Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics

Learning to Hear

Donna Orange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367339302
• eBook ISBN: 9781000682342
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear explores the importance of listening, being able to speak, and those who are silenced, from a psychoanalytic perspective. In particular, it focuses on those voices silenced either collectively or individually by trauma, culture, discrimination and persecution, and even by the history of psychoanalysis. Drawing on lessons from philosophy and history as well as clinical vignettes, this book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the role of trauma in creating silence, and the importance for psychoanalysts of learning to hear those silenced voices.

Chapter 1
Silence in phenomenology

Dream or nightmare?

Silence, at best, is ambiguous. Thomas More, in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons (Bolt, 1962), depends on this unclarity to claim that his silence does not have the dangerous meaning that Cromwell claims it does. No mere void, silence may protect, deny, attack, or give consent. One may be reduced to silence, either by humiliation or out of failure to find the right word. One may be struck silent by art, by holiness, by outrageousness. Persons or groups may find themselves silenced through acts of familial, cultural, or political domination, even by violence. Probably every human being has some experiences with silence, with silencing others, or having been silenced. David Kleinberg-Levin provides an evocative list, challenging all explanations:

What comes to mind are these: the heavy silence of one going deep into her grief; the silence of one whom unspeakable horror has rendered speechless; the awkward silence of shame or embarrassment; the aggressive silence of one who is hiding his guilt; the benumbed silence of a deep depression; the silence of an anger which accuses and causes hurt by using silence as a weapon; withholding the kindness of speech; the heroic silence of the political prisoner, who refuses to surrender the names of his comrades even under extremes of torture; the guarded silence of citizens who must endure constant surveillance under the rule of a police state; the silence of timidity; the silence of shyness; the silence of rapt attention; the silence of prayer; the silence of spellbound anticipation; the silence of a joy that needs to be deeply felt.

(p. 100)

No phenomenological account of silence can fail to address this array, if only indirectly.

But what is silence itself? Phenomenology, of course, ever allergic to universalizing definitions and mindful of Wittgenstein’s family resembances, will look to descriptions and contexts. Let us first trace a meandering path through silence in the company of phenomenologists Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas. Finally, we return to the everyday silences of clinical work, to see what phenomenologists might teach working psychoanalysts, and vice versa.

Pregnant silence

Sartre, writing after the war about the resistance, saw silence as heroic act of freedom. Kleinberg-Levin’s list surely has Sartre’s “republic of silence” in mind:

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported EN MASSE. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles.

(Liebling & Guthrie, 1947)

Thus, Sartre teaches us first about the effects of violent silencing. He continues, indicating that keeping silence may also be heroic:

All those among us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who knew any details concerning the Resistance – asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself…. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean-shaven, well-fed, and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every appearance of being in the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance. Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?

(Liebling & Guthrie, 1947, pp. 498–500)

Merleau-Ponty, explicitly addressing Sartre but implicitly speaking to all who have considered silence a mere lack of noise or the opposite of speech, provides another surprising account in his 1952 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a). Silence speaks, in particular through the work of Cezanne or Klee.¹ From depths before, after, under, and between words or music, but intricately involved in them and providing to them layers of meaning, silence can be full, generous, and generative. “We should consider speech before it has been pronounced,” Merleau-Ponty later wrote, “against the ground of silence which precedes it, and without which it would say nothing” (1973, pp. 45–6). When the conductor raises her baton to evoke a “Kyrie” or the expected notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, when a pause follows an unexpected question, silence creates the breath or ground for music, for painting, or for language. At the end of a talk, a story, or a concert, a moment of silence, unpremeditated, may testify to the depth of feeling produced in the audience. When someone has revealed something shockingly painful, perhaps the loss of a child or a terminal prognosis, a reverent, receptive, compassionate silence must often precede any few words that may be possible. Oh, oh, oh, may be all we can say. Silence may accompany and witness.

Merleau-Ponty, however, meant to speak of a silence even more inclusive and originary than what his earlier words have suggested to me. As in Schelling (Schelling & Wirth, 2000) before him, he came in his last years to identify silence with nature itself,² not contrasted with language but as its very underpinning. A language, he wrote, “sometimes remains a long time pregnant with transformations which are to come… even if only in the form of a gap, a need, or a tendency” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 41). In its indirectness, all language is silence. In his recent Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology, Glen Mazis (2016) places silence at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s early account of perception as well as of his mature work on chiasm and intertwining. Silence becomes the invisible source of the visible. Not a literal silence, it occurs in painting, in music, in poetry. Expressive and lyrical, it gives sense to the sensible.

But this silence can be corrupted. We can avoid it, but only at our peril. Long before computers and the internet dominated our daily lives, Merleau-Ponty warned of reducing thinking to data collecting. In the name of science we then test, operate, and transform the data. In this way, he wrote, “we enter into a cultural regimen in which there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or nightmare, from which there is no awakening” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 160). Like Hegel’s night in which all cows are black, we have entered the post-modern era Merleau-Ponty did not live to see, but which he surely described. Our headlong rush into the big-data world comes with a loss of connection to what Merleau-Ponty in his 1952 essay would have called the “voices of silence,” as Mazis (2016) repeatedly points out.

Of course, such concern about the deadening effects of technical rationality have been common among phenomenologists, beginning with Edmund Husserl (1970) and including especially Heidegger, whose critique in its original form unfortunately included a far-too-casual reference to the production of corpses in concentration camps, as if nothing more had been at stake: “Farming is now a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starving of the peasantry, the same as the fabrication of the hydrogen bomb” (Heidegger, 1994 p. 27).³ Merleau-Ponty takes a very different path, linking cybernetics to a loss of the world’s silent and speaking wholeness, but likewise worried that a reductive data-focus would lead to disastrous consequences. He might not be surprised by our climate catastrophe. When we lose the sense of shuddering and shivering as silence comes to speech, we may also lose reverence for our world, for the nature that we are.⁴

Phenomenologist Bernard Dauenhauer has considered silence as a phenomenon (Bindeman, 2017; Dauenhauer, 1980). He first described two types: First, intervening silence that punctuates speech; second, anticipatory and afterwards silences, expectant and haunting. His third type, deep silence, links him to Merleau-Ponty, though he means perhaps something more recognizable, as he speaks of the silence of intimate contact, of liturgical silence, and of the silence-of-the-to-be-said. This last transcends all saying, but he relates it, with Gadamer, to tact and inexpressibility. Dauenhauer provides such examples as Shakespeare’s Richard’s refusal to answer his victims before their execution. Zen gardens in Kyoto provide me another example.

Threatening silences

Phenomenologists have spent less time describing silences that menace, but the disadvantaged of the world know them well. No less pregnant than those Merleau-Ponty described in his many writings about painting, or that Wittgenstein might have included in his “showing” as contrasted with “saying,” these have quite another feel. In the natural world, we speak of “the calm before the storm.” Patients tell their analysts of parents whose silences were worse than beatings or tirades. Border agents refuse to tell children what has happened to the parents from whom they have been violently separated. People historically excluded from being counted as human – whether from skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or whatever – know that silence concerning their stories wipes out their history and threatens their further significance. “Black Lives Matter” protests such menacing silence. Psychoanalysts who fear gratifying may refuse important words of acknowledgment or welcome. Naming can murder, but so can refusal to name.

Frantz Fanon (Fanon 2008; Fanon & Philcox, 2004), psychiatrist and phenomenologist, described in detail the ways that speaking out of silent assumptions shaped the experience of blacks and of those suffering under colonial regimes. He had sat in Merleau-Ponty’s courses, but for him, the silence was dangerous. The view or “gaze” that whites directed toward blacks and Arabs, he understood, infected their experience of themselves. Only by recontextualizing their experience, a revolutionary idea, could colonized or enslaved people gain any ground of their own. Diagnosing them as insane, or as inherently defective, silenced their own voices and made them invisible. Fanon’s psychiatric work (Fanon, Gibson, Damon, Cherki, & Beneduce, 2014; Gibson, 2017) challenged the colonial-ist thinking and practice behind the psychiatric hospital and gave the silenced voices. Later chapters will consider silences and dissociation surrounding chattel slavery and violent settler colonialism. Fanon also spoke into these silences, and into the presumptions making them possible. Phenomenological epoche remains unavailable to help here, as Fanon clearly saw, because the whites cannot perceive their assumptions that would require bracketing.

Trauma-frozen silences

Another step distant from Merleau-Ponty’s silence of “mute radiance,” we find the silences involved in traumatic experience. We can distinguish, perhaps, the silence of anticipation, that of abandonment, and the failure of witness, where silence itself becomes trauma nachträglich [understood backwards]. Assuming an understanding of psychological trauma as shockingly disorganizing experience⁵ that leaves a person disoriented in time and distrustful of self and others, we may be tempted to think of noisy violence, of school shootings, of atomic bombs, of rape. Even though these images are too often accurate, the silence before, during, and after them rarely receives its phenomenological due. If phenomenolo-gist Emmanuel Levinas could write that his entire life had been shaped by the anticipation and memory of the Nazi horror, no wonder he wrote in the postwar years of insomnia, of the noisy and ominous silence of the il y a [there is], always portending violence yet demanding response.

The entire opening of consciousness would already be a turning toward the something over which wakefulness watches. It is necessary, however, to think an opening that is prior to intentionality, a primordial opening that is an impossibility of hiding: one that is an assignation, an impossibility of hiding in oneself; this opening is an insomnia.

(Levinas, 2000, pp. 207–8, emphasis in original)

Like single-sided deaf people who suffer from tinnitus, the traumatized hear rumbling noises reminding them that the worst can happen and tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Permissions
• Introduction: learning to hear
• 1 Silence in phenomenology: dream or nightmare?
• 2 Violence, dissociation, and traumatizing silence
• 3 This is not psychoanalysis!
• 4 The seduction of mystical monisms in the humanistic psychotherapies
• 5 Reading history as an ethical and therapeutic project
• 6 Radical ethics: beyond moderation
• 7 Ethical hearing: demand and enigma
• Afterword
• Index