Psychotic Metaphysics

To be truly an agent for an idea is “to have an experience as”. And “to have an experience as” is to come to know how inadequate you can be. Something is at stake; you take on the harness, bear the brunt, and at best pull through.

In parenting, to give an instance, you become an agent for some formative principle. Arguably, parenting is a function and not a representation — it might be argued that a parent is just a name covering anyone who “happened to be around” at the time of a procreation or a pregnancy or a birth or through years of nurture; but a nominalism of this kind does not engage with the situation that I wish to describe.

For a brief while, parents are agents for a child’s good objects: the nature of these good objects is unknowable yet approachable through myth. Philip Roth’s story about an unsuccessful theatre agent who writes to Albert Einstein, offering to make him a success in show business, gets the idea exactly. The theatre agent could be any parent encouraged to enter the agency business by the appearance of a newborn.

Intuiting the presence of the infant’s good objects, which, like goodness itself, is unlimited in potential, the parent would be right to think of its newborn in terms of genius. There is genius in every new manifestation of life! Perhaps the parent takes on the newborn with expectations that are too worldly. Parents uphold something, perhaps for the first time in their lives, and in their upholding, mysteriously, the formative principle would seem to work through them. They may expect to assume this responsibility, but so does anyone who takes on care for others.

Priest-kings in former times thought to acquire power through an identification with the sun’s essence (Hocart, 1927).1 The sun warms the earth, and the crops grow; the sun brings prosperity to the kingdom. It is tempting, and improbable, to think that the
priest-kings identified with a natural energy.

Nature is a concept that takes on meaning in the depressive position, and it required the genius of Aristotle to evolve it. The sun that the priest-king identifies with is a preternatural when transfigured object, a god, or something the gods use — which is group talk for a transference object that carries the power in the group’s craziness. It exists before any differentiation between inside and outside the mind has come into being; it is proto-psychological and perhaps originates in foetal intuition; its being carried over into nature shows it to be liturgical in meaning. (A liturgical object is one that carries over meaning from pre-birth times.) It is only with hindsight that it is possible to describe it as a representation of psychotic energies, a mythic, paranoid-schizoid emblem for a psychic power stolen from the good objects.

Through the rites of coronation, the priest-king hopes to obtain control over energies that permit him to integrate the group. Otherwise the group would splinter into factions, each of which would think to appropriate the sun’s essence. The priest-king’s model is Prometheus, who stole the power of fire from Zeus. Promethean fire is mythic fire, and it is something other than natural fire.
The superstition that governments in power tend to win elections if the weather is good, though trivial, carries some truth about the magical way in which governors represent the needs of those they govern. Good or wise guardians are not enough; we need guardians who have the magical essence and who bring good fortune.
In myth, an infant, looking into its mother’s eyes, comes to believe (in an echo of pre-birth) that her formative principle was the fire of the sun; it senses the warmth of her breast and thinks of her procreative powers as stove-like or incubatory: she is the goddess of the kitchen as well as of other places. Beyond that, she reveals a unifying ground, some formative principle, perhaps emblemized (as the Milesian philosophers thought) as sun, water, or the unbounded. To this infant, a father is like a mother, not least when he is maternal.
Both parents have the function of encouraging a capacity in the child of being able to experience meanings, while realizing perhaps that meanings originate through some function of the child’s good objects. A parent stands at some psychic juncture between solidities and powers (and presumably in order for this to happen for the child, its good objects do so too). A child will discover parental qualities in stars, trees, and stones; and in stars, trees, and stones discovers its parents (as the primal gods), without realizing the cost its parents incur in upholding the fabric of its world. The misleading idea of nature as a continuity is bought for the child by those who sustain it through its earliest time of need. If its parents should abandon it, it must face a Lear-like storm and know an air more chill than any actual air.
Far from “knowing” the formative principle directly, a parent embodies it intuitively, by being both the stars and trees and stones in the child’s kingdom, while at the same time epitomizing something else, the realm of powers, of cosmic principles, the often buffoonish, metamorphosing family of the gods. Through an atmosphere of good humour and sense of play (fostered perhaps by its experience of its parents’ relationship), hopefully the child will be able to tolerate its desire to murder rivals and to attack the formation of meaning.

Parents have moments when they are most themselves. A child will observe a parent’s habits and unconscious behaviour and imitate them. It may observe its parents with a canniness in perception that it reserves for no one else. Some of the habits it observes are disabling (you would, as parent, be ashamed to think that they had been observed); some less so. You may be unaware of your enabling habits because your passion for them blinds you to anything else. A parent who loves reading may find that its child takes to reading easily.
Parents and other types of nurturer naturally feel inadequate, insofar as they are aware of a lifelong immersion in a psychopathology that could, if unchecked, harm the child. The Crow Indians of Montana have a myth, recorded by R. H. Lowie, in which the coyote, as trickster or transformer, becomes united with the sun, as supreme deity.
In the cycle connected with him as transformer he possesses hardly one redeeming feature. He is obscene, a fool, a coward and utterly lacking in self control. Yet the moment he becomes associated with the creative deity all this disappears. [Radin, 1924, p. 25]

Here, succinctly, is a process of transformation by which an individual might become a parent. The coyote as trickster is transformer and culture-hero; his powers for destruction can be harnessed to the formative principle and used in nurture. In some ideal construction, the child perceives the sun as a central and unifying meaning in its parents; and at the same time it perceives something else that is more bewildering. Not the monotheism of the formative principle, but the polytheism of the tricky argumentative gods, the strife of parents in argument. Here to be faced is the realm of confusion in meanings, of lies and psychopathological intrusions. But the trickster can be harnessed to the formative principle, the sun, and — when transfigured — become some crucial transforming element in the evolution of meaning.

The infant begins to glimpse the good objects it will never directly know through the interstices of experience. In a sense, the distinction of inside and outside the self gives a misleading impression of this type of intuition, in which (as in certain myths) the dreaming and the waking self are not really separated. Meanings for the infant do not begin as denotative or fixed elements; at some stage in their evolution, as contained in its parents, it feels them to be specifically in the breast.

The incipient meanings exist in flux, molten steel in a furnace of meanings — a sun furnace, which a certain type of child will think of distrustingly as the uterine place that makes all women dangerous to it — a vision of meaning in transformation that cannot be distinguished from the despairing presumption that all meaning automatically enters into the fee of the trickster and liar.

In Plato’s parable of the sun and the cave, the self in the cave, its neck clamped so that it can look in one direction, and one direction only, must look at, and believe in, an unfolding procession of delusions. Some tyrant appears to feed errors of meaning into the trapped self, in the form of lies. Only by escaping from the cave and looking into the sun is the self liberated from the condition of having been suppressed. Looking into the sun in this Platonic way is comparable to the experience of becoming a parent or guardian of others — a moment of conversion that is, if sincere, a chance for the sun and the trickster to work together, as necessary elements in the makings of meaning.

Obviously things can go wrong. Someone may become a parent or guardian insincerely. But the fact that some people use parenting to cheat, or public office to defraud, does not invalidate the theory of representation, even though, when it is looked at closely, the theory turns out to be contrary to good sense. One bad parent, or even an unlimited number of bad parents, cannot discredit the activity of parenting. But the satirist, in exposing fraudulence, may aim for the wrong target, by locating the corruption in the function of representation rather than in the individual representation itself, perhaps because he finds that this theory of representation is so intransigent in its rejection of the aberrant.