Individuation and Liberty in a Globalized World

Psychosocial Perspectives on Freedom after Freedom

Stefano Carpani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367768966
• eBook ISBN: 9781000594072
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What is the best way to understand the narratives of self-identity at the beginning of the 21st century? This interdisciplinary collection brings together perspectives from analytical psychology, sociology, psychiatry, psychosocial studies, and psychoanalysis to consider questions about individuation and freedom in our unhinged world.

The contributors discuss the meaning of, and need for, individuation in individualized and liquid societies. The book begins with a comparison of three approaches: C.G. Jung's individuation, Ulrich Beck's individualization, and Zygmunt Bauman's liquidity. This sets the tone for further consideration of topics including guilt, social media, global nomads, and surveillance. Theoretical reflections are enhanced by clinical material, and the book emphasizes the connections between sociology and psychoanalysis, offering significant insights into the importance of psychosocial approaches.

This timely work will be of great interest to academics and scholars of psychosocial studies, Jungian studies, sociology, and politics.

Chapter 1Dreaming Your Future. Dreaming Your Freedom

Galit Atlas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003168829-2

Sophie, a 34-year-old, successful Israeli businesswoman, started her analysis preoccupied with her future, filled with dread that she would never be able to become a mother and that “the clock is ticking, time passes too fast, and I just can’t make it.” Sophie begins the analysis in a state of agitation, very concrete, desperately asking again and again, “What should I do? Is anything going to change soon?” Our main focus is on her desperation and hunger. Sophie expresses her longing for a baby, while I experience her as a demanding girl who requests that I feed her as an omnipotent mother who knows everything about the past, present, and future. “What do you think, does he love me?” “What should I do? Tell me …” she asks again and again. I am supposed to know her future and help her to make it happen, but in my mind I hear myself echoing her: “Oh, what a hopeless treatment… . Will anything ever change?” At that point, we are both frustrated. She has a limited ability to know her mind, use symbolic language, or play. Rather, it’s as if Sophie is so hungry and empty that she has to immediately “swallow” everything I give her.

Sophie is the youngest of five children and the only girl. Her mother was excited to finally have a daughter, and Sophie admires and idealizes her mother. The mother is the one who shows restraint, who contains everyone, listens, and knows everything. “She’s God,” Sophie says. Sophie’s mother comes from an Orthodox Jewish home. Although her mother was religious, Sophie and her four older brothers renounced religion. “At home,” she says, “no one dared rebel against mother, but everyone rebelled against God.” Only the household rules remained. Mother’s rules, not God’s. It is not God then who knows the future, but mother, and in the transference, it is her analyst.

We work in a preliminary way with Sophie’s dreams (see Atlas, 2015, 2013a, 2013b). Food was the main theme in most of these, and the use of dreams as a shared third enables a shift to more playful and symbolic thinking (Aron, 2006; Benjamin, 2004; Ogden, 1994). “We are cooking,” Sophie used to call the analysis of her dreams, referring to the profound form of thinking that we shared.

One day, during the fourth year of her treatment, Sophie begins a session saying that she feels empty, that sometimes after our sessions she feels like she is vomiting water. She explains that it feels like it does after having vomited everything; when there is nothing there, she is empty, and it is painful and exhausting. She tells me the following dream:

I am in a wedding hall, where I meet an Israeli friend of mine who is a psychologist, who has come there to give a talk. I sit down at the table and see leftovers from lunch that look delicious, many dishes, and everything looks appetizing and fresh. But since I was so late, there is almost nothing left on the tables. I go over to the organizers’ table, a women’s table, and ask if there is more to eat. For a moment it seems to me that the girl whom I am asking is ignoring me, but a few seconds later she says, “There is no food left, but it’s being taken care of [in Hebrew, Betipul, also meaning “it’s in treatment].” I say, “OK, thanks,” and return to the table. But I’m impatient. I think to myself, why do I have to wait for them? It’s easier to just go out and get some fast food so that I won’t be hungry. I ask myself if I should trust them. It feels like I have no control. It is much simpler to buy something with my money than to wait.

We begin by exploring the inherent question concerning whether she can trust whatever is happening in the kitchen. Since food is a main theme in this treatment, the kitchen became a metaphor for the unconscious and for the analytic process. In the kitchen, something is being cooked, but Sophie cannot always know what it is. “It’s better to have control and go outside, to the real world and buy something with my money, the money I know I have,” she says. She makes her own money and can pay for anything she needs, but she can’t trust what she can’t see, touch, or know. The process of waiting for the food to be cooked is too frustrating; she feels helpless, she is hungry, and she feels dependent and asks herself if she can trust the process.

There is another implicit question: Maybe I ate everything and left nothing for her? Maybe I took all the men, I have everything, just like her mother. And maybe in therapy, food belongs only to me. I cook it and I serve it – maybe I even withhold it, and she needs to go back to her place and be patient, be a patient. Can she trust me? Can she trust herself? Can she trust the analytic process? Here, she is explicitly raising these questions while presenting the option that there is something that belongs only to her. “Maybe it is not empty, maybe there is something there, in the unseen kitchen,” she says. “I suddenly exist, and maybe I don’t have to run and fill myself up. Maybe I am full. Maybe someone will soon fall in love with me …”

The following week, Sophie shares another dream. She goes to visit in the kitchen. “It’s the kitchen from last week’s dream,” she says,

and I see a man from afar. I don’t understand what’s special about him and why I notice him. He’s a simple man. He touches my hand and consoles me for all of the things I have lost while riding the motorcycle with my brother [an image from an earlier dream]. I was so happy as he hugged me in front of other people and wasn’t embarrassed, and I say to him, “I love you,” and he answers, “I know. I love you, too.” And they lived happily ever after,

she jokes. Somewhat uncannily, a day after presenting this dream in therapy, Sophie would meet the man who eventually becomes her husband. “He is a simple man,” she says. “And I probably wouldn’t even notice him if I didn’t see him in my dream the night before. You know,” she adds, “I’m sure I cooked my own food in that kitchen.”

While not prophetic, I believe Sophie’s dream was prospective, and the dream process itself – I believe like any other process – was looking toward and cooking the future, unconsciously preparing and procedurally rehearsing for it. The conflict between self-reliance and dependency appears in all of Sophie’s dreams, as she has been mentally and symbolically exercising her sense of agency. She was cooking and gaining a sense of mastery of the kitchen and of riding her own powerful motorcycle so that she now has the autonomy to begin to envision a relationship with a man. Hence the dream is forward-looking; she can cook in that kitchen without feeling that in doing so she abandons her mother or analyst.

Elaborating on Bion’s alimentary model of the container/contained, Ferro (2009) uses the metaphor of cooking when he defines how “emotions can be ‘cooked’ through their narrative transformation, with unsaturated interpretations, as the patient’s response is always being ‘sampled’ in order to determine which ingredients are required to enrich or lighten the dish” (p. 217). In Ferro’s mythic narrative, the analyst is the chef who cooks, processes raw beta elements, and transforms them into digestible form for the patient, always sampling the dish and adjusting, modulating, and regulating what is served up in the kitchen in response to the patient’s unconscious feedback. When Aron and I (Atlas & Aron, 2017) use this metaphor, rather than envisioning the analyst as the cook and the patient being served up a dish, we view the analyst as inviting the patient into the kitchen itself where the analyst and patient cook and process the ingredients together, jointly tasting and modifying the dishes collaboratively. The process that Sophie herself called “cooking together” was a way of co-creating a profound form of thinking and feeling that belongs neither to patient nor analyst alone (Atlas, 2013a). Our attention was thus not limited to the outcome of the prepared dish but highlights the shared activity and process. Bion’s digestive model of containment was transformed in his later writings into a sexual model of co-creativity (Brown, 2011), where mutuality and intersubjectivity are highlighted. Sophie’s and my approach shares that later emphasis on reciprocity.

Sophie was preoccupied with becoming a mother. She could not get there so long as she relied on splitting the images of baby and mother, so long as she believed that a mother must be an omnipotent god, not a dependent baby. This splitting was repeatedly enacted between Sophie and her analyst. Either she expected me to be the all-powerful mother/God who provided for her, or she exerted omnipotent control over her own mind, but in a way that left her feeling both empty and unable to produce. In the process of “cooking together,” oscillating and mutually enacting the functions of mother and infant, we co-created a third that transcended mother-baby oppositions and reversals. That process, as Sophie defines it, helped her to believe she is fertile and capable of dreaming, imagining, and producing – thus ready to become a mother. Her dreams, as they were enacted with me, were a way to rehearse for her future.

When I first asked Sophie’s permission to present her story, she was proud and jokingly said, “Do you think people will realize how amazingly my mind works? Will they see how I learned to dream my existence and make my dreams come true?” Thinking of Ferro’s (2009) ideas, following Bion’s (1991) lines in A Memoir of the Future, I believe the analytic process can help our patients dream their future. Sophie believed she invited her future loving husband and the future father of her three children to her life in her dreams. Bion (1991) reminds us that our future, enigmatically, is always already ours, and that we don’t remember it only for the pragmatic reason that it didn’t happen yet. Linking Bion’s approach with Jung’s prospective function, Aron and I put forward the proposition that in studying the mind, we need to consider the unconscious will and urge to create, envision our future, give birth to ourselves, exercise our destiny drives, and even die our own individual deaths. As Freud (1920) memorably observed “the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion” (p. 312).

These are all conscious and unconscious processes that are based on the assumption that the mind is aimed toward mental evolution and toward the developmental capacity to bear the emotional anxiety of the confrontation with life. Whereas Freud’s pleasure principle is rooted in the idea that the mind strives to avoid pain and frustration, Bion argues to the contrary that the mind develops towards transformation, to tolerate and bear pain so as to grasp Truth. In Bion’s understanding, emotional growth manifests in developing the tolerance for our deepest anxieties, including psychological birth and annihilation, fear of our future death, and disintegration. If Freud emphasized the causality of the past and Jung the future orientation, Bion cautioned that both the past and future can distract from the immediacy of the present, and his effort to restrict memory and desire is in the service of immediate experience.¹

This chapter, which was originally developed as an earlier paper with Lewis Aron (Atlas & Aron, 2017), focuses on the individual’s effort to anticipate their psychic future and thus to transform fate into destiny. While some of the earlier theorists had conceptualized this function in terms of a one-person psychology, Aron and I weaved this theme into the tapestry of the relational matrix, where individuals can only fashion their destiny in intersubjective contact with others.

The Prospective Function

Whereas traditional psychoanalysis emphasized the psychological causation driven by our past and present wishes, in our theory, we highlight how our unconscious hopes and dreams, our goals and ends, pull us toward our destiny. Our mind anticipates and rehearses for that future, and we argue that all productions of the mind, all compromise formations, include some unconscious anticipation of the future and efforts to transform our fate into destiny. Human beings, we propose, can potentially transform t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Absolute Freedom is ‘Freedom After Freedom’
• 1 Dreaming Your Future. Dreaming Your Freedom
• 2 In Defense of the Freedoms of the Self
• 3 The Paradox of Metaphor
• 4 The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Complex Theory and the Numinous in the Development of History (a neo-Jungian Approach)
• 5 The Impossibility of Freedom: From Psychoanalytical Conceptions to Political Objections
• 6 Individuation, Textuality, and Sexuality in Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia
• 7 Mysterium Dissociationis: The Masculine in Crisis Towards New Forms of Thought and Relationship
• 8 False Start: A neo-Jungian Critique of Self-Help
• 9 Natality, Individuation and Generative Social Action: From Amor Mundi to Social Generativity
• 10 ‘Roots in a Pot’: The Identity Conundrum in Global Nomads
• 11 The Necessity of Guilt: A Freeing Movement of the Soul Towards Individuation
• 12 Floating and Taking Root: Individuation in Contemporary Traumatic Conditions
• 13 Paranoia, Politics and the Tyranny of the Identical: Is there Civilization in the Transitions we are Crossing?
• 14 The Applicability of Analytical Psychology in China: How a Western Psychological Lens Might be Adapted in the East
• Index