Psychoanalysis on the Verge of Language

Clinical Cases on the Edge

Dana Amir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000436341
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book examines the importance of language and writing in psychoanalytic theory and practice, offering an understanding of how language works can give a deeper insight into the psyche both in clinical practice and everyday life.

Bringing together psychoanalytic insights that hinge on the language of "difficult cases", this collection also includes contributions dedicated to meta-study of psychoanalytic writing. The first chapter shows how music includes tonal regions that deploy existing rules and syntax, alongside atonal ones dominated by caesuras, pauses, and tensions. The second chapter discusses the malignant ambiguity of revealing and concealing typical of incestuous situations, pinpointing how the ambiguous language of incest "deceives by means of the truth,". The third chapter brings in Virginia Woolf's character Orlando in order to illustrate two types of gender crossing. Distinctions defined by the linguist Roman Jakobson help in the fourth chapter to offer an integrative description of obsessive-compulsive phenomenon as an interaction between metaphoric and metonymic dimensions, as well as with a third, psychotic dimension. The fifth chapter focuses on what is called the "screen confessions" typical of the perpetrator's language. George Orwell's "newspeak" is used here to decipher the specific means by which the perpetrator turns his or her "inner witness" into a blind one. The final chapter uses Roland Barthes' concepts of "studium" and "punctum" to discuss the limits of psychoanalytic writing. As a whole, this book sets the psychoanalytic importance of language in a wider understanding of how language helps to shape and even create internal as well as the external world.

Drawing on insights from psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as from linguistics and cultural theory, this book will be invaluable for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and bibliotherapists, as well as anyone interested in how language forms our reality.

Chapter 1

Tonality and atonality in the psychic space

DOI: 10.4324/9781003194071-1

The term tonality, or tonal harmony, covers most of the music composed in Europe from the mid-17th century until the end of the 19th, as well as the major part of popular western music from the 20th century onwards. Simply put, tonal music is harmonious music, following the laws of harmony and obeying the expectations of the western ear (Xenakis, 1992; Zimmerman, 2002). Atonality,¹ by contrast, denotes music written anytime from the early 20th century, which does not refer to a tonal center. This music does not conform to the typical tonal hierarchy of western classical music, and—naturally—does not meet the expectations of the western ear: it is not harmonious, its movements are not predictable, and it operates outside the familiar musical rules and scales.

Tonality and atonality may be rephrased as “syntax” and “anti-syntax”. If tonality is a condition in which the musical text obeys the known syntactic rules and hence, alongside the specific emotional range it institutes, also inspires a sense of familiarity and orientation—atonality challenges the familiar rules, creating an alien, uncanny environment in which the listener’s ear finds it hard to orient itself. If tonality is grounded in a stable scale whose sounds are arranged in a clear order and which marks the starting point of the musical work to which it returns—then atonality occurs when the “tonal center” is absent. This absence generates the use of ambiguous chords, unusual harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic inflections, lacking a point of departure and return. If tonality represents the homely, then atonality points to the un-homely, Freud’s (1919) das Unheimliche. It is generally assumed that tonality is a natural feature of the human brain and that the mind unintentionally searches for tonal centers while listening to music. This is why we feel uncomfortable when we encounter atonal music, which the “tonal ear” experiences as a jarring noise or disturbance.

Poetry (or the poetic zones of literature in general) is a unique expression of the integration of tonal and atonal linguistic zones. On the one hand—it speaks through words, which are basically “tonal” units (intelligible, common); on the other hand, it uses these tonal units in such an original and unpredictable way that the resulting text is characterized by a marked atonal tendency of different intensities and kinds: one which transgresses its own limits and thus plays out of its own scale. The poetic zones of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are in that sense therapeutic forces which pull toward atonal psychic areas, enabling the ongoing integration of the homely and un-homely, the syntax and the anti-syntax of the psychic space.

This chapter looks at the psyche’s inclination toward tonal centers, and at the way in which mental atonality subverts experiences of centeredness while simultaneously producing unsaturated spaces which are no less vital to it than the tonal ones. The relation between tonal and atonal aspects in the psychic space determines the relations between movement and stasis. In its best, tonality pulls toward a sense of centeredness, while in its worst it drags toward fixation. Extreme cases of atonality, on the other hand, may issue in a disintegration of continuity. But in its favorable manifestations atonality vitally undermines saturated hierarchies, thereby enriching the psychic texture.

In the psychic space, like in music, atonal regions hold contradictions, inherent tensions and ambivalence, which do not pull toward an immediate and intelligible solution. While both holding and producing tension, these regions also give rise to a movement of constant searching. Where there is an excess of such areas with no ability to generate a tonal solution, an experience of fragmentation may emerge, resulting from the lack of a psychic center. A paucity, or absence, of these regions, on the other hand, may result in fixation in the shape of saturated thinking and a tendency toward saturated solutions.

In an unpublished paper entitled “Catastrophic Change” (1967)—later reprinted as “Container and Contained Transformed” (1970)—Bion describes the interaction between what he defines as “the Establishment” (representing the stable, sometimes rigid force that resists change) and “the messianic idea” (which represents the force of innovation and change), arguing that the aspect of the personality which always stays stable and fixed is actually the only force that can contain new perceptions of the self and of the world:

The individual always displays some aspect of his personality that is stable and constant even though it may sometimes be very difficult to detect in the welter of evidence for instability; it may appear only in the regularity with which the patient attends his sessions. In this stability will be found the counterpart of what [..] I have called the Establishment. It will be maintained with great tenacity as the only force likely to contain the counterpart of the messianic idea. Reciprocally, the messianic idea is the only force likely to withstand the pressures of the counterpart of the Establishment in the individual. (1970, p.121)

Bion further points at three possible types of interaction between the establishment and the messianic idea which he calles “symbiotic”, “commensal” and “parasitic”:

I shall not trouble with the commensal relationship: the two sides coexist and the existence of each can be seen to be harmless to the other. In the symbiotic relationship there is a confrontation and the result is growth producing though that growth may not be discerned without some difficulty. In the parasitic relationship, the product of the association is something that destroys both parties to the association. (Ibid, p.78)

Assuming that the influence of the atonal regions on the tonal ones is similar to the influence of the messianic idea on the establishment, the relations between tonal and atonal psychic areas may be rephrased, using Bion’s terminology, as follows: Where a parasitical interaction occurs between the tonal and atonal psychic zones—destructive relations may arise between atonal tension and the yearning for a harmonious solution. When the subjective experience is that the tonal tendency blocks any transcendence of it—or alternatively, that such a transcendence puts paid to the possibility of a harmonious solution—then tonality and atonality become mutually exclusive. Commensal relationship, on the other hand, make possible the existence, side by side, of tonal and atonal psychic zones—even though a connection or link between them does not always exist. Here, harmonious regions assume an insular shape and so do atonal regions. Neither nourishing nor clashing with one another, they maintain a kind of status quo which while not culminating in conflict does not enable significant new development either. It is only in the symbiotic relationship that a struggle occurs which allows tonal areas to contain the threatening atonal areas in a way that eventually holds a possibility for growth and change. Atonality forms the greatest danger to tonality, yet constitutes the only force that can bring about a new tonality and in that sense promote the tonal center exactly by its transcendence.

Tonality and atonality do not only characterize psychic regions but may also characterize forms of internalization of the primary object. Could it be that some psyches are born with an a priori atonal tendency while others are characterized by an a priori fundamental and stable tonal center? What are the implications of such inborn tendencies for the relations with the primary object?

One might consider the interaction within the primary dyad as a reflection of a certain relation between the tonal and atonal aspects of both the primary object and the infant. Objects whose atonal dimension dominates tend to engender an experience of tension and restlessness, a lack of center and harmonious stability. Such a primary object is bound to instill an inherent ambivalence and tension in the primary dyad which may in turn affect the infantile psyche. But there are the a priori characteristics of the infant as well: Some infants are born with an inherent atonality, that is, with a weaker and less stable ability to internalize the object’s tonality, while other infants whose natural tonality is strong enough are much more capable to endure atonal deviations, both in the object and in themselves. An essentially “tonal” infant will obviously be better able to tolerate atonal regions in the primary dyad as well as in him or herself. Hence this infant will be less distraught, than an “atonal” infant who depends much more on the dominant tonality of the primary object. A tonal infant will also gain more from contact with atonal regions, while an atonal infant will be very much in need of the tonality of the other. These relations, clearly, are not static. They change throughout the years of development. At some points, or during some phases, the need for tonality takes precedence and becomes critical, while in other areas and at other times there appears to be more space for atonality. The ability to demarcate or posit a center is necessary to any ability to deviate from it. It may happen though that tonal centrality comes to predominate, turning one’s entire discourse into something that no longer tolerates new movement. When tonal centrality takes over the therapeutic discourse, for instance, there is a danger that both analytic interpretation and analytic thinking may collapse, time and again, into the same exhausted “tonality”. Not only the specific analytic discourse may crash under its own tonal centrality—the broader meta-analytic discourse, too, can founder under its own familiar coordinates.

Such a collapse can be witnessed in the mechanical repetition of tonal centers or familiar theoretical scales, depending on the theoretical-tonal environment from which one has evolved: the Freudian Oedipal triangle (Freud, 1924), Kleinian positions (Klein, 1952), Winnicottian potential space (Winnicott, 1971), Kohutian primary deficit (Kohut, 1971), and so on—all serve as coordinates, productively forming the outlines of our thinking but also constraining it.

In contrast with this collapse into the known tonal coordinates, atonal freedom may be thought of as taking us away from the familiar scales, forcing us to diverge from the equations we usually form. The psychic counterpoint, as well as the analytic one, are determined by the relation between tonality and atonality, which simultaneously preserve outlines and their inbuilt tension, the pull toward linking as well as the inherent threat to any existing link.

Atonality is human idiosyncrasy. This idiosyncrasy which tends to be considered negatively in tonal psychoanalytic tradition as regions of nonthinking or as an expression of lack of psychic center—is also a critical source of power. This is the power to escape not only the ready-made categories which the world presents us but also the categories in which we, subtly and repeatedly, ensnare ourselves. Idiosyncratic areas that resist explanation are a proof of the existence of an unstoppable life force—one that breaks its way right across all beaten tracks to enable the ex-territory required for any territory to exist. In music, in psychoanalysis, in philosophy—the most exciting zones are those where an unsaturated atonal element subverts a saturated tonal one. I am not thinking of where such a movement results in a new “saturated solution”—but of those situations in which it remains an unsaturated element at the very center of the saturated space of thinking, a source of discomfort within the serene, a sound whose discordance does not shatter the general experience yet deposits a permanently ambivalent dimension.

One of the most beautiful examples of this type of idiosyncrasy can be observed in the poetic language of Clarice Lispector, an excellent representative of the deviation from conventions and central tonality. Her writing generates a magnetic field whose strength inheres in the uncanniness it creates, always refusing to be subsumed, resolved, or to settle down in the linearity of worn-out formulas.

At the opening of her story “The Foreign Legion” (1984) a family is seated around the table on which there is a chick they were given. A mother, father, and four sons are looking at the helpless chick, as they try in vain to find the “right” attitude in the face of its frightened squeaks:

There we were, and no one was worthy of appearing before a chick; with every chirp it drove us away. With each chirp, it reduced us to helplessness. The constancy of its terror accused us of a thoughtless merriment which by now was no longer merriment, but annoyance. The chick’s moment had passed, and with ever greater urgency it banished us while keeping us imprisoned.

(Lispector, 1992, p.88)

Lispector shines a light on a scene, which could have easily been tonal: the chick’s tenderness and helplessness calling forth a corresponding tenderness, compassion and wish to cradle it in those seated around the table. She, however, offers us this scene from its atonal, alien, uncanny perspective. From being a spot of light, the chick transforms into a sinister signifier: from something that enables and releases the tenderness of the family members around the table it turns to something that terrorizes them with its helplessness, its dread chasing them away and holding them spellbound at the same time:

As for the chick, it was chirping. Standing on the polished table, it dared not make a move as it chirped from within. I never knew that so much terror could exist inside a creature that was made only of feathers. Feathers covering what? Half a dozen fragile little bones which had been loosely put together for what reason? To chirp terror. […] It was impossible to give the chick those words of reassurance which would allay its fears and bring consolation to that creature which was terrified just to have been born. How could one promise it protection? A father and a mother, we knew just how brief the chick’s life would be. The chick also knew, in the way that living creatures know; through profound fear. (pp. 88–89)

And thus, Lispector marks fear as bringing us close to our deepest knowledge of ourselves rather than removing us from it. This is how we know. Not through the moments when we love, that is, when we are firmly placed at the umbilicus of our inner space, but when we are cast outside ourselves, finding ourselves in an alien scene which may unfold in the most familiar place, the home, a scene in which we are cast in roles that are foreign to anything we ever thought—or wanted to think—of ourselves. Lispector’s solution never strays into a familiar tonality. She insists on singing off the formal scale, to pave a path that strays away. This straying, however, does not necessarily lead to an abyss:

The younger boy could stand it no longer:

Do you want to be its mummy?

Startled, I answered yes. I was the messenger assigned to that creature which did not understand the only language I knew: I was loving without being loved. My mission was precarious and the eyes of four children waited with the intransigence of hope for my first gesture of effective love. I recoiled a little, smiling and solitary. […] I tried to isolate myself from the challenge of those five males, so that I, too, might expect love from myself and remember what love is like. I opened my mouth, I was about to tell them the truth: exactly how, I cannot say.

But if a woman were to appear to me in the night holding a child in her lap. And if she were to say: Take care of my child. I would reply: How can I? She would repeat: Take care of my child. I would reply: I cannot. She would insist: Take care of my child. Then—then, because I do not know how to do anything and because I cannot remember anything and because it is night—then I would stretch out my hand and save a child. Because it is night, because ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Aner Govrin
• Prologue: The body is all ears
• 1 Tonality and atonality in the psychic space
• 2 The malignant ambiguity of incestuous language
• 3 The two sleeps of Orlando: gender transition as caesura or cut
• 4 The metaphorical, the metonymical and the psychotic aspects of obsessive symptomatology
• 5 Screen confessions: a fresh analysis of perpetrators' “newspeak”
• 6 Epilogue: “Studium” and “punctum” in psychoanalytic writing: reading case studies through Roland Barthes
• Index