawn from Bion’s autobiographical works and A Memoir of the Future, but the movie was never completed. What we have are fragments with their own power and integrity. Kumar Shahani and Meg Harris Williams wrote the script, which may soon be published. You will find more information on the making of the movie in the notes that accompany it online.

A psychoanalytic dream, special value to each fragment—the analytic session which speaks through its cracks. An intimate caller— psyche speaking.

Not all births are welcome. In psychic reality there are monstrous births and rebirths as well as benevolent ones (Eigen, 1992). All manner of psychoanalytic babies. We are born all lifelong. Life as an extended moment, an extended birth and/or catastrophe. Bion speaks of a catastrophic impact of O that goes on and on, a kind of big bang of the psyche, bits and pieces flying away from each other and point of origin at accelerating velocity. What happens if a fragment lands on you or a patient? How can one know what it may be? The temptation is great to jump to conclusions or ignore it, but to let its impact work on you and keep on working is another matter. One fears being reborn as a monster or seeing the monster one is. But no one psychic moment is the one and only moment, even if at the time it seems so. Soon enough, other eternal moments qualify it. Alternate and varied infinities modulate one another, excessive as each may be when centre stage (Eigen, 1986). It is, in part, growth of faith that enables us to wait.

It was salutary to come upon a respected analyst who said the subject of analysis is unknown. Bion calls faith the psychoanalytic attitude. Faith, perhaps, in gestation and babies not yet born. Many mystics speak about the unborn and here we have it at the centre of daily sessions (Eigen, 2014c). It can be a scary business. Saint Paul: “What a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” One could also say how dreadful it may be falling into the hands of the living psyche. So many scary dreams portray psychic realities. A man told me how frightened he was of snakes in dreams as a child. He found dream snakes scarier than snakes in physical reality. The former terrified him. There seemed to be no escape from whatever dread they represented.

I knew from my own childhood how scary such dreams could be and many a night I turned on the light, looked under the bed and in the closet to be sure a horror was not there. A colleague of Bion’s, Albert Mason, told Bion about a schizophrenic patient who kept turning on lights at night. Bion’s supervisory response, “Everyone is entitled to a second opinion.”

A second opinion came to me through many years of analysis and many more as an analyst. The need and possibility of a second opinion within grew over time with help. The need, value, and traction of a second opinion is often missing in psychosis and development of alternate inner opinions is crucial.

In time, my patient, too, developed further “opinions”, views, and possibilities. As therapy accustomed him to more psychic contact, he came to see snakes as wisdom figures trying to convey a sense that there is more, that psyche is more than he had dreamed and that dreaming can grow too. Can we and our dreams grow together? Even death can mean different things at different times (Eigen, 1974). And a snake, including all its psychic snake powers, can take on different meanings in varied contexts (1981a).

Images sometimes used for the fear of God link with the fear of psyche. Seeing God and dying, for example, or the appearance of Krishna in the Gita as monstrous in human terms, or turning to stone facing Medusa, One might posit negative and positive infinities, much like Melanie Klein positing good and bad breasts (Eigen, 1996, 1998, 2007), and all the mixtures.

Here are several Bion quotes which refer to mystical experience but which he uses to depict aspects of psychic reality and growth of psychoanalysis:

“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.” (1994, p. 372)

“Many mystics have been able to describe a situation in which there really is a power, a force that cannot be measured or weighted or assessed by the mere human being with the mere human mind. This seems to me to be a profound assumption which has hitherto been almost completely ignored, and yet people talk about ‘omnipotence’ as if they knew what it meant and as if it had a simple connotation.” (1994, p. 371)

What does investigation of the invisible and ineffable look like? With what kind of tools? What is the sense that gives us such intimations? Can it undergo development for the good of humankind?

Freud wrote that he would like to protect analysis from the doctors and priests: “I should like to hand it over to a profession, which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of the soul, who need not be doctors and should not be priests” (Freud, 1963, pp. 125–126).

Psychoanalysis—a profession that “does not yet exist”. By “lay” he means not medical doctors. Nor does he mean laying on of hands. One thing he does mean is psyche to psyche, unconscious to unconscious, a mysterious but very real contact with diverse impacts. Psychoanalysis as a profession that does not yet exist, concerned with psychic work coming into being, extended births over time (Eigen, 2014b). What kind of births, with what quality? How long? How many stillbirths, monstrous births? What kinds of possibilities?

In a session with Bion in 1977, he told me to get married. Is this something that analysts are supposed to do? In this case, more than I can say, I am so grateful. This was not something my own father didn’t tell me but from Bion it was believable. Why? How? Had I learned from early childhood that my father usually wanted something from me for his own ego? My marriage a feather in his cap? Yet when Bion said something similar, I felt free to begin to do it. As if reality itself spoke to me, opened a gate. He spoke from a truth I could believe.

The first moment I saw him I felt, “I can tell him anything.” The word understand meant stand-under. This big man, taller than I by far, had gotten under me, supported my psyche from below and I could breathe and speak and listen, take in, wonder, think on and eventually do. He made my life better, fuller, richer. Through various twists and turns, four years later I married and became a father at the age of forty-five, something I wanted to do and couldn’t since my twenties. My life was soon to grow faster and fuller than a foetus in the womb, the challenges of getting along with wife, children, and profession. I would have to grow into a new existence if it was going to work.

In my early twenties I lucked out having a variety of work experiences in which I felt free to explore and experiment. At some point, I found myself working with disturbed children, including schizophrenic and autistic children, often with important contact with their families. In some cases, I was lucky to have very high quality supervisors, but even so, one was thrown on one’s own resources moment to moment, sometimes sink or swim (better, sink and swim). This forced growth of capacity and, for me, such force was welcome. I was in love with creativity and the work squeezed more kinds of creativeness out of me than I knew about till then.

I knew from love relationships what a cauldron of pain and bliss contact with another person can be. I knew, too, from growing up in a family. But the idea of working with pain and its patterns and building capacity to tolerate and modulate distress in creative interaction with others and oneself was something different. I was learning from vicissitudes of therapy. Rather than simple helplessness in face of emotions, exercising them in a kind of psychic gymnasium had benefits. Not that helplessness is overcome but even one’s helplessness can be a fount of meditation and stimulate rich moments one might have missed through pseudo control or dismissal. In my twenties I learned how rich working with madness can be and how, to the extent possible, staying with fields of experience brings rewards.

It wasn’t until I was thirty that I began work on a one-to-one basis with adults. Two people alone in a therapy room in a clinic. I couldn’t wait. From my first moments I felt like a fish in water. Here was air I could breathe, a psychic medium I could function in. Was I finding what I was made for?

I soon became aware of a hitch. Without quite realising, I was being my therapist and my patients at the beginning were me. A mania of sorts. It gradually dawned on me I thought all I had to do was act like my therapist and my patients would get better. But life did not let me get away with this. Actually, I had enough psychic contact to be helpful to most people I saw. But there came points in sessions, increasingly, that I felt I was losing out by not discovering how to be me and letting my patient be someone other than me. I was losing out on therapy life by unconsciously pretending to be who I wasn’t and not registering fuller reality of the patient’s own-ness.

Years of struggle ensued, little by little chipping away at my identification with my therapist, in so many ways helpful, but also a barrier to more real contact. When I saw Bion ten years later, at age forty, he still felt the need to encourage me “to begin the nasty business of being yourself”. I thought I was moving along by then and he was telling me to begin. To begin and begin again and again. Now, more than thirty-five years later, approaching eighty, I often feel on the verge of beginning. An invitation that does not die. As if beginning becomes a place one enters, lives from, explores.

So at thirty I had to learn how to be a therapist who was not simply my therapist and be with people who were not simply me. Quite a challenge. New difficulties pressured new growth. This is one of the beautiful things about this hard work—and it is or can be more than hard. Impassables and impossibles become avenues of change. Blocks and trauma that had and perhaps have no answer, become ingredients in creative work, colour on the palette of living. Personalities—as the sephirot in Kabbalah or chakras in Kundalini yoga testify—are amazing, often with the emphasis on maze (Eigen, 2012, 2014a, 2014b).

Another overturning came in the wake of becoming a father at the age of forty-five. By then, I had been in the mental health world over twenty years and doing one-to-one and group therapy fifteen years. A new thing that began to happen was falling asleep in sessions, a habit that never entirely left. I learned about Freud falling asleep with his British but not American patients, the latter paying more and demanding more. I learned about others, like Winnicott, dosing—maybe to dose it out.

Contact dosage was something I already learned from clinic work. Some people can’t take much contact, some can’t take not having too much. Too much or too little. I suspect I am closer to needing too much and too little, depending on the swing of events and mood. Need for intensity on the one hand, need for fasting on the other, a kind of psychic bulimia, hunger for extremes. One is not always in the ballpark by trying to tie missing sessions with transference reactions, important as this is. There are people who miss sessions like they miss many things, as part of a way of life, running from danger of being overwhelmed. Lack of capacity to sustain contact. The problem, as Winnicott (1971) and Balint (1968) suggest, is not simply transference of a pattern but need to build capacity for experience.

I brought up my sleepiness to Phyllis Meadow (2003), a lively doer in psychoanalysis. She spoke about her own dosing off and related it to a baby part that felt trust. With some patients she wouldn’t dare fall asleep. She’d be too anxious. They did not have the comforting tone that promoted letting go, like mother singing to baby. She said it was a compliment to the patient to be able to trust them with a dose. Dr. Meadow was not so naïve to think this the only possibility. She knew the usual rap about therapist sleep as a response to being threatened by the patient, and much else. It would be easy to call her or my tack a rationalisation but I think she designed her response in the moment, giving me a taste on the spot of maternal support.

It is also likely that my dosing off is a kind of contact dosage, not simply because of the patient, but because of my own challenged capacity to sustain contact. I think of babies falling asleep and waking many times throughout a day, not being able to take too much waking consciousness. A kind of dialectical swing of states of being. I heard D. T. Suzuki speak of his own intermittent dosing and waking in old age, like a baby, which he let be, riding waves of life.

Hyman Spotnitz (2004), Dr. Meadow’s teacher, often spoke of regulating the amount and kind of contact a psychotic patient can take. He had formulas like staying away from subject oriented focus, since the individual could not take too much of this. Instead, he suggested asking three to five object oriented questions per session. This may sound simple and formulaic but it can be varied with subtle nuances in very healing ways. Over time, little by little, a person is able to sustain more complex, varied and colourful interactions, which would have flooded and made him/her withdraw or aggress earlier. I outline growth of complexity in recovery from psychosis in Contact with the Depths (2011, Chapter Seven, “Tears of pain and beauty”). While following my own bent, many “schools” and therapeutic styles have become a natural part of my work.

Then again, there may be more to my sleepiness than my contact deficiencies. A significant detail in my new situation involved staying up at night with a baby, moulding to a being with intermittent sleep. One of the pitfalls of parenthood not emphasized enough is fatigue. The fatigue of caring for another whose needs do not fit with adult work schedules. I have to marvel at Dr. Meadow’s intuitive sense. She could have asked me, “Has something changed in your life? Are you taking care of a baby?” Instead, she slipped into the feel of the situation, parent and baby, and this spread to my patients.

As months and the first years of parenthood ticked by, I discovered I was becoming a different person with my patients, a different being. The sense of caring for a child, a breakthrough of love, so wanting good for a person, began leaking, transferring to those in my therapy care. Becoming a father, little by little made me more fatherly. I was still a spontaneous, irascible child. But something was added. Another dimension of care and love and support. I always tried my best, but this was something further, wanting to be the best possible therapist I could be, wanting to do well by another, as I would want to do well by my children. Dr. Meadow found me out before I knew myself.

By this time, I already was moving into more complex territory with Winnicott, Klein, Bion, Kohut. As I wrote in the introduction to The Psychotic Core (1986), many schools are part of me. I tend to see all therapists as one therapist with many faces and arms, like a multi-ocular-limbed Buddha. What someone can’t get from me, one might from another. We all have something to offer, our own selves, our own ways. We contribute what we can to the general pool. But, the work is also individual, alone, deeply pressing. I do not like therapy wars as I’ve personally gotten ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE Being born
• CHAPTER TWO Image from the bushes
• CHAPTER THREE Fermenting devils in psychosis
• CHAPTER FOUR Where is body?
• CHAPTER FIVE There is no no
• CHAPTER SIX Shame
• CHAPTER SEVEN My session with André
• CHAPTER EIGHT Figments, facts, interruption, hints, and ...
• CHAPTER NINE Changing forms: session excerpts
• CHAPTER TEN Some biographical notes
• APPENDIX ONE Book review: On Not Being Able to Paint. Marion Milner. New York: International Universities Press, 1973
• APPENDIX TWO Book review: Bothered by Alligators. Marion Milner. London: Routledge, 2012
• REFERENCES
• INDEX