Unconscious Incarnations

Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives on the Body

Brian W. Becker, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, David M. Goodman, Brian W. Becker, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, David M. Goodman

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351180177
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofía
• Categoria: Fenomenología en filosofía

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality.

The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious 'real' as an excessive remainder of flesh.

Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh.

Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.

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Chapter 1
The hermeneutics of wounds

Richard Kearney

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How are we to ‘interpret’ psychic traumas which appear to defy meaning and language? Traumatic wounds are by definition unspeakable. Yet from the earliest of literature, we find tales of primal trauma which tell of a certain catharsis through storytelling and touch. And we witness a special role played in such tales by figures called ‘wounded healers.’ By way of exploring this cathartic paradox of ‘telling the untellable,’ I will look at some examples from both classical Greek mythology and contemporary literature (including Freudian psychoanalysis, Joycean fiction and Holocaust testimony).

My basic hypothesis is that while traumatic wounds cannot be cured, they can at times be healed—and that such healing may take place through a twin therapy of (1) narrative catharsis and (2) carnal working-through. In short, healing by word-touch. A double transformation of incurable wounds into healable scars.

Originary stories of wounding

I begin with some Greek tales of wounded healers—Odysseus, Oedipus, and Chiron.

Odysseus

In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is condemned to act out the wound of his own inherited failure, his own existential finitude, again and again. The name Odysseus means ‘bearer of pain’ and we learn during the course of the poem that he is carrying wounds both suffered and inflicted by his forebears. Indeed, the ultimate act of recognition when Odysseus returns to Ithaca coincides with the exposure of his childhood scar, identified by his nurse Euryclea. The poem begins with Odysseus absenting himself from the wounds of his birth and upbringing, his autochthonous origins in Ithaca, sailing off to heroic glory. But his attempts to become an immortal warrior are constantly thwarted by reminders of his mortality (the brutal carnage of Troy and subsequent calamities and failures). The decisive rupture of the lure of Calypso is central to this disillusionment—Odysseus chooses earthly nourishment over godly ambrosia.

Originally leaving Ithaca as an aspirant hero, Ulysses returns as a beggar: a lowly outcast finally recognized by the smell of his flesh (by his dog, Argos) and the touch of a scar on his thigh (by his nurse, Euryclea). It is significant that Euryclea only touches her master’s scar after a very detailed narrative about how Ulysses received the original wound in a childhood hunting incident with his grandfather, Autolycus (Odyssey 19.393–469)—a typical example of transgenerational trauma.¹ The narrative ‘working through’ leading up to the Euryclea’s touch, takes all of seventy-seven lines. The climactic moment of ‘recognition’ (anagnorisis), in short, takes the form of a double catharsis of narrativity and tactility. The hero comes to final self-knowledge by both acknowledging and embodying the story of his own primal wounding.

Telemachus, expecting a triumphant victor to return, does not at first recognize his own father. He is so fixated on his great expectations of the paterfamilias that he does not see the wound on his body. The son is blinded by illusory imagos, and delusions abound until he finally acknowledges, sharing food in a swineherd’s (Eumaeus’) hut, that the mortified stranger before him is in fact his real father. Tasting simple fruits of the earth is how they finally come together as host and guest: hospitality as antidote to the hostile curse of fate (ate).

The word Homer uses for ‘scar’ in this final recognition episode is oulen (Odyssey 19.391). It is a term often associated in Greek literature with ‘trauma,’ as in Plato’s Gorgias, 524c, “oulas en to somati … hypo traumaton,” where oulen means both ‘trace’ and ‘scar.’ While the wound is timeless, the scar appears in time: It is a carnal trace which can change and alter over time though it never disappears. Scars are written on the body; they are forms of proto-writing. And narrative catharsis is a process of working through such carnal traces. Put simply: While the wounds remain timeless and non-representable, scars are the marks left on the flesh to be seen and touched, told and read. Scars are engraved wounds that may, or may not, be healed.²

What I am suggesting—following Aristotle’s notion of mythos-mimesis in the Poetics—is that certain kinds of narrative may bring about a catharsis of our most basic passions, through a “the purgation of pity and fear.” But such healing is to be understood in a very specific manner—not as facile closure or completion but as open-ended story: namely, as a storytelling which forever fails to cure trauma but never fails to try to heal it. As Samuel Beckett’s unnamable narrator puts it: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” And in the very effort to narrate the unnarratable, there is, curiously, not only therapeutic caring but pleasure: the pleasurable purgation of pity and fear by pity and fear.³ More precisely, we interpret the role of narrative catharsis here as a twofold transformation of the passions (pathemata)—namely, the distilling of (1) pathological pity (elias) into compassion and (2) of pathological fear (phobos) into serenity. Compassion spells a proper way of being ‘near’ to pain; serenity a proper way of remaining ‘far’ from it (keeping a healthy distance, as we say, lest we over-identify or fuse with the other’s pain). Catharsis, according to Aristotle, makes for healthy citizens. Purged emotions lead to practical wisdom.

Oedipus

Now to my second story—Oedipus. It has been noted by Lévi-Strauss and others that the proper names for Oedipus and his patrilineal ancestors all refer to ‘wounds’ which cause difficulty in walking: Labdacos (lame), Laios (left-sided), Oedipus (swollen footed). Each of these figures acts out the crimes and wounds of the previous generation: Laios raped the son of his host, Pelops, thereby committing the equivalent of incest and the betrayal of hospitality. His double transgression replicates the curse (ate) of his own father, Labdacos, and is repeated by Oedipus in the next generation. This fatal trans-generational lineage comes under the heading of the ‘House of Labdacos’ and involves a recurring acting out of unspoken traumata (Greek for wounds).

This recurrence of trauma (inflicted or suffered) takes place over three generations, and the only solution to this curse of cyclical repetition is, it appears, the conversion of the untold wound into a form of enacted storytelling—in this case, the symbolic emplotment of Oedipus’ tragic narrative. Only this, according to Lévi-Strauss, can affect a cathartic transformation of passions which suspends the compulsive acting out of trauma. The basic thesis, in sum, is that myths are machines for the purging of wounds: strategies for resolving at a symbolic level what remains irresolvable at the level of lived empirical experience. (Oedipus’ self-blinding at his own hands is another aspect of wounding-into-wisdom, as the blind healer Tiresias also reminds us. The double sense of blesser as blessing and wounding captures this).

Let me briefly unpack Lévi-Strauss’ argument. Human existence is cursed by a tragic, because impossible, desire to escape the trauma of our autochthonous origins. Namely, the desire to buck our finitude—to deny death. (As Levinas puts it, “l’existence est notre traumatisme originel”). In the Oedipus cycle, this tragic curse is epitomized, as noted, by the patrilineal names for wounds that bind us to the earth. And the poetic role of muthos-mimesis—that comprises drama for Aristotle—is to narrate both our heroic desire to transcend our terrestrial nature and our mortal inability to do so! Our effort to surmount our earthly finitude is repeatedly acted out in our overcoming of monsters: Cadmos kills the dragon, Oedipus defeats the Sphinx. But these attempts to overcome mortality are ultimately impossible for we are scarred by irreconcilable fidelities: to both earth and sky, to immanence and transcendence, matter and spirit, nature and culture. So for Lévi-Strauss, great mythic narratives—beginning with the synchronic myths of la pensée sauvage—are attempts to procure cathartic relief by balancing these binary opposites in symbolic constellations or ‘mythemes.’ In a word: What is impossible in reality becomes possible in fiction.⁴

Let us return to the plot. Oedipus finally comes to a recognition of his traumatic finitude—and the transgenerational crimes of his forebears—through a series of woundings culminating in the removal of his eyes. This ultimately leads, not to curing (that is impossible, the eyes are gone forever), but to a certain cathartic healing through:

1 a new kind of vision (he sees differently);

2 a new kind of touching (as he is led by the hand of Antigone); and

3 a new kind of speaking: his final words at Colonus where he accepts his estranged outsider status as a mortal human being.

Oedipus’ wound has finally become a scar, a witness for later generations to recall. His empty tomb serves as a talisman for Athens. (We might recall here, apropos of Oedipus’ wounding-into-wisdom that those who remind him of his errant wandering and send him back to Ithaca are the blind Tiresias and the ghost of his dead mother. It is two wounded healers who guide Odysseus home to be healed by the touch and testimony of Euryclea—the nursemaid who bathes his childhood scar and narrates the origin of his wound).

Chiron

The woundings of Odysseus and Oedipus recall a whole series of other wounded healers in Greek mythology, from Tiresius and Cassandra to Philoctetes and Chiron. I confine myself here to the last of these—Chiron.

Chiron was a demi-god and centaur, half man and half horse. He was the son of the Titan, Kronos (Saturn) and the love-nymph, Philyra, and was wounded by Herakles during a boar hunt when a poisoned arrow pierced his leg and would not heal. Though Chiron could not cure himself, he found that he could cure others and became known as a wise and compassionate healer. Those who came to him in his underground cave found understanding and compassion. In his wounded presence, they felt more whole and well, which is why they called him “the wounded healer.”⁵ Because his wound was incurable and unbearably painful, Chiron voluntarily relinquished his immortality and underwent death, eventually being assigned a place among the stars as the constellation Centaurus.

Interestingly Chiron became the teacher of Asclepius, one of the two founders of Western medicine, the other being Hippocrates. Chiron, who dwelt in a cave, taught Asclepius the art of healing through (1) touch (Chiron means hand, kheir, or more precisely, skilled with the hands, the word kheirourgas means surgeon) and (2) song (Chiron used music along with healing herbs from the earth and induced dreams). By contrast, Hippocrates, the other patron of western medicine, followed the way of Zeus, Chiron’s brother, who dwelt on Mount Olympus and promoted a method of superintendence and control. In short, while Asclepius promoted healing through carnal nature and nocturnal dreaming from below, Hippocrates promoted curing through inspection and intervention from above. The former worked through taste, touch, and fantasy; the latter through cognitive management.

There are further things to be noted about Chiron. As a hybrid of human and animal form, he is a half-creature who reconnects with our deeper unconscious feelings and earth belonging. As son of not only Chronus (saturnine melancholy) but Philyra (love), Chiron suggests another approach to the compulsive and often violent repetitions of ‘chronological’ time—he prefers an art of loving care, inherited from his mother of that name (philia). And this opens up to another kind of time, a time after time, après-coup, nachtraglich—a healing repetition not backward but forward, which permits a break from cyclical recurrence and a release into the future. Unlike his brother Zeus who continues the periodic blood c...