Becoming Alive

Psychoanalysis and Vitality

Ryan Lamothe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135479374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

What does it mean to be and feel alive and real?
How do we become and be alive together?
Human beings are uniquely concerned with the question and marvel of what it means to feel alive and real, as well as the lifelong struggle of being alive together. Becoming Alive proffers a psychoanalytic theory of experiences of being alive, acknowledging that analyst and patient, indeed, each of us, are caught up in the larger drama and mystery of being alive. Focusing on the challenge in any psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate the relation between culture, community, and the individual, LaMothe's theory provides a bridge between the three, arguing that organizations of experiences of being alive are inextricably yoked to cultural stories, rituals, and practices. Enlivened by clinical illustrations and examples drawn from wider culture, Becoming Alive brings together psychoanalytic developmental perspectives, infant-parent research, semiotics, and philosophy in providing a comprehensive, lucid, and systematic description of subjective and intersubjective experiences of being alive.

Chapter 1
Vitality in human life and psychoanalysis

People say that what we’re all seeking is the meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our inner most being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

(Joseph Campbell, 1991, p. 3)

Oh God! May I be alive when I die.

(Winnicott, quoted in Kahr, 1996, p. 125)

Pause and recall a moment when you felt the simple, though intricate, pleasure, awe, and wonder of being alive. An early morning sun, burning off the mountain’s sweaty haze, may have seized your attention and offered a fleeting instance of rapture. A silently shared sense of gratitude and affection that passes between lovers as one of them faces death may be an occasion for being alive in the midst of suffering and loss. Being swept up in raucous laughter or intense play can create a sense of vitality. A bar mitzvah, baptism, wedding, communal prayer, a conference or gathering, a graduation are all possible moments for personal and communal experiences of being alive. And, of course, there are those who carry a preconscious, background presence of being alive and real, which may come to mind quietly and sporadically.

When we listen to ourselves and remember experiences of being alive, we recognize that these experiences are not necessarily confined to peak moments. They exist on a continuum of intensity, from the seemingly mundane to moments of ecstasy, and they are limited only by our imagination and our willingness to risk. In our ruminations, we might also realize that being alive appears to coexist with suffering and loss. Indeed, the poignant joy one experiences watching the surf swallow the evening sun takes place against the background of loss, revealing the non-static nature of experience, in general, and experiences of being alive, in particular. Diane Ackerman (1999), after marveling at the sight of the Hale-Bopp comet, said, “When I realize that I won’t be around for the comet’s next passage, so many sadnesses fill my heart, fill it with grief both ontological and particular” (p. 209). On a different, though similar tack, Andrew Solomon (2001) wrote, “I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand toward the floor” (p. 24). It appears, then, that suffering and loss are somehow inextricably bound to the possibility of one’s experience of being alive. Solomon understood this as well when he said, “Through chemical manipulation, we might locate, control, and eliminate the brain’s circuitry of suffering. I hope we will never do it. To take it away would be to flatten out experience” (p. 38). And yet, as Solomon well knew, experiences of being alive are diminished or annihilated by agony, misery, and trauma. When this occurs, we are reduced to mere survival, at which point memories of once being alive only seem to increase our despair. Winnicott’s brief prayer in the epigraph to this chapter portrays an old man’s hope that the vicissitudes of dying do not extinguish the possibility of his being alive. We know, of course, that aliveness is not always contingent on whether natural events overwhelm our capacity to be alive. Human beings are paradoxically capable of generating vitality and also annihilating it.

Surely, as a species, we fall under the classification homo paradoxum and our essential contradictoriness is bound up with the fact that we are also questioning animals (homo quaere). What does it mean to be alive? What are the attributes of experiences of being alive and real? What contributes to or diminishes these experiences? How do we become alive and real and how do we maintain an ethos that fosters these experiences? These are existential questions that implicitly concern every human being. Are they not embedded in philosophical musings from Plato to Derrida and are they not found in the teachings of such diverse religious teachers as Buddha and Jesus? Indeed, social, religious, economic rituals and philosophical ruminations stand for human attempts to create and express subjective and intersubjective experiences of being alive.

Queries about being alive and their innumerable replies do not fall solely within the province of philosophy and religion. In 1902, prominent American psychologist William James, who struggled with depression, made sure to include Professor Leuba’s remark, “Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse” (James, 1958, p. 382). In a similar vein, Erich Fromm (1966, p. 132) noted that the Christian notion of sin represents a sense of deadness and the active destruction of being alive. Whether we believe it is a religious or philosophical impulse, the desire for human vitality in all its guises may be studied and understood from psychological and, more specifically, psychoanalytic frameworks. To be sure, as long as psychoanalysis does not divorce itself from the incredibly diverse social, cultural, and religious discourses about being alive, it can continue to offer its own unique contributions to understanding what it means to be alive and how human beings tragically impede and destroy a sense of vitality. This is the aim of this book.

Psychoanalysts, like philosophers, construct theories, which are usually connected to deeply personal interests and questions (Scharfstein, 1980). Professional interests are usually personal. My fascination, dread, and delight about what it means to become and experience being alive and real began when I was in my twenties. Like many young people, I blithely sought to adhere to the stated and unstated directives and interests of my parents and other elders, which purchased me a sense of safety and acceptance. Compliance screened a low-grade depression, an agitating sense of emptiness, and a pseudo sense of being good-enough. Slowly, a modicum of self-awareness lifted the veil to my own desires and passions, though it was as if seeing through a glass darkly. Guided by this foggy recognition, I made the decision to leave the Army and pursue graduate studies in a subject that intrigued me. In retrospect, this decision was distinctly different from previous ones. I did not feel as if I was choosing between equally viable pathways. Rather, there were two paths, yet at some level I realized that there was no choice. To fail to act would have meant choosing to survive in the safety of the familiar. I felt a sense of deadness when I imagined traveling that road. The other path, however, was filled with uncertainty, anxiety, and risk. I could fail. What if I was wrong? What if my desire to leave the Army and attend graduate school was a mistake? How many of my earlier decisions had been made to please others and how do I know if I am not indeed doing that same thing? Even with these questions and anxiety, I noticed a sense of energy and vitality on this path. This was the first of many stumbling steps toward deeper experiences of being alive, which were supported by friends, mentors, colleagues, therapists, family, and a fiercely loyal and loving wife.

This growing awareness and curiosity gradually expanded to include professional questions and interests. I became enamored with psychoanalysis or that part of psychoanalysis that provided tools to explore the limitless complexity and plasticity of human communication and experience. A psychoanalytic ethos provided me with the framework and concepts to struggle with and draw conclusions about a dominant question that both intrigues and hounds me. In this chapter and those that follow, I offer a psychoanalytic perspective to the questions and problems that captivate me: how do we become alive and real and “to what extent can we survive, enjoy, tolerate, and use each other’s aliveness?” (Eigen, 1996, p. xxiii). Or how much variation of aliveness can we accept?

Focal questions such as these typically serve to reframe psychoanalytic issues, concepts, and concerns and, at the same time, give rise to their own set of related questions. For instance, how are experiences of being alive organized in relation to one’s own body, to objects, and to other subjects? How, in other words, are experiences of being alive organized and represented during different phases of development and how are earlier phases related to subsequent ones? What role do cultural and religious rituals and narratives play in facilitating, shaping, and obstructing experiences of being alive? How are these rituals themselves signifiers and organizers of subjective and intersubjective experiences of being alive? How do analyst and patient alike construct and thwart experiences of being alive as well as repair moments of disruption? What does the analyst listen for in the session given this perspective? Put another way, how does the idea of being alive shape the analyst’s understanding of the process and goals of the psychoanalytic ritual? And how does this idea alter our view of defenses and psychopathology?

It is important to acknowledge that, just as experiences of being alive are partial, perspectival, variable, and mediated by a particular tradition and time, so too are the theories, knowledge, and psychoanalytic versions of reality that claim to view and explain these experiences (cf. Marcus and Rosenberg, 1998). Since this work is also historically and contextually limited, there are two initial tasks to complete. First, it is necessary to position this book within the diachronic discourse in psychoanalysis on human motivation and cure. Both motivation and cure, regardless of how they are conceptualized, point to socially constructed values, beliefs, and rituals that implicitly answer questions about what it means to be alive.

It becomes readily apparent, then, that while I place the idea and question of vitality in the foreground, interest in persons’ experiences of being alive and its corollary, deadness, has been present, in various forms and degrees, within psychoanalysis from the beginning. Thus, I use the question and problem of being alive as a lens to interpret other psychoanalytic perspectives. Of course, this should not be understood to be a comprehensive representation of other theories. Rather, it is more of an eisegetical exercise that relies on the metaphor of vitality and the problem and question of being alive to frame interpretations of analytic versions of human experience. This brief and incomplete survey also provides a way to identify differences and similarities between this book and previous analytic views. A final task of this chapter is to identify and amend the specific psychoanalytic perspectives I rely upon in answering the questions above.

Vitality in psychoanalysis: motivations and cure

Despite the variety of models and definitions of psychoanalysis,¹ a common thread has run through it since its inception. Psychoanalysis began as, and continues to be, a study of human suffering. Psychoanalytic versions of the human condition typically start by addressing what goes awry in human life. Neurosis and psychopathology became modern categories that represented the price people paid to survive overwhelming events or deal with troubling fantasies. Attempts to understand and explain neurosis and its origins also addressed fundamental human needs and motivations and, at the same time, required analysts to consider techniques and processes to effect a cure. That is, trying to understand and explain suffering invariably led to efforts to articulate the motivations for and attributes of a good life. Thus, psychoanalysis is a science of the origins and experience of human suffering as well as a science of health, wholeness, authenticity, and vitality, and each is entwined with culture and religion. For instance, even though Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists attempted to explain how motivations become twisted intrapsychically and interpersonally, ending in neurotic suffering, their work can be reframed in terms of how one comes to experience being alive and how these experiences of being alive are fostered or inhibited by cultural activities. So, I begin with Freud.

Freud, motivation, and vitality

Freud, like other keen observers of human nature, made numerous additions and revisions to his theories. And yet a constant theme throughout his writings is the idea that human life is one of conflict and tragic compromise. Human beings are poised between pleasure and unpleasure, wishes and reality, Eros and Thanatos, love and work, and nature and civilization. In his early works, Freud addressed the quantitative aspects of pleasure. Years later Freud shifted to the qualitative characteristics of pleasure and experience (1924a, p. 160), believing that a person is fundamentally motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain while adapting to the dictates of reality. If the demands of reality and civilization required one to renounce pleasure, then a wish represented the motivation for the pleasure that was repressed or sublimated.

An Aristotelian continuum exists whereby too much repression by society leads to reduced pleasure and freedom, while too much narcissistic involvement in seeking to satisfy one’s wishes and fantasies leads to an inability to live in a civilized community. To obtain the security of living in society, Freud claimed, a person had to renounce some pleasure and freedom—some measure of aliveness. Later, Freud conceived of the ego as an arbiter between instinctual demands—the unformulated desires of the id—and the super-ego, representing the negotiations of the Oedipal complex and related demands of civilization. The ego’s successful acceptance of the reality principle and sublimation of id impulses results in a person experiencing a degree of freedom and pleasure.

The importance of freedom and pleasure in human life was also manifested in Freud’s theories of symptom formation, which not only explained how human development and motivations were derailed, but also pointed to what was needed to effect a cure. Initially Freud, along with Breuer, argued that neurotic symptoms and, in particular, hysteria were the result of a traumatic experience (Breuer and Freud, 1895). Symptoms were signifiers of unspoken suffering, the inhibition of freedom, an anxiety-driven distortion of the motivation to seek pleasure, and a concomitant reduction and distortion of pleasure. While he never entirely gave up this idea of trauma, Freud went on to suggest that neurosis results from disturbing, anxiety-laden fantasies that are repressed, though latently present in the manifest symptom. The analyst’s task was to facilitate the movement from unconsciousness to consciousness, from primary to secondary process, from id to ego, from symptom to speech. The analytic method offered the hope of freedom from the bondage of one’s symptoms.

I hasten to add that Freud was less than sanguine about the goals of therapy, which signified his ambivalence about freedom and joy in human life. He wrote, “Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against unhappiness” (1895, p. 305). The cure—achieving happiness or common unhappiness, whether through analysis or some other strategy—was not, however, simply a matter of a correct interpretation or movement from symptoms to speech. Psychoanalysis, Freud also wrote in a letter to Jung, is a cure through love (McGuire, 1974, pp. 12–13). And years later he said, “in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill” (Freud, 1914, p. 85). It could thus be posited that the development of neurotic symptoms resulted from a lack of love and the analytic ritual of transforming silent symptoms to speech was a labor of love. We love people into freedom and pleasure, into being alive.²

Pleasure and freedom represented in Freud’s conflict model and his depictions of the formation of symptoms were connected to his views regarding nature and civilization. According to Freud, pleasure and freedom are constrained by the limits imposed by reality and the necessity of human survival. Nature demands a death, though civilization keeps this juggernaut at bay, for a time, and provides members enough safety and security to experience a degree of pleasure and freedom. It seems that the instinct to survive, which is manifested in the formation of symptoms, has precedence over the motivation for pleasure and freedom. This explains why a person sacrifices some measure of pleasure and freedom when accommodating to harsh reality and the limits of civilization. Symptoms likewise represent the sacrifice of happiness and freedom for the sake of survival. Of course, survival is also a matter of perception and fantasy, all of which could be distorted by an individual’s anxiety and guilt. Creating societal taboos and rituals, for example, is meant to organize communal behavior for the sake of group survival (Freud, 1950), though Freud believed that much of this creation is fraught with illusion. Sometimes the precedence of real or imagined survival results in attenuating and distorting (e.g., perversions) pleasure and freedom, which reflects a reduction in one’s experience of being alive.

Religion, for Freud, represented a clear obstacle to genuine experiences of being alive, though it offered people tools for psychological survival, not unlike the formation of neurotic symptoms (Freud, 1907). Despite Freud’s unconscious motivations for his attacks on religion (Rizzuto, 1998; LaMothe, 2004), he viewed religion as a refuge for those feebler creatures who could not endure the harshness of reality. Religious folk were satisfied to renounce pleasure and freedom for the safety of illusions: they refused to risk the adult pleasure and freedom that depends on having the courage to face human life’s exigencies. Put differently, religious people sacrificed freedom and pleasure to obtain an omnipotent sense of security and avoid confronting the ruthless and impersonal forces of nature. Religion was mired in and focused on survival—it kept people in bondage in the dark depths of a Platonic cave.

Mere survival, however, was not Freud’s (1927b, 1930) hope for humanity. Paradoxically, one could both survive—by renouncing some pleasure and freedom—and at the same time risk sublimating and expressing one’s desires. The person who stood the chance of healthy pleasure and freedom was someone who rationally and bravely faced the anxiety and hardships of reality as well as his/her own fantasies and needs. And though Freud did not stress love and tenderness in attaining freedom, there are instances when he seemed to consider realistic love to be a crucial factor for human health. Freud’s hope for humanity was embodied in science and the psychoanalytic ritual. Psychoanalysis became a ritual wherein the analyst heroically entered the cavern of the patient’s unconscious for the sake of freeing him/her from the bondage of symptoms, anxieties, and from the excessive constraints and superstitious taboos of religion and civilization. The patient, thus freed, would travel to the surface where s/he was no longer captivated by the illusions flickering on the walls of the cave, but instead saw clearly real objects illuminated by the sun. Here on the surface of the world, though less safe than the cave, the patient’s sense of pleasure and freedom was more...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Vitality in human life and psychoanalysis
• Chapter 2 Embodied vitality
• Chapter 3 Living objects
• Chapter 4 Vital subjects
• Chapter 5 Enlivening stories
• Chapter 6 Couch and culture
• Notes
• References