13th March 2008

The Overlap of Two Skeletons

A patient at the end of a session tells me about someone he knows who is in prison - and who suffers from an unusual bone disease. The man in prison appears to have two skeletons: one full skeleton, rather, and another one adjacent to it that seems to shadow the first skeleton, and exists only in bits. The fragments of the second incomplete skeleton keep growing. The growing bits of bone cause him pain, and he has had to have surgery to take the growing bits away.

He believes that something went wrong with his mother’s ovulation at the time he was conceived. An inseminated ovum in part began to split; a pair of twins should have been formed; but the process was somehow arrested. The other twin never reached life, but its residue, the growing bits of bones continue to exist as a disabling physical reproach within the twin who lives. Or partially lives: for although the living twin was effectively given birth to out of his mother’s pregnancy, he was not born into life. He now finds himself in prison, both actual and symbolic, a uterus in negative, a limbo-like or rectal place. (A condition that is poignantly reflected in the limbo-like condition of the patient who told me about the man with the double skeleton.) It is as though the guilt of being the living half of a pair stops the man with the double skeleton from being really born as a personality. In his body he carried the reproaches of a stillborn twin who is also his stillborn self.

I heard of this condition in one session, and the idea of the man with a semi-double skeleton was in my mind when the session with the next patient was about to begin. The patient I was about to see was someone I had only just begun working with, who had been through a good experience of psychoanalysis previously, but was new to me - he and I were trying to get onto each other’s wave-lengths. This may be why, while waiting for him, I had begun to form at the back of my mind an image of two identical clock faces, two photographs of the same clock face, inexactly superimposed, one on the other. These two clock faces were like the image I had formerly experienced of the complete and incomplete skeletons shadowing each other in one body. The two clock faces, the two skeletons, did not glide together into the image of one clock face or one skeleton; they remained slightly apart, like a photograph in double exposure.

The patient turned up slightly late. He was upset at being late - more upset than the circumstances would have warranted. The least one can do, he said, rebuking himself, is to be on time. He and I had begun the session at different times. In my mind the appointment had begun on the hour, and he had been present in my mind in the room, like a phantom presence; he had begun his session with me about five minutes later. Emotionally we seemed to live out the analytic hour by different clock times: although he was consciously obliged to acknowledge that my clock time, by nature of the analytic convention - that we should start on the hour - had precedence.

He had been running from the station; he was out of breath. He described the sense of ineffectual fury he had felt in the underground station. He had been running along the platform; piles of luggage, people, had blocked his way. No one noticed him; he might not have existed. I had two thoughts about this which I was unable to report to him - I was only able to articulate them fully to myself after the session was over. The first thought was that his race along the platform was analogous in behaviour to someone who had been coerced into an identification with the hands of a clock and who experienced the movements of the hands as too fast for him; my world went at a pace that did not suit his. The second thought that occurred to me was that he seemed to respond to the people on the platform as though he were at most a biting gnat. He could observe them and he could feel that they blocked his wishes; but they seemed not to perceive him. He fulminated, and they did not react. Two different time-worlds that overlapped; but only one of them impinged on the other.

He experiences the other world as obstructive and irritating and denying him his wishes - ultimately the right to be born. An ovum has only in part split. He is to me as the second incomplete skeleton was to the two-skelton man. He feels he is given an inadequate space in which to grow. The space he feels to be adequate is the delusional space which the tyrant inhabits. But this is a space that cannot be sustained. He can only make himself a sort of life, by tagging along as the bone shadow to my skeleton, or as a shadowy space-time system bound to the space-time system which nurture his living peer - in this case, his therapist. He thinks of me as inhabiting a relatively full existence in space and time, while he inhabits a space and time that is insubstantial to the point of being ghost-like. The space that nutures me might be the death to him. Reluctantly, he must try and overlap my world and enter it like a phantom and make use of it, as his only hope of survival.

As a manner of doing this, he weaves a narrative about himself, cultivated and thoughtful and self-referential, and then attempts to slip out of it, as though out of a cocoon, leaving a void. He seems to have no private life. It is as though he were trying to create a uterine place for himself through words, so as to bring off a suitable starting point for his own birth, but somehow the process keeps miscarrying. All that is left is an empty cocoon. The self miscarries and sinks into depression.

The other world of the people on the underground - he didn’t experience them as couples - is a world that he thinks of as actual, unlike the world he lives in. It is smug and unhurtable by him. It is an actuality which he responds to as though it were the empty cocoon that will not enable his progress to birth. (I point out to him that he is misleading himself if he presumes that I am necessarily inviolate to his magical wishes to hurt; indeed, the content of the session is concerned with people dying from cancer. He is relieved to know that the power of his magical wishes remains unascertained rather than invalidated.)

He has a right to grievance. The feeling that the underground people are arrogant in their sense of actuality has some truth to it. (In the transference, this is how he experiences any sense of fullness in being in his therapist.) As the philosopher David Lewis says, how lucky to think that out of all the worlds you might have possibly inhabited, you should think the one you inhabit is the actual one. A chastening thought. On the other hand, if you have a sense that you have been born, you are then liable to believe that you inhabit an actual world. That seems to be part of the arrangement. It is only when you acknowledge the actuality of the worldyou inhabit, thatyou can freely utilise space and time, languages and other forms of symbolisms related to individuality and enter into a friendly give-and-take with the symbolism of others (their conceptions of space and time and language, for instance.) If you experience myself as psychically unborn, however, you will not feel secure in actuality. The mother’s lap in which as infant you sit, and the potential intimacy of this situation, is one whose meanings you think to engineer. He brought a dream in which he was playing football magnificently, as though under a special light. The other players were in the shade. He was the adored child, his rivals having no place in his mother’s adoration. Possibly, he experienced his mother’s attention as a re-forming about him of the lost womb. But this was not the light of otherness, the light of insight; it was the phosphorescence of delusion, in which the infant on its mother’s lap thinks of its mother as some depersonalised captive who must endorse its tyrannical claims to omnipotence.

A baby who lives within a phantasmal image of itself as its mother’s star performer is so concerned with being the object of a recognition, whose manner of recognizing it controls, that it will fail to see any evidence of otherness before it. The possessive element in jealousy determines the formations of jealous phantasy; and it determines the jealous mind’s failures in perception. Such a mind is unable to recognize the value in any knowledge which may assist it to move beyond self-centredness. If it has intimation of such a knowledge, it shrinks away from it, as though it threatened a terrible form of annihilation.

For an infant dominated by the need to be recognized, no experience of a mother is allowed to be evident; the admiring light from her eyes is dissociated from her personality and used to fuel grandiosity. It is no longer the admiring light from someone’s eyes; the light has been purloined fromanother individual and, dehumanised, is now the luminous cell of delusion by which the infant seeks to console itself. It feeds on this insubstantial light as Caesar feeds on the praise of the crowds who tell him he is immortal. If such an infant cannot be born, it can hope at least through delusion to create a substitute for the lost uterus and to gild this setting into permanence. In such states of grandiosity, the self is unable to recognize anything because it is lost in the delusion of being recognized (as a type of immortal deity). Its one fear is that the luminous cell will collapse and it will find itself mortal and invaded by a death that is experienced as terrible in its impersonality. (Those who depersonalize those who love them and see this love as no more than an expectable attribute will also experience death as depersonalised and as an attribute of the self.)

People who suffer from delusional jealousy of this kind are attracted by the idea of invisibilities. They are haunted by phantom states, the pale impression of contours rather than substances. They are hermits and magicians by nature, who prefer air and water to earth; transparencies within transparencies modified by light: things which in a sense are not. If they imagine fire, they imagine it as aetherial. They prefer to feed on the insubstantialities of their mother’s eyes rather than to attend to the nipple in their mouth. They are bemused by the reflections in her eyes and by denying her any reality are able to see the reflection as representing a world which is not. It sees the reflection in either eye as twins who in logic precede actuality. And yet a mother’s eyes are an actuality in themselves; they are an aspect of an integrated otherness, a mother: an awareness of which helps to establish the boundaries of differentiation between hallucination and vision, which in the pre-uterine state had not been available.

It occurred to me that he was trying to put into me the belief that I had great expectations for him; and this belief was reasonable, insofar as the infant expects that its mother, if healthy, will have hopes of being able to nurture it. But I did not think the great expectation belief he put into me was quite so graceful as that. It was grandiose and dictatorial; and, moreover, it turned out that it was being put into me in order that he then could disappoint me. He would determinedly not live up to any expectation. I was put in mind of a fetus who thinks it must make its own uterine setting in order to bring about its own birth - and who fails in this enterprise and must persistently undergo its own miscarriage. He wanted me to be his uterine setting; but it was part of his wish that I should be forever collapse.

I found myself thinking of the failure of the self-created uterine setting as like a soap bubble bursting. His failures to give birth to himself was phantom-like. One day he told me about an Egyptian aetiological myth, in which a God on the banks of the shrinking Nile made little men out of the slippery clay and then had the power to make these clay men walk: in this way, the myth supposed, men came into being. The patient had begun the session by saying that he was convinced that I had a furious look on my face, and that I looked furious because he continuously made messes everywhere. A modern reading of the myth would see the God as a fool in thinking to give life to slippery clay: the patient would feel justified in thinking his therapist an omnipotent fool in hoping to make something of someone who did little else but make continuous messes.

It was quite clear that he wanted me to understand the myth with myself as the God and himself as the slippery clay. His slanting of communication was intended to put me on the spot. He wanted me to identify with the God in the Egyptian myth in order to demonstrate my ineffectuality. I was to be shown to be the genii in the bottle whose magic always failed, the masturbator who could not sustain belief in the content of his fantasies. However, it was just before Christmas and I was about to leave the patient for a while. I was inclined to think that in regard to the myth he might experience me as the shrinking Nile. He had thought to use me as a depository for omnipotence, but perhaps I had another use for him, which he was coming close to acknowledging at the moment when the therapist’s lap was about to be withdrawn.

He was the infant lying in the slippery clay, and the source of possible life was shrinking from him. In his hopeless condition he felt impelled to generate into existence the idea of the omnipotent God who manically would bring him to life. But at some level felt this God to be a species of hallucination (possibly invaded by terrible conception of death). It was this figure that he wanted me to represent, as a fool, so as to defuse the presence of death.

At an earlier stage in his life he had almost starved himself to death; and it was possible that, for reasons unknown, he had a great need to live out some experience of abandoment, of being an infant dying on the banks of the Nile. Perhaps someone would pass by and save him; but this was not given in his thoughts. He would lie in sunlight or moonlight and he would die. In his hopelessness, he would experience his mother (whether inner or outer) as so close to dying - the shrinking Nile - that she had lost all interest in her infants. He would not dehumanise her; she would be dehumanised by circumstance. He needed someone to share the experience of his hopelessness. The God factor - the unknowable and non-referential factor that facilitates the emergence of conscious meanings - was unavailable to him. He could not seek nourishment from his unconscious. He was unborn because, his mind being disabled, his God factor could not function.

1. Structure alone does not indicate to us whether a system is delusional or not. Issues of structure in isolation are useful when issues of delusion need not be raised, as when speculating about consciousness in the fetus. Structuralism is appropriate to myth. Myth making bridges the gap between fetus thinking and infant thinking. Myths diminish the caesura sometimes associated with the act of birth.
2. Creationist myths in which the creator seeks to bring inert matter to life are characteristic of the culture of those who feel themselves to be unborn. An instance of this would be the Winnebago myth of the Earthmaker.

“He took a piece of earth and made it like himself. Then he talked to what he had created but it did not answer. He looked on it and saw it had mind or thought....He made it a tongue...He made it a soul...It very nearly said something...Earthmaker breathed into his mouth and talked to it and it answered...” (Radin. Monotheism among Primitive Peoples. p.40.)

We need to reverse subject and object in the myth to release an inhibited meaning. By its nature, the creative element is unknowable; and in fact we cannot know the Earthmaker’s thoughts and intentions. It is not the Earthmaker but the first man - the Adam in all of us - who is endowed with thought and intentions and finds himself in a setting which is seemingly lifeless. In this, I am a creator who cannot create, or discover in myself, the god-factor in mind or nature that underwrites the evolution of meaning.
The first man (in this myth of the unborn) asks: why am I dissociated from any apprehension of communality in experience, the common life-pulse, some shared sentient knowledge? It is death within and without. He is convinced the God factor, or generator of meanings, is dead. His well being depends on bringing his God alive, if only in hallucination.

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