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.
Resilience: A Sally
‘What can I do?’
‘You and I are unique bits of shock waves, contributing our own ripples, pulsations, bits of quakes and floods’ (Michael Eigen, Psychic Deadness 142)
‘We are particles without depth in the scene of the present. The deep effects arise in the aftermath. The roots grow afterward, first the shock, then the nerves’ (Hélène Cixous, Rootprints 67-68)
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry 'Courage! To the field!' And thou hast talk'd
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream,
And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these?
(Lady Percy, in Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry IV, Act II, Scene 3)
In the current circumstances please don’t entirely lose sight of who and what, all of the whos and whats, you are on the way to becoming. That also means please don’t lose touch with what is around you in the spaces where you live, of the affinities that exist between you and your best blanket, of the remembered sight of a silver river at last light, of all the memories that message you from the depths while you are queuing two metres apart outside the pharmacy, and stay in touch with your dreams—not to decipher them.
When all’s not well, Lady Percy draws attention to dreaming.
Her speech recognises the relationship between the state of dreaming and a state of war, complete with attempts to manage. She hears her sleeping husband giving orders to his horse. (Freud says the id is like a horse, and that sometimes the ego has to ride the bounding steed the way it wants to go.) Harry Percy isn’t wanting to be run away with, that’s part of the struggle, and the value of a rider’s knowledge of the ‘terms of manage.’
Lady Percy’s speech is full of language that lends itself to the energies and movements of what psychoanalysis calls primary process. ‘Primary’ because these movements precede us, don’t belong to us, we host them without having issued an invitation. They don’t even belong in words. She refers to forays, retreats, entrenchments, defences, weapons-of-choice, prison, bargaining, deaths. There is bounding, sallying, disturbing, strange motion of holding-on. All these things are virtually in all of us all the time.
She looks at her husband and sees ‘the currents of a heady fight’ flow through a particular beloved human being. The eyes of love become available. She witnesses that he, and we, fight battles and cross streams, and there are battles and streams streaming and battling in us and they don’t begin or end there.
Her speech has a dream-like quality, she is permeable to what she is seeing, she enters into an exchange with it, with him, with us as we read. We feel. It is as if she already knew what we ourselves have felt. Time of dreaming, time of writing, Shakespeare appearing as Lady Percy, the writer ‘in character’ as per usual, here in the time of reading, which is also an experience of currents (flows and times and also currencies, forms of exchange).
Why does primary process matter? Dreams condense and displace dismissed experiences and relational catastrophes, the strange motions of holding that won’t go away by themselves, beginning to transform them. (‘Bits of nameless, formless catastrophic impacts are reworked into moods, images and narratives in dreams, myths and reveries and become psychic objects and parts of successive levels of thought,’ Eigen says.) They are, in Lady Percy’s word, sallies from the unconscious. They set out from the inside that is not simply ours and make a break for consciousness. We are all more or less besieged but there are exceptions, key workers, so to speak. They remind us. They have words of manage.
Sometimes a beginning, a sally, is all that needs to have happened.
Sleep isn’t only rest, which is vital, and immune system maintenance, also vital. It is for dreaming, which reminds you of your own depths—deeps so deep they aren’t able to be owned by anyone, and yet can still can push their way into your exact daily life.
If you are having trouble sleeping, you might try a course of 5-HTP, which won’t stop your dreams.
What is happening at the moment—contagion (viral contagion to be sure but also other contagions, including that of fear), isolation, restriction and the anxieties accompanying them—tends to pull us into a trapping, painfully narrowed sense of the present. Life can feel frighteningly empty of promise but at the same time, dreadfully without the spaciousness that lets us be surprised and reanimated by what enters it. This can apply to those who are currently on the front lines, working intensely under difficult and uncertain conditions as well as to people with time on their hands. Many people will be finding themselves in both situations.
There is also the possibility of odd moments of timeless, intense, awareness. On my way to buy vegetables last weekend, before the lockdown, I saw a woman looking up and listening to a thrush singing in the small hawthorn tree by the recreation ground. I saw her face seeing something I couldn’t see as we listened. It was ecstatic. Good moments are good moments but to really do good they need to be melted into what Eigen calls the linking-dividing power of primary process work, which is serpentine, liquid, electrical and makes sallies into language, rather than belonging in words. It forms and reforms all the time.
The inner processes described with difficulty by psychoanalysis, and spoken of with a strange kind of inadvertent divination by people in individual psychotherapies, flow before and beyond human psychology.
What has this got to do with resilience? The past life of the word is indirectly instructive. Its bio begins with a movement back In Latin the word came from the joining of re-, meaning ‘back’ and salire ‘to jump or leap’. It named a recoiling or rebounding movement. Salire is also the root of Lady Percy’s word ‘sally,’ meaning the bounding leap forward, the sortie, the expedition. It was first of all a military and defensive term in English but its field of reference includes all kinds of activity, including emotional, literary and architectural activity. Words know things. Resilience has to do with a capacity to make virtual leaps and to be receptive to inner leaping. We can’t make trips out at the moment but there are other kinds of foray.
(The entry for ‘sally’ from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
- 1 A sudden charge out of a besieged place against the enemy, a sortie (esp. in make a sally). Formerly also, a place from which a sally may be made. lME.
R. L. Fox Stone-throwers…used to repel army sallies.
- 2 A leaping or rushing movement. Now only Nautical, a sudden rush by crew from one part of a vessel to another, usu. to free it when aground. l16.
- 3 A sudden start into activity. e17.
Daily Telegraph A…sally against the credit industry would choke off…demand.
- 4 An excursion, an expedition. m17.
P. P. Read The elegant suit…for sallies into the West End. fig.: L. Edel Faulkner's bold sally into the consciousness of an idiot.
- 5 A sudden departure from the bounds of custom, prudence, or propriety; an audacious or adventurous act, an escapade. Now rare. m17.
- 6 A breaking forth from restraint; an outburst of emotion or expression. l17.
D. Hume It is difficult to abstain from some sally of panegyric.
- 7 A sprightly or audacious utterance or literary composition; a brilliant remark, a witticism; a piece of banter. m18.
W. S. Maugham Laughter at the sallies of the local wag.
- II
- 8 Architecture. A deviation from the alignment of a surface; a projection, a prominence, esp. on the end of a timber. m16.
Clearly, from these definitions, a sally is brief, a minor but significant deviation. Our topic is resilience.
Francis Bacon’s scientific writings first used the word ‘resilience’ in English in the early 17th century, to discuss the rebounding of sound. He describes sound as a body in motion, like a ball—a ‘Round Orbe of Aire’ that collides with and echoes off surfaces (see Sylva Sylvarum, or of Natural History in ten Centuries, quoted by David Alexander in a very interesting 2013 article, ‘Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey’.)
…
So there is also a question of space. If we are made of streams and held breath, if we are at war with ourselves and also at times preoccupied by ‘iron war’ that will not float or yield or move, if we are stuck, as in ‘stuck at home’ or deeply committed to a vital but exhausting role, and having to go where we are sent—we need to find another, more resonant, kind of space and another thought of spacing.
'Emptiness is vast and astonishing … it does not have to be toxic. When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of truth. If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way. But without a method of looking into emptiness, most of us are at risk of becoming overwhelmed by fear. In meditation there is such a method for looking into emptiness without being overtaken by the fear of the disconnections of the past.' (Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart 20)
Now might be a time to start, resume or continue meditating. It helps the immune system. Metta, or Lovingkindness meditation could be a good one, as there is something to occupy the fluttering mind. There are good apps. Find a voice you like to guide you.
Works cited
David Alexander (2013) ‘Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey,’ Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 13. 10.5194/nhess-13-2707-2013.
Francis Bacon (1626) Sylva Sylvarum, or of Natural History in ten Centuries, collated by W. Rawley, London.
Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber [1994], Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, translated by Eric Prenowitz, Routledge, London, 1997.
Michael Eigen [1996] Psychic Deadness, Karnac, London, 2004.
Mark Epstein (1999) Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, Harper Collins, New York.
Sigmund Freud [1923] ‘The Ego and the Id,’ translated by Joan Rivière, translation revised by James Strachey, The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925), Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 2001.
William Shakespeare [?1597] The First Part of King Henry IV, edited by Herbert Weil, Judith Weil, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007
Observing the Infant
I recently went to a very engaging and memorable day organised by the excellent Chiara Alfano, where parents, artists and researchers (at least one of us, Rebecca Baillie, was all three, you can take a look at her work here) met to talk about babies, little children and how they are looked at and thought about. My own starting points were, first an immense but quite small and ordinary experience I had in my early 20s, sitting in the back of a car with a baby of perhaps 11 months. He touched my hand, to summon my attention. I spoke a lot more about him and what that touch meant, and did, at the symposium. It feels as if there were hundreds, maybe thousands of words gathering quietly around that surprising infant touch.The other inspiration, quite closely related, came from some observations made by Derrida in an amazing conversation he had with Hélène Cixous in the early 2000s. They suggest that in general, no matter who we are or how old we are, our relation to the other – that is to something or someone else, outside us or in us – has something infant-like about it. He insists that ‘the other is he or she before whom I am vulnerable, whom I can not even deny.’ That was certainly the case for me when I was touched on the hand: it was as if I had no idea such a thing was possible. 'What was that?' and 'What is happening to me?' came even before 'Who is there?' and 'What do they want?' A little later on in the conversation with Cixous, Derrida suggests that this relation to the other is not an absence of desire or forcefulness: ‘It’s not a powerlessness of simple resignation, of weakness, but rather an abandonment.' Cixous comments: 'You arrive (to yourself) where you were not expecting (yourself)' They seem to be talking about an inner action of loosening or removing an internal constraint. At the same time as the arrival of someone or something outside us, in the same scene of visitation, there is an opening of the self, a transfiguration, reconfiguration or conversion. And in language something is already at work, silently generating effects. the words ‘infancy’ and ‘abandonment’ are related, they share the same Indo-European root bhā-, to speak. A 'ban' in Old English was a commandment or prohibition. Infancy might be the name for a state before 'thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not.' It would be before learned reactions, before conscience and the Freudian superego formed by the action of parents' words in their children. It would be the inventive abandon of the writer, the artist, the ordinary human at play. Derrida talks about an openness or abandonment in which 'I can not say that I open the doors, that I invite the other: the other is already there. That is unconditional hospitality (foreign to politics and law and even to the ethical in the narrow sense).' Such a state or possibility is extraordinarily interesting and inspiring to observe or watch over. More, it needs to be guarded from debasement and exploitation. It must not be forgotten or lost. The symposium was convened for the purpose of 'Observing the Infant' and there is something vigilant and wary about observation . The root of 'observe' means to protect. Observing the infant, one goes in front or before (I’m thinking of the ob-of ‘observation’), to watch or pay heed to, to look after the young child who is vulnerable, precious and by definition unable to speak for him or herself. One might take this care for the infant further, to the point of a practice. Such a practice would observe infancy itself—not in the sense of one or more humans looking at smaller, younger humans, but as one might keep up a tradition. (Isn't infancy a tradition? Shouldn't we learn to keep it, as Scrooge learns to keep Christmas?) Might we learn to honour and respect infancy itself as a certain way of being, to be taken up and practiced, kept as one keeps the ceremonies of a religion or the customs of a culture? Never to be reduced to the infantile, not to be idealised-denigrated, nor left to run the show: in other words, to be thought? In this sense, the infant would take the lead and show us the way. We who observe the infant give ourselves over or abandon ourselves to the infant and find ourselves taken beyond languages.
One thinks of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, that take up infant joy and sorrow very closely and intimately in songs or poems that could be said to correspond with the kind of intimately strange and nameless being they are about, so that as Derrida puts it in ‘Khora’: ‘the quality of the discourse depends primarily on the quality of the being of whom it speaks.’ Dependency here is not necessarily simple or reducible to the complementarity of form and content. It is what makes it possible to speak about something, some being, in a way that responds to the truth of that being.I may add, thinking of the strangeness of being in fans, that one can also observe, watch, survey or study suspiciously, guardedly, in order to protect oneself. We saw this especially in some of the filmed and photographic research by psychologists and ethnographers shown to us by Katie Joice. From what would one want to protect oneself, in this case? Perhaps from the otherness of the other – but this is impossible: the other is already there. The infant is there, in us and in front of us. Perhaps from the weakness of being unable to speak? But isn't that the very place from which true speech, speech truly able to respond to the quality of what it speaks about, might come?
Partnering ourselves
I recently read these remarks on therapy by the contemporary psychoanalyst Michael Eigen:'The idea of partnering ourselves, each other, and our capacities seems almost a newcomer in evolution next to the model of control and dominance.'
Rivette, relating and connecting
I recently watched a strange and wonderful musical by Jacques Rivette. Rivette is immensely interested in how people relate and connect. Up Down Fragile follows the stories of three young women in Paris in the mid 90s. It's a fair while before there are any songs and dances but it's worth the wait. Singing and dancing are ways of relating and connecting. This sequence is so fresh and on the spot![embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drZYdgA2qTM[/embed]Or with subtitles, and slightly blurred:[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruo-7umPTFc[/embed]Psychoanalysis has a lot to say about relationships, mostly based on an assumption that human beings are fundamentally and permanently at odds with the world. When it comes to what is outside us, hatred or some sort of takeover are the order of the day. Relating takes place from a more or less well-defended fortress. This sequence with Nathalie Richard (Ninon) and Marianne Denicourt (Louise) offers a glimpse of another way of relating.Ninon is a delivery girl. She shows up at Louise's house to deliver some flowers. She also has a bit of information. But even before they start singing and dancing their dialogue shifts away from a naturalistic notion of delivery or exchange into another way of speaking. My spoken French isn't great but it's impossible not to hear the rhymes starting up as they talk. The audible correspondences in the women's speech are accompanied by the reciprocal rustlings of their cellophane-wrapped bouquets. These are twirled, flourished, held and dropped, not in unison, not symmetrically, but in a distractingly harmonious rapport.There's been a plot revelation -- Ninon lets Louise know that the guy who's been following her isn't a suitor but has been hired by her father to keep an eye on her. This is significant but it isn't the main event. Across the narratives of desire: what does the guy want? what does Louise want? what does her father want? plays a lighter, more expansive notion of what matters, what's worth talking about, what talking is about, and what relationship can be.
Therapeutic relating: 'The obscure friendship of rhyme'
There's a remarkable description of this kind of effect in Derrida's book on friendship. He writes about relationships within language, what he calls ‘the obscure friendship of rhyme: alliance, harmony, assonance, chime, the insane linking of a couple. Sense is born in a pair, once, randomly and predestined.'The rhyming in the Rivette sequence, like the dancing that follows on from it, feels pretty loose and improvisational, at times even a little crazy. But the references to the ozone layer, Caravaggio and Mallarmé suggest an advanced awareness of subtle connections and correspondences, whether these exist in the atmosphere, inside the frames of paintings, or on the spaced pages of a poem. The relaxed finesse of the choreography and camera-work shows a practical and formal interest in correspondences, connections and relationality.The sequence shows a joyous type of movement that isn't moving in on anyone or anything. It has another, freer way of making sense and organising life. 'Parlons d'autre choses,' the women sing. 'Let's speak of something else.'