Nietzsche and Psychotherapy

Manu Bazzano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429787942
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Drawing on over a century of international Nietzschean scholarship, this groundbreaking book discusses some of the unexplored psychological reaches of Nietzsche's thought, as well as their implications for psychotherapeutic practice.

Nietzsche's philosophy anticipated some of the most innovative cultural movements of the last century, from expressionism and surrealism to psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology and phenomenology. But his work on psychology often remains discarded, despite its many insights. Addressing this oversight, and in an age of managerialism and evidence-based practice, this book helps to redefine psychotherapy as an experiment that explores the limits and intricacies of human experience. It builds the foundations for a differentialist psychology: a life-affirming project that can deal squarely with the challenges, joys and sorrows of being human.

Nietzsche and Psychotherapy will be of great interest to researchers interested in the relationship between psychotherapy and philosophy, Nietzschean scholars, as well as to clinicians grappling with the challenges of working in the so-called "post-truth" age.

1

“You get burned either way”

Blinkered

On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche went out of his lodging house in Via Carlo Alberto, n. 6, in Turin, Italy, where for the last eight months he had been renting a room in the large house of the Fino family. Within the urbane surroundings of this elegant, Baroque city, the loveless, stateless writer had found solace and, as he wrote in a letter to his mother, a “courage for life … waxing again” (Chamberlain, 1996, p. 21). He had found a quiet space to think and, with access to the family piano, a chance to compose and extemporize. Walking along the nearby Via Po that morning, he noticed that outside the university gates a cab driver was having difficulties with his wilful horse. The horse did not want to move, so at one point the driver lost his patience and whipped the horse. Nietzsche promptly stepped in, snatched the whip from the man’s hands and threw his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing uncontrollably. He slumped to the floor and was nearly arrested for disrupting the peace.

This was the beginning of Nietzsche’s mental collapse – a place of no return. He had exhibited eccentric behaviour in the few weeks and months before the event, but it is this occurrence – tragic and affecting – that lingers in the collective imagination to this day, inspiring artists, writers and also film directors; for example, Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (Tarr, 2012) is an unrelenting and deeply affecting journey into inevitable darkness, shot in a desolate nowhere-land where God has long left the scene.

It may be worth pausing a moment longer on this film, for it presents us with an atmosphere that responds to important aspects of Nietzsche’s thought scattered in his oeuvre up until book IV of his Gay Science, that is to say, just before, around 1881, his ecstatic affirmation of becoming, before the courageous declaration of amor fati, or love of destiny. Tarr’s is a Dostoyevskian Nietzsche, and it may be that Dostoyevsky played an indirect role in Nietzsche’s collapse in Turin. In Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky, 1866/2003), Raskolnikov dreams that he is a child, walking with his father in a small town, when they come across a noisy and inebriated crowd surrounding an old horse who cannot pull the heavy cartload he is harnessed to. The owner is cruelly beating the horse, sometimes across the eyes and muzzle. A few people even climb into the cart to make it heavier and when someone protests, the owner shouts back that the horse is his property and that he can do what he likes. Raskolnikov, a child in the dream, begs him in his childish voice to stop, and as he runs towards the horse he catches a lash from the whip. He then flings his arms around the wounded muzzle and kisses the horse’s eyes, crying out through the tears for the cruelty to stop. As his father gets hold of him and takes him away, Raskolnikov wakes up in a cold sweat.

Some moments in life become decisive in giving us, in condensed and poetic form (the German word Dichtung means both), a hint of the emblematic sense of our existence, or at least of one of the stages we are living through. It is very likely that Nietzsche, who loved Dostoyevsky’s writings, had read the above passage and that it lay dormant somewhere in his mind.

I cannot resist the temptation to read his humane, impulsive decision on that cold January morning as a tragic signal of how he would have wanted to be remembered. He had repeatedly stated in his writings that he had no part in the tradition of sensible philosophers, dull scholars, and dispensers of wisdom within whose folds many later tried hard to embalm him. Instead, a spontaneous feeling of pity for a mistreated animal, paired to some vital autobiographical yearning made him rush in, in such a way that “the shock of willing his own life to the last conscious moment, that momentary exciting flush of power, precipitated his collapse” (Chamberlain, 1996, p. 209).

It is all the more poignant that of all sentient beings a horse should be part of Nietzsche’s last conscious act. These sensitive, powerful animals look at the world through the “seemingly limitless gaze of their large, dark eyes” (Klinkenborg, 2018, p. 46), with a mind that, some say (Hyland, 1990), never adjusts to history and modern thinking, but belongs instead to a perpetual present. Horses were sacrificed on a massive scale during two World Wars; while carrying heavy machinery, their attentive gaze reflected like a mirror the terror and devastation of the battlefield. Already by the end of World War I,

the horse at war was no longer an embodiment of “terrifying power”, as it was in the days of mounted cavalry. It was a drudge, a labourer in a dire landscape. The terror it experienced was simply gratuitous, a change for the worse in working conditions.

(Klinkenborg, 2018, p. 46)

During World War II, horses were pulling heavy machinery through snow and mud, and a change for the worse happened in the overall way they were perceived. That time signalled what Ulrich Raulff (2018) calls the end of the centaurian pact, a dramatic shift that altered irreversibly the relationship between humans and horses. To speak of ‘centaurian’ and centaurs gestures towards a symbiosis between human and animal that is customarily the stuff of ancient myth and, less interestingly, of New Age lore. But a centaur, a half-human, half-horse creature, is a clumsy being, Xenophon tells us in his Cyropedia through the mouth of Chrysanthas (Xenophon, 2012). It is certainly no substitute for a horse and a rider, especially when the latter is humbly attuned to the docile and invincible nature of the former, to the tremendous sensitivity and intelligence of the animal. And it is this link, neither symbiotic nor severed, but signalling instead a continuum between animal and human, that is of interest here. The human rider is neither the crown of creation nor is she the linear descendant of the Darwinian ape. She is “as alert and attentive as the horse is, as present in the world” (Klinkenborg, 2018, p. 47). This vital link between animal and human was lost in the machine horse of the nineteenth century, as it was in the way the horse had been later employed, until the mid 1950s, in agriculture. Humans had no time for this animal’s attentive mind, instinct and intelligence. One thing only was appreciated: its muscular power. To put blinkers on a horse is to restrict its range of attention.

Reducing a living organism to a machine is also what we humans are doing to ourselves. Has psychotherapy reached a similar point? By accepting a neopositivist view of the human organism as unruly and unpredictable, it may have narrowed its range and scope to the drudgery of quantifiable, measurable data. Only by turning the human into a machine can the human be understood, accepted and financed by State and government, and made to serve forces of control and coercion instead of forces of freedom and experimentation. In a scenario where all theoretical orientations supinely accept the managerialism and standardization of an art and a science once designed to explore the inherent complexity of human experiencing, rushing in to snatch the whip in defence of the horse and embrace the animal in a desperate expression of compassion is an act of necessary madness.

Compassion in the face of suffering was also one of the main feelings behind a dream that my client Joanna brought to one of our sessions one winter evening. It had left her bewildered, she said, partly because it was a recurring dream – with one important variation.

In the dream, she is driving a carriage with six horses along a dusty, windy road. Alive with excitement, she notices cars on the road, but not a single person. She knows that the brakes – a square, sticky metal thing – don’t work, and that this can be dangerous. At some point, overcome by worry and wanting to avoid a crash, she decides to ‘take control’ and slams the brakes down. This provokes a terrible accident. The carriage leaps forward, there is blood everywhere; the horses are wounded. She is horrified and wakes up with an awful feeling that lingers after the dream. She feels deep sadness for the poor horses that were so hurt, perhaps mortally wounded, and also feels regret for having caused the accident.

She explained that in past versions of the same dream there were no horses; she was driving a car instead. In the conversation that followed – dreaming the dream onwards – a few things came up. It was her desire to take control that caused the accident. Could greater trust in the instinctual, animal life be a better option? What would that mean? I know this well, she said: it’s a kind of relinquishment. She described – movingly, I thought – going on a horse up a mountain trail, daydreaming, relaxed yet fully present, horse and rider enjoying each other in the stillness and beauty of the place. We dreamt on: there is a danger that comes (paradoxically?) with exerting control. Instead, choosing to let go and gaining … what? mastery? skill? artistry? She looked for the right word to express both relinquishment of the tight grip on experiencing and that feeling of direction and purpose that is gained when one can afford faith in the intelligence of the body, in the intelligence of feeling and emotions.

Against Socratism

What is at the origins of the managerialism and standardization to which psychotherapy is subjected in our day and age? And what are these two overriding tendencies trying to tackle or avoid? At this point in our investigation, these key questions can only be addressed obliquely.

Before ushering in this chapter’s central topic – the link between Nietzsche’s early writings on Greek tragedy and the dimension of affect in therapy – it will be useful to consider one of the most pervasive oppositions to the above: Socratism. One important aspect of Socratism is what has come to be known as Socratic questioning. This has become popular in psychotherapy over the last two decades, especially among practitioners working from cognitive-behavioural and Adlerian perspectives (e.g. Padesky, 1993; Millar, 2015, among others). Even when reduced to interviewing techniques, the underlying assumption behind Socrates’ way of questioning is maieutics or midwifery. Socrates’ method went on to become the founding and widely accepted principle of education (from educere = to lead out or draw out) as we know it. According to this view, the ‘soul’ comes into the world having forgotten all it knew. The wealth of knowledge and wisdom it had gathered from time immemorial is integral, ingrained – so goes the story – and can be drawn out by a skilful ‘midwife’, whose task is to help the soul remember and reassemble its primary sense of discernment. There is, admittedly, a little more to the Socratic method than this Platonist perspective would allow. Equally central to it, as we shall see, is agon or conflict, which in Socrates’ case comes with generous helpings of dialectical reasoning.

The assumption has long been that dialectical reasoning is by nature dialogic – an interpretive error that bore consequences in the development of the art of psychotherapy. But Socrates’ dialectical reasoning, the to and fro in his way of questioning, is not, properly speaking, dialogical. Or: it is dialogical only in the predominant meaning of the term, i.e. dialectical. In other words, Socratic dialogue may use dialectics, but there is no real encounter taking place. The interviewer asks questions in order to draw out (educere) an allegedly pre-existing truth from the interviewee. The therapist/interviewer is the one who knows best, even when she might be paying lip service to the now fashionable theoretical stance of ‘not-knowing’.

Secondly, dialectical reasoning is an essential part of what can be identified as a reactive force. In dialectical reasoning, the natural exuberance of the life force is already waning and nearly spent. Socrates’ shrewd, articulate questioning aims at justifying life, whereas active forces celebrate it. There are ways of conceiving the therapeutic encounter outside dialectical reasoning, ways that are refreshingly non-dialectical. The non-dialectical domain has been referred to as the domain of accident (Bazzano, 2012a; Webb, 2018). This idea is already latent in the writings of Buber (2004) himself, the champion of the Philosophy of the Meeting, and is radically different from the popular misconception that imagines the I-Thou encounter as something that two people can manufacture once the right conditions are created.

Against dialectical reasoning and even, I would add, against the more appealing notion of encounter, Nietzsche’s early writings (1872/2000, 1872/2006b) point towards a quality of meeting that is more akin to what I have variously described as poetry (Bazzano, 2012a) as well as grace (Bazzano, 2018a) – drawing, respectively on the primacy of aesthetics and of immanent spirituality. In Nietzsche’s terms, this equals a threefold re-affirmation: (a) of the tragic in human life; (b) of ancient Greek drama as representational model; and (c) of Dionysus as the presiding (affirmative/affirming) god. The difficult task for a philosophical/psychotherapeutic practice consists in retrieving this (un)holy trinity from the concerted onslaught at the hands of reactive forces.

a Affirmation of the tragic means, at its basic level, developing the ability to embrace the joys and sorrows of existence. This is the beginning of a gradual process of leaving behind the human for the overhuman, which, in this particular context, means recognizing the indissoluble link between the self and the world, and gradually coming to the great affirmation, what Nietzsche calls, improving on Spinoza’s amor Dei (love of God), amor fati (love of destiny).

b Affirmation of tragedy, as in the ancient dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, invites ‘mystical participation’. The intensity set free by the action on the stage viscerally unifies actors and spectators. It becomes direct expression of the god who presides over the event and to whom the dramas are dedicated: Dionysus.

c Dionysus is an elusive, ambivalent incarnation of immanence, reminding us that transformation – in art, in life, as in therapy – happens through a process of dismemberment, fragmentation (for instance of the atomistic self) and an opening to the sublime ordinariness of being in the world.

Retrieving even only a glimpse or taste of the tragic spirit is almost impossible. The tragic has died so many deaths that it is now almost vanished from the world and survives in everyday language only as reference to what is extremely distressing or sad. It suffered three separate, lethal blows at the hands of, respectively, Socratism, Christianity, and (Hegelian) dialectics. These three cultural phenomena together represent the quintessence of reactivity or, in Nietzsche’s parlance, decadence, i.e., an attitude of life denigration. However, finding possible openings within each of these three cultural tendencies is far more preferable to either dreaming up an implausible return to the Arcadia of pre-Socratic ‘Being’ as well as to taking on the attractive, cosy stance of the principled outsider. Furthermore, active engagement with each of these life-denying stances will allow us to know these dominant narratives intimately, so as to subvert them more effectively. Let us look at each of them separately.

a In the case of Socratism, the task is to bypass the Platonism of maieutics and give greater emphasis to the element of agon already present in Socratic dialogue. This implies decentring power away from the philosopher/midwife and placing the heart of education in exteriority, i.e. in the genuine disorientation and truer learning that comes with being exposed to otherness. For this task – a political one before being psychological – the radical ethics of hospitality championed by Levinas (1961), Derrida (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000) and Jankélévitch (2005) offer inspiring developments to the deconstruction of morality boldly initiated by Nietzsche.

b In the case of Christianity, the death of God can be reformulated as the end of transcendence and affirmation in its place of immanent spirituality. This entails that for self-proclaimed atheists the field of perception is potentially widened and can reclaim experiences conventionally precluded to the non-religious. This would make some of us more able to work more effectively with clients who bring the numinous dimension into the therapy room. It also opens one’s exploration to subversive readings of Christianity and immanent theology (e.g. Yoder, 1994; Barber, 2014).

c Hegelian dialectics, representing modernity’s proverbial last straw that breaks the tragic spirit, can also be reversed in favour of the tragic. It is true, for example, that from a Nietzsche-inspired perspective, power is in Hegel’s master/servant dialectic still only representational, rather than being immediate or ‘true’ power. Crucial to Hegel is Anerkennung (recognition/acknowledgement). In Nietzsche’s terms, this implies that in order to fully accept myself, I first need recognition from others. But this is already an improvement from the current cult of the relationship in which therapy is currently enmeshed, for inherent in Hegel’s Anerkennung is the reality of conflict, essential in shaping an understanding of self and kinship alongside love and kinship. It is from the active acceptance of the inescapable presence of conflict in huma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. “You get burned either way”
• 2. Love and the uncontested life
• 3. Fables of identity
• 4. Against humanism
• 5. Homo natura
• 6. Poison and remedy
• 7. Ambiguous legacies
• 8. Tears of joy
• References
• Index