13th March 2008

Killing to remain ignorant.

I want to compare the experience of being invaded by pain with the idea of someone else’s pain. What do I mean by the idea of someone else’s pain; am I referring to a psychic entity with a specific structure?

In what sort of psychic space does the idea exist? What analogies do I find for it? To use an image from Bion’s writings: is the idea as deadly to the mind as a bullet that pierces the armour plating of a tank and whizzes about within the tank, killing the inhabitants?

I don’t want to make too rigid a distinction between a pain that invades me and my idea of someone else’s pain. Experience in itself is an idea: the idea being the complexity of thought and feeling that ensues when mind meets with itself or with the world.

However, the difference between the two is plain on those occasions when mind meets something that annihilates the capacity for symbol formation, so that pain can no longer be thought about. A meeting of this kind may be called traumatic or, to use an older language, it may be called sacred. An example of it would be the moment when Saul collapses on the road to Damascus. Meeting up with the sacred need not be catastrophic: but the catastrophic is one of its modes.

But why should I want to link together the intrusions of a sometimes unbearable pain to the old word sacred? Because I believe that many of the mythologies of the sacred, especially the mythologies associated with the act of ritual sacrifice - which was an act of consecration, of making sacred - are informative about the nature of the idea of someone else’s pain.

I want to suggest that the idea has a structure; and that this structure can undergo change. I will describe this structure in a roundabout way, by considering the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

The pharaohs thought that they had begun as two lives, potentially two journeys or careers down the same birth passage at the same time. At birth one career died to the world of the living, but it continued to traverse some landscape beyond death.

The pharaohs compared this journey through death to the journey they believed the sun made after it sets. Both the alter ego and the night sun are cradled in a boat as they move through the liquid darkness of the night sky.

He sails to the Field of Rushes
Those who dwell on the Horizon row him
Those who dwell in the sky sail him.

Meanwhile the child who lived - the future ruler of Egypt - entered into a reign that acts of ritual bound to the movement of the sun through the day-time sky. The pharaoh and the sun were obedient to the same universal law.

In piety though, and perhaps in fear, the pharaohs felt obliged to mediate with their alter ego in the other world. They set up their own embalmed placentas and umbilical cords as objects to be worshipped. They thought their placentas and cords to be conductors of the radiance of the twin who had died.(Frankfort 1948,69-78).

I want to appropriate this theory as a model for clinical psychoanalytic use, and in order to do so, I have to locate it in some imaginary conception of pre-birth.

Our psychic origins, though unknowable, have the power to attract our capacity for fascination and reverie; and on an analogy with the split between the pharaoh and his twin, I am going to suppose some psychic split occurs in the ovum, or in the act of conception itself; the couple come together, but the content of their love has some need to divide - I am suggesting this as a retrospective phantasy about our native origins.

The psychic ovum splits, and two identities, the self and its alter ego, travel down the same birth passage and through the same passage in time. The two beings are unstable and interchangeable in identity. They are possibly in states of mutual projective identification.

At birth they think to separate, though in later life, at certain times of crisis, which in certain cultures are known as sacred times - as during an epidemic - the distinction between the self and its alter ego is lost, and in a state of panic the two selves become confused. This is a state when all notions of differentiation disappear.

A scholar in Hellenic studies Marcel Detienne has described the word epidemic in the following way.

Epidemic in Greek belongs to the language of theophany....the epidemics are sacrifices offered to the powers of the gods: when they arrive in a country, or appear in a sanctuary, or take part in a feast day or are present at a sacrifice...Apodemics are sacrifices to mark the departure of a god (Detienne 1986, 12).

The living twin has every reason to wish to be freed from its sibling, the turbidity of whose sufferings recalls Frances Tustin’s description of a breast whose nipple has been torn off, revealing a terrifying black hole, comparable to the black-hole planet of the physicist.

The black hole of phantasy sucks all life into itself (Tustin,1972. 21-35). But this is a state in feeling too. The sufferings of the alter ego can threaten to devour the living twin.

In mythic-religious terms, the black-hole space personifies the alter ego as the victim of sacrificial ceremony, someone who emanates as well as suffers unbearable pain. Within the orbit of persecutory states of mind, this figure is both feared and admired. If unconsciously I fend off the sufferings of others through dread, I do so because I locate in them the power to draw me into a black-hole condition of psychotic disintegration, in which an environment is felt to pull out my viscera. Clearly I am talking about an unusual kind of symbol.

One of the unconscious derivatives of the idea of someone else’s pain is of a terrible environment - and this is what I mean by the idea of someone else’s pain; the idea literally is a container-environment - one in which the sufferer is as helpless as a foetus within a malign womb.

The self and its alter ego travel down the same birth passage, but the self thinks of the alter ego as lodged in an alternative bad womb which is all wrong in temperature - it is either too hot or too cold - or wrong in shape. The bad womb provides none of the regularities in space and time which the self in the good womb may take for granted. The conceptions of space and time in the bad womb are unpredictable. Are events in the black hole unpredictable in the same way?
The contrast between self and alter ego is unstable, and at any moment the self in the good womb can find itself in the position of the alter ego. And there is another twist to this situation, as ancient sacrificial practices demonstrate. For the self born from the good womb can come to learn that the alter ego within the black-hole womb has undergone a change. The fire in the shirt of Nessus transforms itself from being the inner lining of the womb into being the radiance of the foetus. It would seem to emanate as from within the alter ego.

At such moments, as the theory of sacrifice informs us, the powers of the universe would seem to stream into the alter ego; all significance condenses into it massively, as though it were the centre of a gravity towards which all gravity inclines.

The struggle of the twins to remain in contact with each other, against an instinctive revulsion for what each entails to each, is spiritually the obverse of the sibling collusions, which Donald Meltzer and others have written about under the heading of narcissistic organizations (Meltzer 1973,50ff.). In this kind of sibling collusion, one twin, the self, views its alter ego as the source of a psychic power which it intends to steal.

For the pharaohs, the alter ego who travels through the kingdom of the dead was a figure to be venerated. For the rest of us, though, the presence of this figure may be distanced, denied or held in contempt because we lack some means of transacting with it.

Today I am concerned with only one form in which this figure can appear. A child is faced by the prospect of realising that one of its parents contains a child like it, who has undergone a catastrophe so extreme that mind flinches from any allusion to the pain.

The father of the patient I am thinking about had survived a terrible plane crash three years before the patient’s birth.

The patient did not know why the plane had crashed; he believed that ice may have accumulated on the wings. The father was aware of the plane’s rapid fall through the sky and of its hitting the ground; and he may have been aware of flames, but he then lost consciousness. A farmer dragged him from the plane, and he survived, though badly burnt.

The patient was aware of how distressed he had been as a child at the sight of his father’s face and body. The extensive skin grafts on both had been clumsily handled. His mother had nursed his father after the accident; the marriage of the parents, and the conception of the children, had come later.

He tended to avoid thinking directly of his father’s accident. Much of his thought, in unconscious phantasy at least, centred on himself as an infant in uneasy alliance with his mother, mixed up with her, almost in a folie à deux. (From what he tells me I believe this to be what actually happened.)

The structure of his conscious thoughts suggested that the infant in him believed that his mother had the power to sanction the delusion that the universe revolved around him. He believed that his mother sanctioned this belief from hostile motives; she allowed him to be deluded in this way so as to maintain her power over him.

He acted out this phantasy by living a double life: by playing the Don Juan while maintaining the pretence of being a happily married man.
After a term or so in treatment he broke off with a girl friend, and she threatened to tell the Press about a sensational aspect to their relationship. He was excited by this threat, until it was pointed out that his career, though absorbing, had nothing about it at present that might interest the Press.

His belief that many people would rejoice in his downfall was a way of coping with a state of blankness, masking anxiety, which afflicted him when unconscious thoughts of his father’s fall through the skies began to surface into consciousness.

He had delighted in the experience of his wife’s giving birth to a child. At the same time, he could not tolerate it; it had shaken his confidence in the defensive usefulness of egocentricity; and in part this was why he had come into therapy.

It is as though any father who witnesses the birth of a healthy child must at some level realize his kinship to the alter ego in the bad womb. An example is Daedalus, the artist-craftsman whose abilities were paralysed by the death of his child Icarus. In a moment that might have been a moment of birth, Icarus flew too close to the flames of the sun, his feather wings separated from his body and he fell to his death.

My patient had a dream early on in our work together in which he was hand-in-glove with his mother and contemptuously looking down through a window at a man called Farrow. The name ‘Farrow’ was noteworthy, for a farrow is a litter of pigs. The figure condensed the damaged, excluded presence of his father with a representation of his contempt for the uterine creativity of women.

His father’s pain began to appear in the material in covert ways. He recalled two patients who had come to a clinic he visits, who diagnostically did not suit its unusual specialisation. One, a man, was a high-risk heart patient with pains in the chest; the other was a woman with inflamed arteries. Her condition had been correctly diagnosed, but she had died from lung congestion half an hour after being admitted. The cause of her death remained unknown; and in this it was like the cause of the plane disaster.

On the last session of the previous week he had dreamt of himself as a diagnostician. On the couch was a patient, a baby with breathing difficulties and with blood-shot eyes which he associated to a memory of his father’s eyes at the time of his death, many years after the plane accident.

His father had been unable to breathe, and no one had been able to help him. He equated his father’s suffering with the sufferings of a baby on a couch, presumably his own baby self.

He recalled how shortly after learning the news that his father was dying of cancer of the spine, he had travelled on a plane and felt a tingle of elation in his spine. He had loved his father, but he was conscious of the excitement he had felt when he had heard of his death.
Allusions to his father’s suffering became more bland as they became more threatening to him.

He reported a dream in which he was a passenger on a plane that was flying too low. He described the plane as weaving through trees; somehow or other, it landed successfully. As he left the plane, he congratulated the pilot on having made a successful landing. He shook hands with the pilot.

I had failed to make anything of his talk up to this point, a quarter of the way through the session. The idea of his congratulating the pilot had a contemptuous ring about it, and it provided a focus to my attention.

After all, you expect professional pilots to bring down planes safely. You don’t expect them to weave through trees without good reason. But you might well expect a patient to weave through the possible hazards of a therapist’s interventions.

Whether he saw me at this moment as the mother who unmasks his delusions in order to assert her authority over him, I do not know. He certainly saw my communications as dangerous: trees through which he had to weave in order to survive. They were bringing him close to realising that his father’s experiences could be his own.

Something like a plane crash existed in the patient like a bullet whirling about inside a tank. It existed as a historical event affecting his father; it existed as a psychotic possibility, in which any distinction between himself and his alter ego might break down; and it existed as a potential language by which he might dream.

Fortunately the patient did not enter a state of psychosis; but he was flooded by the stuff of psychosis mediated through nightmare. The nightmares had the same function as had the embalmed placentas and umbilical cords for the pharaohs.

Many of them alluded to the theme of a plane crash. The idea of burning was central to them. In one dream he was looking out of the back of a bus. He saw a man with a flash-bulb camera burn up the people he was photographing in the flash of his camera. In the next dream, the defective gas-cooker in his mother’s basement was out of control and flaring up. A week later he dreamt of a man and woman in intimacy, and the man was consumed by flames. He remembered a movie he had seen in which a man had been placed in a wicker basket and burnt as a sacrificial victim.

When we had first met, he had told me that one of his difficulties was that he could never feel angry. He now found himself very angry after sessions. He thought my comments undermining. Feelings of unworthiness began to emerge, but he swiftly got rid of them.

One day he remembered how his father had brought him a present of some toy soldiers and a handkerchief. He said: “a terrible storm was taking place; thunder and lightning...I remember the sight of his burnt legs...I’m convinced lightning, not ice on the wings, brought his plane down.” (In mythology lightning often marks the moment when the split between twins occurs.)

The session had begun with dream in which he was driving up to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He had found himself faced by traffic lights turned to red and he had jumped the lights, even though he knew that there was a one-way traffic flow beyond the lights and that he was likely to crash into one or more of the oncoming cars.

This dream was followed by another dream - of being on a jetty by the sea, listening to old sailors talk approvingly of the murder of babies in the war. A photographer in the group broke into this talk to deplore the atrocities of war. He associated the photographer to the photograph of a little girl burning from the effects of napalm in the Vietnam war.

Toy soldiers as against real ones. His father brings him toy soldiers and a handkerchief - acts of war are bound to tears. But the lightning and thunder that overcame his father overwhelms him also. At this point, his father, as well as being identified with a mother in childbirth, is identified with the little Vietnamese girl burning from napalm.

I presume that at a moment similar to this one the self in birth is first aware of its alter ego as moving away from it, carrying with it the suffering which otherwise might hinder the self from living. At this moment, fitfully, my patient was beginning to be able to tolerate the sight of his father’s suffering.

Some time earlier he had dreamt of a photographer whose flash-light had incinerated those whom he had photographed. The situation has begun to change. The eyes that see the agony are now no longer the flash-bulb eyes that project the suffering that they then see. The second dream photographer is able to stabilize the image; he brings into being a certain food for thought. But do we need this type of food for thought? Isn’t there something terribly wrong in someone clicking a camera before such suffering?

I see the second dream photographer within terms of the patient’s development as a compromise between his personification of himself as a benevolent being and his identification with the sailors who delight in the murder of children. He represents a compromise, too, between the driver who jumps the lights at the Arc de Triomphe and the meaning of the Arc de Triomphe.

What is the meaning of the Arc de Triomphe? Those who talk of a negative theology direct attention to mysteries that cannot be seen or touched or directly known about, as in the case of the unknown soldier who died on the battlefields of the first world war, whose tomb the Arc de Triomphe contains. A flame burns as a memory to this soldier - the flame being a fire of a quite different order from the flash of a camera or the flames which leap about a crashed aeroplane.

The psychic authority of the dead soldier lies in his unknowability. Because his individuality is not recognized, the unique pain he suffered cannot be buried with his body.

If we link the theory of trauma to the theory of the sacred - and this is why making the link is useful - we shall discover that on one level his pain is timeless and spaceless and waits to suffered by each of us as companions at the feast of life.

In acts of consecration the victim of the sacrifice draws all psychic power into it; it is as though all the energies of the universe were to stream into it. But this relationship between a particular and the totality works in two directions. For while the whole universe may seem to condense into the sufferings of the victim, at the same time the victim can seem to be transfigured. Though lost within a black-hole planet, he turns into a sun-like radiance, much as day takes over the responsibilities of the night.

Let me speculate on the nature of the archaic thinking by which this process of transfiguration takes place, by looking at some remarkable data compiled by Hilda Kuper in her observations of the Swazi people of South Africa during the mid 1930s (Kuper, 1948). I want to suggest a likeness between Swazi beliefs about the planets and the customs of the ancient pharaohs. They are similar ways of thinking about the idea of someone else’s pain.

Each year the Swazi renew the king’s power in rituals whose degree of potency depends on the point at which the moon is waxing or waning. On this same model, when the king is a boy, the rituals are few and weakly performed; when he reaches maturity, they acquire complexity and strength.

The capacity to make distinctions, between individuals, or between life as an energy and life as an embodiment increases or decreases in relation to the extent to which the king, as sacrificial victim, acquires the gravity of the sacred.

At the moment of sacrifice, he is the negation of the sun: he is the black-hole planet into which all distinctions collapse. There is eclipse, darkness at noon, lightning rends the sky. The king carries all badness and danger and pollution. He is hated by his people and they dance and sing out their hatred. These ceremonies have the same function as had the embalmed placentas and umbilical cords of the pharaohs: the mediate.

His dark skin is painted black and he is placed in darkness. He is not alone. During this time, one of his many wives must cohabit with him.
I think this moment touches at the heart of feeling. The psychic ovum splits, and one twin must begin its tragic journey. The other twin does not want to know about this journey perhaps, but I am inclined to think that the living twin is not the only mind present during the act of primal division.

Isis, as mother, sister and lover, must grieve over the dismemberment of Osiris, which occurs during the waning of the moon. In other religious myths, too, the mother - or wife or sister - of the tortured child must bear witness to its sufferings. Clearly my patient has not reached this stage of understanding, but potentially it lies somewhere before him.

When the king is in darkness, the entire population is placed in a state of taboo and seclusion. In a literal understanding of the word atonement, the population is at one with the king. Spies report on the breaking of taboo in a strange fashion: they do not say of the taboo-breaker, You were doing wrong by scratching yourself. They say: you were scratching the king.

All distinctions have collapsed; everything has become one. The unknown soldier might be anyone, and “anyone” has the power to become “everyone”. The fact that the soldier cannot be known, that he is a presence in a negative theology, allows him to mediate between mind and catastrophe so that thought can occur.

Earlier I described the idea of someone else’s pain as a type of enviroment, a bad womb from which the alter ego as foetus must suffer. I described this womb as being unstable in temperature - so that it is either too hot or too cold - and as disagreeable in containment: it is always the wrong shape. The aeroplane plummets. In the idea of someone else’s suffering, it is not the sufferer who moves; the sufferer is always still; it is the surroundings that move; it is the world that always moves about the sufferer, as in a birth passage which threatens to devour those who travel through it.

An environment that destroys differentiation will tend to confuse intuitions of space and time as well as of inside and outside. The Maya provide an example of this in their picture of time as a series of multiple and de-synchronised actions. The Maya thought of time as various pulses, personified as gods identified with celestial planets, who moved at different speeds, some of them resting or breaking down at certain points on their journeys (León-Portilla, 1973 35-55).

As my patient began to realise the important part played by the idea of the plane crash in his capacity to think and feel, the unstable relationship of the crash to time became more evident.

It had occurred three years before his birth and may have given him an unusual belief about the nature of his own conception, but this belief was secondary to his understanding of the plane crash as a timeless act on psychic reality, as a symbolisation which might be used appropriately in divination, as in the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle.

An event situated outside space and time will be located in the future and the past equally. He was convinced that the plane crash would happen to him; he had to keep his father as a scapegoat in his mind, as someone who would contain this nightmare for him.

But then his wife gave birth to a healthy child. Someone else had apparently taken over his prerogative to be born into life. He could not longer fly in a plane insured against crash; he now might be overwhelmed by the fate of the alter ego.

The nightmares that engulfed him were the pure culture of the sacred in all but one important aspect: they were symbolisations. In comparison, the sacred as pure culture destroys all possibilities of symbolisation when it invades the mind. It can only be described by way of a negative theology. Being anti-symbolic, the sacred is unknowable; it cannot be described or named. It represents nothing and has a way of becoming everything.

A radioactive object does not symbolise radioactivity, it is an object which contains or conducts radioactivity; more likely than not, it is an object which is devoured by radioactivity, so that it is unstable in definition.

The sacred is a source of life which devours all forms of containment and is in turn devoured. Skins, garbs, containers in this kind of situation are like water off a duck’s back, or the water used in a baptismal lustration.

The pharaohs knew that someone had shared their space and time during the experience of travelling down the birth passage; this someone had carried sufferings which might have been theirs.

They thought it important to maintain contact with this someone, and this is why they revered their embalmed placentas and umbilical cords. By means of this custom they did not have to kill representations of the alter ego in order to remain ignorant of its presence.

References.
Detienne, Marcel. 1986 Dionysos à ciel ouvert. Hachette
Frankfort, Henri 1948 Kingship and the Gods. Chicago, 69-78
Kuper, Hilda 1947 An African Aristocracy: rank among the Swazi. O.U.P.
León-Portilla, Miguel 1973 Time and reality in the Thought of the Maya. Boston, Beacon Press.
Meltzer, Donald 1973 Sexual states of Mind. Clunie Press.
Tustin, Frances 1972 Autism and Childhood Psychosis. Hogarth.

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