In Search of the Good Life

Emmanuel Levinas, Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

Paul Marcus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855757233
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914799
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), French phenomenological philosopher and Talmudic commentator, is regarded as perhaps the greatest ethical philosopher of our time. While Levinas enjoys prominence in the philosophical and scholarly community, especially in Europe, there are few if any books or articles written that take Levinas's extremely difficult to understand, if not obtuse, philosophy and apply it to the everyday lives of real people struggling to give greater meaning and purpose, especially ethical meaning, to their personal lives. This book attempts to fill in the large gap in the Levinas literature, mainly through using a Levinasian-inspired, ethically-infused psychoanalytic approach.

CHAPTER ONE
“I'm just wild about Harry!” A psychoanalyst reflects on his relationship with his dog*

“It really explains why we can love an animal . . . with such extraordinary intensity; affection without ambivalence, the simplicity of a life free from the almost unbearable conflict of civilization, the beauty of an existence complete in itself . . . Often when stroking Jo-fi[Freud’s dog] I have caught myself humming a melody which, unmusical as I am, I can’t help recognizing as the aria from Don Giovanni: ‘a bond of friendship unites us both’”

Sigmund Freud

Like Freud, and, for that matter, like any devoted dog owner you happen to meet on the street or in the park, I love my dog. “He is my best friend,” I often say to people. Harry, a one-year-old Cocker Spaniel, was a “rescue” dog, a code word for a pup that was given up by his owner and either left on the street or given to a dogs’ home. In Harry’s case, he was abused and abandoned, a stray found on the Brooklyn side of the Belt Parkway, starving, filthy with fleas and tics, and very frightened. According to the foster lady, Shirley, a remarkable woman from whom I obtained Harry and whose life mission is to rescue Cocker Spaniels from certain death on the street and find them a good home, Harry was a sweet dog, though a traumatized one. When we first met Harry in her Queens, New York home, he was still very skinny and fearful, with long floppy ears and sad eyes. Nevertheless, within a few minutes it was clear that both my wife and I, a child and adult psychoanalyst, respectively, felt a summoning call from Harry: “Help me, love me, take good care of me.”

Pausing for a moment, and having wondered to ourselves out loud, “Are we crazy?”, having just sent off our second of two children to college and having spent many of the preceding months fantasizing about how nice life would be without any children to look after (call it a neurotic decision to deal with our “empty nest” feelings), we nevertheless decided to adopt Harry. “Maybe we will get it right the third time,” I joked to my wife! As this chapter testifies, our decision to take Harry home was stunningly right, as “The Pup”, as we sometimes call him, has been a transformational living presence in our lives, one that has immeasurably enhanced us and inspired us to ask ourselves, why is this so?

This chapter aims to explore the nature of the relationship between a person and his dog. It attempts to delineate some of the reasons why dogs, and by extension other beloved pets (“companion animals”, to be politically correct), have such a powerfully positive psychological meaning and effect on their owners. That is, I will describe some of the psychodynamics between an owner and his dog, as well as the developmental needs and wishes that the owner uniquely satisfies through his hound. Most importantly perhaps, following Levinas, I suggest that what makes one’s relationship with an adored dog so moving, so self-transformational and self-transcendent, is that emanating from the hound, especially from his “face”, there is an irresistible ethical call, an ethical address, of responsibility for the other. Indeed, in my case, Harry, experienced as unique, as an irreducible singularity, is a testimony to a kind of pure love, that is, he represents the gift of diffused love inseparable from my responsibility for him, and my moral obligation to him (Calin, 2005, pp. 73–74). In short, Harry has taught me how to love more deeply and selflessly, and for this I am most thankful. Martin Buber also movingly describes the “deeply stirring happening” in his childhood (he was eleven years old), while spending the summer on his grandparents’ estate. There, the adult Buber says, he had an I–Thou encounter with “my darling, a broad dapple-grey horse”. Stroking his “mighty mane”, “what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other” (Buber, 1965, p. 23).

The context of obtaining Harry

In 2004, about 36% of American household included children; more than 60% included pet animals (Becker, 2006, p. 17). An equally astonishing fact is that one-third of dog owners would be willing to accept a 5% decrease in salary to be able to take their dogs to work, according to a recent survey (The Boston Phoenix, 30 June, 2006, p. 6). Moreover, as Grier points out in her recent historical study Pets in America (Grier, 2006), pet owners now typically describe their animals as their “best friends” or as “family members”. In my case, as I have said, the acquisition of Harry was intimately connected with my family composition, or rather with the dramatic change in its configuration, both of my children having left home to go to university.

In an entirely obvious manner, Harry was a replacement child. That is, he satisfied some primordial need in my wife and me to continue to be in the parenting role: to provide nurturance, stability, and protection to a vulnerable being. Indeed, the replacement meaning of Harry for our children was evident in a variety of ways: in taking great care in feeding, exercising, and looking after Harry’s physical well-being, especially early on when he was so skinny and physically fragile. Thus, as with my children when they were young, I made sure that Harry ate the best food (the expensive, organic Paul Newman dog food); that I took him for a run in the park or woods every day as opposed to a short functional walk around the block (to keep him strong, alert and happy); I routinely took Harry to the veterinarian and responsibly gave him the medicines he needed, closely monitoring his progress; I hugged, kissed, and played with him frequently and with great enthusiasm, telling him what a great dog he was; I tried to help him to get over his fearfulness, especially towards strangers, a skittishness that reflected the after-effects of having been beaten as a puppy. As we did when our children were infants, my wife and I frequently talk to Harry as if he understood us: “Sweetie pie, are you tired today?” “Darling, are you having fun playing with your soft toy?” Like both my children, Harry was a bad sleeper who would frequently come into our bed in the middle of the night, forcing me to get up and put him back in his own bed. As with my children, however, there were many nights when I was too tired or lazy to get up, or simply enjoyed his warm company, and Harry slept next to us. Perhaps the best examples indicating that the Harry–child analogy was operative was that I frequently referred to the veterinarian as the paediatrician, and a few times I called Harry by my son’s name. Most poignantly, as with my three-year-old daughter, once when Harry accidentally ate some poisonous materials that required an emergency visit to the veterinarian, I remember cradling the half-conscious puppy and feeling the same kind of intense anxiety and worry about Harry’s survival that I did for my sick daughter.

However, we had no ambitions for Harry, as we did for our children, when we brought him into our world. We did not fantasize that he would become a great diplomat who would solve the Middle East conflict (my son’s choice of study), or a famous actress (my daughter’s goal). Instead, Harry just had to keep being Harry: loveable. But why is Harry so loveable, and what does this have to do with my two children, who left home, never to return as the children they once were?

Unlike my children, Harry was fairly easy to please. In fact, not only did he not talk back, he was clearly grateful in his own way, and, perhaps most importantly, loyal. Harry would never choose to abandon me for another master, he would never say to himself, so to speak, “Hey Harry, the folks down the road serve better nosh”, or “I can get more hugs and kisses elsewhere”. No, as long as I feed him and take good care of him he will remain loyal to the end, never abandoning me. While my children pay lip service to a similar principle, like most parents, I do not entirely believe that they have the loyalty and devotion that Harry does, nor should they, of course, nor should I need or expect them to, either. In fact, I want my children to separate psychologically from us, get married, have children, productive careers, and live their lives as they want to in their own dwellings. For the most part, I envision my children having a background involvement in my life as I get older, while I never want Harry to separate and live elsewhere.

What I am getting at is that Harry satisfies a very basic need that I have, and, for that matter, seems to be a constituent part of the human condition: he blunts the horror of separation and abandonment that most of us somewhere feel deep down in our infantile selves and spend considerable conscious and unconscious psychic energy managing. He does this through his faithfulness, expressed by a thoroughly gratifying, affirming, and predictable set of behaviours. When I come home every night hungry, tired, and spent, I know for sure that Harry will respond to the doorbell the same adoring way he always does: he starts to bark loudly and frantically; I put my hand through the letter box and he jumps up and starts to feverishly lick it; I open the door and he jumps all over me, tail wagging, licking and kissing me, seemingly utterly thrilled that I have returned home. It is a greeting to die for! Compare this to my teenage children, who hardly notice that I have come home, and to my wife, who is dead tired from a long day of analytic work and, mainly out of politeness, just manages to say, “Hi, how was your day?” In other words, Harry provides an almost magical, though reliable, sense that one can separate from a loved one and return to him, with everything being as one left it—no, better.

Harry’s greeting of me when I come home is a stark contrast to the way my teenage children greeted me, though that was not always the case. Indeed, when my children were younger, especially when they were toddlers, I recall a fairly high degree of excitement when I came home, though I could easily play second fiddle to a good Disney video they were watching. Actually, there is an important connection between Harry and toddlers, for, in my view, part of the secret of Harry’s charm and lovability is that he is like a toddler in so many ways, without, however, the “terrible twos”. Harry is playful, zestful, curious, cute, and affectionate. He is hardly oppositional, and when he is, it is usually for a good reason and entirely predictable, as when he does not want to have his leash put on when leaving the park. These moments are admittedly annoying, especially when it takes ten minutes to coax Harry to let me approach and leash him, requiring me to use the very skills that I use to engage patients who have similar approach–avoidance and “closeness” issues. Nevertheless, for some reason, these occasional difficulties leave no negative trace in me, probably because, unlike toddlers, Harry’s resistance is not oppositional for its own sake. Such difficult moments with Harry are far outweighed by the fact that, like a toddler, he manifests “a love affair with the world”, one that evokes in me an upsurge of joy similar to what I felt when my children were in that adorable stage of development.

“A bond of friendship unites us both”

As the epigraph to this chapter suggests, Freud thought that the secret to his uniquely strong attachment to his dog was that his relationship to Jo-fi embodied the highest form of friendship. What was Freud getting at when he made this provocative claim?

Freud, working from a largely Greek, specifically Aristotelian conception of human happiness, one that stressed “functioning well” in love and work as the gold standard (Wallwork, 2005, p. 287), did not write about the psychology of friendship in any systematic way. Thus, we have to piece together what his view of friendship was, in particular, by extrapolating from his Aristotelian-informed conception of the human condition. Only in this way will we be able to apprehend what Freud may have meant when he described Jo-fi as his uniquely esteemed friend that he loved “with such extraordinary intensity”.

In Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle briefly discusses three forms of friendships: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of excellence. Each one of these forms of friendships is characterized by mutual affection between equals, with the differences between them mainly rooted in the different types of affectionate relatedness or friendliness involved. That is, they have their specific motivations, expectations, and trajectories that apply to human relations and, by analogy, to my relationship with Harry.

A friendship of pleasure is one in which two people simply enjoy one another’s company, though what both parties mainly seek is their own pleasure and satisfaction. For Aristotle the “good” that is desired for both people is enjoyment, and relationships of this type tend to dissipate and end when what had given enjoyment stops doing so. In the case of my relationship with Harry, it is clear to me that Harry and I enjoy being together; everything from petting his soft, silky fur that both feels good and is comforting, to his toddler-like charm, actually his entire demeanour, is extremely pleasurable. Clearly, Harry feels likewise, or he would not seek me out to be stroked, sit by my feet, follow me around, and wag his tail in excitement when I come home. Jonathan Balcombe (2006), an animal behaviourist, shows that dogs and other animals share our capacities for empathy, humour, and aesthetic pleasure. Moreover, contra Aristotle’s understanding of human-to-human relationships, my human to animal relationship is unlikely to dissipate and break off, for it is extremely satisfying and valued by Harry and me, in addition to which the circumstances of our relationship are unlikely to change significantly in the foreseeable future.

A friendship of utility is one in which the parties provide mutual advantages for one another. The friendliness that depicts this sort of relationship is largely based on the usefulness that is served by being pleasant to one another, for example, in a workplace. Again, says Aristotle, there is little to sustain the relationship when the mutual utility ends. In my relationship with Harry, there is a kind of mutual usefulness operative. Through Harry, I satisfy certain psychological needs, for example, for affection, loyalty, and comforting tactile contact from a dependent being, while he benefits from me in that his physical and psychological needs for food, shelter, stimulation, and affection are regularly satisfied. As this mutual pleasure giving is central to our relationship, contra Aristotle, it is unlikely to end, barring exceptionally bad circumstances.

Finally, there is the friendship of excellence or character. Such a friendship is mainly characterized by two “virtuous” people wishing the best for one another. (For Aristotle, virtue refers to some human excellence, intellectual or moral. To have moral virtue, for example, is to have developed one’s character in such a way that one habitually chooses the mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency.) While such relationships are, of course, pleasurable and useful, such aspects are secondary, because these people wish the best for their friends mainly for their friends’ own sake. According to Aristotle, such friendships emanate from good character, and, thus, the individuals involved must be virtuous already, or rather one of them must be virtuous while the other one is characterized by the likely possibility for developing virtue, something the first person will assist in developing. Such relationships are not common, because they require substantial time and effort to develop and nurture.

While Harry has his functional importance to me, the fact is that I also wish him well for his own sake. Harry is a fellow living creature, one that does no harm to other living beings, is one of God’s creations, a manifestation of the Tao, that mysterious force that determines all things and embraces all forms of being, and I want him to live a long and happy life, to be the best dog he can be, according to his own nature, in his own way and time. Moreover, I experience Harry as “wanting” the same for me through his joy-inducing non-verbal modes of communication and life-affirming felt presence. In other words, in some sense, both Harry and I participate in the vital rhythms of Nature, and this involves a degree of wishing the other well, that is, in working together in giving joyful form to our lives together. For me, this is in part a matter of apprehending the interlocking and interdependent relationships between the multiplicity of parts of the universe, in this case my relationship with Harry, and to derive a feeling of connectedness and contentment at viewing myself as organically related to his world and as belonging to the universe as a whole. For Harry, as Freud insinuated about Jo-fi, such “simplicity of a life, free from the almost unbearable conflict of civilization . .. the beauty of an existence complete in itself” instinctively manifests, or at least implies, a similar Nature-animated wisdom. Harry “wants” me to flourish, as I do him, because we are both constituent elements of the same web of interconnectedness and interdependence in the universe, a living, organic universe animated by Nature or, in religious language, by God. In this sense, there is a sacred bond that unites “The Pup” and me.

There have been a few especially noteworthy instances, however, when Harry’s concern for my well-being, more or less for my sake, seemed to be strikingly manifest. I am thinking about the time I had an allergic reaction to some wheat I accidentally ate which lead to an anaphylactic reaction, causing me almost to pass out before I could get to my Epi-pen adrenalin injector. In this moment of panic and horror, I was in the kitchen while my wife was in her office, unable to hear my cries for help. As I lay on the floor, losing consciousness, Harry began to bark furiously, in a manner that was entirely out of character as he is not, in general, a barker, causing my wife to interrupt her session and come to see what was wrong. Indeed, if Harry did not make his atypical barking and commotion, my wife would not have left her session and I would not have been able to get the injection I needed. Clearly, Harry was troubled that something was wrong, or at least unnerving to him, and if he had not sounded the alarm I might have died. It is, of course, easy and tempting to assign human motivation to an animal, including altruistic-like motivation, but such an experience as I had, and there are thousands of similar stories of dogs saving their masters, does make one wonder if there is more going on in a dog’s mind and heart than simply the anthropomorphic interpretations that we, as cynics claim, mistakenly assign to a dog’s human-like, devotional behaviour. Indeed, humourist Josh Billings was probably right when he quipped that dogs are the only things on the planet that love you more than you love yourself (Balcombe, 2006, p. 156).

Harry as a love object: “affection without ambivalence”

One cannot help but remember Picasso’s devoted friend and beloved dog, Lump, who was the painter’s inseparable companion during the later years of his life and the subject of a series of masterpieces in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona (AARP Magazine, 2006, p. 20). Similarly, Mozart rewrote a section from the last movement of his Piano Concerto in G Major to match the beautiful song of his beloved pet starling (Balcombe, 2006, p. 176), and to understand better why Freud believed that we can “love an animal with such extraordinary intensity . .. affection without ambivalence” it is necessary to briefly explore Freud’s views on the psychology of love.

For Freud, all love relations are a “refinding of the object”, roughly analogous to the emotional experience of symbiotic togetherness with the mother or care-giver. What this means in terms of establishing love relations is that, to some extent, the choice of our significant other repeats or calls to mind aspects of our childhood care-givers. Love, says Freud, “consists of new editions of old traits and it repeats infantile reactions” (Freud, 1915a, p. 168). That is, all love is based on infantile templates and is fundamentally a fixation on the parents, what Freud calls transference love. According to Fine (1979, p. 48), transference love and ordinary love differ only in terms of degree. The problem with this, of course, is that if we refind that which is “bad” from our childhood experiences, it usually leads to impoverished and/or destructive intimate relationships. The trick, then, is to refind in the significant other that which is consciously and unconsciously “good” from our childhood care-givers, so that we and our partners have a better chance of being happy in our love relation.

For Freud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE "I'm just wild about Harry!" A psychoanalyst reflects on his relationship with his dog
• CHAPTER TWO Victory through vegetables: self-mastery through a vegetarian way of life
• CHAPTER THREE Long night's journey into day: on tending to a dying mother
• CHAPTER FOUR On reading a sacred book: the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and its significance for psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER FIVE "Guard your tongue": on the psychological meaning of gossip
• CHAPTER SIX The life and soul of good parenting: on wanting, having, and raising children
• CHAPTER SEVEN On feeling altogether miserable: getting help through psychotherapy
• CHAPTER EIGHT All you need is love: on the difficulties of sustaining an adult-to-adult love relationship
• CHAPTER NINE Looking for God in all the right places: on developing an "adult" religious outlook
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX