KARL JASPERS FORUM
TARGET ARTICLE 115
SPIRITUAL, SOULAR, AND MYSTICAL -- IN LIFE, NEUROSIS, AND THERAPY
Zvi Lothane, M. D.
(Published in: Issues in
psychoanalytic psychology, 30:7-26, 2008)
Posted in KJF on 6 June 2009
[1]
Spirituality: the subject is
limitless and my ignorance is encyclopedic. It is also controversial. I make no
claim to settling the controversy, nary to offer some free thoughts and
stimulate further reflection and discussion.
[2]
Spirituality and religion are often spoken
interchangeably, and, undoubtedly, the monotheistic religions contain a wealth
of spiritual messages. But spirit and spiritual are more inclusive concepts and
thus not identical with religion. A basic antonym of spiritual, or soular, the old adjective of soul, is secular, earthly, and
worldly. As systems of faith and worship, organized religions, like the secular
social, legal, and political institutions, wield influence, money, and power in
the service of maintaining the ordered society. By contrast, the spiritual, as
Jesus said, is in this world but not of it: its basic aims are not power but
being, light, presence, peace.
[3]
The basic meaning of spiritual is immaterial,
incorporeal, which has both phenomenological and metaphysical meanings. Thus
spiritual can mean intellectual and mental functions; referring to the higher,
or refined mental or soular forms of thought and
feeling, the subject of psychology and metaphysics. Spiritual are also the
moral thoughts and feelings, in Socrates’ words, the form of the good. As
contrasted with bodily and the carnal, the human soul derives from and is identical
with the divine Spirit, or the Holy Spirit, to which the soul returns after
death, as pictured by Plato, the mystical neo-Platonist Plotinus, and organized
religions? Whereas God is deemed to be omnipresent and ubiquitous and can be
prayed to by anyone anywhere, religions sell prayer, redemption and immortality
for money. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, sells counsel, consolation,
companionship.
[4]
Since psychotherapy, too, like institutionalized
religion, has the dual purpose of helping the person to function as an
individual and as a member of society, it has become fashionable to speak of
the religious functions of the helping profession (Beit-Hallahmi,
1976). But
the idea is not new. As early as in 1908, the pioneer of psychoanalysis in
Boston, before it arrived in New York in 1911, Dr. Isadore
Coriat, with Worcester and McComb,
published a book on religion and healing. In contrast to Freud, who, following
in the footsteps of an atheistic program of the Enlightenment called himself a
godless, i.e., atheistic, Jew, the Aryan Jung was seen as a founder of a
religion. While mankind needs religion, religion has not been an unmitigated
blessing. Already the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who lived in the
first century before Christ, had the insight that “tantum religio
potuit suadere malorum” (so potent was
religion in persuading to evil deeds, De Rerum Natura, Book I, 101). The genocide of the pagan inhabitants of the Land of Canaan by the
armies of Joshua, the Catholic church militant and its Inquisition, the
contemporary militant Islam and the use of terror, proselytizing and
persecutory, are examples of man’s inhumanity to man in the name of God.
[5]
A. SOUL, SPIRIT, FAITH, AND
MYSTICISM
My concern is with the person
and whose actions in the world may be nature-directed or people-directed, be
external or internal, carnal or spiritual, professed by either atheists or believers
in what is called God. God and Godhead beg various questions: is God a who or a what? Is He a he or a she? Is he the white-bearded
grandfatherly figure pictured in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel whom the
Victorians mocked as the gaseous vertebrate? Does God have a penis, which Paul Schreber (1903), as some have imagined, wanted inserted
into his rectum? (Freud, 1911). Is God, as famously
defined by Spinoza, a deus sive natura, a God that is
nature, a view that earned him the excommunication, or herem, by his Amsterdam Jewish compatriots? Or is godhead, the divine essence, an anima mundi, a
world soul, the generative spiritual womb of all souls? I do not profess to know what God, the soul or
spirit IS, only to claim that what matters to me is that the spirit, like love,
is what spirit DOES, for me and for thee.
[6]
The evolution of spirituality:
the words we use
Synonym of spirit is soul, of
which the adjective is the uncommon form, soular. Our
psychological and metaphysical ideas derive from primordial bodily experiences.
The Greek word for soul, psyche, has
the literally meaning of breath, the breath of life. A live, or besouled,
body is one that breathes and pulses
with the heartbeat and courses with the
blood in its vessels. Thus it is natural to think that in death the soul
leaves the body with the last breath. To Cicero is attributed the saying, dum spiro, spero, while I breathe, I hope.
[7]
Closely related to breath is air that moves in nature, or wind, thus the
meaning of spirit as the breath of wind, of breeze. The Hebrew words for soul
are neshama,
derived from the root n-sh-m,to breathe, and nefesh, from the root n-sh-f, to blow. In the act of creation
of man=adam,
from adama, dust, earth: “the Lord God formed man
of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living soul” (Genesis, 2:7).
In Hebrew one speaks of ruah, literally wind, and of madaei haruah, the
sciences of the spirit, i.e., the humanities, as against madaei ha’teva, the nature sciences. In Turkey
they use the word ruh in the same sense. The other Greek
synonym of psyche was pneuma =air,
translated in Latin as spiritus,
and concerned with the pneuma or soul of the vital body and the
spiritual soul, the latter connected to the cosmic pneuma.
[8]
In nature mankind observed
another kind of spirit, the spirit of wine, in its liquid and gaseous forms. Spirit
is literally a liquid produced by distillation, the mixture of pure alcohol and
water, a noble spirit distilled from a crude alcoholic mash, and thus
suggesting something purified, or refined. When placed in a snifter, cognac or
brandy the distilled liquid easily passes to its gaseous form and as such is
inhaled as an aroma, directly stimulating the smell receptors in the nasal
mucosa. Freud’s bosom friend Wilhelm Fliess’ famous
equating of the nose with the genital we can now add a spiritual nasal function:
from mere physical smelling it is elevated to the metaphorical, refined,
ennobling, experiences of smelling the aromas of wines, scents of women,
flowers, and foods, to produce in us uplifting, spiritual, esthetic experiences
that transcend the mere satisfaction of carnal hunger, thirst, and lust. In
German brandy is called
Geist
= spirit and the varieties of brandy are the Spirituosen. The Germans also championed the division of knowledge into Naturwissenschaften,
natural sciences and Geisteswissenschaften
the humanities, derived from the German translation of John Stuart Mills’
concept of “moral science.” In Hegel’s
philosophy Geist became the sum total of the human
institutions of family, society, state, church, the arts, and the sciences.
[9]
Related to distillation is
another literal chemical application, that of sublimation: the direct passage
from the solid to the gaseous state without liquefying. But since the airy
gaseous state is associated with the notion of purified and refined, the
derivative and metaphorical meaning of sublime suggests the ideas of elevated,
lofty, supreme intellectually, spiritually or morally, containing the noblest
in ideas and emotions. For Freud sublimation became the process of
transformation of sex and sexual feelings and sexual curiosity into artistic
and scientific productions, as exemplified in the person and works of Leonardo da Vinci: sex and slime become culturally sublime.
[10]
Things in the world can be
touched, smelled, tasted, through the contact senses and seen and heard through
the distance senses. Awareness of things begets thoughts, the
spiritual-intellectual sense of proportion, abstraction and generalization, all
expressible and expressed in words. In one of acts of creation in Paradise God
“brought [his creatures] unto Adam to see what he would call them; and
whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis, 2:19).
[11]
Curiously, it is Adam and not
God who is entrusted with the function of naming. Since then things and
thoughts are defined by the words and names given to them, words and names
become the tools with think with, they determine what and how we think. This
idea persists in the Gospel of St. John begins St. John: “In the beginning was
the word, Logos, and the word was with God, and God
was the word; and the word became flesh and lived amongst us.” We are born into
words and are surrounded by them within and without through the duration of life (Lothane, 2007a).
[11]
I do not know when and how God
taught Adam to speak and in what language. But I do know that the two most
important abilities a child learns from and with his mother are love and language.
Animals and preverbal children have souls but no words, so they cannot think in
words. I do assume, however, that they think in images derived from their sense
experiences and their unconscious processes. The unconscious is the soul: the
opening paragraph in the 1846 book Psyche
The Developmental History of the Soul by Carl Gustav Carus,
German physician, philosopher, and friend of Goethe : “The key to the knowledge of the nature of the conscious life of the
soul lies in the region of the unconscious” (my translation). Freud does
not mention Carus, but Carus
was an influence on Eduard von Hartmann who did and whose 1869 book on the
unconscious was read and cited by Freud. Whereas Lacan
famously defined the unconscious as a language, he neglected the preverbal
language of images. Since the analytic process is based on investigating the
unconscious turned conscious dreams and memories, and since remembering and
dreaming cannot occur without images, it is Freud, not Lacan,
who discovered/invented the psychoanalytic method of investigating both the
conscious and unconscious processes, the technique of free association (Lothane, 1981, 1984, 1994a, 2006, 2007b)
[12]
There is one more quality of the
soul, in which it resembles the wind and the spirit: it is invisible, only its
effects are visible. Like things around us, the person’s actions can be seen
and heard, but his inner life, the motives and intentions of his actions,
remain invisible, unless disclosed to another person. It is for this reason the
scientists dealing with matter doubt the reality of the soul and of unconscious
processes, because they cannot be independently observed and measured. But neither
can dreams and thoughts, or beauty and goodness; but it does not make them less
real or less important in the lives of persons, families, and societies.
[13]
A special spiritual quality
inheres in music. Like words, music is generated physically and transmitted via
air waves or electromagnetic waves. While sights can persist indefinitely,
sounds live for as long as the singing vocal cords or the instrument played
upon vibrate and when the sounds cease they leave no trace. Music works through
the fusion of matter and energy but it is non-discursive and non-representational.
It is experienced as a present moment and as duration, and it is thus both evanescent
and eternal. Moreover, music has no identifiable programmatic content. It is
thus the most spiritual of the arts, even as it is capable of moving us in the
most profound way. When we listen to a Bach organ toccata, Mozart’s Ave Verum, or a Chopin Ballade
the effect is esthetic, spiritual, and meditative-mystical. The human voice
has a music all its own, it transmits tones and overtones of emotion, of
sincerity and hypocrisy, of joy and gloom, admiration and irony, of consent and
denial, over and above the words that express these attitudes. The last point
is a link to belief.
[14]
Faith derives from the Latin fides (=trust) and means the same as belief.
We have faith or belief in a supreme being called God, and faith is a
synonym for religion, a belief of the doctrines of religion and acting
according to them. But also have faith, to a greater or lesser degree, in our
parents and friends, in the stock market, in the government. Faith and belief
also create the sense of conviction we have about what we hear or read or are
taught. The affirmative answer to the question do you believe in medicine,
neuroscience, or psychoanalysis may contain elements of both: a sense of
acknowledgment and conviction and quasi-religious worship. It has been said
that we can only believe those we love, as has been seen in countless instances
of real love and transference love. Along with language, a loving mother
teaches the child to trust and believe, building on the innate capacity and
need of the child to trust and obey his mother, because such mutual belief and
trust are the basis for individual and social survival, both in animals and
mankind.
[15]
As part of the life of the
emotions, the need to believe, the will to believe, is both inborn and instinctive. It is based on the evidence of the emotions of
love and information obtained through the sense organ: the proof, we say, is in
the pudding. As such it is also preverbal in time and nature, as such it is
also pre-rational, pre-logical, and precedes belief based on logic and
reasoning, in a lawful universe, in a society based on the rule of law. The
inborn faith in the mother is the basis of the instinctive faith in the doctor
and therapist: it is a universal transference from mother love and the basis of
what Freud called positive transference in treatment and its powers are often
perceived as miraculous. It explains the miraculous power of placebo in
medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, the miracle of the belief of helped,
of positive suggestion and the positive acceptance thereof. Placebo, derived from the Latin ‘placebo’
= I shall please, stands not just for the intention to please, but something
much deeper -- the doctor’s care, concern and respect for the suffering
patient, the importance of the emotional connection between the doctor and the
treatment he administers and the person treated, which makes the patient trust
the medication and take it rather than throw it away. We need both
sciences: the science that studies the chemistry of the molecules and the science
that understands and knows how to use the "chemistry" of doctor and
patient. It makes for good doctors and good psychiatrists. In 1893, the last
year of his life, Jean-Martin Charcot, the preeminent French neurologist,
neuroscientist, clinician, and Sigmund Freud’s teacher, wrote an article
entitled “La Foi
qui guérit” (the faith that heals). He said: “The facts I was able to observe in my long
years of practice were cases of faith-healing
resulting in miracles, without regarding such miracles as being beyond the
ordinary healing means of medicine, because they belong to the natural order of
things. The facts called miraculous, which are in no way new, derive from a
trusting, believing, suggestible attitude of the patient,” a fact
scientific in its own right. It rings as true today as it did down the ages.
Since this faith is biologically and psychologically founded on mother love, a
few additional points are in order.
[16]
The relationship
between mother and child contains aspects of contact, communion, and
communication, in the order of ascending development and differentiation. The
original contact and communication are already formed during the child’s
intrauterine life, studied by the growing field of neonatology. After birth it
continues as a bodily contact during feeding, coddling, holding on. It is a
source of immense power for the infant and discernible in the myth of Antaeus, the giant was remained invincible as long as he
touched Gaia, his mother earth, and whom Hercules slew after lifting him up in
the air. The great Hungarian psychoanalyst wrote about the infant’s “anklammern,”
grasping and clinging to mother, followed by “auf Suche gehen,”
letting go of mother’s body to go in search. Michael Balint
in his book Thrills and Regressions built
on this idea to delineate two human types, the ocnophil, who stays close to
mother’s body, and the philobat,
who roams the spaces beyond. The physical contact, from the Latin word to
touch, and also a psychological communion, or merging, leads to communication
through touch, taste, smell, and sound, the latter at first composed of
babbling and other inarticulate noises. With the acquisition of speech,
communion becomes communication with words. These basic psychological facts
return us to faith and introduce the spiritual subject of mysticism.
[17]
The spiritual and
the mystical
Mysteries, things
that cannot be explained, or religious truths of great import, are related to
mysticism, to mystical knowledge of God, spiritual truths, or of ultimate
reality of being, given not by the senses but by immediate intuition or
illumination, often in states of rapture or ecstasy. Mystical derives from
words meaning close-mouthed, murmuring
or moaning, i.e., without using clearly articulated words, dealing with
experiences that are ineffable, i.e., not expressible in words. It thus
possible to connect the mystical communion with the deity, the so-called unio mystica, the contemplation, vision or
inner light in the mystical experience, with preverbal blissful communion
between mother and child.
[18]
Natural mysticism
can occur in conditions of everyday life when we commune with nature, in the spiritual
perception of nature of the cosmos, as expressed by William Wordsworth:
There was a time
when meadow, grove and stream
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The
glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as
it hath been of been of yore; --
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I
have seen I now can see no more.
This communion between
the individual soul and the soul of the cosmos, this sublime mystery of
oneness, is expressed in the following lines from his ode on Tintern Abbey:
. . . a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (96-103)
[19]
Wordsworth is imbued with the
ideas of pantheism, an ancient soular theory that the universe is not a creation, distinct from God, that God is the universe, and the universe is God, of
which the classical exponent was Spinoza, an influence on Goethe. The issue is
not whether God exists or who or what God is: the issue is what does such a belief do for mankind. Wordsworth sings in his
“Ode on immortality”:
Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
[20]
Ellis (1940) noted that “the
poetry of all eras and cultures is inspired by a deep feeling of concord with
Nature, what a modern philosopher so aptly called ‘aesthetic animism’” (p.
305).
Walter Terence Stace (1960) expanded the definition of pantheism to
combine
two opposite pantheistic ideas: the universe
is identical with God, the universe is distinct from God, as viewed by Kabbalistic mysticism, to set forth the paradoxicality
of mysticism, pointing to the paradox of
the contradiction and identity of the opposites (p. 212), an idea that would
find expression in C. G. Jung’s philosophical theology, which he summed up as
follows:
|
Brahman Is |
The World Is |
|
Reality |
Illusion or Appearance |
|
Pure Unity |
Multiplicity |
|
Relationless |
The sphere of relations |
|
Infinite |
The sphere of finitude |
|
Outside Space and Time |
In Space and Time |
|
Motionless, Unchanging |
Perpetual flux |
[21]
Stace compared the two types of mysticism:
extrovertive mysticism looks outward through the senses, while the
introvertive looks inward into the mind. Both
culminate in the perception of an ultimate Unity – what Plotinus called the One
– with which the perceiver realizes his own union or even identity. But the
introvertive mystic, using his physical senses, perceives the multiplicity of
external material objects – the sea, the sky, the houses, the trees –
mystically transfigured so that the One, of the Unity, shines through them. The
introvertive mystic, on the contrary, seeks by
deliberately shutting off the senses, by obliterating from consciousness the
entire multiplicity of sensations, images, and thoughts, to plunge into the
depths of his own ego (p. 61-62).
[22]
He tabulated the two types as follows:
|
|
Common
Characteristics of Extrovertive Mystical States |
Common
Characteristics of Introvertive Mystical States |
|
1 |
The Unifying
Vision — all things are One |
The Unitary
Consciousness; the one, the Void, pure consciousness |
|
2 |
The more concrete
apprehension of the One as an inner subjectivity or life in all things |
Nonspatial, nontemporal |
|
3 |
Sense of
objectivity or reality |
Sense of
objectivity or reality |
|
4 |
Blessedness, joy, peace, happiness |
Blessedness, joy, peace, happiness |
|
5 |
Feeling of the
holy, sacred, or divine |
Feeling of the
holy, sacred, or divine |
|
6 |
Paradoxicality |
Paradoxicality |
|
|
||
|
7 |
Alleged by mystics
to be ineffable |
Alleged by mystics
to be ineffable |
[23]
In his book Stace focused less on God and more on the godhead, Gottheit in German, i.e., principle of divinity,
i.e., divine nature or essence, not the godhead of the Christian trinity but of
the godhead of the great mystics, e.g. Meister Eckhart, the 14th century
visionary, a thorn in the Pope’s side, copiously quoted by Aldous Huxley
(1945) in his book The Perennial
Philosophy, a seminal text about the mystical experience. Huxley’s goal was
to spell out a perennial, universalist philosophy and his starting point was
the Sanskrit Pronouncement, Tat Tvam Asi, Thou art That,
where the ‘thou’ is the Atman, i.e., the soul, or self, immanent in the person,
and which identical with the Brahman, the absolute reality, the spiritual
ground of all existence. This principle recurs in the mystical writings of East
and West: “To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God
and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same” (Huxley, 1945, p. 12). It is not
formal theology but rather an inner state of consciousness, a psychological
reality, a paradoxical knowledge, a striving for love and peace. It is
instinctively grasped by mystics, children, or so-called primitive peoples but
lost upon those busying themselves with analytical philosophy, science, and
established religions. The mystical view has profound ethical implications. Religions
that worship the temporal, tribal and personal God of Israel, of Christianity
and Islam can easily morph into idolatrous national, racial, ideological or
moralistic pseudo-religions, beloved of politician, that preach power politics,
prosperity, and military conquest, to the destruction of nature and mankind in
the name of those very religions that gave birth to this ethics.
[24]
The just drawn distinctions make
it possible to understand Freud’s antipathy towards established religion and his inability to appreciate mysticism. A child
of the Enlightenment, of Voltairean rationalism,
atheism, and anti-clericalism, Freud viewed obsessive neurosis as a private
religion and religion as a public neurosis of mankind, as an illusion and a
delusion (Freud, 1927), which, by the way, made him erroneously reduce Schreber’s mystical experiences to religious paranoia, the
latter caused by homosexual paranoia (Lothane, 1992b,
2004). Freud disregarded the ideas on the sources of morality and religion by the
enormously influential, until World War One, Henri Bergson (1859-1941) but did not
escape being confronted by Romain Rolland
(1866-1944). Rolland, a follower of Bergson, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda,
lesser contemporaneous mystics, wrote to Freud that “the true source of
religious sentiment, … a peculiar
feeling, a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded
– as it were ‘oceanic’. This feeling …
is a purely subjective fact, not
an article of faith … seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems
… [but] a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world
as a whole” (Freud, 1927, pp. 64-65). Freud could “not discover this oceanic
feeling in [himself]. It is not easy to deal
scientifically with feelings,” and since this was too mystical, in the
pejorative meaning of the word this seemed to Freud to be “something in the
nature of an intellectual perception,” he “could not convince [himself] of the
primary nature of such a feeling. But this gives me no right to deny that it
does in fact occur in other people” (p. 65).
Nevertheless, Freud made a vigorous case against such ‘misty-schism’: “Normally,
there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our own self,
our own ego. … On the contrary, the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp
delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity… But towards the outside the
ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. At the height of
being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away: I and
you are one. In pathological processes boundaries between the ego and the
external world become uncertain. Against all evidence of the senses, a man who
is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one and is prepared to act as if it
were a fact [and here Stachey sends the reader to
Freud’s (1911) own footnote in the essay on Schreber].
… [This is both a] physiological [i.e., normal, Strachey] function … liable to
be disturbed by pathological processes. … The infant at the breast does not yet
distinguish his ego from the external world, [lacking] the ego feeling of maturity”
(Freud, 1927, pp. 65-67). Further down Freud quips about “another friend of
mine who has assured me that through the practices of Yoga one can in fact
evoke new sensations … He sees in them the wisdom of mysticism, … connections with
trances and ecstasies. But I am moved to exclaim in the words of Schiller’s
driver:-- ‘Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the
roseate light’ ” (pp. 72-73).
[25]
While ironically cynical about mystical
experiences, Freud is at least tolerant towards of such in others and opines
that while normal in the infant and in the normal state of being in love, it
may turn into the states of such states of mind in psychotics. But he also
expressed the revolutionary insight, contrary to the views of psychiatrists
then and now, that
“the delusional formation, which we take
to be the pathological product, is in reality a [ labor of (self)-healing = der Heilungsversuch], a
process of reconstruction” (Freud, 1911, p. 71). This calls for a reversal of normal and
abnormal: the infant, the child’s, and the mystics perception of the external
world of the internal states of mind, the mystical union, are normal, abnormal
is the adult ego-centric preoccupation with self-interest and selfishness, the
dark side of self-love. In the struggle for survival the ego is a good servant
but a bad master. What is contrasted here is the innocence of the child and the
mystic, their inborn and intuitive understanding
of the spiritual ground of love, joy, and peaceful coexistence vs. the learned knowing of the politicians and
professors of this world, busily pursuing power, prestige and pecunia, with the tools of propaganda and prevarication,
their egos puffed up with pride. The dictators, the doctrinaires, the
dogmatists already know everything, need to know no more and dictate to people
what they should know. What is needed is a synthesis of both, knowledge and
understanding informed by love. In the words of St. Bernard: “What would learning do without love? It would puff up. What would love
do without learning? It would go astray” (Huxley, 1945, p.144).
We are ready to discuss love.
[26]
B. LOVE, LUST, AND LIBERTY
In the opening paragraph of his
1905 Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality Freud speaks of “sexual needs,” a
“ ‘sexual instinctual drive’ ” and sexual “ ‘ libido,’” evasively claiming
in German there is no common word for libido: I can immediately name three: Lust, same as lust and lechery in
English, and Gier and Begierde, both meaning desire. His student Theodor Reik
got it right in his 1941 book, Of Love
and Lust On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual
Emotions. In English we either make a distinction between ‘liking’ and
‘loving’ or just use the interchangeably: we like Obama and dislike Hillary
Clinton, and we love ice-cream. There was a good reason for Freud’s
aforementioned evasiveness: he wanted to sound scientific. However, as an essential
moralist, he was still bound to old medical prejudice in referring to the
varieties of human sexual expression as “inversions” and “perversions” while
his real scientific and moral intention was to destigmatize
sexuality and to promote a naturalistic, tolerant and sympathetic attitude of sexual
freedom. Anatole France had noted ironically, in his 1895
book of aphorisms, Le Jardin d’Épicure, that “Christianity did sex a great
favor by making it a sin,” the sad truth
is that Christianity, starting with St. Paul and Augustine and until about 1750,
condemned sexuality as the work of the devil and women and men accused of
sinful sexual debauchery were convicted as witches and warlocks and burnt at
the stake. Sexual fundamentalism is still militantly espoused by Christianity
and Islam, with nefarious consequences for democracy. Freud created a
scientific sexual revolution, consummated a generation later, after World War
I, as skirts were getting shorter and sexual morals looser, especially in the
big cities of the western world.
[27]
Depending on the context, the
ambiguous word love means either sex or love writ large. It then needs to be
defined as non-sexual love as between parents and children, or that love
between two men does not mean sex, or to be called by other names, such as the
Greek agape, philia, and sympatheia, or Church Latin caritas, i.e., charity, when it used to mean love, high regard,
benevolence, before it was reduced in modern times to mean an eleemosynary gift
(Lothane, 1982, 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1988,
1989, 1997b, 1997c, 1998a). In the sphere of sex Freud replaced the religious preoccupation
with sin with the moral conflict between the body and the soul, renamed as the id
and ego. In the sphere of non sexual love the moral conflict was between love
and hate. For where there is love there is always a moral conflict and
therefore ethics is inseparable for the human condition (Lothane,
1994b, 1998b, 1999a). Conflicts between the body and soul about sex, on the one
hand, and conflicts about love and hate, on the other, played a decisive role
in the lives of Paul Schreber (Lothane,
1992b, 2004) and Sabina Spielrein (1999b, 2003). It
should be noted that Freud was strong on sex, the lion’s share of his
theorizing, and weak on love, subjects he approached towards the end of his
life (Freud, 1927). Ferenczi understood love better
than Freud (Lothane, 1998a).
[28]
Love as charity was a preeminent concern for the
mystics: “He that loveth not knoweth
not God, for God is love” (St. John, 4); “The astrolabe of the mysteries of God
is love” (Jalal-uddin Rumi);
“Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love”
(William Law); “For love is the motive power of the mind (machine mentis), which draws
it out of the world and raises it on high” (St. Gregory the Great), all cited
in Huxley (1945). The spiritual and
ethical nature of love writ large is manifest it these quotes. However, it is
also important to reveal the spiritual nature of sexuality. In previous WSI
conferences I presented the interpersonal nature of love (Lothane,
1982) and sex (1992a). Whereas the former is somehow self-evident, the latter
has usually been viewed as a purely physical phenomenon. Moreover, even though
Freud discovered psycho-sexuality,
the connection between sexual desire and gratification with dreams and
daydreams, he continued to conceptualize sex as a monadic, not as a dyadic-interpersonal
one, as a manifestation of a drive energy called libido. What is more, even
though he knew of the meaning of Lust as
pleasure, the opposite of unpleasure or pain, he did
not dwell on the pleasurable, esthetic beauties of intercourse. Even
masturbation, a truly one-person activity, is accompanied by fantasies and scenarios
involving another person; how much more so sexual activity between two persons
leading to orgasm (curiously, a word found in Freud’s Three Essays only once, in connection with thumb-sucking), a
profound physical, interpersonal and soular-spiritual
communion and communication. This is how Shelley sang of it:
We two will rise …
And by each other, till to love and live
Be one: …
And we will talk, until thought’s melody
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than word eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused [=blended, fused] in Passion’s golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
[29]
We are back to the deep connection between
mother and infant conjoined in the activity of nursing and two people in sex. There
is one more feature of love that is eminently soular:
to be genuine it has to be freely given, it cannot be forced. ‘Love’ is etymologically related to
‘leave’ and ‘belief.’ In her famous Habañera the gypsy Carmen sings:
Love is a rebellious bird
that nobody can tame,
and you call him quite in vain
if it suits him not to come.
Nothing helps,
neither threat nor prayer.
One man talks well, the other
keeps silent;
it's the other one that I prefer.
Children naturally feel grateful when
loved, they are later taught to say ‘thank you’ but do not like to say it just
out of politeness. A child is born telling the truth, it is
taught to lie, to dissemble, to pretend, to practice hypocrisy in the service
of coexistence in the family and in society. We may need to lie to survive, but
therapy must be built on truth or else it dies.
[30]
The freedom of love is contrasted with the
obligation to be ethical, which is part of being spiritual. The
spiritual core of the person persists even in the throes of psychosis, as
profoundly grasped by Daniel Paul Schreber, who felt he was persecuted by God but
was led by God to spiritual self-healing (1903): “God, whose power by rays is essentially
constructive in its nature, and creative, came into conflict with Himself when
he attempted the irregular policy against me, aimed solely at destroying my
bodily integrity and my reason. This policy could therefore only cause
temporary damage, but could not lead to permanent results. Or perhaps, using an
oxymoron [i.e., paradox], God Himself was on my side in his fight against me,
that is to say I was able to bring His attributes and powers into battle as an
effective weapon in my self-defence” (p. 61, footnote
#35).
[31]
C. SOUL AND SPEECH, LOVE AND LANGUAGE, IN
THERAPY
There are things and there are thoughts.
We are surrounded by material things and persons which we perceive both
sensuously and intellectually. We think with words that refer directly to such concrete
and palpable things and persons. We have
other words that are nothing but abstractions and metaphors. „If we trace the
meaning of a great many words,” says Owen Barfield (1973), “we are at once made
to realize that an overwhelming proportion, if not all, of them referred in
earlier days to one of these two things – a solid, sensible object or some
animal (probably human) activity. Thus, an apparently objective scientific term
like elasticity, and the metaphysical
abstract is traceable to ‘draw’ or ‘drag’”. He
then quotes France: “What it is to think? How does one think? We think with
words; this by itself is sensuous and takes us back to nature. Just think, a
metaphysician creates a system of the universe with nothing but the refined
cries of monkeys and dogs” (pp. 63-64). Soul and spirit, as we have seen, are
such abstractions and metaphors, whether used in revelation, which generates a theory
called theology, or in reasoning, which generates a theory called metaphysics. Concrete
words are used in language that assures survival, material and emotional, their
function is representation and emotive appeal. Abstractions and metaphors are used in
theoretical discourse and serve the purpose of learned discursive thought and
the arts. Even though the Bible says that man will not live on bread alone, as
another Hebrews saying has it, ein kemah, ein tora
= no bread, no learning. From the perspective of evolution and biological
survival learned discourse and the arts are irrelevant. From the perspective of
culture, they are precious, priceless baggage.
[32]
The closest to our discursive
thinking is Aristotelian psychology and philosophy described in his treatise On the Soul and based on a tripartite analysis
of the person into a body, or soma, a
soul, or psyche, and intellect or nous. The soul in Aristotles’s
view is a biological principle of form in nature. There is a hierarchical soul
evolution: plants have nutritive and reproductive souls. Animals,
have evolved to possess a sentient and moving soul, with the abilities of
impulse, feeling and imaging. Mankind acquires a thinking or rational soul. As
also taught by Plato, God, the unmoved mover, is the absolute principle,
embodying both reason and the good. This was Aristotle’s metaphysics, a word
that was derived from ta meta ta physica, the
volumes in Aristotle’s works that came
after ta physica, or
physics, the those dealing with the
physical world, including human psychology. Aristotelian psychology
included the functions, or faculties, of the cognitive powers, of knowledge and
reason, and the motive powers, those of feeling, desire, and action,
prefiguring the Kantian classification of intellect, feeling, and will. The
theory of knowledge started with perception and reached the active reason, and
progressed from sense perception (aisthesis), to imagination (phantasia), to culminate in
intellection (nous). This scheme was
also adopted by Kant. Paul Schreber (1903, original
p. 232, note 98) referred to it as well. Kant made an important distinction:
between pure, or theoretical, and practical reason, the latter conjoined with
ethics.
[33]
Psychoanalysis is practical as a
method of a healing art and is also a philosophy, based on Aristotle and Kant, Freud’s teachers
in high school and medical school. Thus, Freud’s dissection of the personality
into entities such as id, ego, and superego is philosophical, while id, ego,
and superego as functions of the whole
person belong in the realm of clinical
theory of disorder. The bulk of Freud’s clinical theories deal with the
varieties of the forms of disorder,
these forms then converted into the corresponding diagnoses, in the manner of psychiatry. But diagnoses are also
abstractions, generalizations of countless cases reduced to their elements and
the combinations of those elements. In real life there is no schizophrenia and
no hysteria, there are only persons deemed or diagnosed as schizophrenics and
hysterics, just as diabetes is abstract entity as against seeing this individual diabetic. Diabetes,
schizophrenia, hysteria, like soul and spirit, are thus abstract entities
useful for writing textbooks, teaching students, and doing research,
and each performs a function in its own context. As a methodological interpersonalist,
my interest is the method, or technique, of psychoanalysis as a healing art, as
a therapeutic dialogue between two people jointly studying the life story of
one, the analysand, no more and no less.
[34]
At the end of the day, whatever labels are
pinned on the person, whatever school of disorder the analyst adheres too, be
it Adlerian or Jungian, or Loewaldian
or Lacanian, Kernbergian or
Kohutian, the two persons forming the analytic work
team engage in a conversation based on reciprocal free association (Freud 1900,
Lothane, 1984, 1994a, 2006). There is a good heuristic reason
to see analogies and parallels between the introverted mystical state of mind
and the state, or frame, of mind of a person immersed in the process of free
association the analytic situation and the process of guided introvertive meditation.
[35]
This is how Freud described his
method, based on the technique of dream interpretation:
My patients were pledged to
communicate to me every idea or thought that occurred to them in connection
with some particular subject; amongst other things they told me their dreams …
This involves some psychological preparation of the patient. We must aim at
brining about two changes in him: an increase in the attention he pays to his
own psychical perceptions and the elimination of all criticism by which he
normally sifts the thoughts that occur to him. In order that he may me able to concentrate his attention on his
self-observation it is an advantage for him to lie in
a restful position … It is necessary to insist explicitly on his renouncing all
criticism of the thoughts that he perceives. We therefore tell him that the
success of the psycho-analysis depends on his noticing and reporting whatever
comes into his head and not being misled … into suppressing an idea because it
strikes him as unimportant or irrelevant of because it seems to him
meaningless. He must adopt a completely impartial attitude to what occurs to
him … The whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man observing his own psychical processes.
In reflection, there is one more psychical activity at work than in the most
attentive self-observation, and this is shown amongst other things in the
wrinkled forehead of a person pursuing his reflection as compared with the
restful expression of the self-observer … the man who is reflecting is also
exercising his critical faculty …
What is in question is the establishment of a psychical state which … bears some
analogy to the state before falling asleep – and no doubt also to hypnosis. …
As the involuntary ideas emerge they change into visual and acoustic images
(Freud, 1900, pp. 100-102; first two italics mine).
[36]
Freud teaches the patient a
technique of reverie and a turning away from concerns with reality and
censorship due to self-criticism. Practicing self-observation, rather than
problem solving by reflecting, ego and reality concerns, which interfere with
the process. The process weakens repression and allows for memories and
fantasies to emerge, leading to a reliving the past, discovering long buried
memories re-experienced in the form of
images, or picture thoughts, generating insight into the meaning of the past.
To be sure, this description is of an ideal situation, the process is also
subject to intrusions of transference and resistance, and it takes a while for
it to take hold. But there is no other way to analyze disorder, dreams, and
dramatic unconscious enactments of the present as determined by the past – this
is the foundation of the fundamental and unique technique of psychoanalysis. It
is an empirical, self-experimental method of self-discovery practices with a
benevolent helper who is also willing to free associate along the associations
of the seeker of such help. The two are a team.
[37]
Analogously, Aldous
Huxley described the technique of mystical meditation as “disciplining of the
will”:
It is the Indian and Far Eastern
formulations of the Perennial Philosophy that this subject is most systematically
treated. What is prescribed is a process of conscious discrimination between
the personal self and the Self that is identical with the Brahman, between the
individual ego and the Buddha-womb or universal mind. The result of this
discrimination is a more or less sudden and complete “revulsion” of
consciousness, and the realization of a state of “no-mind,” which ma be described as the freedom from perceptual and
intellectual attachment to the ego-principle. This state of “no-mind” exists,
as it were, on the knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual
man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation. To achieve it,
one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most
intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most
indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the
spirit. … As separate individuals, we must not try to think [no-mind], but
rather permit ourselves to be thought by it. [there
is] the need for intellectual humbleness and docility (Huxley, 1945, pp.
72-73).
[38]
The common denominator in both
techniques is the pursuit of transcendence: detaching from the mundane, the
noisy, the neurotic, of detaching oneself from self-centeredness, of developing
detached contemplation, of allowing oneself to be guided rather than busily
bending one’s own mind or somebody else’s. The road to illumination is not
easy, but worth the trouble it takes.
[39]
Of course, the treatment
situation is not limited to free association: it deals with conflict, resistance, transference,
and confrontation. Today we have gone beyond the narrow idea that the analyst “only
interprets.” In 1920 Freud rediscovered what he practiced as a beginner: the
healing power of suggestion, the power of the spoken word (Lothane,
2007b). The mutual emotional engagement between analysand
and analyst becomes a powerful lesson in love. Words can hurt and heal. As
noted by Huxley, “Language is the medium in which we live, move and love.” And so is silence. So let us end on a quote from
Shakespeare: “words, words, words, and the rest is silence.”
---------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------------- Henry (Zvi) Lothane e-mail <Zvi.Lothane
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