Vital Flows Between the Self and Non-Self

The Interpsychic

Stefano Bolognini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032132976
• eBook ISBN: 9781000547122
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Vital Flows explores the concept of the Interpsychic, or that which exists in our unconscious or preconscious inter- and intra-human exchanges and demonstrates its significance for understanding psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Drawing on rich clinical material, Bolognini explains how interactions between the self and the ego may be affected by pre-conscious associations, and how these can hinder the development of our self-concept and social interaction. Combining his international theoretical and clinical knowledge, Bolognini provides meaningful ways to understand the unconscious and renders patients' preconscious channels viable and liveable in a transformative way. With the understanding that the psychic life consists of internal and external interactions equivalent to those that occur by bodily exchange, this text provides an insightful account of how internal life can shape our development from childhood onwards.

As an instructive and topical text which draws meaningfully from Italian, British and North-American psychoanalysis, Vital Flows will be critical for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists alike, as they seek to understand and apply the inter-psychic within their own practice.

1SECRET PASSAGES TOWARDS THE UNCONSCIOUSEmotional residences, styles of contact, and exploration

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228578-1

There are only two lasting things we can hope to give our children: one is roots, and the other is wings.

Chinese Proverb

Over many years of analytical work, I have had the opportunity to observe how for many people the tangible place where they live bears no relation whatsoever to their deep emotional residence. Many live in a different city or country, having moved away from their places and families of origin at a young age for all sorts of reasons to do with external reality (most commonly study and work) and/or internal reality (e.g. the need to distance themselves from family relationships with too much or too little involvement).

What has always struck me, however, is the persistence, albeit not always entirely conscious, of powerful underground ties with those places and with those families. Ties which are often minimized or subjectively denied, but which endure to the bitter end constituting authentic invisible symbioses (a term that we owe to the investigative creativity of José Bleger, 1967). Ties which reveal themselves in all their dramatic strength at critical moments, such as the loss of a parent or the disappearance of elements of the fantasmatic base camp we carry inside ourselves, deep down, even though we are geographically distant and seemingly oblivious.

I have always been struck (even if this is not the most edifying of examples, it renders the idea) by those stories of big city mafia clans in 1930s and 1940s America who, when faced with key decisions, clung with almost religious devotion to their family roots, often in remote villages deep in the Sicilian hinterland. Those places where powerful bosses from Brooklyn or Chicago regressed to their origins by consulting the “families”, thus revealing emotional residences and internal scenarios that were surprisingly different from their actual geographical locations.

Cinema has provided us with unforgettable representations of these individual and group intrapsychic geographies.

Nowadays, an interesting indicator of individual scenographic backdrops is given by the choice of start-up screen picture on our computers. Whether they show faraway and exotic ideal places, or – as is most often the case – everyday environments and people that are familiar to us and that are part of our present or past existence, these images reveal basic scenarios that form the backdrop to our internal lives; and we place there, ideally and not always consciously, many of the fantasmatic movements that contribute to making us what we are and how we feel.

Each of us has our own scenario, then, an internal scenario in which our own lives are more easily represented, either concretely or symbolically by analogy. Just like everyone else, I too have my scenario, which I will present now to give you an imaginable (but not overly or exclusively abstract) setting for some psychoanalytical thoughts.

The old river-stone house in the Bolognese Apennine hills, cradle of my childhood and the backdrop to so much oneiric life for me and my relatives, has a small door on the ground floor. This little medieval door, carved out of solid walnut, stands opposite the staircase to the upper floors and leads down to the cellars. Until the end of the 1950s, it was a hive of comings and goings down there. I remember it very well: men busy unloading heavy cases from carts laden with grapes, for days on end, exchanging only a few brisk business-like words; women sitting on the ground clipping the grapes and boxing them up for market, chitchatting in dialect; the smell of the must in the vats, the large silent barrels and thousands of bottles all in a row; tastings, business, and bargaining; we children watching and listening, eagerly taking it all in. The cases of grapes were transported on farm carts pulled by oxen, as tractors, and cars were still few and far between. It was a peasant world not so dissimilar from that of the 1700s and 1800s, when you think about it, with all the associated social injustices and with a variegated unfolding of sounds, colours, and human interactions that are unthinkable today.

Today that world is gone. All those people are gone, however, impossible that seems to me. “Absence, presence more intense”, wrote Attilio Bertolucci (1929), and that's the truth. The house is still there, but no one lives there anymore. Today, stepping through that little walnut door, you are cloaked in heavy, velvety darkness, enveloped by the dense mystery of the centuries and absorbed in their silence.

Going down the steps, by candlelight, you come to a cobbled hallway, filled with barrels and vats that have lain empty for decades, from which other mysterious doors fan out.

One of them is walled up.

A little further on, an even smaller door of very dark, timeworn chestnut wood is the main attraction for the now rare visitors: it leads into the very heart of the cellars, a network of narrow tunnels carved into the rock in days gone by, which led to the icebox (where winter snow was stored for the pantry) and to a long narrow tunnel stretching to the base of the hill, once an escape route in case of enemy invasions.

The outwardly peaceful and unremarkable Bolognese Apennines hide a surprising subsoil riddled with twisting turning medieval transit routes dug by hand with spade and pickaxe. A sort of rabbit warren in which each secret passage had its own dramatic raison d'être and its own more or less adventurous history connected with those dark centuries.

But, truth be told, it is that walled-up door that has always held the intrigue for me: especially since I realized that the floorboards directly above it (on the ground floor), make a hollow sound when you knock on them.

What lay beyond that door?

From that hollow sound I deduced that there had to be something, and from the fact that such an intricate and imposing door, with its ancient brick arch and river-stone masonry, would not have been justified without a room of some importance behind it.

Why had they walled it up, presumably a few centuries ago judging by the type of masonry?

I knew of other walled-up rooms under those house and other similar houses in the area, uncovered during renovation work: but in those cases, the spaces had been filled with waste materials, pottery shards, old wood, other stones etc. Not here: it echoed empty.

As a child, I postponed to adulthood the possibility of knocking down that wall and seeing what lay beyond that door. As a teenager, though, I did hazard a couple of attempts on my own initiative, with a hammer and chisel. But before I could remove a single stone, the house elders stopped me, I don't remember why.

Then I went to university, out into the world, and my interests shifted away from that cellar. I didn't give it another thought; until, in analysis, the walled-up door reappeared in dreams with inescapable force, taking me by surprise.

In one dream, a turning point for me, I finally entered the large room that had been closed off for so long: and what I discovered (or, rather, rediscovered) there changed my life.

An interesting detail in that dream, when I think about it today, was that I did not have to use hammer or chisel to enter that secluded place and discover its contents. Please keep this detail in mind.

In his famous book Zen and archery (1948), the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel, having moved to Japan for a few years to teach Western philosophies, decides, in turn, to immerse himself in the local culture. It takes him a long time to understand that no mechanical or intentional technique is needed to draw the bow and shoot the arrow.

The Japanese Master could not explain it to him in philosophical terms, effectively, if he hoped to produce a real transformation in him.

All he could do was sit by and guide him through that experience as best he could, with a sort of weary patience. Until the moment he snapped awake, excited, as Herrigel, by then exhausted and exasperated after months of slogging away in unsuccessful attempts to draw the bow, suddenly fired off a shot, almost by mistake.

The Master jumped to his feet, bowed, and declared, with solemn approval: “Today it shot!”.

Professor Herrigel, who for months had secretly been trying to outwit him with various techniques to draw that confounded bow, was caught off guard by some part of himself that had pre-empted him, escaping the control of his conscious intention. What had happened? Again, difficult to explain.

In any case, the Master explained that he had not bowed to him, but to the event: “it” had shot.

In psychoanalysis, there is almost never an effectively voluntary and programmable Open Sesame! moment of access to the Unconscious, nor is there anything magical about our work.

What there is, instead, more often than not, is a long, patient and analytically painstaking psychic cohabitation that can produce openings and transformations, awaiting something that will come, if it comes; sometimes through krysis, but more often through slow and laborious lysis.

This underlying disposition is what marks out a psychoanalyst: few people know how to tolerate the breadth and tension of silence, of waiting, of saying nothing if for the moment there is nothing to say, even before knowing how to interpret (from the Latin: inter-pretium-dare = to give a price, a value, a sense to) anything.

Strange as it may seem, few people are able to bear not knowing, and all too often even analysts feel the need to believe they know what is going to happen, what is coming, what is on the other side of the wall of that mysterious cellar; what the Unconscious is made up of, what is inside it, how to open it, how to enter inside it, what can be understood about it, and what (if anything) can be done with it.

Our theoretical and clinical research is without a doubt useful and necessary, and by now hundreds, if not thousands, of colleagues are worthily dedicated to it, following the currents and fronts that suit them best.

Yet the reality of our daily practice means that most of the time we start out with only a very faint idea of where we will end up with each patient, and paradoxically it is precisely this uncertainty that lends wisdom and dignity to our science and our profession. For this reason, if a patient in consultation asks me how long the analysis will last, I can reply with steadfast serenity that it is not a question of determining how long the analysis will last, but how long his analysis will last. I might even point out to him that if someone were to hazard a prediction (worse still, with an air of smug arrogance), that someone would certainly not be a psychoanalyst.

Sometimes, when this sort of request is presented to me with a particularly aloof and superior attitude, I am tempted to respond just as condescendingly with a famous phrase coined by the American baseball champion Jogi Berra, a quipster who drove reporters crazy: “it's tough to make predictions, particularly about the future”.

Our strength lies, rather, in the method, together with the experiential trust built up over many generations of analysts, ourselves included, who have been helped by psychoanalysis above all – let's be clear – in our personal lives.

It is true, however, that those secret passages leading to the Unconscious do exist, and perhaps they await us – in the sense that there is an ambivalent, conflicting but very powerful desire for internal contact in every human being. And every so often we all uncover some of those secret passages, either our own or those of others.

Our specific expertise, tempered through years of practice and exchanges with colleagues, usually keeps us from backing away and wasting the opportunity of exploring those secret passages; which is no small thing.

Almost 120 years after the publication of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams – the date the birth of psychoanalysis is conventionally traced back to – we are constantly improving our knowledge of the complex physiology of the analytical process and the many configurations and developments that can manifest themselves within it. And yet we have no means of predicting their sequence, alternation, intensity, and duration, because each analysis is its own unique story.

We discover many secret passages together with our patients. Establishing who unearthed them first is perhaps not so important.

At some point, the Zen Master would say, it shot, and this event is what matters.

The preconscious

The truly significant fact is that these potential passages are available within us in a primarily conflicted way, and they are a source of great surprise to us when we happen upon them and make use of them.

Much has been written about the Preconscious, and I have found the most fruitful contributions on the subject in Lopez (1976, 1983), Green (1974), Filippini and Ponsi (1992), and Busch (2014).

But much still remains to be written about this area – even if it may appear dated due to its strong roots in the context of the first Freudian topic – as in the session it can prove incredibly fertile. Within it, we dolly back and forth between primary process and secondary process, between rationality, memories and more or less nonsensical fantasies, in a fluctuating dimension very close to the oneiric. The apparent vagueness (or so it appears to the layperson…) of our reliance on associations and complex perceptions is redeemed by the rigorousness of the setting that we take care to maintain, and by the articulated internal structure with ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Secret passages towards the unconscious: Emotional residences, styles of contact, and exploration
• 2 In spite of my ego: The unconscious and “problem-solving”
• 3 Representation and syntonization: A first taste of the consulting room, between conscious, preconscious, and unconscious: Antonia's first session
• 4 Intimacy and its interpsychic equivalents
• 5 Interpersonal, intersubjective, interpsychic, and transpsychic
• 6 Six commonly used minimal technical tools
• 7 Before the intersubjective: “Presubjective” and “preanalytic” patients in the clinic
• 8 Psychoanalysis and psychosis: Rediscovering the self to rebuild the ego
• 9 “Ubique et semper”: Equivalences and consubstantiality between past, present, feared future, and potential future in the analytic experience
• Bibliography
• Index