Decentering the Self

Rational consciousness has long retained its position at the center of the self. Freud drew attention to the unconscious, but it remained marginal, transgressive, frightening. The task of the therapist was to help the client bring unconscious material into awareness, thereby subjecting the unconscious to conscious control. But it turns out that consciousness doesn’t have much substance; it continually reconfigures itself on the fly from material available in the unconscious. It begins to seem as though the unconscious is the center of the self, while consciousness becomes a thin and flexible membrane floating on the periphery. But now we realize that even the unconscious isn’t necessarily inside the self. The self is also immersed inside the unconscious — the various loosely-processed sensory impressions, bits of information, behavior patterns, and social interactions in which our lives unfold. So perhaps reality is central, while the self floats along at the periphery.

In the last post Derrida observed that the center of a structure serves as the source of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude. So consciousness is stable, reliable, secure, fixed, while the unconscious is unstable, volatile, dangerous, wild. If the unconscious becomes the center, then it’s conceivable that the self becomes marginal at its core. Alternatively, the unconscious must become our reliable source of stability. The first alternative seems frightening; the second, unlikely — but Lacan comes close to this assertion. He offers a double paradox: the center of the self, the source of stability and plenitude and the shaper of Reality, is the Other; however, the Other is always already absent. So the structure of the self is completely inverted and undermined. The unconscious speaks in a language that has not been absorbed into the discourse of the absent Other, so the unconscious speaks for whatever is authentic about the self. The unconscious reveals the truth: our lost sense of security at the center can never be recovered, and so we must carry on as best we can in its absence.

The structural inversion of Lacan sets the stage for Derrida, whose decentering project was discussed in the prior post. Let’s acknowledge that the center was never part of the structure. What we always wanted was the function that the center performed, which was to provide a sense of stability and assurance that gave us confidence to explore and to play. We demand that whatever we put at the center — consciousness, the Other, reality — must serve this function by remaining immobile and stable. Anything we discover about the center that is unstable, transient, different we must disallow, exiling it to the periphery. The center then must maintain vigilant guard against incursions by the periphery. In response the periphery mounts a subversive guerrilla campaign, trying to be recognized by the center. The resulting inner conflict between central authority and peripheral disruption brings sin and guilt, symptoms and shame, self-aggrandizement and self-destruction.

But maybe we can come to an awareness that whatever it is we’ve assigned to the center doesn’t really belong there. We’ve forced our consciousness to be single-minded and repressive, our unconscious to be haphazard and menacing. Or we’ve forced reality to be totalizing and fascistic, ourselves to be criminal or corrupt. If instead we relax our insistence that a stabilizing force remain at the center, then consciousness and unconscious, self and other, self and reality, are freed to establish a variety of relationships with one another. Consciousness can become not only a rational decision-maker and law-enforcer, but also a critic and a creator and a revolutionary. The unconscious can be occupied not just by forbidden urges but by perfectly ordinary desires and perceptions and unformulated experiences. The membrane that separates consciousness and unconsciousness, self and reality, loses its importance. Instead there are filaments and trajectories that pass across the membrane, dynamically crisscrossing each other, creating an ever-changing network of meaning that links us to one another and the world.

Next: implications for therapy.

The Anxieties of Free Play

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural — or structuralist — thought to reduce or to suspect.

– Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 1966

Derrida begins by contrasting structure with event, stability with “rupture.” Historically, structures have been constructed around a center, a fixed point of origin. The center serves as the basis for coherence and balance within the structure. Having a fixed center makes it possible to “play” with the elements of the structure, but this play is also limited by needing to remain compatible with the center. The center, while giving shape to both the form and the freedom of the structure that surrounds it, isn’t really part of the structure.

Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center.

Derrida goes on to say that, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. What is the nature of that desire? It’s the possibility of safe play, of playing within a framework of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude. The fixed center is what attachment theorists in developmental psychology refer to as a “secure base,” giving the child a sense of certainty that enables her to master the anxiety inherent in exploring strange situations. What’s important is that there be a reliable presence at the center of the exploratorium.

The rupture, says Derrida, came with the realization that the center was not the center, that the actual center was the desire for security rather than the specific presence on which this desire happened to land. The presence, whether it existed or not, wasn’t part of the structure — it was free of the structure. The center was not a fixed locus but a function. This stabilizing function, rather than being part of the structure, permeates the structure as a system of signs that together constitute the principle of structuration. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.

…and now it’s time to pack my Derrida book into the box because the movers are on their way. I’d wanted to post on this essay for a week but couldn’t quite get around to it, so now it’ll have to be a half-post. (Several hours later…) The movers have come and gone, taking the boxes away with them. And now I see that Derrida’s essay can be found on-line. And so I can finish after all…

Paradoxically, the event of decentering cannot occur without assuming the architecture in which center and structure make sense. When Nietzsche replaces being with play, truth with interpretation, he does so from inside a metaphysics of being and truty. Freud can’t replace consciousness with the unconscious except by consciously accepting the distinction. The opposition is part of the system.

“Human nature” is premised on the idea of universality, that across cultures human beings share certain common features. But what happens when language, education, law, technology, art, are universal? Nature is decentered, displaced by culture. But the conceptual distinction between nature and culture remains useful as a method in studying human societies, even if the truth of this distinction can no longer be sustained. Nature as a concept thus becomes a convenient myth sustained by science. Nature is a myth produced by culture.

This too is a decentering procedure in the human sciences, with truth being displaced by method. Levi-Strauss refers to this particular decentering as bricolage — borrowing techniques on an as-needed basis without regard for their original context or application. He contrasts the bricoleur with the engineer, who presumably follows a systematic and integrated praxis. But all praxes have been assembled from various sources. The engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur.

Is it possible then to make myth the original condition and the center of all cultural endeavor? No, because there is no way of identifying the original myth, or the original source of myths. Myth is always already part of a structure of discourse that contrasts myth with fact. And the fact of the original myth can never be found, because the whole contrast between fact and myth is also part of this same structure. Neither can ever become the center because each always already presumes the other.

It’s not possible to build an all-inclusive structural discourse on anything because the whole endeavor of structuration is always being undermined and inverted. On the other hand, it’s also impossible to construct a complete empirical description of a phenomenon, because it’s always possible that new data will turn up that overturn the prior findings. Totalization, therefore, is sometimes defined as useless, and sometimes as impossible. The contemporary failure of all totalizing discourses can be lamented as a consequence of the finitude of human perspective. But it’s arguable that totalization is simply inappropriate, that the fields of inquiry simply do not lend themselves to comprehensive and all-inclusive understanding. Language, thought, society, culture — all human activity is characterized by free play: the ability to go outside the collection of all prior empirical instances and every rule of the game. Free play is possible not because of the potentially infinite extension of structures built around a center, but because of the finite and contained flexibility inherent in absence, in lack, in structures without a center. When the elements of the structure are disconnected from the center, then all the interconnections are supplemental to the structure. And human invention insures the continual surplus of supplementarity, the continual ability to restructure the elements in an uncountable number of variants.

One can lament the loss of the center, or one can celebrate it:

As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation — the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation — would be the other side. This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays the game without security…

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words, through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game…

There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation — which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy — together share the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, the human sciences. For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing — in the first place because here we are in a region (let’s say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference. Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing — but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.

This is already a long summary, and I’m too fatigued right now to think about implications for my own projects.

Joining the Sorry Parade

At Church and Postmodern Culture, Dr. Carl put up a post about Deleuze and Globochrist. Dominic Fox was the first to comment, calling the post “a sorry parade of solecisms.” Now that I’ve submitted to Dominic’s stern discipline, now that I’ve naughtily whispered the blasphemy (“Badiou is a PoMo heeheehee”) without getting caught, I think maybe it’s safe for me to come out from under the covers.

I’m looking at the article that Dominic tossed in before slamming the door behind him (“and don’t make me have to come back in here…”), where Badiou sets up a contrast between himself and Deleuze with respect to THE EVENT. I’m not wondering about whether Badiou is a disciple of Deleuze or whether Badiou is “taking Deleuze from behind,” producing a monstrous offspring that is no longer purely Deleuzian. I’m not even yet prepared to decide whether Deleuze or Badiou is right, or which position I agree with more. I’m wondering about the question they’re asking and why it’s important.

Here is Deleuze’s Axiom 1: Unlimited becoming becomes the event itself.

In contrast, here is Badiou’s Axiom 1: An event is never the concentration of a vital continuity, or the immanent intensification of a becoming. It is never coextensive with becoming. It is, on the contrary, on the side of a pure break with the becoming of an object of the world, through the auto-apparition of this object. Correlatively, it is the supplementation of apparition by the emergence of a trace: what formerly inexisted becomes intense existence.

By staking out his position Badiou answers a prior question: is an “event” continuous or discontinuous with the conditions that precede and lead up to it? I ask whether this question is interesting to me. What is an “event”? I don’t mean the “Christ event,” or even Biblical events more broadly, but events in contemporary life. If every event is an outgrowth of the conditions that led up to it, does this imply a continual and deterministic unfolding of whatever was present “in the beginning”? If, on the other hand, an event is a “pure break,” does it imply that every event is something like a miracle?

In contemplating human creation I wonder whether the creative act is natural “from the ground up,” an eventual manifestation of nature transforming itself, or whether the creator has to transform nature by some other power. If it’s the former, can we really call it creation; if the latter, is it still strictly human?

I’m also interested in psychological practice. In unblocking the passage between inside and outside, between desire and fulfillment, does the self become so thin as virtually to disappear? On the other hand, if the self transforms everything, both inside and outside, does the self become a “pure break,” something radically other than nature?

Even though I’m not well-read in Deleuze or Badiou, the question they ask about THE EVENT and the contrasting answers they offer are directly relevant to my ongoing projects of creation and therapy. It’s possible to conduct a broad and aimless survey, but at some point you have to have something of which you’re trying to make sense. Having this question of meaning puts you in collaboration with others who also are trying to make sense of the same thing.

Th emerging Christians have recruited the PoMos in their critique of Modernism and in exploring new Biblical hermeneutics. Sometimes it seems that the Christians merely want to plug these thinkers into predetermined slots — Badiou sees event as pure break, Badiou sees the Christ Event as paradigmatic, therefore Badiou supports the Christian story. That approach seems like a distortion and a waste of time — the Christians ought to be able to mount their own cultural critique and their own apologetics. But if the Christians can think about the questions that are being asked and decide whether these are also questions a Christian might ask, then these writers become colleagues in the search for an answer, or at least for a trajectory. Is THE EVENT immanent or transcendent — not just the Christ event but any event, regardless of its religious significance or whether Christians are involved in it? If this is an interesting question to Christians, then it should be possible to mount a project and a series of focused readings. The PoMo engagement becomes something more substantial and meaningful.

Self as Portal

Individual creatures are suspended between the twinned determinisms of the genes and the world. In nature the individual is a carrier of genetic variation, a test case for the survival value in the environment of a specific randomly-generated genomic combination manifesting itself phenotypically. For any individual the environment includes conspecifics. But a pack or herd isn’t just a collection of individuals; the individual is genetically and irreducibly a social creature, capable of surviving and reproducing only among its fellow creatures. So the individual is thrice decentered: the genes, the world, the others.

Human individuals too occupy the genes, the world, and the collective. Human experience is uniquely mediated by intelligence, which transforms the individual expression of the genes into a self, the world into a reality, the collective into a society. The three human domains are yoked together through the uniquely human form of intelligence that is culture. Culture is remarkable in that, while it extends across the entirety of human society, each individual actively configures a personalized version of it and installs it in the brain. Language, understanding, history, tradition, exchange, organization, morality, invention, art — we live inside of culture, and culture lives inside of us. Communal culture is continually updating itself, incorporating countless incremental changes propagated across the species. Individual installations of culture also update themselves continually, emerging from the ongoing stream of encounters with the world and other people, as well as through the active reorganization of the individual mind. Culture is a cumulative installation, repeatedly ratcheting itself up from earlier, simpler iterations of itself — this is true both collectively and individually.

…Which brings us back to psychological practice. I’ve been talking about the self as a membrane, with therapy being a procedure for unclogging the membrane, facilitating the free transport of information, desire, intention, and so on between inside and outside. I wanted to de-emphasize the idea of self-as-entity and replace it with self-as-process. That still seems like the way to go. But the processes engaged in by the self are much more impressive than mere exchange between inside and outside. The self actively and continually transforms everything.

Culture isn’t a vast database stored in the archives of memory. When I want to write something I don’t make a series of selections from a memorized set of all conceivable English-language sentences, nor do I search through my dictionary and grammatical rule book for what I can say. Instead I construct a flow of language on the fly, assembling it from the various bits and pieces that make sense to say next. Language is more like a procedure, a way of transforming experience into communicable information. Similarly, morality isn’t a set of rules governing every possible situation; it’s a procedure for evaluating motives, decisions and actions on the fly, according to criteria that are relevant to the situation at hand.

We experience nothing in the raw. Everything that comes to us from the world, everything that goes out from us into the world, we subject to one or more relevant cultural procedures. This continual process of culturally transforming experience renders our interactions with the world meaningful. Meaning gradually accumulates in our past experiences; gradually our transformative procedures become more sophisticated.

We transform the world as we pass through it, subjecting it to a variety of procedures for embedding it in meaning. Every individual is a portal that opens onto multiple overlapping realities. The task of the practice isn’t just to unclog the flows between inside and outside. It’s to make sure the portal is working smoothly, flexibly, imaginatively, actively creating realities on the fly.

A Ghost in the Machine?

On the other hand, the membrane isn’t just a bag of skin.

A couple posts ago I reduced Self and Reality to opposite faces of a membrane between inside and outside. The membrane is flexible, porous, emergent. The job of the practitioner is to unclog the membrane, facilitating the transfer of information between inside and out, seeking ways for desires to achieve fulfillment. Thinking about the membrane this morning, I realize that I may have underestimated its significance. In fact, I think this membrane might be the most important thing.

I agree that Self has gotten entirely too big, as if it contained all of Reality inside itself. At the same time, I’m concernted that Reality also has gotten too big, with its Totalizing Discourses and its Metanarratives, its Globalization and its Merged Hermeneutical Horizons squeezing all the Voids and Differences out of existence.

But now I’m thinking back to the beginning of this blog, when I was still working on Genesis 1. In my reading of that primal narrative, Self and Reality were the twin stars of that show. In embedding the universe in a framework of meaning elohim created a reality. In watching, learning and participating in elohim‘s work of creation, the selfhood of man emerged as part of that creation. Selves create the meaning of realities; realities create the meaning of selves.

A self has no substance of its own; neither does a reality. At the same time, we humans have no direct access to the world or even to our own instincts and drives and desires. All our experiences are mediated by selves interacting with realities. Without the insubstantial two-sided membrane we wouldn’t disappear; we would recede into insignificance, and so would the world we live in.

The membrane isn’t just the least intrusive break in the continuum between inside and outside. The membrane is a break to be sure, a gap that keeps the world from overwhelming us and ourselves from absorbing the world into our own representations of it. But the membrane is also a radically different entity from the substances on the inside and the outside. It might not even be substantial at all, although I’m wary of inserting some sort of transcendence into the gap, a ghost into the machine. The membrane is different from inside and outside. The two-sided membrane is the source and the process of differentiation.

The work of the practice isn’t merely to make the membrane as porous as possible, so that raw desires and raw phenomena pass through it untransformed. It’s the transformative power of the membrane that’s the most important thing. What’s wanted is a limber and dexterous and powerful membrane, a membrane that is itself a portal, continually transforming the raw into reality, pulling meaning out of the chaos and the void.

Portality

In my Psychotopia post I wondered about what sort of place my therapy practice should occupy. Most practitioners set up in a nice office; their task is to cure, repair, restore, coach, or otherwise normalize their clients.

Suppose your psychological model isn’t about healing the sick or restoring function or getting people in touch with reality. What if instead you emphasize difference from the norm as something to be cultivated, if you regard normalcy as largely a social convention, if you propose that multiple realities can coexist in the same space and time? Suppose psychological symptoms point not to individual illness but to gaps and overlaps in alternate realities, and that the counselor’s job isn’t to relieve the symptoms but to serve as a tour guide in exploring these gaps and overlaps.

Certainly the physical setting can connote either normativity or difference. More important to me is identifying the position the site and the practice occupy inside reality. I’m thinking about a practice that opens reality up for the client. Instead of helping the client “get in touch with reality,” as if reality was some objective and unitary world, I want to help the client explore the possibility of seeing and creating alternate realities, alternate ways of making sense of the world and the self. Together, the setting, the praxis and the practitioner operate as a portal, a means by which the client can pass from one reality into another.

The practitioner stakes no claim to the intrinsic superiority of any particular reality. The practice is a place for experimenting with alternatives. The realities explored in the practice might be confined to the practice, with practitioner and client jointly investigating them during the sessions without ever extending them to other people, places and times. The experimental realities explored in the practice will likely be partial realities, focusing intensively on specific themes, sources of meaning, desires and affordances, interests and values, relationships and conflicts.

Through experimentation with alternate realities it becomes apparent to the client that his or her subjective experience of the world can become different. Through explorations in the portal, the client also comes to recognize that the “normal” reality of our culture is a largely a matter of habit and consensus: it too could be other than what it is. The phenomena of the world can be embedded in many alternative systems of meaning.

The practice is a heterotopia, functioning on the margins of normal reality. But leaving the heterotopia and returning to the world isn’t the same as leaving a fantasy world and returning to “the real world.” Nor do we need to subscribe to Baudrillard’s contention that there is no reality, that all the options are mere simulacra of a reality that doesn’t exist. The world is crisscrossed with limitless numbers of realities, only some of which have ever been actualized. To pass through the portal is to untangle the strands of meaning from each other, loosening the matrix of a particular reality from the phenomena of the world. The strands can reassemble and reattach themselves in a whole variety of ways. One particular reality may prove more salient and compelling than the others, and so the client passes all the way through the portal, allowing this particular reality to cover the whole world, allowing him/herself to participate fully in this reality. The portal has opened itself outward into difference.

The Membrane

There’s a semi-permeable membrane positioned between the inside and the outside. Call the inner surface of this membrane Self; call the outer surface Reality.

From the inside come instincts, desires, memories, thoughts, behavior patterns. From the outside come affordances, objects, events, other people, social systems. The membrane is the place where, for a given individual, outside and inside interact, continually and proactively reconfiguring itself through attention, perception, intent, behavior, thought, speech.

Self and reality too are continually and actively recongfiguring themselves “on the fly,” anticipating and responding to the ever-changing situations on either side of the membrane. Selves and realities are interdependent and are meaningful only with respect to one another. A self is the continually-changing inner situation that’s activated relative to a reality in which it is embedded. A reality is the continually-changing outer situation that’s activated relative to a self that engages it. Motivation and action come from the self and are aimed outward. Reality consists of those affordances toward which the self can take effective action in pursuit of its motivations.

On the inside is hunger. On the outside is a ripe apple. The membrane recognizes the hunger as an inner motivation, recognizes the apple as something toward which the motivation can be directed, creates an intent to get the apple, initiates a behavior sequence to achieve the intent. During this brief interval self and reality are meaningful with respect to the hunger-food interaction across the membrane. An effective membrane recognizes both the self’s motivations and the reality’s affordances, both the self’s capabilities for acting and the reality’s amenability to being acted upon. So: I am hungry and there is an apple that I can eat; I can pick apples and that apple is within reach.

Selves and realities aren’t restricted to simple stimulus-response situations. On the inside is a set of desires and interests and a set of personal moral standards. On the outside is an opportunity to do or not to do something. The membrane recognizes the relevant moral considerations triggered by the opportunity, as well as the particular desires and interests afforded by the opportunity, and generates an intent to act or not to act, as well as a rationale for arriving at this intention.

Selves and realities are two sides of the same membrane. A self is embedded inside the reality it constructs — and so the self can be made an object of evaluation as if it was on the outside. A reality is assembled from phenomena that acquire their salience from the self that constructs that reality — and so reality can be evaluated subjectively, as if it was on the inside. Psychotherapy takes advantage of this ability to turn the membrane “inside out.”

The membrane can lose permeability, blocking flows of information and action between inside and outside. It may not recognize the presence of a particular inner desire or interest, or it may fail to attune to affordances for satisfying that desire or interest that are present in the world. The membrane may become overly sensitized to a single inner desire or set of outer affordances, which then override other desires and affordances that might otherwise become salient to intentional action taken by the self in reality. These impedances and overrides may come from inside the membrane, the result of repression, denial, obsession, habit, unformulated experience; they may come from outside through legal prohibitions, social norms, marketing. Typically both the inner and outer blockages operate beneath the threshold of awareness.

A psychological practice would focus on restoring the membrane to full permeability, flexibility, and attunement. It would attempt to identify specific areas in which the membrane is “clogged,” then try to “unclog” them. Attention is focused on both sides of the membrane: self and reality, desires and affordances, intention and accessibility. Awareness, formulation, meaning, flow: these are the foci of interaction between practitioner and client.

Multiple Overlapping Realities

My last two posts on Vietnam vets illustrate various points about realities:

Realities aren’t coextensive with physical stuff. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings can participate in the same heroic mythic reality; the Vietnamese jungle and the Midwestern American suburb can participate in the same warzone reality. On the other hand, a single place can simultaneously occupy two different realities: the jungle can be both a beautiful habitat and a source of danger; a suburban home can be a source of both security and insecurity.

Realities aren’t all in your head. For some people Vietnam and suburbia are dangerously insecure places; for others these same places are loci of supply and demand in the global marketplace. But these aren’t just different subjective responses: they’re responses to different meaningful features of the world.

Realities aren’t defined solely by intersubjective agreement. Isolated Vietnam vets can participate in the same alternative American reality as one another without even realizing it. An artist can “see” impressionism or cubism even before anyone else does; a handful of scientists can detect signs of global warming without knowing that anyone else is detecting the same evidence. On the other hand, intersubjective agreement can validate a particular reality, defining it as either mainstream or marginal, healthy or sick.

Realities are systems of meaning that link individuals to the world and to other people. A reality isn’t centered in the individual or the world or the community. A reality is more like a web that stretches across, embeds and links together the self, the world, and other people. A web of reality is knit together from multiple interlacing strands of meaning: beauty, danger, money, security, etc. A reality is neither objective nor subjective, neither a permanent part of the world nor a mental construct. An unlimited number of realities coexist in the world, but they are what Deleuze calls “virtual” realities (see prior post). A particular reality actualizes itself on the fly, assembled from whatever strands of meaning are important to an individual or group as they interact with the physical and social world. Language illustrates the general structure common to all realities: each of us has language inside our head; language can be represented as physical symbols that point to features of the world; language is an interpersonal medium in which conversation takes place.

As psychologist J.J. Gibson pointed out (see prior post), animals don’t just occupy space and time; they live in environments. An environment “affords” nourishment, shelter, danger, etc. — features of the environment that are specifically meaningful to the animals living in it. Individual animals are genetically attuned to these affordances, continually seeking out and making use of affordance information in order to eat, avoid predators, reproduce, protect offspring, etc.

The environment consists of multiple overlapping virtual realities, each of which comprises one or more categories of affordances. If the animal is hungry and thirsty, the food and drink affordances of the world become salient, and the animal attunes to them: the virtual reality that links hunger and food, thirst and drink. When the hunger and thirst are satisfied, these affordances of the world aren’t exhausted; rather, they recede back into the virtual, ready to be activated again any time.

Humans are like other animals: we live in environments, we attune to affordances, we assemble realities on the fly depending on whatever motivations are activated. Because we are really clever and complex animals we can attune to affordances that aren’t purely instinctual; e.g., beauty, justice, understanding. Most of the time we participate in realities without paying conscious attention. But we can pay attention; we can become aware of realities and the strands of meaning that comprise them. I can realize that right now I’m attuned to the jungle’s affordances of beauty and taxonomic knowledge rather than to its affordances of danger and food.

If I’m attending to the environment’s affordances for threat and protection, it’s because I’m currently motivated to avoid danger and/or to seek out security. For each of us these motivations surge and recede, as do the environmental affordances that are meaningful relative to these motivations. This particular reality, which links danger to environmental threats, insecurity to environmental sources of safety, is always virtual but only intermittently actualized. If I’m constantly participating in this particular reality, it means that I’m sensing immanent threat or insecurity all the time, and so I’m hyperattuned to sources of danger and protection. On the other hand, I might never participate in this reality, never recognize any sort of danger or need to protect myself from it. These two extremes — overengagement and underengagement in particular realities — should probably constitute the dual foci of a psychological practice.

On Validating the Illness

Alternate realities typically refer to alternate physical places and phenomena, as in science fiction movies or dreams, but I’m referring to alternative ways of construing the meanings of things. Yesterday I wrote about wartime reality, where fear and violence come to dominate the way people in the war zone experience the world. When the soldiers who fought in Vietnam returned from the remote Asian jungles to the States they perceived it as a hostile environment riven with imminent but hidden danger — the way they had experienced Vietnam. It was an uncanny experience for the vets: they had returned home, but home had changed. The place was the same, but what the place meant was different. They remembered how they used to feel at home, and people treated them as if they had never left. But now they felt out of place, as if Vietnam had changed them into someone else.

As individuals the vets were isolated. When everyone else acts as if nothing has changed you feel like there must be something wrong with you. In a group, they came to realize that they shared a common orientation to the world. I think we all experienced a sense of vindication. PTSD, we felt certain, was a legitimate syndrome, deserving of official recognition in the psychological profession. Vets who couldn’t hold down a job should receive disability. Professionals who offered treatment of PTSD should be compensated by the Veterans Administration. Society adapted itself to the vets, not by validating their reality but validating their illness.

I’m not so sure I want to see the world like the vets I knew did, but I’m aware that their paranoia wasn’t psychotic. They were acutely attuned to the subtle threats that surround us, the small gestures of aggression and fear, surveillance and counter-surveillance, covert acts of treachery and retaliation, the precariousness of existence and the gradual loss of life that all of us experience. No doubt most of their perceptions were accurate. Who was I to tell them that these experiences were unimportant and should be ignored, that all things considered America was a safe and friendly place, that adjustment depended on their unlearning of instincts that had kept them alive during the most dangerous and meaningful interval of their lives?

I believe that the vets did learn to doubt their perceptions as warriors, to mistrust their newfound instincts for survival and attack. I believe that I helped them adjust to civilian life, not by guiding them through catharsis of repressed traumatic experiences but by abetting their repression of awarenesses deemed unacceptable by mainstream American culture. Only gradually did it dawn on me that the vets’ reality was and is a latent truth about America, comprising an alternate reality that for most of us remains invisible. Only when something triggers our awareness, some kind of wartime experience comes out from the camouflage and moves into the foreground, are we able to glimpse this alternate reality.

Maybe if we had listened to the Vietnam veterans we’d all be better at distinguishing real threats from contrived ones, at recognizing acts of macho bravado as the kind of bullshit slung by guys who have never actually been in the line of fire, at never purposely putting people in harm’s way unless there’s a damned good reason for it. Instead, we allowed ourselves to be manipulated into a continual paranoiac state of war against unseen enemies, persuading ourselves that it had nothing to do with Vietnam.

I’m trying to get on with the project of formulating what a postmodern psychological practice might look like, but as I rethink these experiences I’m finding myself a little discouraged by the prospect.

Wartime Reality

When I was in grad school I helped start a counseling center for Vietnam veterans. This was around 1980 — 5 years after the last American troops pulled out of Vietnam, the same year that post-traumatic stress disorder was officially recognized as a diagnostic category by the American Psychiatric Association, two years before the Veterans Administration acknowledged that PTSD was a problem with the Vietnam vets. We started a group, and lots of vets started coming out of the hills looking for help. While we had some research findings and some psychoanalytic theory to work with, we were exploring mostly uncharted waters.

Our plan going in was to get the vets to relive their combat traumas, leading to catharsis and a resolution of symptoms. We soon discovered that catharsis didn’t have a lot of impact. The vets felt alienated from loved ones, paranoid, psychically numb, drawn to substance abuse and high-risk behaviors, prone to outbursts of anger, unable to hold down a job. There were occasional violent episodes and hallucinatory flashbacks (just like in the movies), but for the most part the problems were chronic.

Most of the vets in the group had never talked about their experiences with other vets; now they began to recognize that they shared with one another a similar orientation to civilian life. In getting to know their stories I realized that this orientation to life had begun while the were in Vietnam as survival strategies.

• Alienation — when your friends are apt to be killed at any minute it doesn’t pay to get too closely attached.
• Paranoia — the jungle and the village hold hidden terrors; a civilian may turn out to be a guerrilla.
• Psychic numbing — when threat is imminent and continual, loss is frequent, and killing is part of your job description, then reacting emotionally just makes you less vigilant and more vulnerable.
• Substance abuse — alcohol and drugs helped with the psychic numbing in Vietnam.
• Risk-seeking — when life poses a constant threat, actively pursuing the enemy at least gives you the illusion of control.
• Outbursts of anger — for a soldier, anger is part of the motivation.
• Unemployability — when victory is not achievable, the only ways out of the war are death, injury, and the end of your tour of duty — i.e., losing your job.

Vietnam wasn’t just a different country; it was a different reality. What gave life meaning in America — home, family, success, competition, possessions, fun — had no place in Vietnam. War strips life back to the basics of survival — life and death, attack and defense, fear and anger and loss, hypervigilance and fatigue. After discharge, the survivors found it hard to return to the petty concerns of daily American life — it just didn’t seem serious. Though they had come home, they were still living inside a wartime reality.

My job was to help the vets to get over it, to re-adapt to civilian life, to lose their symptoms and regain psychological well-being. But as I came to a better understanding of their lives, catching glimses of life the way they saw it all the time, I began to have a change of heart. These guys knew things about life that I didn’t. Maybe they could sensitize me to strands of meaning that I ordinarily ignored.

At the time I wasn’t able to formulate these insights fully. My job was to serve as an ambassador of normal American reality. Welcome home; I’m here to help you resume your place in this reality. Knowing what I do now I’d go about it differently. Welcome home; teach us what you’ve learned.

Psychological Objects

Psychotherapy is territorialized in fairly standard ways. The process has a name: counseling, therapy, analysis, treatment, coaching. The participants have titles: therapist and client, analyst and patient, counselor and counselee. There are the diagnoses and the drugs. There are varieties of praxis: ego psychology, Lacanian, ratio-emotive. The “sessions,” usually scheduled and of fixed duration, are conducted in an office. There are the fees.

But there are other ways of dividing the territory. In my work on Genesis I put forward some constructs for understanding the act of human creation. If we think of therapy as a kind of interpersonal creation, then these constructs might be relevant. Here are the most important ones:

A reality is a way of making sense of phenomena, a way of ascribing meaning to our experience of some part of the world. Human experience is interlaced with untold numbers of realities. Each reality stretches itself across a whole array of phenomena; each phenomenon can participate in an array or realities. So, for example, a field of flowers can be meaningful as a subject of a painting, as a source of pollen for bees, as discrete instances of various species of plants, as a relatively unobstructed terrain for setting up a picnic, etc.

A strand is an abstract property of a reality that links phenomena together on a single dimension. In Genesis 1, “light” is a strand: a property of phenomena that affords visibility for a human onlooker, arrayed in a continuum from darkness to brightness. Strands come into conscious awareness through a cognitive process of separate-and-name.

A void is a set of phenomena that does not participate in a reality. A nihilistic void has degenerated from a previously meaningful organization into chaos; an emerging void has never before been assembled into a meaningful array. Voids are relative: various phenomena might already participate in multiple realities, but they might not be assembled into a unified collection whose commonality might be defined by a reality not yet formulated.

An interval is a limited duration of time, either continuous or intermittent, during which someone participates in a particular reality. Inside an interval, a person understands the meaning of phenomena in terms of a particular set of strands that together constitute a reality.

A portal is a place or procedure by means of which someone makes the transition from one reality to another. In transubstantiation, the priestly act of consecration is the portal by means of which the bread and wine make the transition to the body and blood. This is a transition not of the stuff but of the systems of meaning — the realities — in which they participate. So the phenomena of bread and wine pass through consecration from the shared reality of bodily nourishment to the shared reality of communion. The stuff doesn’t change; the realities for making sense of the stuff change.

Using this small set of alternative “psychological objects” I propose over the next few installments to reterritorialize psychotherapy.

Pentecost in Nice

1.

Anne was assigned the crucial passage — Acts 2:1-11. She had practiced, had looked up the foreign pronunciations, was prepared. The moment arrives; reverentially, confidently she approaches the dais. When Pentecost Day came round, the apostles had all met in one room… Loudly and clearly she announces the mighty wind, the tongues of fire, the filling with the Spirit, the speaking in foreign tongues. ‘Surely,’ they said, ‘all these men speaking are Galileans?’ But somehow Galileans just will not take shape properly on the page, as if some of the letters are missing. Gali…. Galee… And now it’s as if the spirit of Babel has descended, confusing the speaker’s tongue. Parthians and Medes and Elamites, people from Mesopotamia and Judaea and Cappadocia — none would have recognized themselves in this proclamation. At last the passage comes to an end and the lector, having drunk her cup of public shame to the dregs, resumes her place in the congregation.

2 .

Kenzie and I took the noon train to Nice, meeting Anne at the church. For lunch we ate burgers et frites at the McDo on the beach, its second-floor dining area affording a superb view of the Promenade des Anglais and the magnificent Baie des Anges dotted with sailboats and yachts. Then it’s up the boardwalk to the Rialto for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, shown in V.O. (version originale, English with French subtitles). The title of this latest installment is At World’s End — AWE, as Kenzie pointed out. It’s a virtual theme park ride to resurrection, complete with the ferrying of dead souls across to the other side, a goddess with cool makeup and a nifty Jamaican accent, the uncanny doubling of a dead Johnny Depp, an inversion of surface and depth, and a sunset that turns into a sunrise. If you had to choose between the church’s representation of life after death and Disney’s, which would you find more compelling?

3.

The movie over, we walk three blocks up the rue de France to our favorite kebab place. On the way we see a little boy about 3 years old crouching before a storefront window. He’s making moaning noises, grasping at the glass, trying to reach right through it to the rubber balls displayed on the other side. Here is pure desire, pure frustration. The glass separating the boy from the balls, desire from fulfillment, is the marketplace. Eventually the ball will move forward to become an image projected onto the glass, and the boy, older now, will desire the glassy image for its own sake, not for what it reveals behind itself.

4.

We arrive at the station in plenty of time to catch the next train back to Antibes, but the place is packed, and guards are blocking the doors leading from the station to the platform. A train pulls in heading west, where we’re going, but even after disgorging its Nice-bound passengers it’s still nearly full. Part of the waiting crowd is packed into the cars, and the train pulls out. What the heck is going on? The guy in front of me in the crush hears me speaking English to Anne. “The race is ended,” he tells me. The course for the Monaco Grand Prix runs right through downtown Monte Carlo, making the roads inaccessible to ordinary traffic, so the savvy French spectators park along the coast and take the train in. Now they were all heading back. Two trains later we were on our way, and we even got seats.

5.

The guy who gave me the scoop about the crowded trains was a Californian. He had been to the race (“a dream of a lifetime”), stopped off in Nice for a quick lookaround, and was heading to Cannes for the aftermath of the Film Festival, which ended at about the same time as the race. Note to Ron: the Romanians won the big prizes. And note to regular readers: on the second day of the Festival Anne and I managed to penetrate security and stroll through the bar, grounds and lobby of the fabulous Eden Roc hotel. But that perhaps is another story.

Toward a Different Sort of Innocence

I’ve been posting lately about a possible psychological intervention focusing on sorrow. As usual, I find it easier to say what this thing is not. Is isn’t therapy for depression where the goal is to treat a disorder. It isn’t grief counseling where the goal is to work through a specific loss. It’s more a personal exploration of the ways in which sorrow lays a shadow across everything: self, relationships, world. What would be the point of undertaking this personal exploration? I think it has something to do with achieving innocence.

Sam and I have been talking about this a bit on the Man of Sorrows post with reference to literature. He points out that in Great Expectations Pip retains his innocence into adulthood, not becoming embittered through grievous disappointment like Miss Havisham. The world is hard and cold but, as Estella discovers, becoming conformed to the world doesn’t really protect you from it. Pip holds great expectations for his life, but when these expectations aren’t met he remains open to the possibility of surprise. He even maintains an open-heartedness toward those who have hurt him the most.

The delirious discussions at Cultural Parody Center return again and again to David Lynch’s Inland Empire. I’ve seen this movie twice, posted a couple times on it, have reflected on it a bit. But now I’m thinking about it in the context of sorrow and loss. I’m seeing it as a kind of surrealist variant on the Stations of the Cross, imbued with variations on the Lacanian theme of loss. I realize that the film is not cathartic; that the sorrow is never even fully experienced, let alone resolved; that perhaps this is Jesus’s Via Dolorosa transfigured into a woman half-born trapped in a labyrinth. Maybe these ideas too will remain half-born, but thinking about the film in terms of sorrow opens up new horizons for my experiencing of the movie.

The European churches present a wide variety of interpretations of the Stations of the Cross, some that predate the convergence on fourteen prescribed scenes. But the literal renderings don’t exhaust the possibilities. There’s a starkly magnificent installation by modernist Barnett Newman at the National Gallery in Washington: huge unprepared canvases painted stark white, each one distinctively “slashed” in black top to bottom. Newman was Jewish, and his lifelong output of works was quite meager: I don’t know what motivated him to create, over a period of several years, this series of paintings. Maybe he rendered the Christian tragedy in modernist idiom, or commemorated some deeply personal sorrow, or expressed abstractly the universal experience of suffering.

If I were to delve into sorrow as a psychological intervention, I believe that a fabric of sorrow would weave itself together, suspending the world in delicate threads strong as death, strong as life. I would become a vector of sorrow traversing that suspended world. Every action would be transformed into a pilgrimage; every gesture would reveal sorrow. Something reminiscent of innocence would begin to penetrate the world. It would be a different sort of innocence, one that doesn’t regret or deny experience but that goes through it to the other side of experience, until it enters into the beginning of something like wisdom.

Living Inside of Sorrow

If I were to build a psychological intervention for plunging into sorrow, a postmodern Stations of the Cross, I wouldn’t be focused so much on having people relive their personal Via Dolorosa through an iconic representation of the original loss — though that might be part of it. I’d be more interested in exploring how each of us lives every day inside of sorrow.

When we lose something or someone that we value personally we experience sorrow. Unresolved sorrow can make us depressed, or it can make us numb. This continual, residual sorrow suggests the presence of absence: the sense that loss isn’t a past event but a present condition.

Sometimes it seems that loss pervades everything — why is that? In Christianity’s interpretation the loss is a spiritual one: as a consequence of the Fall we always already experience the loss of God in and among us, as well as the loss of our ability to respond to God. We try to compensate by exalting ourselves as gods, but we cannot recover from our loss until by faith we re-establish this lost presence of God. Following Hegel and Freud, Lacan contends that we always already experience this sense of loss because as infants we experienced a loss of personal plenitude. As a consequence we spend much of our energy in one futile effort after another to find or replace what we’ve lost. Lacan says that we can never recover what was lost because we never had it in the first place, and coming to this realization is the first step in becoming fully human. Deleuze believes that our loss isn’t primal and permanent but continually repeated in our interactions with culture, and especially in our engagement with the economy. Every exchange is a frustration, taking away the satisfaction value of our work and of the commodities we buy. Deleuze proposes that by becoming aware of the illusory satisfactions of the marketplace we can begin deterritorializing our desires, letting them find their way to authentic satisfaction.

When we experience an intimate personal loss — the loss of a loved one, say — is our sorrow affected by the endemic condition of sorrow that surrounds and permeates us? Are we reminded of our inability to control the world like a god, and of our own mortality? Do we experience the other’s loss as our own loss, not because of empathy but because we were able to use the other to complete us, and because of our loss of the other we’re no longer whole? Do we experience the other’s loss as a kind of cheat, a bad investment, a sudden withdrawal of the value we’d invested in this other?

I don’t believe that reliving a loss is particularly helpful in resolving the sorrow. This idea of “catharsis” was proposed by Freud as the preferred treatment, but it doesn’t work very well. The sorrowful person relives the loss every day. The experience of traumatic loss plunges the grieving survivor into a sorrowful way of being in the world. Every relationship affords not just fulfillment but also loss — another potential source of sorrow. The chronically sorrowful person withdraws, forces confrontation, undermines the relationship in order to keep from getting too close. As a consequence the relationship sours, destabilizes, fails — loss recurs, again and again. To a significant extent all our relationships play out in an environment tinged by sorrow. We’ve all lost and been hurt; we’re all cautiously self-protective; we all sabotage intimacy.

The unconscious is inside us, causing us to relive the losses of the past. The unconscious is outside of us, channeling our desires into chronic loss. The unconscious bubbles up in the moment, structuring our experiences as tinged with loss. The unconscious is the source of unformulated experience that might lead us out of the Tomb World and back into life.