On his deathbed, Voltaire was given the last rites by his priest, who asked him if he renounced Satan and all his works. “Come, sir,” Voltaire replied, “surely now is not the time to be making enemies?”

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YOU ARE THE REASON

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@thegoodenoughblogger
On his deathbed, Voltaire was given the last rites by his priest, who asked him if he renounced Satan and all his works. “Come, sir,” Voltaire replied, “surely now is not the time to be making enemies?”
Joachim Pissarro:
It could be said that Monet did not, in fact, paint the cathedral. He painted this invisible mass of air between himself and the cathedral, composed of innumerable waves of sunlight, intertwined with mist and cold, that make the cathedral visible.
A short post about love
(after reading Badiou)
Two risks to love - that it is risk-free!; that it doesn't really matter (it is only an adjunct to sex).
Philosophically, love is either denigrated in an anti-rational sense as being too full of enjoyment; or elevated to a transcendental level. Kierkegaard says love, at its highest level, ie when sanctioned through marriage, allows the ego to break through to the social/religious level, allows love to point towards the absolute.
Starts from a chance encounter, but creates a movement from identity to difference. Note the importance of the chance encounter - love is not (as dating sites suggest) picking from a list of possibilities - it is the unexpected emergence of an impossibility.
Lacan says: sex separates. I find my pleasure via your body. Sexual pleasure is narcissistic (I am relating to myself), and the sexual relation is imaginary. Sex also empties - hence why we need to do it over and over again. Whereas, in love the relation with the other (in all his otherness) is the end, not merely a means to the end. Love is about the being of the other, not just her specific objects.
Different philosophers have cast a romantic, contractual or sceptical eye on love. Badiou says none of these is quite right. For him, love is the way we experience life from the point of view of two (difference) and not one (identity).
Which means love cannot be about communion or becoming-oneness, as per religious love. Instead - we are the subject of love, seeing the world together through the prism of our difference.
Two meet by chance - a chance event, meaning that it doesn't fit into the order of things.
Philosophers have generally preferred friendship over love, because it is free of the physical passion of love. Philosophy often doesn't know what to do with passion.
The process of love: an initial chance encounter, completely random; then the randomness must stop, and a process must begin. A process that endures and builds a new truth, until that initial chance seems like it was destined.
Is the child the 1 that unites the 2, or the 3 that separates them? Or is having a child a point in the "drama of 2," a point of reinvention - ie the point beyond which the 2 can never be what they were, so that they must become something else?
my suggestion is that the papers should be read in the same conditions as those in which a psychoanalysis should be conducted - without memory or desire. and then forgotten. they can be re-read; but not remembered.
W.R. Bion
I will, however, briefly describe some personal experiences, but which are wholly in accord with observations published in the medical literature, for example with the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar.
Roger Caillois, Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia
Bion reading group (i)
Some rough notes, in light of “Attacks on linking”:
Speech is intended to deceive as much as to communicate; speech is an action. Cf Betty Joseph: pay attention more to the action or intention than the content of speech. Why is he saying this, now? What is she trying to do to me by saying this?
The mind acts to protect itself itself from danger; and the therapist is always a source of danger. Contact is especially dangerous; another’s mind is the mind of the other. Your mind will murder mine, or mine will murder yours; for you to know me, is to murder me. (To be known or understood is not necessarily a relief - it may evoke something terrible: Winnicott: “it is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found”.) (After nine months, a patient said to me, “You’ve grown a beard!” - I had had the beard for the whole time we had been meeting - but today he dared to make contact with the otherishness of me, rather than the pure function.)
*
Attacks on linking (or contact):
Envy - of what the (m)other has that I need. Can touch envy be borne? (cf. the handsome, erudite, clever vicar in Trollope who envies his ordinary friend’s lack of envy.) I can’t stand needing you - may be said explicitly or implicitly. The intolerance by the baby of the mother’s power to feed. Cf “Analysis terminable and interminable” - the feminine protest - the intolerance of helplessness as a barrier to psychic change ... the unbearability of being a receptor. Cf Ron Britton’s analogy with the immune system, which is programmed to recognise the foreign protein - this is not me, I must repel it - what if we have a corresponding aversion to the otherness of the breast? Even extends to understanding - if you understand me, it is no longer mine. (One patient wished that he and his analyst sat in separate rooms, so that he could receive his analyst’s interpretations through a serving hatch - a de-othered thought.)
Here is a problem with Lacan’s idea of being a secretary to the insane - that the analyst minutes the meeting, but does not participate in it; the psychotic remains in a state of omnipotence, and there is no psychic change.
[Read Bion’s “Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities” alongside Freud’s “Two principles of mental functioning”]
Projection of fear into the other - a fear of dying, or of anything. Projective identification is the earliest form of communication or interaction. The projection from the baby evokes a response in the mother - a two-way interaction. If the mother is not receptive to the child’s fear, if she is fearful of it or rejects it, the fear might come back, perhaps magnified. (In the psychotic, we see a confusion between what’s mine/me and what’s yours/you - for example, the therapist repeats the patient’s word or phrase back to them, a simple paraphrasing or clarification, and it is taken up as an interpretation from without.) Ion: a consequence of this non-receptivity = a re-introjection of a non-containing object, an object that hates, that wants/seeks disorder (Klein’s chaos monster). If the child has a good enough object, a sufficiently containing object, the child can go on being - it has a fairly constant object and can say, I am me and you are you. Whereas the non-containing object is out to destroy us, like the Egyptian God Seth - the god of the desert, storms, disorder, violence, and foreigners. In Genesis, God creates binary distinctions; binaries mean the potential for order and integration. The opposite of this is the psychotic confusional state, where everything gets on top of everything else, there is muddled speech, disordered thought, great anxiety .... and then everything settles by way of a delusion - a construction where absolutely everything fits.
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form of Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Letter by Keats to his brothers
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T.S. Eliot, Four quartets
Thought of this while reading the interview with Allen in the Guardian yesterday. I think my broad feelings of bonhomie towards her mainly stem from my deep contempt for her horrible, complacent father.
Admitting she doesn’t know what she’ll do if her daughters get into diet pills and cheering that one of them is so into reading further warms me to her.
But this track is the real deal, isn’t it? A perfect document of an empty person in an empty decade, the 2000s - both fully aware of their own hollowness, and unable to do anything about it.
you, too, spoke of what does not exist
[A reading of Miller’s “Ironic clinic”]
We seek out others, we create relationships with them, relations of love or power or hierarchy, and we have discussions with these others. All this we do to defend ourselves against the real. We create symbols to protect ourselves from that which cannot be symbolised.
But the schizophrenic does not use symbols in this way, for they would not work as a defence – for him, the symbolic is real.
Irony says that there is no Other. These social bonds – they are a scam, they mean nothing. We should not seek them out to defend ourselves against what lies outside of them. This is also the domain of psychoanalysis.
The neurotic speaks to kill the thing he speaks of. To kill means to spoil, to take apart, to parch of enjoyment. If we don’t want to talk about it, we mean that “it” is precious (precious in its wonder, perhaps, or its awfulness). And here’s why, for the schizophrenic, the symbolic is no defence against the real. As Freud says in “The unconscious,” for the psychotic the word does not kill the real; no, for the psychotic, the word is the thing.
Lacan’s theory of language does away with referents. The signifier does not refer to a particular thing. The signifier just refers to another signifier, which refers to another signifier, and so on, endlessly. There is no “thing,” no referent…and what is the empty referent, the non-existent object, if not the very thing around which psychoanalysis revolves: the mother’s penis?
So this is what we get the patient to do: just speak, go for it, don’t worry about what you’re trying to speak of (for it does not exist), just keep going. What happens when a patient tries to do this? Something gets killed, spoiled, destroyed for sure; but something emerges too, a sense of something just out of grasp, something that could still be said, which could fill the lack in the subject (though of course, it never will).
This something, this quasi-object – we could call it the motor of desire. But what does the neurotic do? As the neurotic, I create the Other and hand this precious motor of desire over to the Other. I delete myself before the Other as a way of defending myself against the real.
The neurotic defends himself by symbolising, deferring to language, losing himself (and his object) to language. The phobic creates a certain signifier which blocks off the empty referent altogether.
The pervert also has his defences against the real – he too creates a signifier, which this time becomes a fetish and disavows the absence altogether.
The schizophrenic, though, is defenceless against the real. It is not that his defences fail, it is that they are not valid defences in the first place. We all speak about what does not exist – but for the schizophrenic, there is no “I” to do the speaking.
I’ve never taken the time to explore anything much that Chuck Berry did after the early 60s - the giddy priapics of “My ding a ling” might just have put me off a touch - but wait a moment...this is from 1970. 1970! And it’s a blues, a real bona fide blues, with Chuck Berry lyrics, and it’s TERRIFIC.
CAN’T GET NO...
There’s a difficult, sticky claim at the heart of psychoanalysis: that women tend more towards hysteria than men. This is highly contentious, I think partly because it seems a crude signifier of sexual difference (which today is in itself an idea to be avoided), and partly because it seems to reinforce a highly stereotypical and stigmatising view of women.
And yet, it seems to me, there is something in it that is worth keeping, worth expanding even, or understanding. Charles Melman is a French analyst, and I find he can explain psychoanalytic concepts, especially those of Lacan, in a charming and sometimes plainspoken way. So it is here, in a lecture given in 1995 on Lacan’s Seminar 11.
This is what he says.
Psychoanalysis is an effort to make someone speak. Specifically, to speak what has not previously been spoken, what has previously been mute. This is what an hysterical symptom is – something that has remained dumb, and that erupts without speaking.
You speak the unspeakable, and the symptom disappears.
But there is this: “Lacan says the problem for the hysteric … is that it is in the very movement of speaking that the hysteric constitutes her desire.”
Melman says: “This means that … normally women are mute and it is only in speaking that they constitute or establish their desire.”
Why so? Melman’s answer is worth quoting in full.
“Because the girl is not marked by castration in the same way as the boy. She does not have a place, as he has, from which her word, her speech, can be organised. What makes a boy speak? It is the gap that there is in him. It is in that gap that the subject can take up its place.
“But if there isn’t this gap, if I am not marked by this gap, I no longer know what I have to say. I don’t have a place in me that can organise and give rise to my word. So then it is only if I speak to my counterpart, if I share hysterically in his cut, that I can express a desire.”
The key here is that the hysteric must address her speech to an other in order to realise her desire. This is what Lacan means by the movement of speaking. So, “if I am not marked by this split or this gap, I remain within myself and I don’t know what I want – I don’t even know who I am – and so it is in speaking to the other and by coming to share in his castration that I can discover my desire.”
Freud talks of sharing in the other’s castration in Group Psychology – the girls whose friend doesn’t get the love-letter she is waiting for. My friend is distraught and retires to bed, so what do I do? Perhaps I retire to bed too (this is hysterical identification), or perhaps I go to her, try to console her, try to cure or save her. In Freud’s example, the girls all retire to their own beds. In a sense, they each try to curl up in the friend’s wound. Her wound is the position they take up.
The hysteric never wants her desire to be satisfied, which leaves us with the classic confusion of the sexes: the man asks the woman what she wants because he thinks he can fulfil her desire. He tries – and either she accepts, and immediately creates a new unfulfilled desire, or she does not accept his attempt at satisfaction at all. Like Dora, she will leave him. (This, says Lacan, is the original sin of psychoanalysis – Freud failed with hysterics because of his own desire, which was never analysed.)
Why won’t she accept satisfaction once and for all? We have already seen the answer to this: it is in the gap that the woman finds the position in which she exists, desires, finds her self and her word. The absence of the gap – which is what satisfaction is – would be intolerable.
To Boris Johnson watchers, a reminder of how to really use a resignation speech to stick the knife in.
THE PROS AND CONS OF FIDELITY
Thoughts on transference, inspired by Roustang:
Freud’s criticism of groups: everything is centred on love of the leader, the ideal ego. But he couldn’t find another model – so a psychoanalytic group must be based on the same love – for Freud himself.
Yet isn’t the aim of psychoanalysis to dissolve the transference? How can this be, when the group is based on maintaining this transference?
What is the transference? A love which clothes the other with knowledge – if I knew what he knows about my situation, I would be cured. The analyst is supposed to know. The analysand puts his faith in her.
But this faith is the opposite of religious faith. Religious faith must be maintained, even through the severest doubts. Psychoanalytic faith must be forced to melt away – because it is not my faith, it is the faith/desire of s/he who I love and/or hate, s/he who de/formed me.
In other words, God will know forever; but the analyst will be revealed as a placeholder – her knowledge is temporary (retrospectively we can see, it never existed in the first place).
I the neurotic long to desire or speak from the place of the other, because I can’t find my own place to desire or speak from.
I the analyst will therefore find the place of the other, and desire or speak from there – but with the ambition of shining a light on this place, so that this place, and this other who occupies it, evaporate.
So what happens when it doesn’t evaporate? What happens as a person trains, as s/he goes through the passe, as s/he becomes, perhaps, a training analyst or a teacher? S/he will, presumably, have undergone an extensive analyst which, perhaps, has dissolved the transference – so that the other, on the whole, has less hold over the subject than it did previously. And yet, having dissolved one transference, hasn’t the analyst fixed another?
Put more simply, the trained analyst must believe in some fundamental truths: let’s say, the fundamentals of repetition, the unconscious, transference, the drive. We all have faith in Freud. If that transference has dissolved, can one call oneself an analyst? But if any transference has been reinforced, can one really call oneself analysed?
BEETFRUIT
We’re all looking for something to do with two small raw beetroots.
Here’s my suggestion.
Peel them both, cut each into quarters, and shove them through a juicer. Then do the same with two pink grapefruits - peel, quarter, juice.
Mix the beetfruit/graperoot mixture together - it should be a lovely frothy crimson. A bit sweet, a bit sour, a bit rooty. Much recommended if you need freshening up a little.
You’ll get two big glasses from these quantities.
To work with the psychotic person over a long period is distressing, not so much because of their psychosis, but because of how they deconstruct the defenses crucial to our own peace of mind.
Christopher Bollas, When the sun bursts