Feeling Matters

Michael Eigen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429913648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing. Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other's feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don't exist. A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere.

CHAPTER ONE

Yosemite God¹

Yosemite silenced me. Words dissolved. A wordless world for millions of years. What can speaking do? Tears, awe, like so many other people before me. Mammoth rocks, mammoth stars. God’s beauty. The soul of the rock says, “Come closer.”

A sign says, “Here is where Theodore Roosevelt camped with John Muir, spoke good forest talk, and left Roosevelt inspired to conserve remnants of nature’s forests and wilderness.”

So this is what words can do – inspire great thoughts, feelings, actions. In people so different as Theodore Roosevelt and myself, words can and do make a difference.

What I put into my writings, my books: words that echo the silence, the wind and water – the spirit that hovers, runs through, uplifts, dashes down.

Not God as signifier for inbuilt, unknown intelligence. But God that gives birth to religions. Religions that reveal and obscure. Religions that botch it but provide hints, openings, pointers, God-prints. I would not go so far as to say that religions are God fossils in which God is embedded without life. Religions can and do help implant God in us, awaken us, get us going to some extent, in some ways. Are they necessary? Can’t Yosemite do it alone? Doesn’t Yosemite ignite the God sense all by itself? Doesn’t Yosemite ignite God? Surely, God, too, must be awed, dumbfounded, amazed, moved, swept away, by forms creation takes.

Look at what words do, their danger. I said religions help implant God, as if God were an implant, a graft, a foreign organ. As if religions put into us what they grow out of and express. Maybe we should take religions more as a gush, an outcry, a moan, a whisper, an unfolding prayer. Like the last psalms, shouts of joy, banging cymbals, blowing horns, King David’s dancing, singing. Songs that echo what life feels like when aliveness quivers and surges.

Yet religions are God implants. Lighting shabbos candles, eating chalah, learning that rest is very special, very holy, more holy even than repentance. My Hebrew school teacher was fond of shocking us by saying, Shabbos, the sabbath, is holier than Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On shabbos we can even rest from repenting. You have your childhood memories, your implants. And when they work, these plants grow and grow and you grow with them and the holy grows too.

Often they do not work well, they mar, deform. We try to pull them out of us, run away, take another route. We run and run. Some of us – many here – run to psychoanalysis. We run to psychoanalysis to save us from God, a bad implant. Often we call these implants parents.

It can be difficult to distinguish good from bad, toxins from nourishment, undamaged from damage. Few things are more binding, more gripping than toxic nourishment and damaged bonds. The way God is stuffed into us by the religious often poisons the spirit, damages the soul. We use psychoanalysis, in part, to pump out our psychic stomachs and restore ability to digest experience.

Some criticize psychoanalysis for teaching people to tolerate toxins. Others see a truer calling, to work with poisons and damage, to approach what we fear, to come closer to challenging our makeup. Psychoanalysis is less a medicine than an act of creation, an incessant shaping, re-texturing, fine tuning of affective attitudes.

The God I know wants us to create, to taste the power that makes us giddy. Giddy with God, harmless with others. To be harmless with others – something that will never happen. Does God want us to practice the art of something that will never happen? For example, to achieve a world without murder?

We created psychoanalysis to re-create ourselves. If not to re-create ourselves, at least to try to help ourselves, or at least to work with ourselves. I say we, but of course I mean Freud. But once a tool leaves its maker’s hand anyone can make use of it. And there is no telling to what uses it may be put. For example, Marx and Lenin’s depiction of historical forces, expressed in communism. An attempt to help ourselves, to cure society, to make a fairer life. But things we do to help ourselves turn out to be mixed blessings, if blessings at all.

If I were making a movie, we would eavesdrop on God telling heavenly hosts, “Let’s send them Freud and psychoanalysis with the hope they’ll do a better job working with their impulses.” God tried a lot of ways before without enormous success. Floods and plagues didn’t work. Neither did abusive, punitive religions promising heaven for behaving and hell for being bad. We’ve been very bad children. We just don’t act very well. So here comes psychoanalysis to take another shot at it. Working with impulses in a freer, indirect way. With free association and free floating attention: saying whatever you want, listening in new ways. Perhaps psychoanalysis wants to teach us how to be bad in a better way, a less destructive way.

As we worked with this new toy – professionals called it a method – we found that much more than impulse control was at stake. Fields of intertwining, pulsing, rigid and shifting affective attitudes swam into view. We found not just caesuras, blinks, and fissures of consciousness through which we thought we glimpsed work of unconscious processes. More and more, focus turned to nuances of emotional transmissions, dialectics of permeability and evacuation, how we take in and get rid of ourselves and others. How quality of unconscious processing of emotional life affects quality of existence, as well as the reverse. Less sticks and carrots than opening fields of experience.

Awareness of the importance of dream-work grew. Winnicott (1992) felt dreaming contributes to the use of experience, making life feel real. Bion connects dream-work to processing emotional experience. We have to dream life into reality. Damaged dream-work leaves us in a state of chronic emotional indigestion or shut down. For Bion (1992; Eigen, 2001) something like dream-work goes on day and night, linking levels and forms of existence, taking life in, working it over, giving back in profound interweaving.

But there is, too, experience beyond dreaming. Dreaming is already on the road to narrative structures and rationalizations we can work with while awake. We sleep not only to dream, but to allow contact with places dreaming can’t reach, that reach towards dreaming. Bion (1992: 149–50) suggests one reason sleep is essential is to make possible emotional experiences the personality can not have while awake. Sleep enables experience outside the reach of waking and dreaming to move towards dreaming’s reach.

This idea coheres with the Hindu saying that everyday life is the past, dreaming is the present, and dreamless void the future.

Shall we call this a wordless, imageless unconscious, a portal through which our lives are fed impalpably and ineffably by experience that accesses us in dreamless sleep? As though God or nature or evolution has safeguarded something from our use of it, a special form of contact that we can not ruin with our controlling narratives or our lust for power or our fears. That gains access to us when our ordinary focus and selective attention, even the foci of our dreams, are out of play. A contact that accesses us when we’re not looking.

Yet there are threads in waking life that reverberate with the ineffable background of our beings. The thunderous silence of Yosemite, a wordless awe, feels connected to the impalpable portal in dreamless sleep that freshens life. There are words that come from this contact too, however much they obscure it. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.” It is an accident of language that “hear” and “here” sound the same, and that God’s name might translate as, “I am here.” Soundless hearing, a here-ing, an ingredient of dreamless contact through which experience closed by personality finds openings. Yosemite, then, touches us because it is so old yet stimulates an awesome sense of replenishment, eternal replenishment, that goes on in our sleep.

Would it be too much to suggest that something of our ethical sense is fed by dreamless sleep? A taste of peace, refreshment, replenishment. New possibilities of experiencing entering, given a chance to touch us through sleep. How can something touch us if we are not aware of it? An aporia that marks our existence, our plasticity.

Perhaps marks us with a sense of mystery.

The peace found in dreamless sleep gives us something most dreams can not provide. It takes us deeper than conflict, antagonism, fear. So many dreams have persecutory elements, distilling and exaggerating frictions of waking life. Where does the idea of peace come from? One source, I feel, is the profundity of sleep. The association of “profound” with sleep is no accident. That sleep can be profound gifts us with a profound sense of peace that daily anxieties can not exhaust. A peace we may fail to access while awake but which enters while we’re asleep. We look forward to sleep after a day of activity, not just to refresh ourselves, but to contact the deep peace that rest and sleeping can bring. A peace we may consciously try to base ourselves on through prayer and meditation.

Sleep is not peaceful for everyone. Damage can be so profound or consciousness so heightened and vigilant, that sleep is difficult. Many complain of not being able to let go, surrender, give themselves to sleep. For some, sleep is murderous and dreams are often nightmares. The traumatic background of our beings has free reign in sleep. Even so, many for whom sleep is fearsome treasure peaceful moments that sneak through, moments when sleep overtakes them and profound peace seeps in. After waking, the message is garbled. Terror as usual reigns. A person may express regret, grief or anger that peace does not last longer. Memory of it remains, if nearly obliterated, and one wants more of it.

Some people for whom sleep is too twisted for much peace find heightened moments of meaning while awake. A beautiful color sky, tree, hill, a painting, a facial expression, tone of voice, a kind gesture, music: a taste of the Yosemite God and the impalpable background of being breaks through and raises existence. A flash of insight, reading, writing and insomnia pays off. A kind of peace is part of heightened awareness, even if awareness shatters. A bit like the peace of fireworks, the lighting up, incandescence, shattering and fall.

An awesome peace, stirring in Yosemite grandeur. A stirring peace embedded in heights of awakening and depths of sleep. There are, then, different kinds of peace. I am interested in an enlivening one. Peace that stirs, lifts. It is not just that I am little and Yosemite is big, or that we are both changing and passing, slowly or quickly. We are both amazing in spirit, the great spirit of the rock, my thrilling awareness of the rock, a stirred and stirring awareness. Coming alive, shivering by being touched by, invaded by stone. A grandeur that transfers to ordinary experience, that is part of the touch of flesh.

There are great ideas that link with this profound stirring. For me, Plato’s vision of the Good is one, Kant’s treating each other as ends, not just means, is another. These ideas link with the golden rule, giving, caring, putting oneself in the place of the other. Kant speaks of the moral universe as more thrilling than the starry skies. Where does the idea of peace, of caring, treating others as ends come from in a world permeated by survival needs, practicality, antagonisms, lust for power?

A vision of natural divisions vs. strife is one possibility: Taoism vs. Empedocles or Heraclitus perhaps. Some speak of dialectics, paradox, the contribution of diverse tendencies and tensions to a greater whole. Emmanuel Levinas (1969; Eigen, 2005) draws on another possibility, expressed in our response to the human face. An ethical sense inscribed in our flesh, growing through our experience of the Other, particularly another’s expressive face.

Levinas writes of a vulnerability, an infinite appeal, even a destitution. The other calls for our response. We are not speaking of the other as master now, or slave, but the other as naked before God, as naked to others, needy, yes, but also at risk. We all ask something of others and it is that something we are all required to give. An infinite asking, an infinite giving. Neither term can be exhausted.

An enfleshed infinite, an immediate infinite, infinite immediacy: from an infant’s response to its mother’s face, to our response as grownups to each other. An infinite immediacy that embraces, that upholds within it as its nucleus an infinite distance, intimate distance that calls for respect as well as caring. To see and sense as a form of giving. How can distance be an infinite immediacy, an inexhaustible caring? Doesn’t distance run the range from cruel to compassionate? To live a difference that does justice to what is lived: isn’t this an immediacy worth striving for?

We have had time to learn how injury is inflicted, to read the pain we create in one before us. To behead the enemy, the stranger, to destroy the intimate: we know these well. We are an abusive species, a tormented species, a pain inflicting group.

We know how defensive we are, warding off the pain that is our heritage, that comes at us from all directions. We know, too, what it is like to support life in one in need. To come through ourselves, to help. Have we decided as a group which is the greater satisfaction, the greater prompting? Have we decided to water down the appeal – a mutual appeal – that brings life to another level?

Which do we imagine the greater fear: that we will be empty if not brutal, or empty if not giving? We dread losing either way, as if we need both to feel alive, a dependency, an addiction to the dialectics of brutality and giving. Part of suicide bombing’s compelling genius is that both poles maximally combine: the flash of brutality and fullness of self-giving. Giving oneself to God or cause, supported in the background by devoted faces, friends, mother, militant brothers. The flaw: to believe some faces are human, some are not.

What Levinas speaks of is the appeal of faces everywhere, universal appeal, a concrete universal embedded in experience. An immediate appeal that experience is made of. No exclusions. This is the ethical aim inscribed in our looking, hearing, feeling bodies, the aim that lifts us, impels us into life beyond murder. An impossibility, perhaps. But when we sense it we know that Kant is right, it is a beauty the stars themselves sing to. A happening that brings a smile to every infant’s heart and face, a spontaneous smile in response to another, alive with expressive, touching radiance – unless something has gone horribly wrong.

What, then, are we called on to give? We are asked to give ourselves. To give of ourselves. And for this, no one else will do. There are no substitutes for what only you bring now, this particular, passing forever.

A patient, call him Cusp, dreams of sex with a pretty girl beyond his reach. He is fearful. Did something happen? Tallish girl. He also dreams of giving a seminar, a talk. There is a water sound in the background, pleasant enough, perhaps a distraction. Should he shut the doors, windows?

The next week he does give a weekend seminar in the country for a well known group and sleeps with someone he meets there. A tallish girl beyond his reach he normally would be fearful of approaching. In the country seminar setting, they readily fell in with each other, but only for a single night. The next day she was already bobbing in the sea of events, moving away from him, free spirit. She touched him with her magic wand and he felt renewed, redeemed, gulping loss as part of the richness.

Sex as a redemptive act. Redeemed through a moment’s contact with another person, with her body, being allowed entrance, being held, smiled at, felt. A good moment that won’t solve daily problems or particular torments, that won’t makeover a wounded self. Merely a passing forever that adds light in the background of being and a sense of being worthy. It is not the first time he felt it.

He asks if everyone sees Light during sex.

I don’t know about everyone but I often do. I don’t think I did at first. I suspect, at first, I felt I was getting away with something, that sex was taboo, a sense of triumph part of the thrill. But by the time I was moving out of my twenties, definitely in my early thirties, light was a regular visitor, in the darkness in and around my head, behind my eyes, trickling through skin, surges beneath and within and over my body, my incorporeal corporeal body. It streams from my part-ner’s face, lighting the room. In a semi-comic way, Keith Herring expresses this by lines representing light pulses around penises. Sensation glows. Feeling glows. You sometimes see this glow in animals.

Keith Herring’s penis glows are real, as are halos around the heads of angels and saints in medieval and renaissance paintings. Such representations can also be misleading. They are so highly localized, whereas the light my patient and I experience is hard to pin down. It is part of what gives rise to notions of spirit being everywhere. But I would have to add, to be true to my experience, more densely packed here and there, undulating, fluid, with varying concentrations, yet also glowing with undying, golden intensity, an uplifting thrill with no beginning or end, even when ignited by sex organs. I have had similar experience in many places, many forms.

For example, I felt God more highly concentrated in Jerusalem than other places I visited. The golden illumination seemed to be part of the dry land, the old walls, the light. God was in the land, the air. Inner-outer luminous sensation, ineffable sensation. Perhaps sensation is ineffable. A lighting, heightening, awakening that the region’s bitter pain fails to disconfirm. God is infinitely everywhere, but there are infinite fluctuations in infinity. This coheres with shifting numinous densities that characterize the influence of ancient gods on changing fortunes. Freud distilled such experience in his notion of libido, energy expressed by liquid and electrical images, changing forms and densities, instantaneously distributed from place to place. A sexual cosmic vision, after all.

If spirit affects environment and environment affects spirit, I fear what evil in the land does to the air of Washington, D.C. There is good too, always a struggle between good and evil, although we differ in saying which is which. A sense of wanting to do right by life, to do justice to life and each other, remains alive through remnants,² as the Bible says. Nevertheless, life is sacrificed over differing definitions of justice, or perversions of justice, a horribly apt phrase.

We seem to have drifted downstream from Cusp’s dream. As we may expect, double currents make up the dream, opening and closing, on the analogue of pulsation, Lacan’s (1978, pp. 32, 125, 143) image for the opening and closing of the unconscious. To open, to close. A basic rhythm. The dream movement also involves approaching the unapproachable, touching the untouchable, which Cusp tastes in dream and waking life.

The contrast between dream and waking life is porous. Dreaming is a ki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Credits
• Introduction
• Chapter One Yosemite God
• Chapter Two Tiny Quivers
• Chapter Three Words
• Chapter Four Trauma Clots
• Chapter Five Election Rape
• Chapter Six Healing Longing
• Chapter Seven Alone Points
• Chapter Eight Filling Up with Rage
• Chapter Nine Boxes of Madness
• Chapter Ten The Annihilated Self
• Postscript
• References
• Index