Repetition again
I feel as if I’ve written about this before, but I just had to. Talking about tradition in an interview, Derrida says this lovely thing in a quite personal way: “I love repetition, as if the future were entrusted to us, as if it were waiting for us in the cipher of a very ancient speech–one which has not yet been allowed to speak”. He talks about repetition in terms of speech and speaking, parole and parler, and of course psychoanalysis has to do with that too. When you come to analysis or psychotherapy, you have to talk, and you find that this talking is really something. You start to experience talking to someone as a thing and it has all kinds of non-verbal and yet-to-be-described experiences going with it. Some of them can happen fine and others seem to meet with interesting forms of hesitation or pleasure or other strangenesses of feeling. Psychoanalysis is an archive of writings as well, of course, and by now also a formidable configuration of institutions but when you are doing it, it’s about talking. And Derrida brings the whole of repetition into focus by invoking speech as what might have the future waiting inside it, waiting to be figured out, de-ciphered—kept quiet so far, but really having something necessary to say. If there is one thing that’s necessary, it is the future.
It brings to mind the recent events in a London court, where five climate crisis activists were on trial for a protest that blocked traffic on the M25. As Damien Gayle reports: “The judge, Christopher Hehir, had ruled that information about climate breakdown could not be entered into evidence, and could only be referred to by defendants briefly as the ‘political and philosophical beliefs’ that motivated them – which he would tell the jury were in any case irrelevant to their deliberations.
But the defendants had other plans. They sought to turn Hehir’s court into a ‘site of civil resistance’ causing as much disruption as necessary to ensure that if the jury could not see their evidence on climate breakdown, then the jurors could at least be in no doubt it was being kept from them” .
The activists felt they had to find a way to say what they weren’t permitted to say, what simply had to be repeated. Édouard Glissant talks about “arts of mixture, of adjustment to situations” and these have always been needed. Sometimes things need to be said, and imagined and we lack the cultural instruments to go to and find the words or other forms of expression. It becomes essential to be able to improvise. The climate protestors face prison for persistently improvising from the motorway gantry to the court room, finding ways to speak, without being allowed to do so, for the earth and the living beings who were, or are, or will be, living here. When Glissant thinks about history, he talks about memory and repetition and reminds us of what is enciphered in music: “The Africans had lost everything; they had nothing, not even a song. In jazz, black Americans had to recompose, through memory and through extraordinary suffering, the echo of what Africa had for them. Jazz came about not through a book but through a flight of memory. That’s why jazz is valid for everybody, because it’s a reconstruction within a distraught memory of something that had disappeared and had now been regained. It required a terrifying effort.”
There are many situations, psychotherapy included, where speech can be at times a strangely terrifying effort but on the other side of that effort are necessary “arts of mixture, of adjustment to situations.” The improvisations of life, a life not one’s own but multiple, that’s the discovery. That there is change. Glissant talks about “the voyage in which, from intuition of the world to intuition of the world, we try to see how humanities transform themselves—I say ‘humanities,’ never ‘humanity.’“
Could psychoanalysis come to recognise itself part of this transformation? Could the very smallness of the session—two people talking for a limited time, with ethical restrictions on how they interact—be a resource in this?
Last word to Glissant: “I myself like the idea that I can change through exchanging with the other without losing or distorting myself. It’s only recently that it’s been possible to believe this, and i think it is one of the truths of the present world.”
Unlikelihood
Sometimes things don’t change, and they don’t look like changing. Instead, a strong sense of what is possible prevails. It lodges, folded in the contours of statements and beliefs, generalisations and summary judgements, refusals and hesitations. They carry a lot of conviction and some of them probably look admirable.
One feels stuck.
One of Freud’s suggestions, one he felt was fundamental to psychoanalytic treatment, was that analysts “instruct the patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation, and to report to us whatever internal perceptions he is able to make—feelings, thoughts, memories—in the order in which they occur to him” (Introductory Lecture XIX, 287).
Furthermore, he suggests that psychoanalysts warn the patient expressly “against giving way to any motive which would lead him to make a selection among these associations or to exclude any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant, or that it is nonsensical and need not be said. We urge him always to follow the surface of his consciousness and to leave aside any criticism of what he finds, whatever shape that criticism may take …”
We learn how to feel
What’s more spontaneous and unstoppable than feeling? Psychoanalytic psychotherapy feels its way, following the track of your dreams, memories and associations. You learn a language that you invented without knowing it.
Very quick thought
… about what’s possible in therapy.
If you can say it, find the words to say what’s needing to be said and say it, in a session, live as it were, you can start to dream it, and something can start to change.
Don’t think about it too much. It’s not confession, it’s something simpler and more mysterious. But this is something that happens.
‘an unconscious plot’
Is it possible to feel differently about repetition?
Can it be imagined as a force for good?
Sometimes it’s not so hard. The New Year’s resolution that we manage to keep. The return of an anniversary that we celebrate. The favourite thing. The great song—music’s wondrous iterations, calls and responses … Dancing …
But what about the return of something painful that I didn’t wish for, or the feeling of being caught out, or caught full stop. It happened again! I did it again, how could I not see? Time after time. There’s no escape … The story seems to play out again and again, as if it were fated to do so, on nerves prepared (but somehow never enough) for suffering.
The experience is both confused and all too clear. It dictates. It includes the blow to self-esteem that can be dealt by the unexpected.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy offers an engagement or re-engagement with an inner multiplicity of levels and tones of experience, instead of the authoritarian messages that Jacques Derrida, in a different but entirely relevant conversation, identifies with the dominance of “a single voice on the line, a continuous speech.” Part of what he’s encouraging is an enthusiasm for repetition, rereading the tradition, including our inner traditions; finding “still other forms, other kinds of music” by returning to what’s already here: ‘I love repetition, as if the future were entrusted to us, as if it were waiting for us in the cipher of a very ancient speech—one which has not yet been allowed to speak.”
Therapy begins with repetition.
References
CD III, Get Tough [1983] on Rare Preludes Volume IV, 1993.
Jacques Derrida, Interview with Catherine David in Le Nouvel Observateur, September 1983, translated by Peggy Kamuf in Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews 1974-1994, 130.
Interesting video about healing from trauma.
I thought some of the people visiting my site might find this video by the trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk interesting. It is here.
The Thing Itself
How do new good things come?
Listen …
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
—Wallace Stevens
Sheaves
The transcendental ego of Husserlian phenomenology is a sheaf. That is a rapid and condensed notation and needs more working out from me, but I wanted to get the thought down somewhere before it vanished. So, in terms of ordinary living, what I’m thinking is that knowing someone, including knowing oneself involves the construction of a sheaf. A sheaf is a term from mathematics and this definition by Fernando Zalamea perhaps starts to indicate its applicability to psychotherapy:
To construct a sheaf on some space allows us to ‘shift the discourse’ from something less well-understood to something better-understood by ensuring that the less well-understood object is faithfully patched together from regions of better-understood structures – and this even though the better-understood structures in themselves may initially appear to have nothing to do with the less well-understood object that we want to study.
A sheaf can thus be regarded as an answer to the following question: what kind of rule turns local nonsense into global sense? More suggestively put: A sheaf is a rule to patch together nonsense into sense. And if we are in possession of a sheaf then we can literally replace our object of study with a sheaf defined on it – and proceed to study that sheaf, forgetting all about the object we started with. This simple but vague idea of a sheaf was of monumental significance in 20th century mathematics. (WittgensteinSheaves 3)
And Husserl is the philosopher who is tremendously interested in how it is possible for us to know anyone other than ourselves. He had a desire to think ‘a transcendental theory of experiencing someone else, a transcendental theory of so-called “empathy”’ (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations 92). He felt that this is business of experiencing each other is a more complicated thing than one might have wanted it to be. His reflection led him to believe that there is no direct experience of the other and that if there were, ‘if what belongs to the other’s own essence were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself would be the same’ (Cartesian Meditations 109). By this logic, direct experience, what would seem to be immediate confirmation that I am not alone, turns out, on reflection, to leave me more alone than ever.
Psychotherapy might weird us out sometimes because it involves leaving the more direct understanding of oneself, loved ones, other people in general. Perhaps the injunction Freud makes the ‘fundamental rule’ for people in analysis, to say ‘whatever comes into their heads, even if they think it unimportant or irrelevant or nonsensical . . . or embarrassing or distressing’ (Freud, Standard Edition VII, 251) is a way of encouraging a sheaf to be patched together. The rule is perhaps a response to a wish nobody knows they have, to make sheaves, to begin a new kind of harvest. The sheaf is always made of materials from more than one region, and always remains itself a gathering of differences. Free from the tyranny of what we think we know about situation, we get into something that in Zalamea’s words ‘may initially appear to have nothing to do with the less well-understood object that we want to study.’ But despite that appearance, the sheaf allows us to study ourselves, live, spontaneously but also fruitfully and in a way that works because it loosens the grip of what we already believe we know about ‘me’ and ‘myself.’
Finally, the way to talk about this is also derived from poetry, painting, music, cinema, you name it. Science, technology, whatever you can know. For the joy, here is Fred Moten, whose poem ‘The Red Sheaves’ in the catalogue to a recent exhibition by Jennie C. Jones takes us up into the company of many others from whom we learn about ourselves, who were there all along, and who we can be with:
Because we want to see what it will be like to submit to no design, to be undevoted to our line breaks, to have them only ever come from having been broken, cut, cut off, or having been surprised by the real in the neighborhood, like when we come upon what comes up on us from behind, while we be walking straight ahead, eyes wide open, over the rentpartying cliff of some threshold, having walked right through the bend in Betty Carter’s river, through the scent of the heather, in the shimmering, in the wreck, all up in the water, remember, with all them birds, because, in our shared attention to edges and margins, we are certain in nonfull nonsimplicity, tuning, turning. (Moten. ‘The Red Sheaves’ 28)
You can read, and hear the whole thing by scrolling here. But it’s a thought, that psychotherapy might be a thing we do because of a thirst to ‘see what it will be like to submit to no design.’
Why (Your) History Matters
Doing psychotherapy involves history, and history is not the same as what gets remembered or officially recorded. Walter Benjamin thought of history not in terms of facts or stories or memories but of images that rise up involuntarily at moments of historical emergency. They interrupt continuity with its predictable markers of progress. These fragmentary glimpses are different but no longer possible to ignore and they therefore disrupt established forms of expression and communication.
Don't wait ... There are no mistakes.
John Akomfrah
Part of what happens in psychotherapy sessions is a constant learning, by both parties. They keep having to learn what that interruption or disruption feels / sounds / looks / appears / disappears like. They invent or imagine ways to welcome it or at least give it a chance to have a say. For Benjamin involuntary memory isn't something individual people have, it always points to collective experience. Part of the shock may be that one finds oneself relating or connecting with what had always seemed other than oneself: no longer a single being. Many, and one of many, in a radically unexpected way.
John Akomfrah talks about why history matters here. He points out that:
The question of why history matters is connected to why the non-fictive or non-fiction matters, because you could tell, and I'm using the two phrases here in metaphoric terms, you could tell when the surplus of fiction has got into the mix. You know, so one of the reasons why I was compelled to make Vertigo Sea is because you're sitting there listening to someone referring to 'migrants' as 'cockroaches' and you think okay, what's going on here. How do people migrate from being migrants to cockroaches. What do you have to forget, what's the process of amnesia that allows the kinds of forgetting that builds into hierarchies in which there are beings and non-beings. So those things, the aversion to fiction, is what keeps me interested in the non-fictive. It's what keeps me interested in questions of the historical because they act as a kind of powerful counter-ballast to, it means a kind of turbulence of amnesia and amnesia is a constant sea, we swim in it all the time.
Resisting
I am reading about fascism, in particular Robert Paxton's book The Anatomy of Fascism.
If analysis is concerned with untying and loosening bonds (ana-, un- + lysis, tying) then its founding movement contrasts with the tightening that forms the bundle or sheaf (Italian fascio) that gives fascism a name. So far, I am struck by a kind of opportunism in the history of fascism. It has a lot to say, often very loudly, but there isn't a body of writing or thinking behind or inside it. Fascism gathers tendencies and harnesses energies outside thought. But it is not itself wild. Rather, it forces order, espouses myth and hierarchy, and seeks to automate thinking.
Psychoanalysis, with the notion of an unconscious, something other than knowledge, at its core, is honestly wild. It is also marked, in its emergence and most vivid development, by the formations of reason in language. This combination of wildness and reason gives the best analytic writing its abiding energy and veiled truthfulness.
I am also reading about Wilfred Bion. A forthcoming book on Bion by Naomi Wynter-Vincent takes forward his psychoanalytic project in terms of a theory and practice of thinking. Fascism is against thinking. It treads on the eggs and the nests of thought. Wynter-Vincent's book, out with Routledge in 2021, brilliantly, fearlessly opens up Bion to access by those who love and read, and therefore think with, literature. She brings out the ordinary-language magic of good psychoanalytic thinking.
She suggests that rather than reduce language to a way of representing a pre-existing reality, and thereby coercing the wild thought into the realm of what is known, Bion is 'exquisitely concerned with the transmission and cultivation of the thought, posited as logically prior to the mechanism of thinking' (Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism, Ch 1)
Rather than gather what is to be thought into his own space of thinking, Bion opens his mind hospitably to the problems and inabilities-to-think that precede thought--whether this be in infancy 'when the pain of hunger and the absence of the breast ... generate a problem to be solved (what to do with the ‘bad’ feeling of hunger)' or later in life, for the adult equipped with a mind, 'who nevertheless needs some thing to set off the thinking process' (Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism, Ch 1).
This year of 2020 I have read William Davies' Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason, and more recently Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works. You will very likely divine why someone might do that in these days. But it has taken reading Naomi Wynter-Vincent's study of Bion to call up in me a mind capable of thinking about what fascism might be doing to thinking, and to see that a psychotherapist's blog might be a good place to mention it.