The Psychoanalytic Zero

A Decolonizing Study of Therapeutic Dialogues

Koichi Togashi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367859350
• eBook ISBN: 9781000028447
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2020 Gradiva Award

The Psychoanalytic Zero: A Decolonizing Study of Therapeutic Dialogues is written from the unique perspective of a Western-trained Asian psychoanalyst and applies principles of Eastern philosophy to understand the psychoanalytic relationship, psychoanalytic processes, and their uses—and limitations—for alleviating human suffering.

Bringing a unique Eastern perspective to a previously Western-dominated discipline and framed within the current relational and ethical trends in psychoanalysis, the book enables readers to develop a language for understanding an Eastern ethical viewpoint and explore how this language can change our awareness of psychoanalytic practice and human suffering. Chapters are devoted to the Eastern concepts of nothingness, emptiness, surrender, sincerity, silence and narrative, and issues including existential "guilt of being," trauma, contingency, informed consent, the sense of being human, and uncertainty. Discussions are illustrated and illuminated through vivid recreations and careful elaboration of therapeutic case studies with traumatized patients. The studies demonstrate the process by which patients regain a sense of being human. This enriched perspective will, it is hoped, help the analyst treat traumatized patients who are unable to relate to others, and who do not experience themselves as being human.

The Psychoanalytic Zero will enrich an analyst's sensitivity to the appearance of the moment without context—the psychoanalytic zero—which opens infinite opportunities for continued growth in a psychoanalytic relationship. It will be of great appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in self-psychological, intersubjective, and relational theories.

PART I

Emptiness and the psychoanalytic zero

1

Surrender and silence

The problem of narrative and non-narrative in psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic work most often occurs through narrative. The patient describes his or her experience in narrative form, attempting to create order out of chaos (Murray, 2003) and using narrative as an organizing principle (Sarbin, 1986). The analyst listens to the narrative and pieces together scraps of information of all sorts from the patient’s account of his or her daily life. The patient and analyst observe and attach meaning to these scraps, and then create stories with spatially structured and temporally consistent plots. I would like to suggest, however, that the analyst’s preoccupation with theoretical models and formulation of a psychoanalytic narrative can be limiting as well as liberating. By examining the uses of surrender, Nature, and emptiness in relation to narrative, I believe we can expand the possibilities in the psychoanalytic dyad.

Surrender, East and West

Emmanuel Ghent’s (1990) innovative and pioneering idea of “surrender” is widely accepted and praised by contemporary psychoanalysts, especially in the intersubjective and relational schools. By distinguishing “surrender” from “submission,” Ghent makes clear that surrender need not imply “defeat” or “giving in to the other,” but may be “a quality of liberation and ‘letting-go’” (p.118). While submission is a relational form in which a submissive individual is subjected to a dominant other, and the submissive’s identity, sense of self, and sense of wholeness atrophy, surrender involves the “discovery of one’s identity, one’s sense of self, one’s sense of wholeness, even one’s sense of unity with other living beings” (p. 111). Ghent emphasizes that in Eastern philosophies, the term “surrender” is associated with transcendence and liberation.

Despite some differences of emphasis, contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers (Aron, 2005; Benjamin, 2004, 2007, 2018; Orange, 2008, 2011; Togashi, 2017c, 2017g; Knoblauch, 2018) all advance the view that surrender plays an important role in the psychoanalytic process, that it implies freedom from any interest to control or dominate, as well as a devotion to human relationships, and allows for creativity and development to unfold in the intersubjective field. They emphasize that surrender is often necessary to break an impasse or repetitive loop in the therapeutic process.

Benjamin (2004, 2007, 2018) emphasizes that surrender need not be to someone, in a one-way fashion, but may be to a space of thirdness. She maintains that “the Third” is the position from which a patient and analyst can recognize each other as having a shared subject yet experience each other as individual minds. She writes that “the Third refers to the position constituted through holding the tension of recognition between sameness and difference, taking the other to be a separate but equivalent center of initiative and consciousness with whom nonetheless feelings and intentions can be shared” (Benjamin, 2018, p.4). When an analytic relationship gets caught in a “complementary” dynamic (Benjamin, 1990), in which each partner feels that his or her perspective is the only right one, an analyst’s (and a patient’s) surrendering to the Third helps them achieve mutual recognition, the ability to let go of a certain part of the self and take in the other’s perspective.

Orange (2011) understands Ghent’s surrender as resembling Levinasian passivity or receptivity. In her “hermeneutics of trust” (Orange, 2011), she describes the psychoanalytic process as radically asymmetrical and an analyst as primarily a respondent to the patients’ suffering. For Orange, this ethical response precedes an analyst’s recognition of her own subjectivity or willingness. She argues that an analyst cannot resist feeling concern and responding once she has seen the suffering face of her patient, and casts herself into infinite responsibility to him. In this ethic, an analyst’s surrendering to the patient is no longer agentic or chosen. For Orange, unlike Benjamin (2007, 2018), surrender is not to the field or a position, but to the Other, or the call for responsibility from the Other. This ethical response precedes an analyst’s recognition of her own subjectivity or willingness.

Although these are useful insights—courageous efforts to adapt Ghent’s ideas to contemporary psychoanalysis—Benjamin and Orange’s conceptions of surrender are still grounded in a Western perspective. Their models view analytic fields as organized between two subjectivities, even when they assume the third, or ethical, field in which both participants escape from the subject-other distinction. Ghent’s innovative contribution, however, draws on his understanding of Buddhism and his special interest in Eastern philosophies. He sees the concept of surrender in relation to “‘emptiness,’ the beneficent state of being that is at the center of the Tao [Dao]” (Ghent, 1990, p.113; emphasis added), and adds that surrender can be expressed in many forms depending on culture Ghent (1990) states:

My hunch is that there is something like a universal need, wish or longing for what I am calling surrender and that it assumes many forms. In some societies there are culturally sanctioned occasions for its realization in the form of ecstatic rituals and healing trances. In other societies, perhaps most notably in Japan where the psychology of amae is so central to one’s way of being, something akin to surrender is experienced as almost universally desired and desirable. In many people in our own culture the wish for surrender remains buried; in some it is expressed in creative and productive ways, and in others its derivatives appear in pathological form, deflected away from normal channels by that most unwelcome price-tag: dread. I suspect further that this dread is something that we have encountered in other contexts and have conceptualized as annihilation anxiety, dread of dissolution, ego fragmentation and so on.

(Ghent, 1990, p.114)

For Ghent, surrender is transcendence of the fear of death or annihilation. In the transcendence of this fear, one commits him or herself to an experience which could shatter his or her belief system and threaten a sense of being. It is only in the transcendence of the painful contemplation of non-existence, Ghent (1990) states, that one can reach radical emptiness in one’s personal or relational development and obtain a new sense of unity or relief in the presence of other living beings. He emphasizes that surrender is neither to a person nor a space, nor ethical responses nor actions. He says that “one cannot choose to surrender. …One can provide facilitative conditions for surrender but cannot make it happen” (Ghent, 1990, p.109).

Taoism or Daoism, the ideological background of Ghent’s concept of surrender, is “an ancient legacy of the East Asian culture” (Ai, 2006, p.149). It is more a cosmology than a religion or psychology. It presupposes neither the existence of an afterlife nor a benevolent divinity but, instead, is premised on the idea of an unintentional principle of Nature that precedes and underlies all of reality. Tao, which refers to “the way” or “universal principle” in Chinese tradition, implies this ultimate, indefinable principle underlying all movements (Møllgaard, 2007); a fundamental dynamic principle that also exists within all things. The founder of Taoism, Lao Zi, states in the first chapter of his scripture, The Tao Te Ching:

Chapter 1 THE EMBODIMENT OF TAO

Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.

Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.

Without words, the Tao can be experienced,

and without a name, it can be known.

To conduct one’s life according to the Tao,

is to conduct one’s life without regrets;

to realize that potential within oneself

which is of benefit to all.

Though words or names are not required

to live one’s life this way,

to describe it, words and names are used,

that we might better clarify

the way of which we speak,

without confusing it with other ways

in which an individual might choose to live.

Through knowledge, intellectual thought and words,

the manifestations of the Tao are known,

but without such intellectual intent

we might experience the Tao itself.

Both knowledge and experience are real,

but reality has many forms,

which seem to cause complexity.

By using the means appropriate,

we extend ourselves beyond

the barriers of such complexity,

and so experience the Tao.

(Translated by Rosenthal, from National Taiwan University Library, 2018)

Lao Zi emphasizes that Tao is the indefinable and nameless universe infinitely changing and moving. In our “human” world, which has a need for names, Tao is divided and dichotomies emerge. “Not big” means “small,” “not ugly” means “beautiful,” and so on. Such is the human condition, the artificial “world that results in the neglect of the world qua world” (Møllgaard, 2007, p.17). But in the indefinable and nameless universe, there are no dichotomies, and all contradictions coexist. “Not poor” does not mean wealthy, “not good” does not mean “bad.” In this universe, presence is absence and absence is presence. If presence disappears, absence does not take its place, but also disappears. Lao Zi emphasizes this basic principle of Nature and recommends that people surrender themselves to it. He states:

Chapter 5 WITHOUT INTENTION

Nature acts without intent,

so cannot be described

as acting with benevolence,

nor malevolence to any thing.

In this respect, the Tao is just the same,

though in reality it should be said

that nature follows the rule of Tao.

Therefore, even when he seems to act

in manner kind or benevolent,

the sage is not acting with such intent,

for in conscious matters such as these,

he is amoral and indifferent.

The sage retains tranquility,

and is not by speech or thought disturbed,

and even less by action which is contrived.

His actions are spontaneous,

as are his deeds towards his fellow men.

By this means he is empty of desire,

and his energy is not drained from him.

(Translated by Rosenthal, from National Taiwan University Library, 2018)

Lao Zi’s poetic description suggests that in the original idea of Taoism, surrender is neither to the third place between two entities nor to the ethical response to the other. Instead, surrender is to Nature, the nameless universe, or what Ghent calls emptiness.

For Ghent, what we surrender tois not the painful and meaningless emptiness people may imagine and, in order to proceed, the reader is asked to put aside some assumptions derived from standard psychoanalytic literature and practice, and encounter what is perhaps a very different and unfamiliar conception of emptiness. Taoism’s Nature, or Ghent’s emptiness is the moment without context, in which neither a sense of being, a living experience, nor a meeting of the other has yet emerged. It is the moment that is not defined by personal will or agency, or determined by human thought or artificial control. To borrow a convenient metaphor from physics, it is a black hole, to which everything is reduced and from which everything comes.

As an example of his notion of surrender, which aligns with an “Eastern sensibility,” Ghent (1990) refers to Zen satori. Zen Buddhism derives from a different historical background than Taoism, yet satori—awareness of the essence of the universe—is a closely related concept. The Heart Sutra, one of the central scriptures of Zen Buddhism, preaches that the essence of the universe is absolute emptiness, as well as its negation, encapsulated in the famous phrase, “Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form.” This implies that all being in the universe is insubstantial and intangible. Also implied in this phrase is the suspension of all artificial categorizations, such as you/me, subject/object, and inside/outside.

Many Eastern philosophers (Watsuji, 1952; Nishida, 1958; Sagara, 1980, 1998b; Abe & Heine, 1992; Møllgaard, 2007) maintain that the concept of emptiness has strongly influenced many fields of East Asian culture and is inherent in people’s thoughts and habits. In this conception, all beings and entities in this world are seen as a part of an indefinable Nature, and there are no self/other differences. It should be noted that this is not like the “we-self” quality that has been discussed by some Western theorists (Moore, 1983; Roland, 1996). There are not even differences between the individual and “we.”

How is the therapeutic dyad altered in the face of this absolute emptiness? It is suggested that the therapist (and often the patient) go through a process of surrendering themselves. But how is this process of surrender to be understood?

Psychoanalysis often uses narrative to make sense of the therapeutic process (Searles, 1965), to put the ineffable into words and to find a way of telling stories that are waiting to be heard (Freeman, 2002, 2012; Frie, 2012a, 2016). A personal experience is organized through narration of a story. This personal experience is always already embedded in relational, cultural, and historical contexts, which can include elements that the narrator is not even aware of. Contemporary relational psychoanalytic and narrative thinkers (Cushman 1995, 2011; Freeman, 2002, 2012; Frie, 2012a, 2016) no longer limit narrative to the spoken revelation of personal stories and memories but conceptualize it to include untold and unthought stories as well. These narrative perspectives implicitly include elements that are closely related to surrender and emptiness.

Freeman (2012) advocates the idea of

the narrative unconscious in reference to those culturally rooted aspects of one’s history that have not yet become part of one’s story. They are hidden, not so much in the sense of that which has been buried through the forceful work of repression as that which remains unthought and is, therefore, not yet a part of the story I can tell.

(Freeman, 2012, p. 362)

These contributions expand the idea of narrative, but do not allow for the idea of emptiness in itself; they still conceptualize what is unspoken as an expression of something that has been disavowed, unformulated, or remains unorganized. Similarly, for relational theorists, dissociation presupposes that there is something that is sequestered (Bromberg, 2009), and unformulated experience presupposes that there is something to be formulated (Stern, 2010). Neither notion includes the existence of emptiness as Eastern philosophy characterizes it. It may be that the “surrender to emptiness” lies outside the use of narrative in relational psychoanalysis; in other words, we have to ask if it is always the case that there are stories, told or untold, in the analytic dialogue, or can we be open to our patient’s accounts without formulating stories about it? Might the analyst’s preoccupation with formulating a narrative, in fact, limit his or her vision? In posing this question, my aim is not to displace an existing concept of surrender. Rather, I want employ my cultural background to expand the discussion with an alternative conception that may be unfamiliar to Western trained psychoanalysts—and I do not exclude myself, because my psychoanalytic training was also in the West.

Non-narrative in psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has paid attention to a patient’s action of not narrating. Through the idea of resistance, Freud (1896) provides a procedure to work through a patient’s failure or inability to talk fully about his or her subjective experience. This is based on the premise that there are unarticulated psychic processes in a patient’s mind. Freud’s (1900–01) idea of the unconscious refers to a topographical space in the mind which consists of what is not narrated and what is not organized enough to be narrated.

Using this model, Freud understood an analyst’s job to be the discovery of truth in two senses. Freud (Breuer & Freud, 1893) originally saw psychoanalytic practice as a way to find a “true event” in the past that was missing from a patient’s memory. Later, he came to believe that the recovered memory was not necessarily of a real event (Freud, 1925b) and saw analysis a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figure
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Emptiness and the psychoanalytic zero
• PART II: Human suffering and the experience of being human
• Epilogue
• References
• Index