Psychotherapy Under the Influence of Georges Bataille

From Social Theory to Clinical Practice

William Buse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000364712
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This fascinating book applies social theorist Georges Bataille's revolutionary thinking to psychotherapy, offering clinicians a new and valuable context for practicing therapy.

In adding Bataille's ideas to several different psychotherapeutic modalities, this book makes the notoriously obscure thinker more accessible while testing the validity of his far-reaching work in the treatment room. Through an in-depth examination of several clinical case studies, the book demonstrates how to balance an understanding of the social and historical contexts of participants with a therapeutic approach that offers empathy for individual distress. It also explains how Bataille's innovative approach can be applied to work with couples, groups, institutions, and even one of Freud's classic case studies. Both the content and form of each chapter demonstrate the therapeutic value of a reflexive, critical approach to one's practice and exemplify how to write about it.

Offering an unprecedented opportunity to imagine how Bataille's own interest in psychoanalysis and clinical psychology might have developed, this book will be of interest to both practitioners in the field and scholars of continental philosophy and social theory.

Part I
Psychotherapy with individuals

Chapter 1
Searching for a sign
Listening, looking, touching, way-finding

This is an account of the psychotherapeutic treatment of a sign-maker. The treatment posed a special challenge due to the patient’s idiosyncratic blend of sexual, artistic, and spiritual interests, all of which informed his own notion of the sign/way-finding relationship. Way-finding came to connote more than its usual pedestrian meaning—it came to represent a spiritual quest and a personal exploration of the sacred. Conceptualizing this treatment, first for myself (the clinician), then for the patient, and now for you the reader, led me through a way-finding process of my own. This entailed a reconsideration of the function and meaning of signs before finally locating the pertinent theoretical context for my understanding of the patient. Ultimately, it was in the work of French social theorist Georges Bataille, particularly in his 1930 essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” that I was able to acquire the conceptual framework that properly expressed the sacred as understood by my patient and that informed all aspects of his life, including his treatment. However, first and foremost, the patient was a sign-maker, and so it is with the conventional interpretation and function of signs, and the way-finding they enable, that I begin.

In 1960, Kevin Lynch published his ground-breaking book entitled The Image of the City. For this study of urban design he coined an unusual term: “way-finding.” Way-finding captures the conceptual novelty of Lynch’s discussion; that is, he writes of the city as a landscape to be traversed both physically and in a simultaneously parallel, Kantian way, within one’s mind: “In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the physical world that is held by the individual” (1960, 5). This internal image of the city is “read” by the way-finder to the extent that it is, as Lynch proposes, “legible.”

Legibility, and the clarity and ease of comprehension it enables, is in turn facilitated by the invention or discovery of signs that are positioned throughout our environment. A sign is “an object, quality, or event whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else” (Oxford English Dictionaries online). For the way-finder, according to Lynch, this could consist of a path, an edge, a node, or a boundary. However, following Lynch, if we additionally consider the interior landscape of the way-finder, our experience of signs might also include dreams, symptoms, memories, fears, or wishes (on the subjective contribution to sign interpretation from the field of linguistics see theorists Saussure 1915 and Peirce 1897; the latter especially regarding his “trichotomous interpretation of signs”).

Beyond the information from exterior and interior frames of individual experience lies the world of the supernatural as articulated by myth. This suggests a third mode of way-finding that expands the notion to include such activities as a pilgrimage, a mission, or a quest. This conventionally recognized spiritual dimension is exemplified by Chatwin’s (1987) discussion of Australian Aboriginal “songlines,” or paths through a landscape that are simultaneously past and present, natural and supernatural, and navigated by simultaneous actions of precise ritual singing and walking. As suggested by Chatwin, supernatural phenomena such as the aboriginal mythic Dreamtime stretch the way-finder’s sojourn beyond real time, with the sign serving both as an omen auguring future tidings as well as an enduring if not arcane signature of the ancestors from the past. Aboriginal way-finding is thus the equivalent of worship – an acknowledgement of one’s origins in Dreamtime – as well as an affirmation of the relational order by which the aborigine is oriented (kinship relations include animistic aspects of the flora and fauna of the aboriginal environment).

Notwithstanding this plasticity of the sign – whether appearing in a city landscape, a Freudian dream, or aboriginal Dreamtime – it is generally construed as functionally generative of symbolic meaning and thereby orders our world. This ubiquity of symbolic function, implying as it does “the probable presence or occurrence of something else,” as well as its ordering, synthesizing function, are common qualities that account for the homogeneity of all human signs. So effective, so pervasive are these features that our understanding of ourselves and our world is thoroughly shaped by that which pragmatically fulfills a signifying and synthesizing function; that is, until we encounter an event or object that exceeds or subverts this universal function of the sign. That place where our signs cease to orient and affirm lies in the realm of the sacred.

Perhaps because of its seemingly anomalous social character, cultural anthropologists in particular have approached the sacred with special interest. Geertz (1989, 10) refers to “the peculiar ‘otherness,’ the extraordinary, momentous, ‘set apart’ quality of sacred acts and objects.” Even more pointedly, fellow anthropologist Douglas (1966, 48) famously postulated the criteria for a universal definition of the sacred as being “matter out of place.” I wish to focus presently on only two aspects of this latter definition; that is, the suggestion of disorder and the emphasis on matter. Taken together, these heterogeneous features of the sacred dialectically threaten, necessitate, and ultimately shape the homogeneous world of signs and the activity of way-finding, for, as Douglas (1966) states (equating notions of the sacred with notions of dirt),

Dirt [the sacred], then, is never a unique isolated event. Where there is dirt [the sacred] there is a system. Dirt [the sacred] is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter [signs], in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.

48

Exploring the relationship of these features of the sacred and their subversive potential was the preoccupation of French social theorist Georges Bataille. By way of an introduction, Bataille eludes easy categorization. During his most active period stretching from the late 1920s through the World War II, he was a formative part of Andre Breton’s surrealist movement, published pornographic texts under a pseudonym, earned a living as a medieval librarian, founded both highly influential journals, Documents and Critique, and founded the secret society Acephale, a workshop of sorts through which he sought to enact his ideas. He is best known for both the content and form of his essays on social theory that embody a highly original integration of varied and diverse European intellectual strands including the works of Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Sade, along with contributions from numerous ethnographic, theological, and literary sources. Moreover, Bataille’s focus was on a specific aspect of the European intellectual stream. It was Hegel’s work on the negative, Nietzsche’s exploration of nihilism, as well as Freud’s notion of the death instinct that seemed to have most affected him. His work has been acknowledged as a prominent influence by later French intellectuals Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida among others and, in part due to the highly idiosyncratic form and critical focus of his work, has often been dubbed the precursor to post-structuralism.

While certainly never intended for use in the clinic, this author has found Bataille’s ideas very helpful as a non-reductive means of understanding and empathizing with individuals experiencing psychological states very different from his own. Specifically, Bataille sought to reinstate the central importance of expenditure (depense), waste, excess, and base materialism; all, he argued, once among the core components of a “general economy” in pre-modern human life. In so doing, he was offering a critical, remedial response to the limited focus based on scarcity and accumulation that is associated with the “restricted economy” of global capitalism.

In our contemporary world, production and subsistence are the sine qua non activities by which all other human endeavors are measured. Bataille contested this view as partial, incomplete, and ultimately dehumanizing. Pointing to numerous case studies ranging from ancient history to current annals of criminal and deviant behavior, he sought to theorize those ubiquitous and enduring human activities that cannot be rationalized as productive and offer no functional or utilitarian value, such as sacrifice, festival, eroticism, war, and self-mutilation. His project may be seen as having far-reaching implications for psychology to the extent that, post-Enlightenment, all the positivist sciences fall under the pervasive influence of the ethos characterizing a restricted economy. Hence, an unrestricted psychology would rightly be concerned with the micro elements of human experience and behavior that are stigmatized and suppressed within the macro value structure associated with the restricted economy of contemporary society.

In the following case example, the patient developed his own novel and highly personal notion of the sacred that was simultaneously spiritual, sexual, and aesthetically determined, and even materially actualized in his everyday life. This required an inquiring, supportive response unfettered by the limits of this clinician’s own values. I aspired to an open, receptive stance by consulting Bataille’s work, beginning with the writings and discussions of the College of Sociology, an intellectual discussion group Bataille founded that met from 1937 to 1939 in Paris and whose participants included Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alexandre Kojeve, and Walter Benjamin, among others (see Hollier 1988). A central mission of the College was the development of a “Sacred Sociology, implying the study of all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear” (1988a, 5). Reformulating the sacred as inherently exuding the threat of disorder, Bataille (1988b, 122) stated, “the integrity of human existence is put at stake each time sacred things are originally produced.” Bataille’s described this sacred disorder as “heterogeneous” and defined it in relation to the “homogeneity” of social order:

In summary, compared to everyday life, heterogeneous existence can be represented as something other, as incommensurate … a force that disrupts the regular course of things … The very term heterogeneous indicates that it concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate … the heterogeneous world is largely comprised of the sacred world … Beyond the properly sacred things that constitute the common realm of religion and magic, the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure. This consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste … Included are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words, or acts having an erotic value; [as well as] the violent and excessive nature of a decomposing body … The reality of heterogeneous elements is not of the same order as that of homogeneous elements. Homogeneous reality presents itself with the abstract and neutral aspect of strictly defined and identified objects. Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock. It presents itself as a charge, as a value.

1991b (140–143, author’s emphases)

Bataille’s (1991a) reformulation of the sacred with regard to materiality is specifically developed toward the goal of re-assimilating, or at least recognizing as significant, the censored, discarded, deviant, excessive, or wasteful aspects of modern life and hence his discussion of the affinity between what he terms “base materialism” and Gnosticism. This is not a dead materialism on which is built a hierarchy, decidedly Christian, which relies on a disparagement of all that is profane and culminates in the lofty equation of consciousness with an elite realization of the sacred through enlightenment. As with Douglas’s (1966) aforementioned characterization of the sacred as matter out of place, Bataille also equates the sacred with dirt or, in his words “base matter,” and emphasizes the importance of the dialectical relationship between heterogeneous disorder and homogeneous order:

Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations. But the psychological process brought to light by Gnosticism had the same impact: it was a question of disconcerting the human spirit and idealism before something base, to the extent t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Psychotherapy with individuals
• Part II Psychotherapy with couples
• Part III Psychotherapy with groups
• Part IV Psychotherapy with communities
• Part V The end(s) of psychotherapy
• Pandemic postscript: screened out
• Index