Posthumanism and not knowing in psychoanalytic thinking

Editor's Notes

• #4: You say I am repeatingSomething I have said before. I shall say it again.Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,       You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.In order to arrive at what you do not know       You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.In order to possess what you do not possess       You must go by the way of dispossession.In order to arrive at what you are not       You must go through the way in which you are not.And what you do not know is the only thing you knowAnd what you own is what you do not ownAnd where you are is where you are not. A basic tenant in all psychoanalytic work is to be without memory or desire. But what does that mean? It means that when the analyst is with the patient, they are not the expert, but a fellow traveller into what is not known and cannot be known as it is not yet conscious. The pair work together to sift through the debris of dreams and body memories, some sharp and clear, others less obvious because of the numbness. What work is this?
• #6: Hungry and deprived. Psychoanalysis is a theory, it is a method of treatment and it is a research methodology. I propose that what psychoanalysis gives us is a way of understanding the other, ourselves and the non-human environment. At it’s most profound level, psychoanalysis offers a language to understand our feelings (or experiences) but we need to realise that words are themselves transmutable and open to interpretation – in fact they are transitional objects that we use as we attempt to make sense of our external reality through a process of playing – i.e. work and love… Hollway and Jefferson who have incorporated psychoanalysis into their research work, state; psychanalsis is first and foremost an epistemology and methodology.
• #7: Why I became interested in psychoanalysis, the story which begins this book, of a symptom that abated on the first day she met her analyst. I had my personal reasons – I recognised that my previous coping mechanisms failed. This book gave me courage to being my own journey into the interior. Fearing the darkness, I sought a companion, that is a therapist. But this was not enough, many of my experiences affected what I could know and see, I feared doubt and uncertainty, they were signs of weakness and incompetence. I could not rely on another person to help me. What I wanted most I resisted with all my might. Words are difficult to locate, change once they are spoken can never express what agony the mind can suffer, but sometimes they are all we have to connect us. The language of Psychoanalysis offered me a way of understanding a confusing an frightening inner world.
• #8: Antonia S. Byatt in Possession has described certain kinds of readings that seem to be inextricable from certain experiences of writing, “when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.”’ (Morrison, 1992, pg.xiii)
• #9: Psychoanalysis, rather than an archaic language that refers to mankind’s predetermined sexual drives and/or perversions, speaks to the heart of what it means to be human. Any serious study of the analytic theories will reassure readers that they are probably already somewhat aware of the emotional significance within the concepts, either inside the experience of their own lives or as they have come to understand the life world of their clients. Psychoanalysis is a language of understanding ones feelings through the process of thinking, a process that I have termed being concerned with ‘matters of the heart’.
• #10: My concern over the loss of unconsciousness (a core idea in psychoanalysis) is that authors maintain a view of the world that is wholly conscious, socially and/or culturally motivated and responsive to clear explanations and good intensions. Perhaps the most profound loss in our current discourse has been an appreciation of the unconscious and the effect it can have on the actions and choices of individuals and within society. In the current climate of evidence based practice and measurable outcomes, that are reliant on positivist views of science and therapy, there has been a loss of wonder and delight in (appreciation of) the imaginative potential of the unconscious with its capacity to repair, reconcile and recover. The unconscious carries within it, not only instinctual drives and their concomitant anxiety, but a capacity for connection, knowledge, wisdom and creativity (Milner, 1987, Segal, 1986, Banks and Blair, 1997, Fidler and Fidler 1963, 1978). Unconsciousness carries not only the intimate experiences of feeding, stroking and holding but the cultural milieu in which the child is born soaks into the unconscious world of the infant. This interest in the environment and context in which the child lived and/or adult now lives has been explored in Lawrence's work (social dreaming) and contemporary theorists who look at gender, race and class within unconsciousness (Swartz, Dalal, Straker, Eng and Han).
• #11: Psychoanalysis does not seek to explain events to or for people, but to offer them a way of understanding themselves and thereby others. The theory and therapy can offer, at its simplest level, containment for the individual client or group, but on a more profound level can bring about a resolution of conflicts and thereby a release from symptoms that may have been the cause of constant suffering. E.g. Lucia’s recovery from psychosis through the resolution of her trauma. However understanding oneself, as anyone who has spent time in reflection knows, does not necessarily lead to measurable change, or an ongoing experience of happiness, but it can offer a sense of integration. Craib (2001) writes that psychoanalysis does not offer a ‘cure’(pg.182), in fact he frequently advises patients that they may well feel worse long before they begin to feel better, and anyone who has put themselves through the agony of an analysis knows this all too well, but it does offer a capacity for thinking and thereby thoughtfulness that can sustain the self during times of emotional turmoil. Brown and Peddar (1991) use a quote from a patient who described the outcome of her psychotherapy as; ‘And so for the first time I can remember a feeling of solid confidence in myself to face life itself, still confusing but not so frightening any longer. The feeling of being able to be and exist and give of myself without feeling the treat of an infinite void, of falling off a very high roof, but rather of having myself, and contact with the world all around, continues.’ (pg 201)
• #13: What distinguishes psychoanalysis from other forms of psychotherapy is the belief in the existence (and powerful influence) of the unconscious. Craib (2001) said that Freud’s notion of the importance of unconscious in all our actions and interactions was as important and discomforting as Galileo’s discovery that the world was not the centre of the universe! His point is draw our attention to the very real possibility that we are not in control of all that we think, do and say, and that if we are to understand the nature of what it is to be human we must look beyond explanations that reinforce the view we ‘masters or mistresses of [ourselves]’ (pg.21). ‘The lived past is never really past; it endures in us in more ways than we understand. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like the past; it just feels like life itself, like the way things have been and always will be, now as before, then and forever. For many people, experiencing the past as past, allowing it to become truly historical, is very difficult. It involves uncovering aspects of our lives, especially our early lives, that we have forgotten or not really known about, except perhaps as occasional spasms of mind or body, disturbing dreams…., hidden beneath our remembered pasts. The sources of the self run deep’. Barbara Taylor ‘The last Asylum’ (2014).
• #14: So much of our everyday understanding of human interaction relies of Freud’s early work, it is embedded in our language and beliefs. Consider the term ‘Freudian slip’. The return of humour to a patients verbal repertoire is a sign of a return to psychological well-being – but the extent of that health would depend if the humour was at another's expense (projection) or if it was a reflection of the frailty of the problem of being a human being – full of contradictory feelings and fears of inadequacy and failure. Freud gave us ways we could know the existence of the unconscious and they were in the from of Freudian slips - ‘Dreams are the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious’
• #15: Anyone who says that the unconscious cannot be know as it is not visible has not paid attention to the act of dreaming. As Brown points out we have a layers in in our unconscious, there are dreams we can consider dreaming, those we would not consider dreaming and those we cannot even consider that we would not dream them… Segal; Dreaming is the material the mind uses to grow as it processes the events of the day and anticipates the issues it has to face in the future.
• #17: This presentation looks at a turning point which occurred during an ethnographic study of the care work done by occupational therapists in acute inpatient settings in the UK and South Africa. I was the researcher – and the research was called ‘putting it into words’ . My methods included participant observation, in depth interviews, group inquiry and the use of reflexivity including the dreams of participants and my own. So let me get the more formal discussion on methodology out the way. 2 geographically different sites, similar numbers of OTs and clinical areas. I have not gone on to describe the analysis of the data, because it was messy and confusing and anyone who has worked with qulaiative inteview material will known it is a highly contested area of finding voice. I am happy to talk about approaches to data analysis if there is time at the end.
• #18: I found that I was very conscious of my race (i.e. whiteness) while doing the study. I found that in all my reports and reflections I mentioned race. I shrank from anything that implicated white people in the legacy of the past and I also felt burdened and guilty for the assumptions I had made about people’s experiences that were located in my colonial personal past. I didn’t want to consider that I could carry racist notions about the ‘other’ and yet I found evidence of them in many of the transcriptions and observations. During the study I found myself trying to be ‘different’ from the white people I saw round me, as if I would otherwise be associated with them through a shared racial identity. I viewed them as selfish and insensitive, something I wasn’t (or was at least trying very hard not to be). One of my difficulties in the SA research project (as I mention in Chapter 5) was my attempt to distance myself from Joanne (a white Afrikaans therapist) whom I saw as holding racist views, which I could not acknowledge as being my own. It was in reading the transcripts that I saw how I had positioned her in my mind, and how the transcripts presented another narrative, one of a deeply committed person who wanted to work with people who were ‘other’ and who didn’t make excuses for herself or them. Joanne: For me I think I am a bit of a pathological optimist … maybe nobody has given them [the clients] a chance in life … I am not expecting them to turn around and say I am so glad I met you because you have changed my life … but … everyone deserves a chance … when we hear the shackles [sound of chains which prisoners wear when coming to hospital] … everyone says ‘oh no another gangster’ … which I am sure they are, but they also quite frightened by the fact they have now had this injury, and they also have the same pain that has been experienced by the guy who goes to church every day …
• #19: It was thinking about my relationship with Joanne that brought a new insight to the dream I had prior to the second observation I had with her . In the dream I had fallen down a narrow chasm, which felt as if it had no end to it, and I was using rolls of pressure garment material to try and wedge below my feet so I could lever myself out. I have wondered what the rolls of pressure garment material may have meant. The elastic material was used as a second skin (i.e. a tight-fitting undergarment) for patients who had had skin grafts after a deep burn. Were the rolls of this material a symbol of the disfigurement which occurred during and as a result of apartheid? Like a burn on the skin, often visible after many years, one’s racial past carries a legacy that is still part of the visible identity (racial markers) in current times. How do black and white South Africans bear these scars? Is there an end to the suffering? Straker (2004) and Zembylas (2009) have both written about the inconsolable mourning process that has been (is) part of the identity of every South African. Straker’s paper looks at the effects of the institutionalisation of racism in South Africa and how black and white suffered a profound loss and grief without end (p.408). Black people were the victims of a system that denied them a rightful place of belonging and the white people who were actively opposed to the apartheid regime ‘could provoke … the very racism we are attempting to avoid’ (ibid. p.407).
• #20: Craib (1994) writes about the contribution of psychoanalysis to everyday life and he offers the reader these words to ponder over; ‘Integration is the acceptance of a process of being unintegrated, of depression, internal conflict and a normal failure to contain these within the boundaries of the personality. Perhaps another way of putting it is that integration involves a madness, a disorder, an internal division that for the most time remains within reason.’ (pg. 176) This recognition of emotional complexity may enable occupational therapists to lessen their hold on a wholly functional approach to work with clients and a return to thoughtfulness about their relationships with clients and the meaningfulness of activities. Occupation, i.e. what people chose to do with their time, could then be considered as a symbolic representation of a client’s need for a connection with others and an opportunity for a method of reparation though action. [1] Lyrics from the song ‘Mad World’, written by the group ‘Tear for Fears’, voted the best UK Christmas Song for 2003.
• #21: A transitional object can be used in this process. The transitional object is often the first ‘not me’ possession that really belongs to the child. These could be real objects like a blanket or a teddy bear, but other ‘objects’, such as a melody or a word, can fulfill this role as well. This object represents all components of ‘mothering’, and it means that the child himself is able to create what he needs as well. It enables the child to have a fantasized bond with the mother when she gradually separates for increasingly longer periods of time. The transitional object is important at the time of going to sleep and as a defence against anxiety. ‘To control what is outside one has to do things, not simply to think or to wish, and doing things takes time. Playing is doing (pg 47) In a later stage of the development the child no longer needs the transitional object. He is able to make a distinction between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’, and keeping inside and outside apart and yet interrelated. This development leads to the use of illusion, symbols and objects later on in life.
• #22: Communication between therapist and client then is a richly textured encounter, and it may be beholden on the therapist to understand the symbolic and manifest content of that connection. The patient’s description of their life, interests and occupational performance problems will be lost to the therapist who sees them as a symptom without a context. A patient of mine, who was living in the community and who had a schizophrenic illness, once said to me that when she went to the community mental health team for her monthly appointment with the psychiatrist, he asked her if she was hearing her voices again. She said if she replied that she was, he often then prescribed an increase in her medication. She said; “The thing is; no one asks me what the voices are saying”. Her voices were very important to understand because they, during significant periods of her illness, were her heard as dead mother imploring her to kill herself and join her on the other side as she (her mother) said she was very lonely. It was during these periods of this particular voice that my patient became suicidal and battled to maintain her routines of caring for her children and maintaining her home.
• #23: The mind picks up everything, files it, classifies it, and keeps it all. It has meaning, every event, no matter how minuscule, no matter how ordinary is catalogued, labeled and locked away in oblivion, but marked in consciousnessby a signal which is often microscopic: a scented sprig, a flash of colour, a blinking light, a fragment of sensation, a shattering word. And less even than that; a rustling, an echo. And still less, even: a nothing that is nevertheless something".                          Maria Cardinal 1975
• #26: The language of psychoanalysis also can also provide us a way of understanding ourselves, the relationships we establish and the society in which we live. A few years ago I was listening to Archbishop Desmond Tutu on BBC Radio4 discuss the importance of the truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) in healing the psychic wounds of South Africa. He was asked for his opinion on the war in Iraq and the Palestinian Israeli conflict. His strong anti-war views may not be easily appreciated in these times of conflict, but he used the African word ‘Ubuntu’, which means that a person is only a person through his relationship with other people, to describe the responsibility he felt we all carried towards each other. It was following this radio discussion that I came across the following section in Craib’s (1994) book on the ‘Importance of Disappointment’ and understood it again and for the first time. ‘…the straightforward rejection of the insights of psychotherapy does not help, because it denies one of the few areas where a separation from the system can be achieved: the complex internality of the individual, comprehension of which can enable him or her to take a critical and analytic distance from what is happening, and enable the formation of relationships based less on the illusion of common identity than on the reality of individual separation, difference and dependence. But this achievement means recognition of the real internal pain of fragmentation, of internal conflicts and of our manifold limitations. This, perhaps, is the most important message of psychoanalysis.’ (1994, pg.189) What I think he is saying is that psychoanalysis gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves, our capacity to feel concern for others and a critical ability to see through rhetoric and cultural assumptions about what is right or good for oneself or others. It is through this ability to think about our feelings and experiences that emancipates us and allows us to love the ‘other’ as a separate and important part of our lives.