Psychic Deadness

Michael Eigen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429917615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Many people seek help because they feel dragged down by a sense of inner deadness that persists in an otherwise full and meaningful life. These individuals somehow remain untouched by their own inner experiences; a deadness persists that can cripple their entire life or part of it. This book shows what is involved in enduring and working with psychic deadness in a day-to-day, session-by-session basis.

PART I

THEORETICAL SOUNDINGS

1

Psychic Death

The sense of being dead has become a popular clinical theme. More people than in the past now seek help for feeling dead. Although feeling dead is a central complaint of many individuals, it is not clear where this deadness comes from or what can be done about it.

There are many variations of psychic deadness. For some people, deadness does not consume much psychic space. It is a circumscribed counterpole or subtheme in a fuller, richer existence. It comes and goes or nags in the background. At times it becomes prepossessing, and one wonders, with a chill, what one would do if it swallowed existence, if it became all there was. One waits for it to fade and usually it does. It moves along with a variety of moods and states of being.

Some people have pockets of deadness that are relatively constant. They become used to living with areas of deadness. They wish they were more alive, that life offered more, but they make do with their portion. If life is decent enough, a bit of deadness is not too much to pay for satisfactions. One adapts to being less than one might be, to feeling less than one might feel. One talks oneself into imagining one is about as happy as one can be, as happy as one is going to be. One more or less succeeds in believing oneself, since one fears (rightly) that things could be worse.

For some people, the sense of deadness is pervasive. They describe themselves as zombies, the walking dead, empty and unable to feel. An extreme example of massive deadness was an anorexic-bulimic woman, Deborah, who passed through my office several years ago. She weighed under eighty pounds and looked like a corpse. Her bones were like piercing icicles that stung and ripped me apart.

I wept upon hearing her story, a familiar one but yet a story shocking in its outcome. Deborah’s parents were successful professionals. There was a history of neglect, a mixture of over- and understimulation, the usual story of emotional poverty in a luxurious setting. Overeating-vomiting-starving parodied the too much-too little that characterized her life.

Deborah’s parents both indulged and deprived her. They catered to her fears and pushed her aside. At times it seemed as though she had two sets of parents: one that spoiled her and catered to dependency and another that required her to be healthy and independent and to act as if she did not need them. Deborah was left with a double imperative: she could not live without her parents, and she should leave them alone.

Each time Deborah sought help, she got worse. Her therapists tried to foster and support her independence, but her dependency needs were too great. One therapist in college was so stimulated by her neediness that he began an affair with her. Deborah relished, yet feared their closeness. The outcome was devastating. When he backed off and became colder, her sense of forlornness intensified. Ordinary therapy did not fill the hole in her being

After college Deborah drifted in and out of therapy and in and out of jobs. She felt helped by some therapists more than by others. The therapy situation itself was tantalizing and frustrating. It offered the hope of contact and elicited longing, yet at the end of sessions, therapist and patient parted. Hope and longing went unfulfilled. Intense neediness met a void. No amount of transient contact seemed adequate. The very structure of therapy annihilated the desire it elicited.

Having an affair with a therapist made things worse; not having an affair also made things worse. Contact was overstimulating, and lack of contact was too depriving. In time, Deborah found an analyst with whom she could stay. They worked many years together. He was a highly respected man in the field, one of the best. Yet it was during this treatment that Deborah’s downward plunge accelerated and seemed to become irreversible.

Her analyst ended up refusing to continue treatment with her, apparently horrified by the turn of events. He told her, she said, that had he known what was going to happen, he would never have started with her. How could he have known? Who would have known?

Once more the pattern was repeated: a promise of too much and then the drop through the hole in the bottom of the universe. Perhaps any therapy would have been a promise of too much for Deborah had a dual attitude toward it: therapy solves nothing and ought to solve everything. The wish for therapy to be more than it is can be overwhelming. Part of Deborah’s tragedy was that she found an analyst who was good enough for her to want to be with. His very goodness overstimulated her. She wanted more from him than he could provide. His skill and caring heightened her unfulfilled longing, and at some point her whole system shut down. Therapy could not support the intensity it fueled.

Yet Deborah continued to seek help. This must mean that she believed change was possible, hope was alive, but it also could mean that she was stuck in a pattern, a sort of sticky free fall, like a pinball bouncing through therapy slots until movement stopped and the game ended.

Therapy was a chronic part of her life; she clung to it, then dropped it, over and over again. Some of her therapists did the same with her. To some extent, she regulated the dosage of therapy she was able to take. She usually left therapy before it or her feelings overwhelmed her. Was she better off dipping in and out? Staying in may have killed her.

Normally therapists like it when a patient comes more often, stays longer, and works more deeply. One assumes that dedicated work leads to better outcomes. In Deborah’s case, the attempt to work more intensely broke open a hole in her psyche. She became numb and far away from herself. Her life got caught on a trajectory that moved from deadness to deadness. Therapy no longer was life calling to life, but a magnet drawing out depths of deadness.

What can be said about such psychic deadness? How can we meet it? We do not know why a person like Deborah falls so far out of life, while another similar to her pulls out of it and builds a satisfactory existence. Deborah vanishes through a hole in her psyche, while another finds a way to swim in the emptiness. At times it seems as though a toss of the dice determines whether the hole one falls in supports life or not.

FREUD

Freud’s work is rich with ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities. Freud may say there is no death in the unconscious, yet he writes of unconscious death wishes. By unconscious death wishes he usually means that /will live forever, but you will die. The unconscious acts as a magnifying machine. My hostility toward you becomes absolutized in the wish for you to die. Common speech bears witness to this passion in the phrase, “I wish you were dead!”

The Freudian world is one of high (or low) drama. The “I versus you” runs deep in Freud’s picture of psychic life. The Freudian ego originally reacts with hostility to the external world. Externality creates discomfort. The ego tries to avoid it, to wish it away. From the outset one escapes, even annihilates reality. The you is partly an enemy from the beginning.

The Freudian you follows the track of pain. Pain is Other, alien, not-I. Wherever pain is, you are. If pain comes from inside the body, then the inside of the body becomes Other, not-I, something that is happening to me, an alien, hostile, or indifferent you.

The boundary of I-feeling shifts. I-feeling tends to identify with pleasure and react against pain. One tries to set pain outside one’s boundaries: I try to exclude pain from myself. Pain may be the most intimate fact of existence, but I make believe it is a stranger.

Above all, death—that stranger of strangers, other of others, alien of aliens— wells up from my body, seizes me, takes me away. Processes that constitute me and support my life are also enemies. Death wipes meaning out of life. In the middle of a beautiful experience a voice mocks, “What good is it? You will be a corpse someday.”

People live with an eye glued to death; in Deborah’s case, with two eyes. Deborah’s knowledge of death swallowed her up. She became a parody of death, a living corpse. Perhaps she imagined she could control death by aping it, by becoming its proxy. Perhaps she wanted to stuff death into people’s (her parents’) faces to show them the lie they lived. She became in her body a haunting critique of self-absorbed luxury, a physical image of psychospiritual starvation.

In Freud’s writings there are death symbols as well as sexual symbols. An obsession with dying ran through Freud’s life and work. Freud’s attempt to reduce death anxiety to castration anxiety was never fully convincing.¹ Libido theory could not wish death away. Death kept popping up in its own right, and finally Freud legitimated it in his theory by declaring death an instinct or drive.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud writes of a death instinct that is initially turned inward. There is a drive toward death from the beginning, and there are many facets to this faceless drive. Freud emphasizes the conservative principle of instincts, the tendency to regress to earlier states, to repeat a position. The logical conclusion of the slide backward is zero. The earliest state is no state at all, zero stimulation, zero complexity.

In semi-biological, physical terms, Freud depicts organic life becoming inorganic again, because the inorganic state was original, the point of departure and point of return. Life sustains its complexity only so long and then collapses. Cellular units are bound together and then fall apart. The binding of any sort of unity is precarious, subject to unbinding.

Life feeds on death and death on life. Life deflects death outward for a time. Ambition, the will to power and mastery, sadism, and destructiveness, are some indications of variable life-death drive fusions. Life holds death captive, directs its attention toward objects, makes death want things, persons, places, positions. It is as if libido attracts death’s interest, fascinates death, busies death with diversions. The deception, masquerade, and rerouting take effort. Systems wear themselves out by the work of sustaining themselves. One dies, in part, from exhaustion.

Yet it is not enough to speak of inertia, collapse, or the wearing down of systems. If death is a drive, it exerts force or pressure in a certain direction. When the life drive does not bind the death drive, the latter unties sentient unities. Psycho-organismic being is dismanded, broken apart, reduced to chunks of inorganic material. Death is more an active breaking down than a passive falling apart.

It is tempting to dramatize Freud’s vision with mythic language and phrases from everyday speech. We speak of life or death as taking or losing hold or its grip. We speak of life’s victory over death or death’s over life, as if the two were gods eternally wrestling, at war. We say death or life wins or loses. Freud also uses the language of struggle, combat, tension, and difficulty. When an individual dies he is in the grips of a process that has won out. From Freud’s point of view, it is doubtful that there can be such a thing as an easy death or an easy life.

An individual like Deborah makes one feel the force of Freud’s death drive. Deborah is a symbol and embodiment of death. One feels death working in her. One feels a dark force taking her more and more out of life, sucking life dry. One feels a negative process working even after life loses the battle.

It was not only Deborah’s body that lacked flesh and fullness; her psyche had undergone an enormous reduction. There was not much left of her. Perhaps she never had been too full a person, but I have no doubt that there was more to her, that there were more possibilities. Death had eaten away almost all it could eat away. The shell of Deborah—a bundle of reflexes—persevered. She moved from office to office looking for therapists to feed the death within or to miraculously stop it. She could not die before the death inside her devoured every crumb of potential aliveness in every corner of her being. It was as if she had to stay alive until there was nothing more for death to eat.

Deborah’s life is carried away by something deadly that accelerates over time. Does Freud’s formulation adequately depict the death momentum? Is it enough to say a drive toward tensionlessness won out? Aren’t there explosive tensions in inorganic matter? Explosive processes seem to be part of the universe. What would a tension-free universe be like? Would a tension-free universe be a process-free universe, no universe at all?

Deborah’s life is a silent scream stretched over time. It is an explosion that no one can hear because it occurred and goes on occurring in a place where no Other is. Deborah explodes in a vacuum. No one hears Deborah cry. She does not hear herself crying, yet quiet crying of her insides continues. All the loudness has gone into her visual appearance: her skeleton rips the eyes of the Other, tears the Other’s heart. The more she vanishes the more full of impact the place where she was becomes. The blackness she leaves behind or falls into is not tension free, but a heightened, condensed, blank, magnetic-like field increasing in force. What processes govern this force? What can be said about the black hole consuming Deborah’s life?

MAXIMUM-MINIMUM

It is important to note that notions of maximum-minimum states are part of the fabric of Freud’s writings. For Freud the primal trauma is flooding, a maximum state of excitement. Freud pictures a system that can generate more stimulation than it can handle.

A one is too much for oneself paradigm can be applied to many facets of psychophysical being—neurological, sexual, social, emotional, and cognitive. Freud posits mechanisms that dampen and regulate the psycho-organism’s tendency to become overwhelmed. A stimulus barrier offers resistance to the promiscuous streaming of excitations. Psychological defenses resist the rise of libidinal promptings. Freud’s picture is always of systems with double or opposite tendencies, one offsetting and regulating the other.

In an informal fashion, one can speak of being overwhelmed or flooded by energy, stimuli, drives, emotions, ideas. At such moments, filter or containing systems break down or are inadequate. One may enjoy the flood, but one may only be able to take so much of it and no more, or it may be too dangerous to begin with. In response to massive flooding, one may massively shut down. It is as if the psycho-organism short-circuits, turns off, being unable to bear its sensitivity. The blankness of too much is replaced by the blankness of nothing.

Instead of too alive, we have too dead. Which is the greater anxiety in Freud’s work—the dread of aliveness or the dread of death? The Freudian ego lives this double anxiety. There is no end to the permutations. When one is dead, one fears aliveness; when alive, one fears death. There are sublime moments of aliveness when there is no room for the fear of either life or death. There is a deadness that fears both life and death and a deadness that fears neither.

There are two tendencies—toward maximum aliveness and toward total deadness, toward building up and tearing down, toward increasing tolerance of energy and complexity, toward a zero point of sensitivity and stimulation. For Freud all life is made up of these two tendencies, summarized under the rubrics of Eros and the death instinct, a doubleness that marks all psychic products. Whether or not one likes Freud’s double instinct theory, issues related to the theme of psychic aliveness-deadness cannot be wished away.

A QUANTITATIVE FACTOR

The play of aliveness-deadness runs through Freud’s work. He is concerned with the raw presence-absence of sexual energy, its rise and fall, reroutings, rechannelings, its fate as it meets with internal-external obstacles and resistances.

As his work developed into “official” psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on conflicts between and within psychic systems,² and between psychic systems and the external world, his interest in sheer presence-absence and in the strength-weakness of raw sexual energy pers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Theoretical Soundings
• Part Two: Clinical Probes
• Epilogue
• Credits
• Index