FACULTY OF PSYCHOLOGY
and of
SCIENCES OF EDUCATION
Interpretation of
the Logic
of the
Process of Creation Using the Szondi Test
by
Karl Louvet
Translated by
Arthur C. Johnston, PhD
© 2009
by Arthur C. Johnston
Sponsor: Professor Jean Mélon
Dissertation presented
for obtaining the rank of Doctorate in Psychology.
September 1995
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
for
The WHOLE
BOOK
INTRODUCTION................................................................................ iv
mETHODOLOGY............................................................................... 1
THEORETICAL aPPROACH.......................................................... 43
Results......................................................................................... 189
appendixes................................................................................... 242
Appendix 1: Commentaries.............................................................. 243
Appendix 2: Continuum Ratings
by Testees...................................... 283
Introduction
To
create is to go beyond the limits of the conceivable. It is the movement that
transcends itself on the course that goes from the point of origin to the point
created. This movement can require several aspects going from putting in place
a relation to different things to putting into form something that it did not have.
This
trajectory of thought that creates is positive in the sense where the result is
not a pure and simple deconstruction. It is the trajectory of the looking at* [regard] that expels its own looking [regard] and positions it into the object
of the looking [regard]. This
reversal on oneself that chooses its existence makes it possible to strike this
self in the object in order better to perceive oneself and thus better to
detach oneself from it.
[*looking at is one translation of this key word regard; other translations are look,
looking, glance, attention, focus, viewpoint, view, viewing, perspective—all have the
literal meaning of a person looking with his or her eyes at something. Generally, it means the perspective of the
self and inner world or that of the Other and the external world. Since it is
awkward always to translate regard
with the word look, its simplest
translation, several different words will be used. Note:
any comments within brackets are those of the translator, not the author.]
This
alchemical transformation of human thought that is expelled from the self makes
possible that its essence proceeds into the existential. To create is to plunge
into one’s essence in order to extend towards the being that frees one from
one’s former choices. Basically, all is possible for the not-differentiated and
all is the potentiality of being. The liberated spirit releases the enclaves of
one’s being and is impregnated with the freedom of being with respect to the
attachment to things. A pure movement towards detachment.
To
examine the creative process is to separate from something in us, a little as
if the mooring ropes of a boat suddenly broke loose.
But
we live in a space and a time where the thought must reconcile two vectors:
that of the concretized stowed in a body that is human, familial, social; and
that of the potentiality, this vestige of thought that characterizes the human
species. It is at this crossroads, worthy of the devil, that is registered the
dialectical between detachment and attachment, between absolute power and
limitation, and between oneself and the Other*. [*Other = L’Autre that stands specifically for the Other and generally for
anything external to the self.]
The
human being intrinsically is a crossroads between two dimensional planes: the
abstract and the concrete. It is an incarnated link. It is perhaps this nature
of the interspace that enabled one to go so far in creation. This is only
possible at the continual intersection between two worlds: that which is and
that which becomes. To create is a position where the creator is at the tangent
to himself and in a precession* of oneself. It is the link in a transitional
nature, that which consists in having anticipated itself and thus existing on
two planes: the potential and that which exists. [*precession
= going first]
Getting
ideas is one thing; to make them concrete is another. If the thought can be
transcended by itself, can it, by itself, be self-limiting? We will see what
way the light of the mythical figure of Nemesis can do for us in this obscure
part of ourselves that sometimes makes the most worthless decisions for our
destiny.
To
enter the world of creators is to learn all the value and the importance that
we bring to our vision of the world, to its illusions, and its impasses. Our
looking looks at the world all the time, but do we look at ourselves
sufficiently with this looking in order to correct it? And if looking loses
itself in the labyrinths of our desires or the desires of others, how to leave
the inside of a looking at one? And if even so we succeed in doing it, what to
think when one is exposed faced with its look that penetrates to the truth of
us? What to say to oneself when one realizes that all our words are lost in an
existential impasse and that which remains to us is rightly a looking at things?
It
is even so just a looking at us and, yet, it is present at every moment and it marks
its print on all that happens to us. Gradually, this looking traces the path of
another perception of things and another manner of representing itself. Each
day, all that is built in us is the heritage of this looking. The choices that
we make carry the mark of this looking. And, one beautiful day, we open our
eyes and when we look before us, we can not believe our eyes: all is changed.
And, in us, what was the same is no longer the same, and we look behind at our
past and it seems another world to us and of another dimension.
Between
the inside and the outside and in all these things, there is this look that is
like a cement of life. It is perhaps in the Bible the sentence that says: “And
we all will be changed in a blink of the eye.” We believe indeed that if our
looking at the world changes, everything changes. Because our perception
changes, our manner of feeling for things and finally our representations and,
consequently, all the choices and all the decisions that we make are connected
to this manner of looking. To go away from its look and to change it is to
change everything because it is at the source.
But
to go away from its look on us is to enter into the fault* [la faille], the discontinuity. It is a
little as if the cloth on which we project our vision is torn and we are face
to face with our looking at things. The fault is an element of the system that
recognizes that it is in a system that threatens us and that by its look comes
no longer to be part of the system any more since it has viewed it from the
outside. As long as it did not know that, it was in the inside of the system.
[*fault (la faille) = a fault in a
stone, a crack in a stone, a flaw, a break, a rupture]
When
the system threatened the integrity of this element, this person looked at the
system with his own perspective and look and not with the perspective and look
of the system. He saw where he was, and by perceiving this, he pre-detached his
being from this system. He created a look and perspective suitable for him that
was not registered in the system. If he saw it correctly, he would change the
system. Then, we say that it is the action of a creator. If he does not change
the system, he will remain at the side lines, in error, regarded as “mad” and
as one “disconnected.”
To
speak about creation without speaking about the fault [la faille] is like speaking about life while omitting death. Only a
break [la faille] in the relation to
the known and the conceivable can push the creator towards the unknown. And
this break seems to be in the threat that weighs on the ego of the creator who
inscribes himself in a participative thought. Thus in this way to approach the
process of creation, the illumination, and in another that of the dialectic
between l’ipséité [oneself as an
individual, individuality] and l’altérité
[the otherness, the Other] seems essential.
The
Szondi Test will, we hope, be a faithful ally in this journey. It should enable
us to set boundaries in the manner of a guide.
The
subject of our dissertation is not just one. In fact, this dissertation
involves three subjects:
· The subject itself of this dissertation, i.e. its contents, and the object of this investigation: the process of creation.
· The subject who wrote this dissertation, the subject for the knowledge, in fact our self and the authors on whom we count to be in agreement in thinking.
· The subject for which this dissertation is intended, its readers.
These
three subjects have in common to be happening together. Theory always advances toward
horizons that recede. Theory is continuously altered thanks to the contribution
of all. The subject who writes the dissertation is in the process of obtaining
his diploma and is thus in an existential transition. Lastly, the subject who
will read this dissertation is also on this journey in as much as any human
being that is faced with knowledge.
Understanding
and taking with you what is said when reading this dissertation is agreeing in
some part to follow along side the path given in thoughts that have tried to
clench all the more closely a logic of the creative process. It is perhaps the
common denominator to the three subjects -- to be on a journey -- that can,
perhaps, permit the creation of a field common to the three subjects. A course
that is proposed to be taken by oneself this subject that is in us all.
Let
us go to the first matter of this dissertation.
Methodology
Table of Contents
Introduction........................................................................................................... 2
Purpose of the Dissertation......................................................................... 2
Principles................................................................................................................... 3
General Stages...................................................................................................... 4
Population................................................................................................................. 5
The Szondi Test........................................................................................................ 7
1. Description of the Test................................................................................................ 7
1.1 Introduction to Theory.......................................................................................... 8
1.1.1 The Structural Problem of
Fate Analysis [Schiksalsanalyse].......................... 8
1.1.2 The Structural Point of
View and the Reference to the Primal Fantasies ....
11
1.1.3 The Ontogenetic Point of
View and the Theory of the Drive Circuits ........ 13
1.2 The Indexes......................................................................................................... 18
1.2.1 Symptomatic Index (Sy%)........................................................................... 18
1.2.2 Index of Acting (S0/±)................................................................................. 18
1.2.3 Tension Index (S!)........................................................................................ 19
1.2.4 Social Index.................................................................................................. 19
1.2.5 Index of Variability...................................................................................... 20
1.2.6 Index of Disorganization.............................................................................. 20
1.2.7 The Drive Formula and the
Root factors...................................................... 21
1.2.8 Drive Positions............................................................................................. 21
First
Positions................................................................................................. 22
Second
Positions............................................................................................ 22
Third
Positions............................................................................................... 23
Fourth Positions............................................................................................. 24
1.2.9 Forms of
Existence....................................................................................... 25
1.3 Periodic Interpretation of
the Drive Circuits...................................................... 26
Periodic Table of Drive Cleavages........................................................................ 27
1.4 Average Profiles.................................................................................................. 30
2. Three Levels of Analysis............................................................................................ 33
The Accompanying Framework................................................................ 33
1. Final Purpose........................................................................................................... 33
2. Description................................................................................................................ 34
The Continuums.................................................................................................... 34
Continuum Number 1..................................................................................... 34
Continuum Number 2..................................................................................... 34
Continuum Number 3..................................................................................... 35
Continuum Number 4..................................................................................... 35
Continuum Number 5..................................................................................... 35
Continuum Number 6..................................................................................... 36
Continuum Number 7..................................................................................... 36
Methodological Approach......................................................................... 36
1. General Information................................................................................................. 36
2. Interviews and
Testing...............................................................................................38
Bibliography.......................................................................................................... 40
Methodology
The
question is to encompass what would probably be a creative process in the work
of the majority of creators. Our aim will be clinical within the context of a
meeting between a psychologist who would have a framework of interpretation and
a person who creates. It would be a halfway meeting between the knowledge of a
psychologist, very often of the psychiatric type, with a nosologic aim
[classifying of diseases] and that of the more philosophical creator, open a
little to all views and thus eclectic.
Each creator has one or more manners of
functioning, but we dare to hope to be able to decipher a certain coherence on
the level of the operating rules: this is the subject of this dissertation.
The
method is to some extent a path that one follows to reach a certain goal. Our
idea of method thus results from the aim of our research, which finally amounts
to explaining the purpose of this dissertation.
The
purpose is to try with the aid of the Szondi Test to approach what would be a
creative process. All in all, we hope to shed light on the creative process
thanks to the Szondi Test.
We
choose a theoretical framework of reference and we look to see if this
framework can make a process reveal itself. Does it make it possible to meet
the creator as he is?
This
“way of seeing” will be able perhaps to shed light on the people who are faced
with the complexity of the creative process. Our report does not consist in
finding an exhaustive theory of the process of creation. It rests on the idea
that it is possible, using the Szondi Test, to build a theoretical
interpretation that can clarify the clinical aspects about creators in a very
broad sense. The clinical aspects of creators being understood here as
experienced by the people who subject themselves to a creative process.
Our
goal would be reached, if this report permits, a better encounter between the
knowledge of the psychologist and that of the creator. At stake is basically
the encounter.
To
determine the process, only the movement back and forth between the clinical
and the theoretical seems to us to guarantee a “practical theory” that is
adjusted as well as possible with the fundamental data. To make it possible for
the creators to put in perspective themselves by an outlook that is not often
theirs is a richness if this perspective respects the course of their thought.
The psychologist can consequently be conceived [naître]with them in the sense of together knowing [connaître] them.
The
idea of a cycle came to us in order to put the various theoretical concepts
into form. This idea germinated in the course of our experience of the
lifestyles of the creators. The knowledge of the creators tends besides towards
this idea that they feel sometimes clearly in the sense where they “know” that
they are overloaded and that it is necessary that “that manner” or otherwise
“that” will block them. They feel good that they live their lives with a cyclic
pace that has a beginning, a middle and an end even if that is not always also
definite. The object that will be created directs the process according to a
cycle still emerging; the finished work and the “ejection” of this object into
reality rest on a redundant pattern that is in the object. Sometimes, several
objects at the same time are in a moment of creation at various stages, but
even there the creator locates these objects according to a strategy of the
cyclic type at various stages according to the object and its progress. The
literature speaks about stages, and we will see that according to Anzieu, there
are five stages.
If
the dynamics of creation rest on a process that evolves more or less
cyclically, we are correct to think that this process can be marked by various
mental configurations. Those would be like some kinds of landmarks on a
journey. These configurations would be connected then according to an overall
logic that covers the process.
The
method by means of the test would consist in finding the various stages
important in creation. These stages would correspond to mental constellations
that would have significant meaning in relation to the life of the creator. The
questions would be consequently about what type of configuration it is and how
connected to others. Then, in the best of cases, a global theory would recall
the whole course while trying to clarify the guiding thread of the process.
Finally,
using the test, the clinician could locate the mental configuration of the
creator in the cycle. From there, he could consequently reframe the life of the
creator according to the “limits” in which he finds himself.
Indeed,
it is the comparison between two logics that will give a key for analysis. The
first logic is that of the creative process with its stages, its risks, and its
internal movement. The second logic is that of the test that states how energy
is distributed among the various choices, the test giving the state of the
mental “engine.” Thus, the confrontation of the life of the creator with the
data of the test makes it possible to see whether there is a discordance, or a
congruence, or a tension between the two logics and in which area. The creator
thus would receive the most reliable possible analysis.
The
reference would thus be located in an interval made up of the life of the
creator and the data resulting from the interpretation of the test in agreement
with the experience of the psychologist.
1
- To observe and to retrieve observations from the facts. This framework of
observation is based on some criteria that are characterized by:
- being as much as possible common to the
greatest number of creators;
- being basic (essential to the process);
- being as much as possible unequivocal (to go
to the essence).
2 - To remain “virgin” from the literature on
the subject. Not to proceed to draw directly from the books of information that
would prevent observing certain things. To incite a “thirst” for information in
us, a lack of knowing in order to sharpen one's observation. To be a look that
looks at and not a look that confirms. To give up the loss of a mastered
knowledge for a knowledge of discovery. Therefore, to accept regions of
darkness until late in the research.
3 - To continually traverse back and forth
between the revealed theoretical elements and the empirical ones. The more the
theoretical aspects become clear, the more extracted information of the
empirical is precise and of quality.
4 - To make evident the visible: to bring its
perception to a degree of zero. “What I look at, I look at it still poorly,
what do I see in an obvious way?” We think particularly of Einstein, who said
that: “It is the theory that decides what we can observe” or of Piaget, who
said that: “It is a matter of the environment to the degree that authorizes the
level reached by the individual.” That leaves us with a rather broad field of view.
5 - To find a line of conduct, a guiding thread
among the facts.
6 - To arrange “theoretical spaces a little”
like small islands not necessarily connected to the whole but that “keep
sufficiently to the road” (a kind of non-homogeneous suspension that will end
up by becoming part of it).
7 - To build a first theoretical architecture and
to reorganize it to obtain that which is the least unsatisfactory as possible.
To change the observation according to that.
8
- To interpret the subject and to refine the whole.
As
the crow flies, while using the Szondian vocabulary, we passed throughout our
dissertation from a maximum state of introjection (k +) to a k - state, i.e. a
position legalist-realistic-rational. Sometimes, we remain in the shadowy
regions of the type k ± , i.e. semi-realistic and semi-intuitive at the end of
the course.
The
expression “knowledge of discovery” is welcome consequently to qualify this
report. Finally, it is only one interpretation that helps to understand in the
best case the empirical. But it is never more than an approximation of the
complexity of the human psyche.
In
the final analysis, to have a mastered knowledge is reassuring and gratifying
but where is the common ground to be situated? On the other hand, to give up
the loss of the absolute power of
theoretical knowledge is difficult. We think consequently that the most
important end is the happy medium.
The
people tested are selected according to the function of the creative process.
That means that these people follow this process in their lives: some for a
long time, others for a little, and that with more or less intensity according
to the occasions.
How
to define such people? We went along with the opinion that consists in taking
people considered as creative. We do not have criteria sufficient to say that
this or that individual is more of a creator than another. The quantitative
aspect is relative. The qualitative aspect is also. A known creator can confine
himself in the same category whereas a student can create a method of analysis
particularly difficult to understand without being recognized at this moment as
creative. The rich occasions of creation have highs and lows in the same
person. The key word is “unforeseeable.” In extreme cases, it is a little a
mixture of intuition, of reputation, of favorable circumstances and of practical
conveniences that made us choose these people.
The
majority are regarded as very creative by several different people. The
creative production attests to this evaluation. For these, there is not any
doubt that creation is an engrossing part of their lives. This is so for Henri,
Georges, Jeanne, Jean-Marie, JP, Mité, Joseph and Pierre.
On
the other hand, three younger subjects were selected for their “admission” into
the creative dimension. These three people are likely candidates for a creative
course in full development. They are not really known for their creative
aspect. It is rather their personal progress that brings them to creation with
more or less results. In any case, we find interesting that they have their
place in our report because they represent attempts at organization of a
creative process. This applies to Anne, Zénon Elée and Zéphyrin.
The
people in creation are not easy to insert in a procedure like ours. We have
eliminated the refusals. In addition, two people stopped after a few profiles.
The first of these people was eliminated because she felt negative influences
because of the test. Whatever one thinks about it, this test disturbed this
person. The second person took up again the testing after having taken a respite.
Very
often, it is difficult enough for the creators to agree to open their interior
realm that is often extremely protected without knowing what the returns will
be in the final analysis. They very often try to know a maximum of facts on
what interests them. This mental “enterprise” on what touches them and the
difficulty of doing it with our dissertation can perhaps explain this mistrust.
For
our part, we spoke at length with them. We left them the possibility of forming
their own opinion about our procedure while answering all their questions. This
attitude is very demanding in time since a profile can occur in a five hour
long discussion. We did not prevent the creator from being interested in our
personal world. It is a little a giving of our world for a receipt of theirs.
All that is possible smoothly only if we are fundamentally interested in creation.
On
the other hand, if one feels the “scientific objectification,” the door is
closed automatically. There is a meeting between two people each preoccupied by
their research or there is no meeting.
All
the people tested agreed to come into contact with us and our procedure by the
intervention of a person whom we know and who was different each time. It is
the confidence in this intermediary that made it possible to open the door to
the creator. For other creators, it is the fact of knowing them personally that
enabled us to start this research with them.
Four
of these people agreed to take the test many times so that we could have a maximum
of profiles for an analysis on a larger scale. For the others, the average of
the profiles is approximately six except for two subjects with whom we have
only three profiles each.
This
disproportion reflects the attempt to have a basic core made up of important
protocols and the clarifications constituted by the small protocols. We do not
hide the fact that it is very tiresome to obtain so many profiles from the same
person who, moreover, is creative and thus not very inclined to yield to such a
difficult procedure. We are glad to have four “large” protocols. Even for “the
small protocols,” it was not easy to obtain them. Very often, the creator
wanted “to quit” before a new profile. We often put “the pressure” nicely to
bring closer a meeting.
Georges
is a little different because he had been for a long time with a Szondian
psychologist who agreed to give us his protocols. We thus have about forty
profiles covering one period of his life known as "blocked" in
addition to those that we collected.
The
majority of the people tested have a knowledge about their creative process. It
was born from the period of their life and their experiences, but what is more
difficult for us is that this knowledge rests on a discourse that is strongly
attached to the creative life. That, in turn, is made of intuition, feelings,
sentiments, strategies, rituals, interpretations…. Thus to be able to transfer
this knowledge into a psychological discourse, we judiciously helped ourselves
with the Szondi Test to clarify the life of the creators.
We
largely and amply were based on the thesis of Martine Stassart for the
presentation of the test (15). We more or less followed his layout in order to
respect the coherence of his work. The Szondi Test is rather long but it is its
richness and its complexity that clarifies things. We make a point of paying
homage to the work of Mr. Stassart, who allows us to give to the reader a
presentation of the test whose clearness is by far the best possible to our
knowledge.
The
test is comprised of six series of eight photographs. It is managed by
presenting to the subject each series. one following one another. The
instruction consists in requiring the subject to make choices concerning these
photographs. He is asked to choose two photographs that he judges antipathetic
and two others that he judges sympathetic. The four other photographs will be
used in a second round of choices.
Each
photograph shows a face. Each face evokes a meaningful psychiatric “destiny”
registered in the face. As we will show through the thesis of Mr. Stassart,
Szondi has chosen in a precise way eight types of individuals whom one, each
time, finds again in the six series.
Once
the choices are made , a system of code makes it possible to align a profile
including eight elements when the analysis starts.
We
will refer the reader to the work of Jean Mélon, “Théorie et pratique du
Szondi” of 1975 (8) for the encoding of the test.
Being different from the other projective tests,
the Szondi Test contains its own theory; that is intrinsic to it.
The major discovery of Szondi resides in his
drive diagram (Triebschema) since
this diagram presides as well over the construction and working of the test as
also to the theoretical elaboration of the empirical data resulting from the
test experimentation.
Built on the basis of the great clinical
entities of traditional psychiatry, the drive system (Triebsystem) brings about, according to the words of Schotte, “the passage from the classes to the
categories.” (Schotte, 13, pp. 21-76)
The classes
are those of an original nosographic regrouping [regrouping of diseases]
produced with the crossing of the works of Kraepelin and Bleuler, as regards
the ordering of the psychiatric field through the opposition between the cyclothymias
(C) and schizophrenias (Sch), and from Freud concerning the
correspondence between the sexual perversions (S) and the neuroses defined as
the “negative of the perversion,” whose paradigm is hysteria redefined as a
paroxysmal disorder (P).
As for the categories,
they are those of human existence reassembled from an anthropopsychiatric point of
view that, in accordance with the principle
of the crystal, sees in the pathological forms of this existence the “royal
road” that leads to the comprehension of normal psychological functioning, the
human being regarded as a being in becoming (ontogenetic point of view) whose development
is subjected to a collection of invariable and universal laws (structural point
of view).
Szondi concurs explicitly in the fundamental
opinion of Freud where this is affirmed specifically:
We have know for a long time
that we must expect to meet the same complexes and the same conflicts among
patients and among healthy and normal people. We are even accustomed to suppose
in any civilized man a certain amount of repression of perverse stirrings, of
anal eroticism, homosexuality and others, as well as a share of father and
maternal complexes, and still other complexes, just as in an elementary
analysis of an organic compound we can detect in all certainty the elements of
carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and a little sulfur. What distinguishes the
organic compounds one from each other is the quantitative proportion of these
elements and the constitution of the connections that they establish among
themselves. This then is the case in the normal people and the neurotics; it is
thus not the existence of these complexes and conflicts, but the question of
knowing if those have became pathogenic, and in this case which mechanisms they
have implemented. (Freud, 5, p. 180)
The first ambition of Szondi has always been to
found psychopathology as a science, with its own objects and its laws, to make
a science auto-logic of it, like all other fundamental sciences, in order not
to need to import its concepts from other fields of knowledge and thus always
to function in a crossbreed and analogical way.
For this purpose, Szondi tries to make it share
the essence of and to be an accessory of the psychiatric nosography of his
time. This leads to his rearranging the things in a certain order, starting
from the concept of drive that he
obviously borrows from Freud.
The decisive act will have been to enumerate the
drives, to arrange them within a system, to encompass them in a unit and to
affirm that this unit made a structure, that it is the structure-itself of the
operation by which the human being as a person is animated, not by immutable
instincts, like the animal, but by a set of drives whose destiny is unforeseeable.
It is the limits
of enumeration of the factors and drive vectors and their presentation in
the table of protocol of the test that gives to the drive diagram its character
of structure. From now on, each factor, each vector, each component of the
table is defined by relation to the others:
Nothing any more has
autonomous existence; all is reconstituted in and by networks of significant
relations: we have just left the mode in which the mental diseases are
considered “partes extra partes,”*
for the articulation of a single structure whose whole divides them and no more regroups them. (Schotte, 13, p. 155)
[*a part as an external thing to another
part: It means that things exist alongside, beyond each other, exterior to
each other. No interdependence, just external independent existence.]
From being put into a table, each component
receives, in addition to its own significance, a value from a position in the whole. (Mélon, 11, p. 5)
This is what results when speaking about “drive
positions,” with the Kleinien sense of the term, rather than of drive tendency
or reaction as done by Szondi. For Szondi, the psychic or mental diseases are
not diseases of the brain (Hirnkrankheiten)
or spirit (Geisteskrankheiten) but of
the drive diseases (Triebkrankheiten). When he produced his system for the drives,
Szondi distinguished four of them that he judged fundamental:
the Contact
Drive (C)
the Sexual Drive (S)
the
the
The drives, Freud has already stated, are not
identifiable in themselves. One can recognize them only through their
representatives (Repräsentanten) and,
at best, when those are delivered up, as regards the affects (Affekte), the representations (Vorstellungen) of a thing (Sache), and words (Worte), with extreme manisfestations, which make one and/or the
other of the drives dissociate from a totality where they were supposed to make
a good arrangement with the others.
It is the disproportion
of a drive demand that unbalances the total structure and, by making it to
stick out in an exaggerated way, makes it appear in its singularity.
For example, the need to be avenged (e -) or,
the contrary, to repair (e +), to make amends by its merits -- these needs can
be so strong that they direct the whole destiny of a subject, sometimes making this
destiny great, but sometimes also its misery, making him or her insane or
mad, a devil for himself or herself and
for others.
If we consider the four great drives or the four
drive vectors (as Szondi calls them), we can say that:
The disorders of Contact are the disorders of mood, which we call thymo-psychopathics, represented
at the extreme by mania and depression; m and d, initials of mania and depression, become the two constitutive factors of the Contact vector.
The disorders of contact are the disorders of
mood [humour] that are disorders of our fundamental relation to the
surrounding world, disorders of harmony (in the musical sense of the term, Stimmung) in the rhythm of life,
disorders of the rapport to the environment; bad mood, to state things
simply, is a mood out of tune.
The Sexual
disorders are perversions.
Perverse imbalance occurs when all the life is dominated by the desire to
posssess the sex object completely, when the pleasure in the quasi
sense of the term, becomes the only goal or the supreme goal; the prototypic
representatives of perversion are the homosexual
and the sadist.
The Paroxysmal
disorders are neurotic troubles.
The definition that Szondi gives of neurosis is not everyone's. For Szondi,
neurotic troubles, in a strict sense, are those that intervene in the life of
the affects and that appear noisily by crises, by paroxysms, from where
are derived the concept of paroxysmality. But what produces the affects?
It is, states Szondi, not the relation with the
object or the environment but the meeting always the surprising and inevitable
conflict with the principle of the Law and the two great fundamental interdictions
that are the interdiction against the murder of the father and the interdiction
against incest, in other words that of Oedipus.
The prototypic representatives of the neurosis,
definite as more or less permanent state of crisis, are, for Szondi, not the
obsessional and the hysterical, as it is the case with Freud, but the epileptic and the hysteric, i.e. those who react violently to the (Oedipal) crisis by
making precisely “crises.”
Lastly, the disorders of ego are those that
relate to the ontogenesis of the ego, its auto-ob-tention (Selbst-er-haltung) like its self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung) and, negatively, the destruction of the relation
of the subject to oneself that leads to the extreme forms of the disorders
of identity met in psychosis and more particularly in Schizophrenia whose prototypic figures
are those of the catatonic [katatonique in German] and of the paranoiac.
The merit goes to Jean Mélon for having pointed
out what makes the structure of Szondi, as also to Freud, to establish the homology in fact between the Szondian
vectors and the Freudian primal fantasies. (Mélon,
10, pp. 673-680)
Primal fantasies as “a core in the unconscious”
(Kern of Unbewussten) and guides in a
preconception -- to what correspond the infantile sexual theories -- of what
occurs with the little man defined as a subject of/with the drives are organizers of human desire as this
desire precisely plunges its roots in the fantasy or fantasies.
As Laplanche and Pontalis have remarkably shown (Laplanche and Pontalis, 6, pp.1833-1868), the
primal fantasies are charged to give an account of the origin and the sudden appearance of the first elements constitutive
of true human desire at the same time as they offer a model to him and give him
a form through the putting of him into a scene where the positions of subject
and object are not given in advance.
If
one refers to the Lacanian trilogy of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real,
one can state that the real [reality], impossible to know as such, is the
drive, that the imaginary consists of the series of the idiosyncratic fantasies
of the subject and the “thoughts of connection and transition” (Mélon, 10), and that the symbolic system is the
whole, the structure, of the laws that govern the operation of the psychical
reality whose primal fantasies, as organizing designs of the desire, constitute
to some extent the matrix.
It is rather easy to see that what is in
question in the Sexual Vector of Szondi is the question of the relation to the body
as an object of seduction and pleasure. The Paroxysmal Vector confronts the
subject with the Law, the major interdictions against incest and parricide, the
primal scene representing the impossible meeting place between two incompatible
sexualities: infantile sexuality and adult sexuality.
The Ego Vector, raising the question of the
differentiating identification, between to be and to have, returns to the
decisive question of the difference of the sexes through fantasy and the theory
of castration.
As for the Contact Vector, it is put in
connection with the primal fantasy of regression into the womb of the mother,
which Freud always hesitated to insert into the series of the primal fantasies
because he saw there a kind of idealized mythical transposition of the fantasy
of the primitive scene.
With each Szondian
vector corresponds a particular field of psychic operation with its own
problems, in particular with regard to the relation to the body, the relation
of subject and object, the grammatical position of the person, a certain type
of aggressive aim…. The passage from one field to another is carried out
through a filter where each time must be elaborated a well defined type of
dialectical conflict.
In 1975, Jacques Schotte
(14, pp. 20-25) proposed to generalize
on the four vectors of the diagram with the concept of the drive circuit (Triebesumlaufsbahn)
that Szondi had introduced only for the Sch Vector (16, pp. 389-391).
This concept of the
circuit, to Szondi himself, refers to two ideas: on the one hand that normality or mental health is related
to a certain mobility of the drive life in opposition to the petrification into
certain cleavages or certain rigid
structures that characterize the pathological. In addition, the concept of the
circuit evokes the idea of an order of increasing
complexity between the various functions of the ego.
From a genetic point of view,
if, at least concerning our culture, the negative-rational tendency (k -)
expresses itself the best throughout the latency period (between 6 and 10
years), the awakening of the consciousness of desire (p +: das Wunschesbewusstwerden) takes on a certain amplitude only in the
late phase of adolescence (Mélon, 9, pp. 140-159).
There are good reasons to think that the ontogenesis of the ego is carried out
according to the schema suggested by Susan Deri (1,
pp. 182-204).
Sch
1. O - indistinctness of ego and the other
(before one year)
2. + - all powerful magic-autistic ego (pre-Oedipus)
3. ± - phase of turbulence (Oedipal age)
4. - - latency period
5. - O beginning of adolescence
6. - + adolescence
The subject discovers
himself initially in his semblance or his image in a mirror, which corresponds
to the mechanism of projective identification (Sch O -), then he introjects this image (k +) to make it
the core of his ego ideal (Sch + -),
authority of the body essence endowed with all powerful magic.
Thus the primary
narcissism is constituted in a strict sense of the term by the favored
investment of the object-ego products left from the specular image, which the
myth of Narcissus illustrates so well.
This primary
narcissistic imago that results in fact from a seduction creates in the subject
the illusion that it is the center of the world and the sole object of the
desire of the other or, which refers to the same, the object -- the phallus --
which is absent in the other.
This imago necessarily
will undergo a deflation under the double impact of the revelation of the
difference of generations -- “You have no part in this yet!” -- and of the
sexes: “You lack something or there is something that everyone does have and of
which you could be deprived.”
The reaction k - that
opposes negation and repression to affirmation and to introjection (k+) ensures
a function of transformation in a paradoxical sense of Aufhebung, i.e. of a
change where the suppression of the old state does not imply its pure and
simple destruction but ensures, on the contrary, its conservation under a new
species; Aufhebung fulfills the
double function to demote the primary narcissism by self-criticism -- birth of
the superego -- while saving this same narcissism by the negation of the
insults made to the first ego ideal (Sch + -, + O) and the transfer of the
primary narcissistic libido onto the secondary authority of the ego ideal (p +)
that the subject “projects in front of him like the heir to the lost narcissism
of his childhood; in that time it was for him his own ideal.” (Freud, 2, p. 98).
However, behind this
authority of the ego ideal is hidden the most important of all the
identifications, that of the father of personal prehistory, immediate
identification, anterior to any object-choice…. (Freud, 3, p. 200).
The taking into account
from this favorable point of view is to be considered as the “paramount”
identification with the father of the origins (Urvater), prototype of the Superego and the Superman (Uberich, Ubermensch) and is to be
located as well at the origin (arch) and
at the end (teloz) where one becomes oneself, as an archaic imago (Urmensch) and teleological model (Übermensch) of becoming a man.
This remark is very
important because it underlines how much the genetic point of view is
subordinated to the structural point of view that includes it in accordance
with the principle of the ontic-ontological* reversibility, which means that
from the ontological point of view, in the order of being, the position p+ is
at the origin of the circuit, while from the ontic point of view, in the order
of being, p + is at the final stage of the development and the Ego Circuit,
which gives significance to Goethe's adage : “Become what you are!”. [*ontic: pertaining to the biologic
development of the individual (ontogenesis);
ontological: the treatment of the
essence of things or being]
The final identification
(secondary) with the father replaces the primary originating identification.
One understands by the
above that in the ontic (developmental) order -- because of prematurity and of
the vestiges that specifically characterizes the human being -- the
identification process begins and is anchored in the primary projection (p -)
that consists in locating the ideal of absolute power of ego in an external
concrete object invested with an absolute power, of which the subject “takes
part” (p -) as Freud shows it in “Collective Psychology and Ego Analysis” (Freud, 4), the other being able to be
incarnated, in the examples given by Freud, by the chief, the hypnotist, the
love object but also the mother.
If introjection (k+)
consists in incorporating all or partly the object of ideal love with whom the
subject takes part (Sch + -), negation and repression (k -) are done in the
name of a higher authority, that of the Superego-Ego ideal (Sch - +) that calls
forth the desexualization and the giving up for a loss the original object,
with, as corollary, orientation of the libido toward external objects and the
abandonment of the primary narcissism (corporeal) for the benefit of the
secondary narcissism (spiritual).
One thus obtains a
circuit of ego in the form of eight reversed:
Schotte proposes to
generalize the concept of circuit to the four drive vectors:
Inside each vector, an
order of succession is introduced among the four poles consisting of the
positive and negative positions of each factor.
The circuits introduce
an asymmetrical arrangement between the two factors of each vector. From now on
there exists in each vector a factor -- known as director (m, h, e, p) -- whose internal dialectical is mediated by
the Other. The passage from the first to the last position of the circuit is done
via the second factor that is used as a mediator
(d, s, hy, k).
Finally the circuits
introduce a temporal dimension, progressive, in the reading of the diagram and
the positions, where Szondi had proposed an order exclusively spatial. The
genetic reading that we consider from now on is obviously an exploitation of
this last property.
If each circuit is the
reflection of the whole of the diagram, reciprocally, the periodic reading, that rests on the sequential order C-S-P-Sch, is supplemented
or enriched; the whole of the diagram that can from now on also be the object
of a reading “in circuit.”
That means that the
relations that the vectors maintain between them in the diagram are homologous with the relations that are
maintained among them with the positions inside a vector.
The introduction of the
circuits makes the drive diagram a structure
on two levels, characteristic that appears fundamental for our actual
developments, as well from a theoretical point of view as in the applications
that are made by it in the interpretative step on the level of the results of
the test. The double level of the circuits makes it possible to introduce the
16 drive positions in a table with two entrances, which presents them in series (C: m+ d - d+ m -) and in levels (1: m+ h+ e - p -), evoking
something analogous to the periodic table of the elements conceived by Mendeleev:
|
Position
1 |
Position
2 |
Position
3 |
Position
4 |
C |
m+ |
d- |
d+ |
m- |
S |
h+ |
s- |
s+ |
h- |
P |
e- |
hy+ |
hy- |
e+ |
Sch |
p- |
k+ |
k- |
p+ |
Now let us try very
briefly to describe the characteristics of the various levels represented by
the columns of the table, for which we assume that they are laid out in an
order of increasing complexity.
Level 1 and Contact
Vector.
Level 1 relates to a
primarily dependent subject, from all points of view, dependent on
what occurs in its environment, consequently likely to be easily frustrated if
the entourage does not respond to his or her expectation.
Level 2 and Sexual
Vector.
The second positions of
the circuits correspond to a time of autoerotic
retrogression into fantasy (Mélon and
Lekeuche,
12, p. 25); it is a specular, imaginary
time. In this sense it marks a first autonomy compared to the preceding positions.
So on level 1 the idea
of environment or milieu prevails, on level 2 appears the concept of the object, in particular the body
perceived as a totality objectified,
isolated from the background, in the field of vision, that underlines the imaginary
dimension of the category of the object because with the object, it is a matter
above all of the investment of an image, the image of the narcissistic body.
Level 3 and P Vector.
On level 3, the subject
detaches himself or herself from the self-satisfaction of position 2, under the
impact of the law: deprivation,
exclusion and prohibition. The passage from 2 to 3 brings into play an
operation of negation of the
investments of objects conceived in the second position where prevails the
fantasy dimension. The process of anti-cathexis,
counterpart obligated of repression, gives access to external objects, this time real others. Position 3 is defined as the legalist-realistic-rational position.
Level 4 and Sch Vector.
Level 4 marks the
appearance on stage of the subject in first
person: subject with plans or
projects, a subject that desires, and a subject of his own word. It is the
time of the maximum autonomy of the
subject, autonomy that takes a pathological turn (psychotic) if it is
correlative of a rupture with the environment.
Level 4 is also
potentially the level of sublimation and
of creation where the subject projects to be free and responsible for his
or her destiny conceived as a history
to be made.
This
index measures the relation expressed in percents of the sum of the symptomatic
reactions (ambivalent and zero, ± and O) to the total sum of the factorial
reactions. Normally, the index value ranges between 20 and 30. A low index
(< 15) is the sign of a great rigidity.
A high
index has the meaning interpreted only according to the index of acting.
This
is the index that Szondi calls “quotient of the tension of the tendencies” (Tendenzspannungquotient) and that indicates
the product of the division of the total of the zero reactions by the total of
the ambivalent reactions.
The
ambivalent reactions refer to the subjective symptoms, the zero reactions to
the objective symptoms. In a more precise way, the ambivalent reactions are
indicative of a psychic work that favors the activity of thought at the expense
of immediate discharge. They thus belong rather to the secondary process.
An
ambivalent reaction can always be interpreted in the sense that the subject
“has made a problem” of the question raised by the concerned tendency. For
example, “m±” means that the subject raises the question of remaining or going
away, maintaining the ties or cutting them, etc.
The
zero reactions, on the other hand, mean that the drive tension is solved by the
discharge in the behavior, the passage to the act, hysterical conversion,
somatization…or via the repression or of another mechanism of defense that
makes it possible to evacuate the tension at the same time as the problem that
generates it.
For
example, the reactions S + O, P O -, Sch - O, C O +, that are very frequently
met, must be interpreted generally not in the sense of discharge but in that of
the evacuation of the problem ad hoc, for example the evacuation of the
questions of the lack of an object (s O), of the lack of investment (d O), of
the consciousness of culpability (e O) or of the consciousness of the desire (p
O).
Usually,
the index of acting ranges between 1 and 3. When it is lower than 1, the
intra-psychic conflict tends to be solved in the realm of mental thought. When
the index is high, the resolution of the tensions is rather carried out on the
mode of action or of conversion symptomatology.
The
tension index “S!” is equivalent to the sum of “!”s. It has meaning only when
combined with the other indexes, as we will explain it later.
The
social index is so to speak an index of neuroticism because its value increases
with the strength of the reactions that indicate that the subject sublimates (h
-) or harmoniously combines the two currents of sexuality (S ++), submits
itself to the ethical (e +) and moral (hy -) requirements, accepts the reality
within the meaning of reason (k -) and of the need to control (oneself) (k±),
and is faithful or preserving (d -) in its relation to the objects of
attachment (m+) that constitute its environmental framework.
The
accentuations (!) make the social index fall to the degree that one can
interpret them as the sign of an excess on the level of the drive demands (h+!,
s+!, s -!, d -!, d+!, m+!), generator of frustration, or as well the
demonstration of a radicalization of the mechanisms of defense (hy -!, k -!,
p+!, etc.) that tips the scales on the side of an autarky [self-sustaining]
narcissism, at the expense of object libido.
One
establishes the social index in assigning of a + or - sign for each vectorial
reaction according to whether the sign goes in the direction of a socially positive
or negative attitude. Accentuations (!) are always rated negatively.
The
social index is obtained by putting as the denominator the sum reactions (+)
and (-) plus that of the accentuations, and placing as the numerator the sum of
the positive reactions. The whole is multiplied by 100 to give the social
percentage (soc%).
The
normal value ranges between 40 and 50. Beyond 50%, the subject can be regarded
as neurotic within the meaning of an excessive submission to the requirements
of adaptation, to respect for authority, of responsibility and culpability,
etc. An index lower than 30 indicates anti or asocial tendencies.
We
give the following table that makes it possible to calculate the social index,
“+” meaning socially positive. The other reactions are inevitably ” - “.
Table for the
Calculation of the Social Index and the Hard (Dur) / Soft (Moll) Index:
Reactions |
S |
P |
Sch |
C |
0
0 |
+ |
|
|
+ |
0
± |
|
+ |
|
|
0
+ |
D |
D |
|
D |
0
- |
|
|
|
D |
|
|
|
|
|
±
0 |
D
+ |
D
+ |
D
+ |
+ |
±
± |
|
D
+ |
D
+ |
|
±
+ |
D
+ |
D
+ |
D
+ |
+ |
±
- |
+ |
+ |
D
+ |
D
+ |
|
|
|
|
|
+
0 |
D |
|
D |
D |
+
± |
|
+ |
|
|
+
+ |
D
+ |
+ |
|
|
+
- |
|
+ |
D |
D |
|
|
|
|
|
-
0 |
D
+ |
D |
D
+ |
D
+ |
-
± |
D
+ |
D |
+ |
D
+ |
-
+ |
D |
D |
+ |
+ |
-
- |
+ |
D |
D
+ |
D |
This
index measures the degree of total malleability of a drive structure. One obtains
it by crediting with a point each change of factorial sign and by making the
sum of the changes that have occurred for the eight factors in the series of
ten profiles.
Normally,
the index of variability (Var) ranges between 10 and 25. Lower than 10 means an
excessive control amid an abnormal rigidity. Above 30 means either inconstancy,
or lack of control, or disorganization or destructiveness.
This
index gives an idea of the intensity of the processes of cleavage.
For
each factor, one makes note of the reactions + and -. One draws up a fractional relation with the denominator of
which the total of these reactions is carried. For the numerator, one indicates
the figure of the minority reaction (+ or
-) by adding the sum of the accentuations (!) if necessary to it except for
those that affect the ambivalent reactions (±!). One makes the sum of the eight
numerators and denominators. The quotient obtained is the index of
disorganization whose value is normally lower than 10. Above, it increases
proportionally with the degree of destructiveness.
There
are distinguished three types of factors: symptomatic factors, the submanifest
factors and the root factors.
According
to Mr. Stassart, a factor is regarded as symptomatic when, in a series of 10
profiles, the sum of the zero and ambivalent reactions is higher or equal to 5.
The root factors are those for which this sum is lower than 3.
For
our part, we preferred to follow the criteria of Mr. Legrand (7, p. 94). For
him, a factor is symptomatic whose sum of O and ± is equal or higher than 6. A
factor is determined as submanifest or sublatent when the sum of O and ± lies
between 2 and 5. Lastly, a factor is identified as a root factor when this sum
is equal to 1 or O.
The
root factors, owing to the fact that they correspond to a drive tension held
relatively constant, play a dynamic part in the psychic economy.
For
example, a subject who gives the reaction k - constantly is someone in whom
repression constantly exerts its action, a subject who gives d+ all the time is
someone who is perpetually in search of new attachments, etc.
The theory of the circuits invites one to think
that there exists an affinity between the drive positions – the reactions --
that occupy an identical row in each vector.
The question arises of knowing what the
positions have in common:
1 C :
m+ h+ e
- p
-
2 S :
d - s - hy+ k+
3 P :
d+ s+ hy
- k -
4 Sch : m - h
- e+ p+
One can say, for example, that e - is the
contact-thymic [thymic = emotional
lability] position of the vector P, that k - is the
neurotic-adaptive-realistic-legalist position of the Sch vector,… but it is
necessary to be able to grab hold again as well as possible that which
specifies these quartets.
1 C and “reversal into the opposite” (Die Verkehrung ins Gegenteil)
2 S and “turning towards one's own person” (Die Wendung gegen die eigene Person)
3 P and “repression” (Die Verdrängung)
4 Sch and “sublimation” (Die Sublimierung).
First Positions
They are those where the subject is the most dependent on the environment,
where the need for a container, an envelope, a shoring up, a support, for a protector
from excitation…is the major need. What here in question is: the need for attachment (m+), exclusive
love (h+), the rage (e -) tied to frustration, and projection (p -) as the most
economic defense put into motion in the situations of extreme distress (Hilflösigkeit).
The distress is indeed what threatens if the
object of support, which Szondi so precisely named “Haltobjekt” [holding object], suddenly is missed.
In German, “Halt” means stop as well as
prop, support, succour, sustain, keep, cohesion, solidity… the “Haltobjekt” is
this object that one needs to be stopped or be held upright and not to let one
drift or to collapse.
The “reversal into the opposite” concerns above
all the thymic reversals of mood (euphoria versus
depression, m versus d) but more
basically the reversal of love into hate,
defense by hatred, being what
dominates the psychic operation most rudimentarily characterized by a weak
autonomy and a weak differentiation of the ego.
Second
Positions
The French translation of “Wendung gegen…” by “Reversal against…”, which received the blessing of Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, is not really correct in the degree where “Gegen,” in the German language, has two meanings: “against” and “with respect to.” As to “Wendung,” one cannot reasonably translate this word by reversal, which evokes a little too much the reversal of sadism into masochism. “Wendung” evokes above all the concept of “turn" within the meaning of turn, turning and turning around much more than of reversal. Therefore, “Wendung gegen…” has basically with Freud the meaning “returning towards oneself,” where there is originally no idea of self-aggression but much more the concept “to turn” the libido towards oneself that constitutes the essence of narcissism. What Freud presents as the second possible drive destiny is, without doubt, that of narcissism, more especially as “Drives and Destinies of the Drives” (1915) is written in the course of “For the Introduction of Narcissism” (1914).
The second positions correspond, in accordance
with our translation of “Wendung gegen…,”
with the “turn” of the libido “to the place of” one's own person, i.e. with the
narcissistic "turning toward"
such as Freud described it in “For the Introduction of Narcissism” (1914), turn
that Lacan magnified in his “mirror stage” (1937).
The subject adopts an autoerotic conserving
position (d -) that is strongly marked by anal retention, at the
same time as it falls in love with its double
-- its specular image -- produced in the primal
scene of seduction (s -); he remains fixed at this scene, tends to
reproduce it in spite of the interdictions that are opposed to it, puts himself
forward towards and against all (Geltungsdrang),
is compulsively pushed to put himself in a spectacle (hy +: “Sich-zur-Schau-Stellen”) while
portraying himself as a “character”
(k +) within the sense of the Latin “Persona” that means “mask,” the mask
in question being intended to perpetuate the image of a glorious body, object
sufficient for himself and at the same time as the missing object -- “phallus”
-- for the other.
The hieratic “poses” of the catatonic, even if
they have became rare today (whereas they were very frequent formerly),
illustrate perfectly this compulsion of the subject to be portrayed as statues
of himself or herself (k +).
The accent put on body narcissism, still safe from castration, is what one finds in
the core of melancholy, of perversions, especially the masochist and the
fetishister, of the most specific character traits since they have a traumatic-scar
basis but also, in part, in sublimation, in so far as this aims at creating
objects whose perfection is supposed to join the unaltered perfection of the
specular imago.
Third
Positions
These positions proceed in the direction of repression on the condition of
understanding this as the operation that consists with negating the
narcissistic specular imago -- imaginary by definition -- and with turning away
as a whole from all that is imaginary by investing preferentially in
material reality (d +), by orienting the libido in the direction of the domination of the objects outside of
the ego (s+), by controlling the erotic affects by rejection of any kinds of
sentimentality considered to be ridiculous (hy -) and by massively favoring the
perception of exterior reality that becomes the standards for all reality (k -:
“A fact is better than a “Lord Mayor”). This position can be considered
impartially as realistic, legalistic, rational or “fatalistic.”
It is the position that we call neurotic-normal, that which prevails absolutely during the latency period
and that, later on, with the help of a certain regression (passage from m - to
m+), characterizes most of the general population. As it is the majority
pattern that pays court to the media, it is enough to turn on the TV to have an
idea about it.
Fourth
Positions
These positions are in connection with sublimation in the sense where
sublimation implies a certain detachment
in relation to the environment (m -), a desexualization
with a “transfer of passion” (h -), a certain need for “reparation” as Mélanie Klein described it so well (e +) and the
transposition of primary narcissism onto the court -- secondary narcissism --
of the ego ideal (p+).
Sublimation -- as the clinical facts so often
show is close to psychosis, in so far as the desexualization and the withdrawal
of object libido that it implies -- always risks opening up the vacuum of a
psychosis.
Jean Mélon proposed to calculate the proportions
of the four types of drive positions, which makes it possible to have an idea
of their quantitative distribution, “to measure” their respective weight and
starting from there to work out an original typology that takes into account
the idea of drive destiny.
According to whether one or the other of the
first, second, third, or fourth drive positions is relatively higher compared
to the others, one can describe some cases of simple figures that correspond to
easily identifiable and structurally organized clinical pictures in a well
differentiated manner:
1. The ideally balanced table where all
the positions are found in equal proportions:
1 2 3 4
2. Seriously unbalanced tables in the sense:
a) 1 2
3 4
where the extreme dependence with respect to the
objects of the environment easily involves disorders of mood and behavior
(thymo-psychopathics),
b) 1 2
3 4
where the narcissistic demand is exacerbated,
determining perverse behaviors or freed from any respect for limits,
particularly sexual ones, intrusion being the rule; this is the case in
hysterical “extravagance”;
c) 1 2 3
4
where legalism, realism and rationality are
constantly called upon, producing the traditional conditions of the obsessional
“character neurosis”;
d) 1 2 3 4
where positioning is typically schizoid, as one
can see it, especially in adolescence, in the “disease of idealism,” and in
many of anorexics’ mentalities.
3. The most frequent neurotic-normal tables,
associated with these positions:
a) 1 2
3 4
characteristics of the “adapted” subjects within
the meaning of common socialization, combining the submission to the moral
interdictions (hy -), the respect for reality (k -), the active investment in
the objects of the outside world in their material concreteness (d+ s+), the
emotional dependence with respect to the objects of support (m+), a strong need
to be loved (h+), an intolerance for frustration with a propensity toward rage
(e -) and the prevalence of the collective concrete ideals (p -) over the
ideals of personal development in the spiritual or ethical meaning of the term;
b) 1 2
3 4
characteristics of the sublimating subjects with
whom the desexualization (h - s -) and the withdrawal to being outside of the world
(d - m -) are compensated by the narcissistic need to create (k+ p+) and the
impassioned exaltation of affects (e+ hy+);
c) 1 2 3
4
rarer situation of the “obsessional” subjects in
whom the isolation between the thought and the affects has the effect of
“making mental” all the problems, particularly those of the control of reality
(k±), of the possession of the object (s±), of the attachment to the things in
general (d±) and the expression of the affects (hy ±).
From
1960, in collaboration with Armin Beeli, Szondi developed the method of
diagnosis known as the forms of existence. There are 17 of them that
corresponds each to a particular constellation of the eight factors of the
test. With each form of existence corresponds a relatively specific diagnosis
that returns to the great traditional syndromes of psychopathology but also in
tables considered as normative (forms 16 and 17).
For
more ease of use, we used the shortened form of the “Computerized Diagnosis of
the Modes of Existence” worked out by Felix Studer and Jean Mélon, which we
reproduce further on.
We will still largely call upon the thesis of
Martine Stassart (15) to clarify this interpretation.
This interpretation takes account here of the
sense of the meaning, progressive or regressive, that occurs in each vector,
work on the drive, in agreement with the theory of the drive circuits, which it
exploits according to its own logic.
Each
vector thus produces four periods
indicated by Roman numerals, according to whether the factor more charged in +
or in -, called dominant, belongs to
one or another level -- or period -- of the circuit.
The Periodic
|
|
C |
S |
P |
Sch |
||||
|
|
d |
m |
h |
s |
e |
hy |
k |
p |
I |
1 |
0 |
+ |
+ |
0 |
- |
0 |
0 |
- |
|
2 |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
|
3 |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
4 |
± |
+ |
+ |
± |
- |
± |
± |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
0 |
± |
± |
0 |
± |
0 |
0 |
± |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
II |
1 |
- |
0 |
0 |
- |
0 |
+ |
+ |
0 |
|
2 |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
|
3 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
|
4 |
- |
± |
± |
- |
± |
+ |
+ |
± |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
± |
0 |
0 |
± |
0 |
± |
± |
0 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
III |
1 |
+ |
0 |
0 |
+ |
0 |
- |
- |
0 |
|
2 |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
3 |
+ |
- |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
- |
+ |
|
4 |
+ |
± |
± |
+ |
± |
- |
- |
± |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
± |
0 |
0 |
± |
0 |
± |
± |
0 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IV |
1 |
0 |
- |
- |
0 |
+ |
0 |
0 |
+ |
|
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
|
3 |
+ |
- |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
- |
+ |
|
4 |
± |
- |
- |
± |
+ |
± |
± |
+ |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
0 |
± |
± |
0 |
± |
0 |
0 |
± |
For example, in the vector of the Contact (C),
if m+ is an occupied position in a stable manner and quantitatively higher than
d+ or d-, one poses in theory that one is found in the first period of the
circuit of the Contact; if d- dominates, one is in the second period and so on,
the fourth period implying that the dominant position is m-.
The factor dominating can be qualified for
modulating in the sense that it controls, determines, and modulates the meaning
that the complementary reaction takes, the reaction d in the example given here.
According to whether the reaction in d is zero
(O), negative (-), positive (+) or ambivalent (±), the dominant-modulating reaction
m+ remains, one considers that one is in the first times -- or moments or stages -- (C O+), second (C - +),
third (C ++) or fourth (C ±+) of the first period of the circuit of the Contact
drive.
When the infant is at the breast or when the
breast is close, immediately available, the need for clinging to the mother can
vary in intensity -- from m+ to m+!!! -- but the question of the lack of an
object does not arise because the events occur as if the infant absolutely did
not doubt that the object, real in fact, is at any moment available. If the
object comes to be missing, the infant will express his or her need for the
breast by agitation, cries…. And, as Freud very rightly noted, that will
change, since this is above all his or her mood [humor]. Although the term used
by Freud is here, not Stimmung [mood; in
tune] but Gemüt [disposition], it
is good for the basic way of “finding oneself to be” -- well or poorly -- of Befindlichkeit [feelings], and that it
an issue in the Contact vector.
It is only in second time of the first period of
the circuit of the contact (C-+) that in “retaining” (d-) the real breast
engramme, its memory trace, the child will be able to hallucinate the breast
and to obtain an autoerotic satisfaction. In other words the passage into d-
implies the entry concerned the work of the representation and retrogression
into the fantasy that underlies autoerotic satisfaction.
The second time of the first period of contact
(C-+, I 2) can be considered hallucinatory, autoerotic, narcissistic or
imaginary cases. It is a time controlled by the pleasure principle.
In the third time, the failure of hallucinatory
satisfaction on the one hand, the necessity imposed by reality -- the “Not des Lebens” -- or authority on the
other hand, will push the child to seek in reality (d+) an object of
replacement -- an “Ersatz” -- likely
to enable him to find a satisfaction similar to the first satisfaction. As long
as the wish to find again this satisfaction dominates the drive life, one does
not leave the first period, dominated by the tendency m+.
Thus, the reaction C ++, I 3, is that of a
subject who is perpetually in search of an object from external reality that
could return “lost happiness" to him.
This third time of the first period of the
circuit of Contact can be sometimes considered realistic, objective,
“necessary” or illusory, but always driven by the principle of reality in the
sense as understood by Freud.
It is because the first object, the real breast,
is lost forever and can be found again neither in hallucination nor through its
innumerable Ersätze [substitutes],
that a fourth time has come to succeed the first three.
In this fourth time (C±+, I 4), doubt is set up
as for the possibility of never finding an object that would make it possible
to find the first and complete satisfaction. The object is lost for good.
The ambivalence that has occurred in the search of the object (d±) causes
eventually the crisis (C ±± > C O±) that leads to call into question the
principle even of the ideal of the first satisfaction and the object of which
it was the bearer, i.e., finally, the
primal mother, Urmutter.
If the subject continues its evolution in the
cycle of the Contact drive, one enters into the second period, whose first time
is characterized by the narcissistic return to one's own body.
If, as we did for the first period by calling
upon the mythical relation to the breast and we hold here for a paradigm the
installation in the anal phase of libido development, we represent the first
time of the second period (C - O, II 1) as the moment when the child in
imagination forms a union with his faeces experienced as a narcissistic
prolongation of his own body, invaluable product among all products, as the
miser forms a union with his purse and its contents, the mother with her child,
the father with his family, the workman with his work, the artist with his
work, the man with his fatherland, his or her religion, his or her ideas, etc.
The second time (C - +, II 2) where d- controls
or modulates m+, corresponds to the need to join again the contact with the
surrounding world, narcissistic sufficiency that characterizes the position C -
O having become as intolerable to it as was C - + of the first period. One sees
well here that, according to whether one is in the second or the first time of
the circuit of contact, the same reaction C - + receives different, even
radically opposite, meanings. This is one of the major difficulties of the
interpretation of the Szondi Test; one easily sees this from this example,
Because the “demand to the other” or “the desire
for the desire of the other” fails in a manner similar to what occurred in
search for an object of replacement (C++) and because the subject eventually
comes from that to think that it would do better without the others and thus
would withdraw from the world (C - -, II 3), doubt emerges on the question of
the relation to the desire for the other (m±), confounded here with one’s
relation to the world -- “the world of worthlessness for him or her whether I
would be there or whether that I would not be there!” -- this doubt about the
question of the relation to the world, of its importance, of its value or its
necessity, introduces the subject into the fourth time of the second period (C
- ±, II 4).
We could prolong these considerations until the
end and provide the most illustrative possible examples for the fourteen
following periods.
We hope to have been sufficiently clear so that
our procedure will be understood when we will utilize this method. Still,
let us say that in accordance with this theory, the most specific positions
are, according to the periods, for each of the vectors:
•
C I 1 that is to say C o+
•
S II 2 that is to say S + -
•
P III 3 that is to say P + -
•
Sch IV 4 that is to
say Sch ±+
The above could be translated in the following
way: a subject is never as much “in” the contact position that in C o+, sexual
position than in S + -, ethical-morale than in P + - and subject than in Sch
±+.
The fourth time of each period is always, as we
hope to have made clear, the moment when the subject returns to himself, puts
questions about what has suddenly made a problem in a particular area and
thinks about it, in short comes from there to place himself as “subject of” the
drive as much as “subject to” the drive, even “subject against” (gegen) the drive, which induces us to
retain and to characterize this moment with the qualifier of “subject,” the
third time that can be retrospectively described as “object,” the second of
“narcissistic,” and the first of “pre-object.” Other qualifications remain
possible with the condition of sticking to groups of homogeneous or homologous
concepts, such as, for example, the series posed by Freud in his study on Schreber:
·
autoeroticism
> narcissism > homosexuality > heterosexuality;
or elsewhere:
·
constancy
principle > pleasure principle > reality principle > beyond the
pleasure principle;
·
ego-reality
of the beginning > ego pleasure (Lust-Ich)
> ego reality (Real-Ich) > final
ego-reality (Endgultiges Real-Ich)….
The
average profiles, such as we consider them, is an innovation based on our
knowledge. They are not explained in the thesis of Mr. Stassart.
We
make the sum of the rough choices in each polarity of each factor with both the
foreground and the background [The
background is the Experimental Complementary Plan (E.K.P.) not the Theoretical Plan (Th.K.P.) that is the opposite of the
foreground]. Then, we make the sum of + for the foreground and the
background and we obtain a sub-total for +. We do the same way for -.
We
make the sum of these two sub-totals to obtain the number of total choices for
the factor with the foreground and the background. This total is done the same
for all the factors. Then we convert into a percentage for the total and the
sub-total.
|
fo |
bk |
T |
|
fo |
bk |
T |
|
fo |
bk |
T |
|
fo |
bk |
T |
h+ |
12 |
9 |
21 |
s+ |
29 |
4 |
33 |
e+ |
15 |
17 |
32 |
hy+ |
7 |
21 |
28 |
h- |
21 |
18 |
39 |
s- |
18 |
9 |
27 |
e- |
10 |
18 |
28 |
hy- |
14 |
18 |
32 |
|
fo |
bk |
T |
|
fo |
bk |
T |
|
fo |
bk |
T |
|
fo |
bk |
T |
k+ |
12 |
17 |
29 |
p+ |
15 |
18 |
33 |
d+ |
16 |
17 |
33 |
m+ |
14 |
17 |
31 |
k- |
10 |
21 |
31 |
p- |
12 |
15 |
27 |
d- |
18 |
9 |
27 |
m- |
17 |
12 |
29 |
[fo = foreground bk = background (E.K.P.)]
Thus,
the total for h = 60. Therefore, (39/60)
x 100 gives
us 65% for h-. In the same way, the sub-total for the foreground gives us 12 + 21
= 33. And (21/33) x 100 gives us approximately 64% h- with the foreground.
Finally
if we do this procedure for all of the factors, we obtain: 1 - a total
percentage for the most important polarity of the factor, 2 - a percentage that
gives the most important polarity of the factor for the foreground and 3 - a
percentage that gives the most important polarity for the background.
For
example, by considering only the highest percentages, the total for h is 65% in
favor for h- ; it is 64% for h - for the foreground and of 67% for h- for the
background.
Once
all these percentages are calculated, it is invaluable for knowing to situate
them compared to the accentuations. It is in this sense that we had the rather
simple idea to take again the basic proportions. What is especially interesting
is to know the higher limits of each “stage” (±, ±!, + or -, !, !!, !!!).
· ± is obtained by a ratio
whose higher limit is 3/2 (or 2/3). Therefore, with 5 choices, 3 are placed as
the highest level: if we divide 3 by the total of the choices (5), we obtain
60%.
· ±! is obtained by a
ratio of 4/2 (or 2/4), therefore 6 choices to the total: 4/6 = 66%.
· Reactions + and - within
their higher limit are obtained by a ratio of 3/1 or 1/3, therefore 4 choices
to the total: by dividing 3 by 4, we obtain as higher limit 75%.
· An accentuation is
obtained by the ratio 4/1 or 1 /4: thus 4 /5 give us 80%. Two accentuations:
5/1 or 1 /5: thus 5/6, i.e. 83%.
Let
us summarize:
± :
up to 60%
±! : from 61% up to 66%
+ or - :
from 67% up to 75%
! : from 76% up to 80%
!! : from 81% up to 83%
!!! : from 84%
The
average profile in this case will be:
Total:
h±! s± e± hy± k± p± d± m±
Foreground:
h±! s+ e± hy±! k± p± d± m±
Background:
h- s- e± hy±
k± p±
d±! m±
We
are sorry to have taken as an example a “monotonous” profile with a majority of
± but this is not the case for all profiles and for the outstanding differences
that are made clear quickly.
The
analysis of the average profiles should be done as usual since the basic
proportions are respected.
In
the same sense of simplicity, we chose an interpretation in the term of
position in the drive circuits for each factor with the foreground and with the
background on the basis of figures obtained by the sum of the rough choices.
That
gives us figure 1 (first position) for h+, m+, e- and p-.
figure
2 for s-, d-, hy+ and k+.
figure
3 for s+, d+, hy- and k-.
and
figure 4 for h-, m-, e+ and p+.
The
translation of the preceding table gives us this:
Fo Bk Fo Bk
h 4 4
65% 4 s 3 2 55%
3
e 4 1-4 53% 4 hy 3
2 53%
3
p 4 4
55% 4 k 2 3 52%
3
m 4 1
52% 1 d 2 3 55%
3
[Fo = foreground Bk = background (E.K.P.]
We
see from the start where are located the more fusional positions (1), those
where the realization of oneself is most advanced (4), those where the pleasure
principle is dominating (2) and in those where the reality principle prevails
(3).
We
grouped them in such manner to see the factors' “conditioners” or directors (h,
e, p, m) and the factor mediators (s, hy, k, d) vis-à-vis each other. The
factor mediators are those by which, in the circuit, one passes between the two
extremes (positions 1 and 4). A factor mediator in 2 is closer to a starting
state (1) while a factor in 3 is closer to a final state (4).
We
can finally supplement this small table by the total percentages that give the
most important polarity of the factor and that is retranslated in terms of
position in the circuit by a figure ranging between 1 and 4 that accompanies
the percentage.
The
first level consists of general data that locate the creator in his
development: they are some reference marks. Following come the indices of the
test. This is the “macroscopic” point of view.
The
second level is characterized by the “average” profiles and the interpretation
according to the positions in the circuits. This is an intermediate level.
The
third level is the move into the “microscopic” point of view. We will endeavor
through the comments to capture the possible significances of the various
profiles. We will see in what ways theory can clarify the interpretation of the
“beacons” of the creative process. We will stick to a selection of profiles
judged to be the most “enlightening.” Thus we would not be tied down with an
analysis “profile by profile” with commentaries because that would be tiresome
and more cumbersome than useful since the mass of information would be enormous.
This
framework was used in order to be able to determine various likely aspects in
the process of creation. The idea is “to stuff” the profiles with information
likely to clarify them. We did not know how to establish criteria of evaluation
parallel to the testing. We trusted our personal experience that is the fruit
of a great concentration for several years at the side of people prone to be
creative. A heading “Commentaries” finishes the framework. It is used as blank
space for non-formulated features in quantitative terms.
This
background though incomplete and subjective has the merit to launch some
landmarks with which the creator will position himself.
This
framework consists of seven continuums and we look at each one from a bipolar
aspect of what we suspect to be important in creation.
Each
continuum includes two paradoxical [antinomic] poles of which a maximum is
fixed arbitrarily at 100% on each side. In the middle of this continuum resides
the point “zero” where the two poles meet without either one or the other
prevailing. The subject is invited to mark on the continuum where he is
positioned. He or she can do it as he or she wishes (one or two crosses for
example). The subject can also make comments on his or her choices.
The
instruction stipulates to the subject to mark the continuums depending on his
or her frame of mind at the time of the testing. However, especially at the
beginning, we noticed that the subjects marked according to a kind of
“assessment” of the last days that preceded the testing. We are unaware to what
degree this bias of evaluation of our subjects has affected the precision of
the data.
Continuum
Number 1
Two
poles: the world of the others and one's world with oneself.
“The
world of the others” includes the collection of the rules and social
conventions in force: the desire for sharing with others, for being available,
for not having too many personal requirements. The world turns and one with it
in a communion. It is also the strength of the view [regard] of the Other on oneself. The reality of the others and the
probability of social reality are things in which one participates.
“One's
world with oneself” includes all that is made specifically part of one's world.
This is the interest for one's personal concerns. One’s personal view is
stronger than that of others. What relates to the Other is eliminated; what
only remains is what concerns oneself. The verisimilitude of social reality is
refuted. There is no more participation.
Continuum
Number 2
Two
poles: attachment and detachment.
It
is the point of view of the Other that is used here: attachment to the Other
and detachment in relation to the Other.
The
attachment concerns what connects us, with the result that one tends towards
something and that one approaches someone or some thing. It is the
establishment of a process that binds us to this someone or thing. The
detachment disconnects us from this thing or person; one moves away from there;
that releases us from our relation with this thing that becomes less important,
almost invisible.
For
example, in the relation with the Other, the attachment is expressed by the fact
of thinking about the Other, of wanting to be with the Other, and of having
difficulty being separate from him or her; something is missing when the Other
is not there, and internally, a force drives him or her to find the Other again.
The
detachment will be expressed by the reverse of the attachment. In particular,
by an intense flow of questions that puts in suspense the participation with
the thing thought about. A question opens a conceptual breach in the
participative bond with a thing. The area of the questions is all the more
original as the detachment operates. There is a kind of "magic in the
air”; one does not "stick” to reality. This is the strength of one's own
view of oneself and of things. The verisimilitude of the world is eliminated in
the area where the detachment acts.
Continuum
Number 3
Two
poles: the desire for conforming and the desire to create.
This
is the tendency “to return to one's allotted place” or to leave it. This is the
difference between convergent thought towards the standards and a thought
diverging from the standards.
Continuum
Number 4
Two
poles: the feeling of dispersion of oneself and that of unity in oneself.
The
feeling of dispersion would consist in feeling vague, confused, incoherent, as
if one were “parceled out bit by bit.” There is a lack of internal unity. The
things do not go from oneself; one badly has “to gather one's nougats.” The
feeling of unity is opposite to that of dispersion. We will be able
consequently to have an idea of the subjective schisms.
Continuum
Number 5
Two
poles: anxiety and interior peace.
Anxiety
or the absence of anxiety prevails. By anxiety, we understand what the majority
of people understand. We do not seek to be precise as to the definition of an
anguish; we simply want that the creator marks near the pole “anxious” when he
or she feels anxious. That signals to us his or her difficulties.
Continuum
Number 6
Two
poles: to exist everyday spontaneously or exist everyday with effort.
To
exist with effort daily is to make an effort to maintain the different things
that make the daily routine as one goes about, washing up, getting up,
preparing a meal and eating it, returning a visit, going to work,…. All these
things require an effort when one moves towards the pole “to exist with effort,”
an effort greater than usual.
To
exist spontaneously is to live everyday in a spontaneous way, without there
being a question of making an effort; “that rolls along,” it is automatic, life
runs on and one with it.
Continuum
Number 7
Two poles: the absence of a creative flow in
oneself or a creative flow that is intense.
Creative
flow consists in this flow of ideas, thoughts, images, sounds…that would
resemble a river that one feels to flow in one's being. All these things would have
as a characteristic to be in phase with the creative research of the person.
The flow of this river is variable.
For
example, an intense flow for a composer would be an overflowing imagination in
order to put in song an idea, a feeling. The words would flow abundantly, rich
in powerful associations, percussion….
We
indicate in the comments that creative production is different from creative
flow in oneself in the sense where the production is the concrete realization
of a finished work.
A methodological approach is a question of
finding recurring information and a guiding thread through the various
parameters put in place. Or what is constant, and what is a variation. For
example, for Jeanne, this inconstancy follows very closely the various stages
that she considers necessary to create or to renew contact with the Other.
The
stable and redundant reference marks are often absent: that moves a lot, that
is variable, and that evolves and adapts to the new data of their experience.
The emergence of a favorable idea with the
creative process can occur at any time; the capture of this idea, on the other
hand, can occur later. Patrick captures the whirling movement of his spoon in
his coffee and modifies the movement of his brush when he paints. Jeanne is
taken by an “interesting” form by looking at peelings.
Very often, the tiredness of the body comes to
stop the process. The rhythm is variable because each day brings its harvest of
modifications for which it is necessary to adapt, and the creative process does
also. Therefore, it is not a necessarily continuous-homogeneous process, and
the profiles, even with fixed intervals, will not capture successive stages
that are followed in Indian file. Sometimes, nothing will be done during a
week; another day, two hours of the day will be devoted to creation and the
remainder of the day will pass and finish with one in front of the TV in the
evening. Other times, a creative thrust will require more time for oneself, and
the person will be unavailable for three days. Therefore, we observe specific,
impulsive creative times and what we will call the most continuous creative periods.
To determine a very
variable process in time is difficult. Rhythmic creation differs from one
person to another and within a person. That can make the research of the
guiding thread very complex. The question becomes: how to encompass something
that does not have a straight course?
By continual travelling
back and forth among the theoretical elements, the clinical perspectives, and
the reflections of the creator and ours and thanks also to the richness of a
long time experience as well as an always attentive listening -- all that is
incorporated in a meaningful constellation around which revolves what will be
registered later on when the configuration of the core allows it.
All that raises the question of the framework of
interpretation from the time of the testing. One starts with a theory that
makes it possible to understand more or less what happens. Then, the
interchange between the theoretical and the empirical ends in a refining of the
framework that becomes more and more precise. That is facilitated when the
creator has a view and an experience of his creative life. It is a matter to
some extent of a perception of oneself consolidated by a capacity to verbalize
this experience. That requires a suitable vocabulary. Sometimes, our subjects
will be precise, sometimes they will be very vague.
We hope to find these precisions from the
“seasoned veterans” of creation. They traversed the roads of creation and its
pitfalls to arrive at a better management of their process, i.e. a greater
control, from where comes the term of sculptured creation. On our side, our
experience of life in a creative environment is a major asset to accompany
these people at the time of the testing. Only so that the creator may speak to
us about his experience, he must have a certain confidence in our procedure.
The
psychologist is not always welcome among creators, and this attitude seems,
sometimes, justified by “unhappy” experiences. It is not rare that a creator
finds himself in the “remote regions” of society especially in his youth and
finds that he must encounter psychologists for unfortunate events without being
able to communicate his manner of being for innumerable reasons, but first of
which is the absence of a real meeting between the psychologist and the
creator. This dissertation is an attempt to surmount this “wall.”
The
laying out of the test in the meeting went through a demystification of the
psychiatric approach in order to lead to a more philosophical approach. The
reason for this is simple: generally, the word “psychiatry” is associated with
“control” and “repression” in the mind of the majority of the people whom we met.
The testing was placed within a framework where
the interview and the meeting came first. These talks, generally, had a
function of reinsurance as well for them as for us: this space for talking
opened up a common space. We insist on the fact that it was our curiosity and
our thirst for more that led us to speak at length with them. We tried to be
the least academic as possible.
We little standardized the meetings in order to have a greater
flexibility with what occurred (the amount of time depended on their
availability, the course of the interview took the color of what was happening
that day, the questions emerged as the exchange of ideas took form) apart from
the fact that, for the majority, the testing took place at the end of the
interview in order to give first place to the aspect encountered than to the
study of the viewpoint on creators.
Therefore,
roughly speaking, the interview was followed by the testing itself, sometimes
still followed by a discussion. We went along with their subjects generally. We
were not always able to shift the topic from the test. These cases illustrate
the fact that it is not desirable to force a frame of mind not very compatible
with the test for the simple reason that that indicated to the creator our
respect for his or her sensitivity. Generally, these people spoke about their
creation and explained to us their experiences.
It is interesting to note that, from the point of
view of the creator, the fact of meeting a student who is making his
dissertation introduced the dimension of a person with their similar age, their
own manner of speaking, and their own inquiry into the sphere of the creator.
This is not negligible for creators who often try to escape the influence from
reality and the Other: our body is a space and time impossible to circumvent
from their perception; the presence of the vibrations of our voice and our
gestures will direct his or her sensibility towards a seizure of which rightly
he or she tries to go beyond.
That means that when the creator met us, he or
she “prepared” his or her mentality to receive us and sometimes his or her
creative push can be so strong that, sometimes, we could simply disturb it by
our presence.
Thus, to move towards a creator is also to
introduce the dimension of the Other into his creative universe; it is
sometimes difficult to anchor him or her in reality because of his galloping
sensitivity.
A
last point relates to the use of the Szondi test to determine a process. Jeanne
formulated the fact that it is embarrassing of suspecting among these people
(photographs of the test) the problems, that is to say, to see themselves in
the “abnormals.” To approach creation with the faces of abnormality was for
Jeanne misleading in the sense where she can deduce that abnormality is
appropriate to determine the creative process; this is what she rebels against.
That required personal work by her to get beyond this barrier. She concluded by
saying that it is necessary to forget their abnormality although that leaps to
one's attention. Finally, for her, all rests on the confidence that she puts in
our procedure.
This
matter shows that the use of a test, the procedure of the dissertation in itself,
can cause an unconscious selection of the information received in the sense of
a screening of the essence of the creative phenomenon. The establishment of the
confidence “of our subjects” on the basis of personal integrity is for us a
methodological point of first importance.
1- DERI S.(1949). Introduction
au test de Szondi [Introduction to the
Szondi Test]. Traduction de Jean Mélon. Bruxelles, De Boeck Université, 1991.
2- FREUD S.(1914). Pour
introduire le narcissisme [On Narcissism:
An Introduction]. In La vie sexuelle,
3- FREUD S. (1923). Le moi et le
ça [The Ego and the Id]. In Essais de
Psychanalyse. Paris, Payot, 1973.
4- FREUD S.(1921). Psychologie
collective et analyse du moi [Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego]. In Essais de Psychanalyse. Paris, Payot, 1973.
5- FREUD S. (1912). Pour
introduire la discussion sur l'onanisme [For
an Introduction to the Discussion on Onanism]. In Résultats, Idées,
6- LAPLANCHE J. et PONTALIS J.B.
Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme [Nature of Fantasies, Fantasies of Origins,
Origin of Fantasies]. Les Temps Modernes, 215, 1964.
7- LEGRAND M. Léopold Szondi,
son test, sa doctrine [Léopold Szondi,
His Test, His Doctrine]. Mardaga, Bruxelles, 1979.
8- MELON J. Théorie et pratique
du Szondi [Theory and Practice of Szondi],
Liège, Presses Universitaires de Liège, 1975.
9- MELON J. Le point de vue
szondien sur la période de latence [The
Point of View on the Period of Latency]. Feuillets psychiatriques de Liège,
13, 1980.
10- MELON J. Positions
pulsionnelles, fantasmes originaires et système des pulsions [Drive Positions, Primal Fantasies, and
System of Drives]. Feuillets Psychiatriques de Liège, 1980, 13, 1. Une
version abrégée de cet article a paru
sous le titre "Fantasmes originaires selon Freud et système
szondien des pulsions" dans Psychanalyse à l'Université,
11- MELON J. Révision de la
doctrine szondienne des pulsions [Revision
of the Szondian Doctrine of Drives].
12- MELON J. et LEKEUCHE P.
Dialectique des Pulsions [Dialectic of
Drives]. De Boeck Université, Bruxelles, 1990.
13- SCHOTTE J. Notice pour
introduire le problème structural de la Shicksalsanalyse [Notice to Introduce the Structural Problems of Fate Analysis].
14- SCHOTTE J. Recherches
nouvelles sur les fondements de l'Analyse du Destin [New Researches on the Foundations of the Analysis of Destiny].
Notes de cours 1975-76. Archives Szondi, Louvain-la-Neuve.
15- STASSART M. Adolescence,
post-adolescence et processus décisionnel - une étude szondienne [Adolescence, Post-Adolescence and Decision
Processes – A Szondian Study]. Thèse de Doctorat, U.L.G, Liège, 1995. Les
monographie du CEP, Les Editions du CEP (Centre d’Etudes Pathoanalytiques),
Bruxelles, 1995.
16- SZONDI L.
Schicksalsanalytische Therapie [Fate
Analysis Therapy].
Theoretical
Approach
Table of Contents
Theoretical
Outlines...................................................................................... 46
1. Definition.................................................................................................................. 46
· Difference Between Creativity and Creation............................................. 47
2. Personality of the Creator......................................................................................... 47
3. Theoretical Panorama of the Outlines...................................................................... 48
4. Heroic Identification of the
Creator.......................................................................... 51
5. Workings of the Unconscious
and the Conscious in Creation................................... 52
6. Phases of the Work of
Creation According to Anzieu............................................... 53
7. Szondi Theoretical Approach
- Empirical................................................................. 55
Focusing on the C and Sch
vectors........................................................ 59
THE EGO
VECTOR.................................................................................................... 59
p -.................................................................................................................................. 60
k +................................................................................................................................. 61
Illustration Through the
Adolescent...................................................................... 64
p +................................................................................................................................ 65
k -.................................................................................................................................. 66
The k -Position and Society................................................................................... 66
THE C VECTOR......................................................................................................... 67
m -................................................................................................................................. 67
m +............................................................................................................................... 68
d+................................................................................................................................. 68
d -.................................................................................................................................. 69
The diagram of the cycle............................................................................ 70
1, AXES....................................................................................................................... 70
2. QUARTERS............................................................................................................. 71
1. Quarter k + p -.......................................................................................................... 71
1. Passage from k- to k+............................................................................................ 72
2. The “Break” [La faille].......................................................................................... 74
2.1 The “wound with the other”............................................................................ 74
2.2 Hate................................................................................................................. 76
2.3 Possible Psychoanalytical
Meanings of the Break [La Faille]........................ 78
Symbolic
Murder of the Father....................................................................... 79
2.4 Philosophical
Interpretation of the Break [La Faille]..................................... 80
2.4.1
“Que philosopher est apprendre à naître”.............................................. 80
2.4.2
Comments.............................................................................................. 83
2.5 Illustration of the Break [la Faille] by a Profile.............................................. 87
3. To Perceive Is to See the
Difference..................................................................... 89
4. The Sensibility and the
Perception........................................................................ 90
5. To Startle [Sideration]........................................................................................... 93
6. Detachment or “Disengaging”.............................................................................. 93
7. The Capture........................................................................................................... 95
8. Sensibility and the Work of
the Senses................................................................. 99
Meanings of the Specularity................................................................................ 100
9. Sedimentation..................................................................................................... 101
2. Quarter k + p +...................................................................................................... 102
1. Relation with Oneself......................................................................................... 102
The Absolute Aspect of the
Narcissistic Relation........................................ 102
The Relative Aspect of the
Narcissistic Relation......................................... 103
2. The Creative Fiction Is a
Differentiating Fiction................................................ 103
3. The Search for a Lack of
Differentiation............................................................ 105
4. Essence: the Total Choice................................................................................... 106
5. In What Way Is an Other a
Creation? ................................................................ 110
6. Autopoièse.......................................................................................................... 110
3. Quarter k - p +........................................................................................................ 111
1. How to Go Beyond the Desire
for Omnipotence? ............................................ 113
Analysis of G. Bonnet on
Narcissism.................................................................. 114
A. The Disappearance and the
Cult of the Phallus...................................... 115
B. Nemesis and the Punishment
of Narcissus.............................................. 116
C. The Evil Eye or Shock in the
Recoil........................................................ 117
D. Realism of the Unconscious
and the Disappearance............................... 118
E. History of Leonardo de Vinci................................................................. 119
F. The Recoil and the
Narcissistic Apparatus.............................................. 120
G. The Shield of Perseus.............................................................................. 121
H. The Other, Love and
Nothingness: a Waltz in Three Time..................... 121
2. Effects on the Creative
Process.......................................................................... 122
2.1 The Disappearance of
Oneself....................................................................... 122
2.2 The Limit to the Creative
Process................................................................. 122
2.3 Attachment.................................................................................................... 125
2.3.1 Hypnosis - Love - Point
of View of Freud......................................... 125
2.3.2 Theoretical Base.................................................................................. 126
2.4 Dialectical of the
Attachment and Detachment............................................ 129
2.4.1 Philosophical
Interpretation................................................................ 129
2.4.2 The Thought Must Be
Braked............................................................. 129
2.5 Love of the Other.......................................................................................... 133
4. Quarter k - p -......................................................................................................... 135
Articulation of interpretation
according to Maldiney - Mélon 137
1. Fusco and Catatonia................................................................................. 138
2. Work-Made [Faire-oeuvre]...................................................................... 139
3. Ego Systole and Ego Diastole.................................................................. 140
4. Ontogenesis and p -.................................................................................. 141
5. To Create and Tension in p...................................................................... 142
6. The Fault [Faille*] and
Psychosis............................................................. 142
7. Abstraction and Einfühlung
[Empathy*]................................................. 142
8. Crossing of the Fault [la faille]................................................................. 144
9. The k Function......................................................................................... 144
10. The k - Position...................................................................................... 145
11. The k+ Position...................................................................................... 145
12. Identification with the
Primitive Father................................................. 147
13. Limit to Creation.................................................................................... 149
Discussion............................................................................................................... 150
Passage from the lack of
differentiation to differentiation in Creation................................................................................................................................................. 168
1. Facts.................................................................................................................... 168
2. Principle............................................................................................................... 169
3. The Degree of the Creative
Process.................................................................... 170
4. The “Threat of Jocasta”....................................................................................... 170
Myth of Oedipus and Jocasta...................................................................... 171
5. The Course of Individuation
= The Creative Course.......................................... 175
6. Creation as Psychic Work
Producing the Difference.......................................... 176
7. Symbolic Castration............................................................................................ 177
8. Sculptured Creation............................................................................................ 179
Illustrations...................................................................................................... 181
Bibliography........................................................................................................ 186
Theoretical Approach
There
exists many approaches of creation and we think that each approach has its type
of definition.
During
his seminars, Jean Mélon (18) proposed this:
Whoever says creation
means a break with something repetitive. The creator is alone since he belongs
apart from the repetition.
With
this point of view, we are from the start projected into the assumption of our
report. Indeed, the break with the repetition supposes a logic of distance. A
distancing is placed with respect to what is repeated. We can also encircle the
known, the social-like repetition of conventions and rules whose
representational inertia is one of the principal factors.
Once
apart from the repetition, the creator only finds himself alone not to repeat.
An individual says “no” and rejects the scenarios that make the majority of
people to function; he must find for each day that passes his ration of
meanings to continue. He knows the stakes involved in such a break. Not only
that he generally will take his distances in relation to others, but that he
goes to distance himself also from his personal representations that slow him
down in his progress. This is a double schism with the root, i.e. faith in the
other (con - fiance [confidence]:
with la foi [faith]).
Often
in the nudity of his being, the creator passes by the “small door of destiny,”
alone among the others and alone in himself.
If
we are to exist and to be human, creation is not human and it does not form
part of the human species that obeys the repetition of the “human” program; on
the other hand, a being can take on this opening to the tangent of the spirit.
To
create is a drama because it carries its flaw [faille]. The human being functions with a weakness [dans une faille], and the creator does
not forget this. Somebody often tells us that the human species is a species
that does not have a chance. And if this “misfortune” were a chance? That must
resemble in that the point of view of a creator.
·
Difference Between Creativity and Creation
According
to an extract of Proust, Didier Anzieu (3, p. 4) says that:
Creativity is defined as
a collection of predispositions of the character and the spirit that can be
cultivated and that one finds if not in everyone, as ideologies tend to mislead
with the latest fads, at least with most people. Creation, on the other hand,
is the invention and the composition of a work of art or of science, answering
two criteria: to produce something new (to do something that has not been done
before) and to see its value recognized sooner or later by a public. Thus
defined, creation is rare. The majority of creative individuals are never
creators: what makes the difference, as what Proust says of Bergotte, is the
disengagement [le décollage].
We
will reconsider this “disengagement” [décollage]
fully because as the extract states it is what makes the essence of creation
and, for this reason, we will concentrate our report around this disengagement
[décollage]. For more clarity, we
will designate it by the term “detachment.”
We
take again the description that Godefroid (14) gives of the personality of creators:
The creative individual
is, indeed, primarily a nonconformist. It is his independence of judgment that
ensures the possibility to him of exploring ways in which the others do not
dare to risk for fear of ridicule.
All the system of
education set up by society is centered on conformism. It is the surest means
to ensure cohesion among the members of the group, but it is also the most
radical way to prevent any blossoming of a creative thought.
In the social area, he
is not integrated easily into the life of a group although he is open to others
and relatively popular. In the same way, he agrees to share the values of the
others only if they correspond to those that he supports. He is however not
very dogmatic and has a quite relative
view of life and the world as well as meanings given to his actions. he is
an eclectic person, always curious and anxious to integrate data gleaned from different areas. The creator loves
to have fun, having always his head filled with fanciful ideas. He prefers what
is complex and new with what is simple and usual. His perceptions of the things are
unceasingly renewed.
He has preserved
generally the gift of wonder proper
to childhood and is able to be moved
before a flower as before a revolutionary discovery. He is, generally, a
dreamer who can pass for a fool by the fact that he will express his emotional
life while accepting it and while
integrating the irrational facets of its behavior.
We
have highlight in bold characters some words in order to draw attention to
them. We could summarize them as the capacity sufficiently to maintain a
personal relationship with its meanings, the capacity of integration, the going
beyond rational thought as an interpretation among others and the relative
facet of its conceptions in relation to those of the others.
The
description stipulates that the creators have perceptions unceasingly renewed
on things. We see the influence of the creator on his meanings in his own usage
as his continual work on his perceptions.
Michel
Mathieu (3) made a fast panorama of the authors of traditional psychoanalysis
on the creative process. He quotes Rosolato G., according to his book, “Essais sur
le symbolisme” [“Essay on Symbolism”], Gallimard,
Thus Freud has staked on
the neurosis, and one can, indeed, ask himself while wondering as Rosolato did
about the divergences that exist between Totem
and Tabou and Un souvenir d’enfance
de Leonardo de Vinci, which is exactly the type of mental operation
favorable to creation: “Would hysteria and obsessional neurosis have thus their
role jointly to play in the artist? Would there be some contradiction there?
Michel
Mathieu begins again in his turn (3, p. 85):
One can also follow
Chasseguet-Smirgel in her lucid but dangerous arabesques on the anal
introjection of the penis of the father. Returning to the frozen ground of
perversion, we find ourselves in company of Rosolato who supports, of course,
his own theory: it is perversion… (...) And there is Mélanie Klein… (...)
Beyond neurosis and perversion, in the abyssal universe of hate and love, the
parceling out and the reparation….
But
Chasseguet-Smirgel directs her search for a psychoanalysis of art towards other
directions than that of the anal problems towards the Kleinien position of the
artistic creation articulated around the concept of reparation that she borrows
from Mélanie Klein. She is often quoted and we will speak about it with Michel
Mathieu who synthesizes her thought (3, pp. 85-86):
… the psychic
development is established in the very first times of life by a position known
as paranoid, where the being archaically is delivered to a Manichaeism of the
object: the good is opposed to the bad. Gradually, in a position known as
depressive, the overall character of the object is grasped, the subject thus
discovers in itself this permanent totality. From acceptance of such an
ambivalence, even chosen, will be born the culpability where will be taken the
sources of the fantasies of reparation, fantasies aiming at always restoring
the good totality in imaginary prey to the sadistic attacks.
Chasseguet-Smirgel
as follows describes her position in connection with Klein (9, p. 90):
The creative act will
constitute one of the favored methods of achieving reparation. The concept of reparation of the object constitutes
thus the foundation of the Kleinian conception of the creative function.
But
Chasseguet-Smirgel orients the creative act more towards a reaction formation
than a true sublimation according to Michel Mathieu (3, p. 86):
Classically, the
sublimated drive loses its repressions and counter invests, in that it is
connected with a mechanism of defense.
Mathieu
continues by underlining in the thesis of Chasseguet-Smirgel the fact that she
postulates two categories of distinct creative acts; one pursues the object,
others the subject, and it is this last category that reaches sublimation.
Finally Chasseguet-Smirgel poses the hypothesis of the passage from a form of a
repairing creation of the object to the reparation of oneself.
Let
us return to the conception of M. Klein, who stated that that the creation is
structured starting from the fantasies of reparation. The subject seeks to
repair the effects of its destructive fantasies on itself or its objects of
love (3, p. 91):
This mechanism aims at
saving from the disaster created by the imaginary sadism of the child on the
mode of the spitting out, the devouring,
etc. the body of the mother or, still more, the combined parents… (...) It is
with this archaic fantasy of destruction of the combined parents, image of the
primal scene, that the child must be opposed, giving up again, gathering the
scattered objects of its violence. The position known as depressive is
resolved in the degree even of the reparation, a stable identification of the
ego with the object become beneficial being established of the same body. And
its success, Mélanie Klein will state, supposes the victory of the forces of
life over the death instincts.
Thus,
during the ontogenetic development, sadism is vanquished, the child comes to
the genital stage by the reparation.
Then,
we observe the role of the anal eroticism in creation. Indeed, the experience
of the passage of faeces from
the interior to the exterior is structuring (Anzieu, 3, p. 28):
… in so much that the
succession of the suffering and satisfaction and in so much that a produced object
(the faeces and, on their model, the work) can be invested with love (a gift)
or aggressiveness (a weapon).
Anzieu
thinks that the Id of the creators is characterized by his great drive force. As
for the ego, he thinks that it is the essential and quasi-constant agent of the
work of creation, in so far as he is endowed with the following characteristics
(Anzieu, 3, p. 29):
capacity to start the
regression and to control the results of it, capacity to idealize his own
omnipotence identified with that of the mother, capacity of fantasizing
starting from the defensive conflicts, capacity, finally, to symbolize
symbolization (in other words, of passing directly from a view to a transcription).
The
topic point of view according to Anzieu shows a conflict between the ego ideal
and the superego (Anzieu, 3, p. 29):
The conflict between the
ego ideal and the superego is intense, with nevertheless frequent predominance
of the first over the second. The ego ideal of the creative genius… makes
possible the mental transgression of the prejudices, the taboos, the heritages;
he exonerates himself of the transgressions; he preaches on revenges to be
taken: the work for its creator is a revenge over childhood, over the family,
over society, even over the human condition. But the superego does not fail to
continue through shame, inhibitions, the feeling of impotence to create, and
the devaluation of the products of creation. The self-punishment, so acute in
the creators, is the revenge of the superego for having yielded to the
temptations of heroic identifications proposed by the ego ideal. The
glorification of oneself as a producer of a work -- of a work produced starting
from the psychic wounds and bearing their marks -- gives the example of the way
in which the ego ideal regains again the upper hand.
The
transgression of the paternal interdiction, illustrated by the myth of Icarus,
is very precisely the marked seal of the dead and hovers over the shadow of the
creator.
Heroic
identification is a term created by Daniel Lagache (Anzieu, 3, p. 3):
To create, as a first
condition, requires a symbolic connection with a recognized creator. Without
this connection, and without its later disavowal, paternity of a work is not
possible. Icarus must always owe his wings to some Daedalus.
But
this heroic identification is also masochistic (Anzieu, 3, p. 24):
Besdine at length
studied the identification heroic-masochistic in the creative genius. The need
to be made to suffer while being worked to death is at the same time a way of
expiating oneself by the excess of work for the excess of an old and major
fault: Greco-Latin mythology
described this dialectical with the work of Hercules. The purpose of the
pursuit of the exploit is to transform the culpable into a hero. But the need for punishment returns sooner
or later, and the failure comes to prohibit or counterbalance the exploit.
The
springs of this heroic identification are centered on death and the figure of
the father. Thus this identification shows its defensive color. Gelly R., 1969
in La personnalité professionnelle de l’aviateur, Revue des Corps de santé des
Armées, May 10th, p. 587 states:
Desires to outdistance the father and distresses
over death, such are the two principal psychological elements in the foreground
in the post-Oedipal phase. At this point in time will enter into play new
mechanisms of defense that end in what one can call the heroic identification.
This
identification consists in taking for a model a real or imaginary character who
has the characteristics to achieve exploits that the majority of the human
beings would be unable to do.
Mr.
Mathieu thinks that (3, p. 107):
The creator oscillates
between two levels of identifications: an imaginary level, to which his ideal
ego seeks to carry out fusion with the all-powerful and omnipresent mother, and
a symbolic level, where the father is introjected and interiorized in the form
of the couple superego and ideal of the ego.
We
will leave the final words to Jean Guillaumin (3, pp. 212-213), who considers
that the creative work itself is centered on an organization established in the
economy of the ego:
… one gives oneself to
the task of the study of the processes of
intrapsychic [intra = inner] mediation,
and that of the place or of the system of operation in which is worked out the
process of the contributions of the unconscious and of the Id to the profit of
the ego (...) Because the essence of the operation’s founder of the art is
situated, whatever the psychic material that he uses, on the level of the
intervention of the psychic instruments of an ego, that order its unfolding.
Speaking
about the conscious-preconscious
unit, Jean Guillaumin thinks (3, pp. 212-213) that:
Acting, as one knows, in
the manner of a filter, which makes it possible to soften -- all in their
preserving a representation proportional to the unconscious demands -- the
drive demands admitted into consciousness,
the unit authorizes, by releasing a great quantity of reinvested energy, an
important activity of exploration and
mental experimentation on the representations. This one leads then to the
development of satisfactory relations, because economically of better
regulation between the various elements and levels of psychic life. It is not
to be doubted that the ultimate development -- and even all its realization –
of the work of art depends on the handling of this apparatus by the ego of the
artist…. (...) Art obviously results from
a certain type of utilization of the psychic filter, that it is necessary
to specify, and who presents among different characters that of leading to
particularly important effects on the narcissistic level. But to place under
this angle the “psychoanalytical” study of the creativity does this have
anything distressing or degrading for the artist? That leads, on the contrary,
to having a high regard for the skilful mental design and the marvelous functional
availability to which corresponds its capacity to create beauty.
Then,
J. Guillaumin making the unconscious second by subordinating it to a
conscious-preconscious system can only explain why such an unconscious will be
employed for purposes of creation. For him, it is the quality of the psychic
apparatus of selection and appropriate transformation that transfigures the
unconscious in the creative act or not (3, p. 213):
The approach “by the
Unconscious” is not made obsolete for all that. But it subordinates itself
henceforth, as less central, less “relevant,” with a course that can only
explain why such an unconscious will be employed for purposes of creation,
which, fallen into other hands if one can say that, dealing with a psychic
apparatus of selection and of transformation less suitable, and for example
less fine and less stable, had never generated art, but only, perhaps, failure
and neurosis.
We
find again this concept of intense management of the internal representations
by exploration and experimentation. In the same way, the underlined fact of a
selection and a self-managed transformation strengthens us in the hypothesis of
capture and putting into form with a “private usage” of its sensibility and its
representations respectively (located in k + and p +).
Finally,
J. Guillaumin returns to the unconscious its original place in the creative
process (3, p. 237):
If the ego organizes and
alone controls creation, it is from an “elsewhere”; it is from the Id that the
ego draws substance and desire in order to create. The desire remains the last
word for the psychoanalyst as undoubtedly for the creative artist.
To
conclude this matter, we will leave with the words of Anzieu:
If it is true that the
regressive moment in the work of creation mobilizes a narcissistic
identification with the maternal omnipotence, this same work in its later
phases, requires an eminently active interior attitude, without which the work
remains in a larval state and the discovery does not pass beyond the stage of
obscure intuition. (...) There, according to the conscious ego, the will, and
the secondary psychic processes would be and are only decisive. (Anzieu, 3, p.
26)
To
be a creator is to be capable of a fast and deep regression from where
unexpected correspondences are returned, archaic representations -- in the form
of images, of affects, rhythms -- of the primary psychic processes,
correspondences, representations that will be used as an organizing core for an
artistic work or a possible scientific discovery.
This
process breaks up according to five stages that Anzieu (3, pp. 14-16)
described:
1
- Regression: achieving of a
regressive movement, related to an internal crisis and mobilization of archaic
representations.
According
to Anzieu, this regression can cause the fear of the unknown, of a disturbing
strangeness, of a metamorphosis. The regression also should be supported, i.e.
the fantastic productions and feelings released by the regression. To support
them is not to feel invaded by them in a catastrophic overflow and
decompensation [lack of functioning of a diseased organ]. It is about a
regression controlled by the ego where there is the double capacity to regress
and to fantasize. In this stage, solitude is the setting. In the regression,
each one is alone with himself or herself: from whence the necessity of a
strong narcissistic over-investment in order to be able to support it.
2
- To perceive while deciphering: clear
perceptive capture of some of these representations, allowing to fix them in
the preconscious as an acting organizing core.
According
to Anzieu, this phase is inhibited by the feelings of shame and culpability and
the weight of the knowledge acquired bundle of perceptions of the new things.
The creator is assailed by doubts because what he is seizing can be of no value
and pure personal delirium without any interest. It is often here that
intervenes a close person who is a witness and gives the confidence necessary
to the creator towards his or her own inner psychical reality to counterbalance
his or her deviance. This privileged interlocutor allows the recognition and
the sharing of that seized by the creator. Consequently, the material takes in
the eyes of the creator a more objective reality. It is a great importance to
be able to share his or her secret. This friend procures the essential positive
illusion that reality rejoins the desires of the creator. We speak in
connection of this illusion about a maternal relational space or container.
Anzieu
has recourse to the concept Winnicottian of “illusion.” The mother, while
taking care herself of external reality for the child, brings to this last the
illusion that this external reality agrees to his desires; a positive illusion
because she brings the child to a progressive taking into account of this
reality, of which, on the contrary, he would be diverted so that upon the
departure of this external reality did nothing to inflict a permanent denial of
his internal reality.
This
illusion according to Winnicott is a space where there is a continuity between
the pleasure principle and the principle of reality (Anzieu, 3, p. 16):
… the work, by its
reality and by its effects, proves its persistence in us, since early
childhood, of the universe of the illusion and satisfaction in the necessity
where we all find ourselves, in order to support the difficulty in living and
of reconciling thus one time or the other of the pleasure principle and the
principle of reality.
3
- To record: detailed adaptation of
the image, the affect, the rhythm thus captured in a material (writing,
painting, music, etc.) that one acquires or has the mastery and/or according to
a familiar knowledge (mathematical, chemical, botanical, linguistic,
socio-cultural, etc.), the greatest creations consisting in innovating as for
the material or the familiar knowledge.
4
- Work of composition: the choice --
or the innovation -- of a genre, the work of a style, an internal design of
parts into an overall organization entering in a symbolic resonance with the
archaic representative nucleus.
5
- To produce to the outside: the
completed work, becoming an object external to the creator, is subjected to a
reality-testing of a particular type that is the judgment of the readers.
Always
according to Anzieu, it is here that the creator definitively detaches oneself
from the work; he faces the reactions, the judgments, and the criticisms with
indifference.
We
will finish this quick panorama of the basic elements that help us with better
determining a type of psychoanalytical approach to creation. We could observe
that the ego plays a role even if the material is of an unconscious origin.
This psychic activity in creation can be approximated by theoretical elements
that will be more or less arranged in such a manner to better understand the
articulation between the empirical such as we have lived and observed and the
theoretical elements of the Szondi Test.
Someone who creates will
bring something new, i.e. something of unknown and of the inconceivable
starting from something known and conceivable. If p- is the knowledge common to
everyone, the first movement consists in starting out of p- and then to move
away from it.
As
he carries with him all alone this movement as “denier” [négateur ] of the known, he tends towards a position where he
installs himself as the carrier of this knowledge. As Nietzsche said in
Zarathoustra: “He is always a denier, the one who must be a creator.” (7, p. 216)
This
one source in an ideal that he has made his own. It is thus constituted
gradually little by little into an alternative to the known. The place of this
elaboration is his imaginary space and his tools those of his psyche. More
precisely, we will see that it is about his own translation/formatted of
sensory feelings that is internal and/or external.
The
framework for such a self-managed edifice is instituted in a relation with
oneself as it draws the elements through him to nourish and shape his ideal
represented in p+ towards which the creative movement tends.
Thus, the trajectory of
the creative movement would start from p –
to make one’s way forward to p +.
In
an autocentric movement, the creator organizes a representation that will allow
the installation of other things that are not yet conceivable.
p–
is the theoretical knowledge common to all. It is the base common to all the
motorists that allows them to use the car. Thus, the use of a car requires an
ensemble of representations common in usage in a society and at an epoch. There
is an openly collective dimension in p–. In the Rorschach, the k – p – persons
give the most banal answers. We will speak about this again through the thesis
of Jean Mélon in connection with the quarter k+ p+ and of the relation to oneself.
For
passing from p– to p+, there exists a mediator: the factor k. That supposes
that p– and p+ function like two separate entities and that the passage of the
one to the other supposes a mediator. According to the theory of the circuits,
k+ is the mediator that makes the individual leave factor p–. Thus, p would be
a factor “condition”: p– = collective condition (primacy of the Other) and p+ =
condition suitable for oneself (primacy of oneself).
k+ mediates the movement
that moves away from the common representations situated in p–.
We
will see that it is about a reappropriation of the person’s imaginary space. This movement towards the imaginary is
built on the base of an oppositional no [to say no to something or someone]
registered in k+. To move away from these common representations, it is
necessary to fix them in a kind of star-distance [sideration] that makes it
possible for the creator to work from above.
Without distance, there
is no “looking upon.”
This
is the function of an oppositional no: to fix something, to be detached from
it, and to make it perceptible to the senses. It is a little as if one took a
photograph of something mental, and by doing this, to observe what one has
photographed allows one to disengage oneself from the perception hitting one by
the act of the photograph. Without reference mark fixes, no distance because
this is an approximation based on the distances between. “To fix” allows one to
perceive the distance when one moves away.
The movement of the
thought can move away from its object of perception only in so far as it is an
object of perception and in so far as the ego does not participate with this
object (thus, no p–). That supposes that the subject of
perception differs from this object. This differentiation rests on a detachment
of the subject in relation to the object of perception.
This
operation is registered in the oppositional no: “I say no to something.” And
the more “I say no,” the more we know that we are detached from what is the
object of this refusal. The reappropriation of his imaginary moving off is by a
refusal that institutes the I in the operation of oppositional no. The role of
the hate is paramount, and we will see that with Jean Baudrillard (6).
Thus,
it is a fixed reference mark that enables us to estimate the distance between
this reference point mark and the ego. In order to fix something mentally and
even in the act to perceive, the I says “no” and strikes this something by its
negation. The oppositional no becomes necessary when the distancing operates on
things strongly anchored in us, i.e. strongly registered in our act even of
perceiving and of thinking: in other words, these are the things in which we
strongly participate.
The
essential idea is that the creative process implies a permanent revolution. To
make the space to be able to create; therefore, it is necessary all the time to
engage in a process of destruction from where a new construction emerges.
We
postulate a “fault” [la faille: a break in a structure, a flaw]
whose role from a macroscopic point of view is “to aid” perception to free
itself from itself.
It
is through the “fault.” rupture in the participation with the other, that this
fissure develops allowing the visibility of “the obvious.” A fault, which
perhaps happened to a child abandoned by his parents as Georges experienced it
at 4 years of age who was adopted. That can be such a strong depersonalization
that it is vital to cut the bond to the other in order not to disappear in the
other. There is also and especially the wounds of love, the dramas like
divorces, mournings,….
We
undergo a break. That “falls” on us from out of the blue. Moreover what gives
it power is that we “are not prepared” to assume a similar rupture. We all
without exception undergo ruptures in our life. How is it that certain persons
start a creative procedure to surmount the rupture and that other persons
choose another way? It is a question that we will leave open.
This
distancing of the mental in relation to the known must in some part operate on
a mental fixation. A view of the view is
set up: visions that make visible the visible (“there were the years that I
lived with him and I was never able to understand it; it is when he stepped
over the limits that I really saw things and then I said no”).
The
expression to take something into account
[se rendre compte de quelque chose]
means comprehension of this thing. The full interpretation of the expression
says in fact “to give account to oneself” (rendre
in the meanings to give without restitution). If we tighten the analysis on the
word compte, that becomes in the
sense of closing the accounts [comptes]
in order to end with a total (“at the end of the count [compte ]”). This concept to arrive at the final account [compte] (“to do his accounts [comptes]”) requires a final limit that
makes it possible to determine a time frame, for example, one year. It implies
that something ends. It is precisely this limit that, we think, is intrinsic
with the expression to take something
into account [se rendre compte].
A
limit is placed on the perceptive act and the one that is returned (the look of
the look) on that which has been perceived and experienced. This look of the
look can emerge only in the condition of being detached from the “basic” look
taken inside the movement of looking. In order to make visible the visible, the
laid-down limit intervenes in order to divide the look of the look in a
perceptive unfolding (to look at oneself looking at something) and with this
intention, it is necessary to take account of it, i.e. to be hit with a mental
“photograph” (limit placed on the perceptive act) of something and to demand
accounts of “it.”
Thus
the creative process and the process of limitation are basically anchored in a
common root: without the act of limitation to the attachment, no detachment. In
the same way, without the act of limitation to the detachment, no
concretization, i.e. the completed work.
The unlimited consists
in putting a limit on the limitation. If unlimited is the source and is expressed in
the imaginary, it could be deduced starting from the mental act that consists
in placing a limit to the strength of reality and the look of the others on
oneself in the premises of one’s thought. By reality, we understand the limits
of spacial and temporal reality included or not in the Other, the non-ego that
we interiorize. And the look of the Other would be limiting to oneself in the
sense where the Other is that which is not oneself; therefore, that which can
deny the share of its altérité
[otherness] is the inflational movement of one’s own thought.
We
are more specifically interested in two vectors -- C and Sch -- for our
dissertation. We do not forget the two other vectors in our interpretation.
This focusing on the ego and contact results from a choice carried out in the
spirit of a tight analysis, and we think that these two vectors are more
favorable to detect the creative reference marks in someone. We will give only
some information to introduce this interpretation of the factors for two
reasons: 1 – the methodological part is rich and already gives many theoretical
elements, 2 – spread throughout this dissertation are clarifications on the
factors according to our interpretation.
The Sch vector relates to all that has to
be seen with respect to the relation of oneself with oneself. The ego is above
all a relation. At the beginning of his “Traité du désespoir,” Sören
Kierkegaard writes that the ego is the relation of a relation, which indicates
the direction of this relation: relation of oneself with oneself. The ego is
something that is distinguished from another thing. And that raises the
question of the Other and the self.
The
Szondian factor of p+ “to be all” is exactly on the level of the individual
while p– (i.e. to belong to the whole but the whole that is not oneself and the
whole that is outside of oneself) is to think that one only feels well if we
participate with the whole (the religious position).
On
the Sch level, the problem is that of to be or not to be. To be, it is
necessary to exist. p is the factor to be
and Szondi says that k is the factor to have. But we can retranslate the
factor k as the factor of existence in the sense where if one does not even
exist, the question of to be does not even arise.
It
is the one who exists that raises the question to be: “Why do I exist?”. One
can raise the question for oneself at any time: Why are we here?. Here, we are
in an activity that concerns above all the ego. Thus k is the mediator to be,
to have is the mediator of to be; one cannot be without to have. It is
necessary to pass in to have to be able
to be.
Schizophrenia is the properly human
illness, which one meets only in humans. If there exists a catatonic behavior
in the animal, it is not devised by a relation to itself. To function, one must
cut oneself into two in order to speak and to think at the same time.
The
schizophrenic is somebody who lost the relation with itself (Compare: The
specular [mirror] relation). The schizophrenic has lost contact, he is no more
in the world and does not know anymore what is the world. We are in the world,
and it is for that we are alive. The world is different from an object. The
world is indefinable: the world is in oneself, one is the world and one forms
part of the world.
Szondi
speaks about participative projection or projective participation. Eros is the
reunion of what has been separated. Consequently, the tendency p– is to be
interpreted with these meanings, i.e. in the meanings of an attempt of the ego
to find something from which it had been separated at the beginning.
It
is a matter of a desire of the ego for not being separate from the world but of
being in participation with the heart [l’âme:
also the soul] of the world.
Primitive mentality is characterized by the “no-distinction between what is me
and what is not me.”
The
meanings of projection is that there is a projection of this need finally for
omnipotence. What dominates the desire of the ego basically is this desire of
omnipotence. One never wishes but for only what one has lost.
The
most primal position of the ego, that which animates it basically, is that to
recover the omnipotence, and one is never as eager to recover omnipotence than
when one is impotent and when one feels lost in existence. Then, the need
emerges to participate in something that justly makes it so that one feels not
separated from the rest of the world.
p–
is the most profound tendency of the ego. When one speaks about the infantile
omnipotence, that is what one indicates: the narcissistic ego infantile
omnipotence. In fact, this ego-there does not exist as such. The child at this
stage is the center of the world; it does not feel separate from the rest of
the world; it forms a unit with the rest of the world. We all have lost this cosmic
feeling of belonging in the world.
p–
is given by approximately 50% of the population. The subject who gives p– has a
need to participate in all that is beyond one. That means that his ego is not
sufficient for him or her. He or she is not self-sufficient. Obviously, this is
unconscious.
One
could also say that it is the micro-manic [micro
= small] position in opposition to megalomanic [megas = great] (the inflative position). p– will be found in a
crowd of things and, in the normal population, that means nothing other than
this need to take part of something and this need to be attached to something
that represents the omnipotence and that is not oneself and to make oneself a
part of it. It is that which is most important: to belong to.
Therefore,
one could say that p– is the first psychic operation, that which will consist
in creating representations that make it possible to work out intolerable feelings.
The
baby being abandoned in his cradle is one of these situations. What happens in
these moments? We are persecuted. Therefore, to fabricate bad objects or
terrifying representations and to hallucinate in a “negative” manner (bad,
malicious,…) – this is a psychic work that contains something.
This
fabrication of bad representations makes it possible to support the situation
best because the anxiety can then be attached to a representation. The worst
being to experience an anxiety, a kind of primordial anxiety, a distress. One
needs in these moments to believe or to imagine that one has a persecutor for
example. We do not need to be primitive for that. As soon as that does not
continue and that functions all alone, the process gets started. It is banal
that one does not stop doing similar things.
Projection
is neither good nor bad. It would not have to be understood only in the
meanings of persecution: “nothing happens, I invent a representation where I
find the cause and where I put the cause of my discomfort, and, presto, that is
better.”
k+
is the second stage in the genetic circuit of the ego after the ego has been
part of the first, primal position. In p–, one deals with mental operations of
level 1, i.e. the operation of the most elementary psychic apparatus. The 2nd
stage occurs in k+ and thus relates to more elaborate psychic operations.
The
term introjection indicates to us
that it is an operation which consists in making to pass to the interior and
projection is making to pass to the exterior. Therefore, introjection presumes
that one interiorizes something. What will constitute ego is a new mental
operation that will produce the ego as a representation of itself. According to
Lacan: it is the fascination of oneself by oneself from where comes the mirror
stage.
Let
us define autoeroticism as a self-sufficing [autosuffisante] satisfaction thanks to a representation that brings
pleasure. There is no autoeroticism without a world of fantasies; autoeroticism
nourishes fantasy. The Freudian conception of narcissism rests on the idea of
the circulation of libido, the energy that, at the beginning, goes towards the
“object” (for the child, it is the mother but here, the concept of a
not-separated object is not evident); then, the libido returns towards oneself
and this constitutes narcissism.
For
Freud, it is thus above all a matter of the circulation of energy, of libido.
The ego must become autonomous and that is only possible if it is sufficiently
fed with narcissistic libido. At a given time, the child taking itself as an
object of self-love can separate itself for the first time.
The
libido starts with autoeroticism and then one passes to the narcissism that is
a capitalistic operation (it takes everything for itself). Only it is necessary
to love if one does not want to become ill. That explains why one goes from
narcissism despite everything; one ends up bursting like the frog that wanted
to be like an ox. At a given moment, boom!, it bursts and one finds nothing any
more. Then, comes the choice of an object.
To
get to the root of k+, it is necessary to see it as a capitalistic operation of
recovery of narcissistic libido.
From
the time when there is ego and when the ego attracts towards itself all the
libido that before was directed towards an object that was not really an
object, one can say that ego is the first object (Lacan: the ego is above all
imaginary).
What
is introjected? Introjection is the operation that allows what Freud evoked in
narcissism, i.e. the concentration of libido in the ego. Libido can concentrate
in the ego only because there are introjections. Finally, the ego makes itself
with the image of the Other.
Primary
narcissism is built on nucleuses so that this narcissistic libido can be fixed.
For Lacan, the nucleus is the image of the ego and it is the mirror stage. The
individual is condensed in his image.
What
feeds k+ is also the desire to be loved or to love oneself. What is this object
that is lost in k and that one tries to find again? It is the image of oneself
such as he or she was loved and idolized by the parents. The subject k+,
basically, is the one that would like to capture again this image and truly to
possess it. That is impossible obviously. There is no possibility of going to
seek one’s image behind the mirror.
If
we concentrate on the concept of image, the question of seeing becomes
fundamental and the question of the object is also a matter of seeing and of
having. The history of Narcissus is very telling. He did not know how to be
detached from his image; he wished to see it and to have it and he dies because
of it.
Narcissus
is also the patron of poets. In the myth when he dies, there is a flower that
pushes forth at the place where he disappears; he is also a figure of creation
in a certain manner.
What
is a catatonic? He is a spectacular subject that remains hours holding the same
pose physically trying after a few minutes. He has an extraordinary force to
hold the posture without moving three days straight. The catatonic phenomenon
is truly the mad attempt to find again an image of oneself and to incarnate it
in a definitive way. The catatonic tries to find himself again through his posture.
k+,
through this image of a catatonic, is to copy an attitude. Szondi evokes the
concept of the persona. This term means initially in Latin a mask. The subject
in losing his ego is no longer a person.
In
k+, there is thus this concept of a
nucleus that makes it possible to crystallize the narcissistic libido
that finally will feed the ego. The catatonic, for example, through the
catatonic pose poses himself, “it is necessary to be posed.” In the very
symptom of the catatonic, one can capture again the meanings of that which he
wants to say: “I pose.” That implies the idea also to impose a character and
that returns us to this concept of the persona, i.e. the mask that is more real
to some extent than the person.
We understand better
what function incarnates the catatonic: a function of fixing.
Szondi
offers all kinds of illustrations of this position k+. He says initially that
it is the ego that opposes and that says “shit!”. It is the stage of no in the
child. That supposes that he or she has introjected something that enables him
or her to say no; otherwise, one would say that this is the stage of negation.
To be able to say no, it is necessary to have introjected otherwise one cannot.
The no that we find here is obviously not k-; that is another no than this one.
In fact, no is to be taken in the sense that it is a distinct operation that
makes it possible for a subject to be posed, and, rightly, one finds again this
concept of the pose in the opposition. That also introduces us to the notion of
the object, i.e. to throw something in front of oneself, to constitute oneself
like an object.
The
simplest way to seize again what k+ means is to think that one is k+ each time
a character is constructed. The very positive side of the character is that
which makes it possible to understand this formula of Szondi that states that
catatonia is the form of cure of paranoia. One understands this well because
the paranoid is not a person; he is not able to constitute himself as a
character. If he achieved that, he would be a catatonic and he would have
crossed a first stage. That which is in k+ asserts its autonomy in a certain
manner thanks to its character.
k+
would allow the capture, the putting into form and the construction of its
image of oneself caused by a relation with oneself that has its source in one’s
ego ideal located in p +. It is an “I” who is related to an image (“I look at
myself”) and that is different from the “I” in p + that falls under a reflexive
relation with oneself (“I think of myself”). k + opens a relation with oneself
through an image of oneself; it is in these meanings that it opens a specular
relation with oneself in the sense where one refers to an image to locate one’s
own movement.
The
adolescent in our view expresses this opening of a specular relation to himself
or herself since this is in the phase of constructing an image of himself or
herself in order to locate his or her movement of being -- his or her search of
identity. It is in the search of an image of himself or herself that
corresponds to that which he or she believes to be. This search of an identity
does not skip the laying out of one’s own universe. That can be divided into
two facets.
The
first
is concerned with the representations that it brings into play in order to be
situated in the society. This is the side p + of his universe. The second
facet is concerned with all the sensory facets of his universe. Indeed, he
works out from the world all around him a specific sensory environment proper
to his search of identity. It is a matter, in fact, of all the information that
is collected by his senses in his universe. That goes from the posters to the
musics while going over to his clothes and to his manner of speaking and of
holding himself without forgetting the quantity of objects that occupy his
personal space. There is a true sensory bath specific to the adolescent that
sends back to him unceasingly, through his sensibility, an image of himself of
a sensory nature.
The
interaction of these two facets, (k + p +) is that all this sensory bath is
truly a very powerful mirror that returns an image to him that he selected. In
extreme cases, it is a mirror much more powerful than a conventional mirror.
Indeed, this last returns an image only when he looks at himself in it, while
the “sensory mirror” returns his symbolic image to him with each glance and at
every moment lived in his universe. If he had been suddenly locked up three
days in his room for example, his universe would return to him a massive amount
of sensory information during all this time that would flood his mentality and
would end up forming a deposit more and more in representations built with
these sensory elements. It is in this sense that we speak about a specular
relationship between the subject and his sensory universe in the meanings where
his universe returns an image of him to himself through the sensory configuration
that was formatted by the laying out of this universe. We can speak about a
“sensory style” specific to the image of one’s imaginary self that one wants to
capture by the position k +.
The
capture and working of a sensory material suitable for oneself are injected
into a representation of oneself in which are deposited these sensory elements.
Since the configuration of these sensory elements is due only to his own
imaginary will (k+), the effect of the look of the Other (p-) tends to be
eliminated and the representation of oneself more and more is built with his
own look (p+).
It
is as visible in the adolescent as in us as we announced above. Selection of
his music, his posters, his clothes, his speech, his food, etc. show that he
withdraws from the common sensory bath the personal elements that contribute to
forge his personal “stamp” in life.
The
selection, the capture and working of these elements are in agreement with the
image of himself that he has the desire for creating and building. This filtration
of all the days of this common sensory bath is fundamental to nourish an
identity specific to oneself. What k + has seizes and put into form will be
maintained in suspense in his mentality and will feed a representation by a
kind of sedimentation of the sensory of the representational. There is an
“injection” of this material into a representation of himself.
The
creator uses his meanings and his sensibility in a way specific to him. We
“often see” the same thing as he but without paying attention and that does not
leave a trace because that was not captured. It is question of paying
attention, being attentive, and being available with our manner of feeling the
things that are also subtle and subliminal. The process of paying attention
increases the density of the perceived elements and gives them sufficient
weight to be collected and maintained among all the rest even if we are alone
in perceiving this way.
To
be able to do this, it is necessary to have self-confidence, to accept its
“imprint” and to be able to pull aside without the vision of the others
abolishing it.
p+ is a position that
authorizes a beginning of individuation in the sense that the subject is
constituted there while doubling himself or herself from an image of the Other
that can be as well his or her own specular image (Mirror stage according to
Jacques Lacan)…this alienating image allows a subject to discover a ONE,
unified, with the image of the Other, a complete being. This is why p + refers
to the need for completeness and bisexuality. (Mélon, 20, p. 98)
This
image will become later the Ego ideal. It is in this sense that Mélon says that
p+ corresponds to the spiritual ideal.
p
+ goes toward the meanings of the lack of differentiation because it tends
towards an increasingly great potentiality to be everything. It is inflation. A
p +!! shows an inhibition to carry out a choice: the person does not move
because he oscillates through his multiple possibilities of choice without
choosing. He is constantly in the potentiality to do everything: everything is
possible…then what to choose?
A
simple k- image would consist in saying that it is “the eraser that erases what
is formulated on the imaginary tableau created with k +”.
It
is in this position that the ego breaks its image of itself created by its
imagination and destroys the specular relation with itself. It is,
consequently, in the image of the Other that the k - individual will seek in
reality his or her image of himself or herself. k - institutes a specular
relation with the Other: “You, what are you considering? You have the look of
those human wrecks? One does not speak like that in Dupont! Extinguish this
music of a nutcase! Do you hear the aberrations that you formulate? But you are
delirious!”.
It
is the “sensory eraser” that erases the imaginary dimension registered in the
image of oneself and that cleans it of its fantasy nature or improves it while removing
what is not appropriate. In the latter case, it is rather a matter of k± where
the two tendencies act in concert.
k
- would be also a use of its sensibility indirectly in the service of the
ordinary. Thus, to capture the same thing as the others, it is necessary to
have conforming senses in order to capture this thing. In our perceptive
capture, it is nevertheless necessary to have a framework of interpretation of
our senses in order to be located on the same baseline as the other persons.
Moreover,
it is not all from having this collective framework; the investment and
maintaining of it by granting a certain primacy within himself allows himself
to adapt easily. This expresses the idea that the more this collective framework
is invested, the less we require effort to agree with the others; the fact that
it “is automated” makes it possible for our attention to be spared an
exhausting mental concentration. Its investment is carried out to the detriment
of our own framework of personal interpretation. By slowing down our
imagination sufficiently to level it to the common standards, k - with its
negation makes its senses to be appropriate to the common use in the culture
and with the representations in use in our society. The k - adaptation places a
limit to our putting into personal form of our senses: k - denies the function
k +.
It
is sufficient to go to live a few days in a culture radically different from
ours to feel the weight of this sensory tuning. To a lesser extent, to fit in a
team that has its own codes asks at the beginning much attention to capture the
way in which this team functions, its vision of work to be achieved, and the
small subtle things that form a common sensory baggage. It is all this sensory
work of leveling of one’s sensibility in relation to that of others that we
suppose in k -.
In
the school situation of examination, the distress warning signals related to
this situation of great stress are often standardized (made common) in the
sense where the common representation in force that tallies with this
experience states that: “It is normal to suffer, that happens to everyone
who passes through it and that finally, it is common and necessary to go along
with it: this is how your exams work; if not, you are not made for the studies!”.
The
personal sensory experience related to this situation is standardized, i.e.
leveled to a common standard that tends to eliminate what would prevent the
intellectual performance. This way of treating one’s senses makes it possible
to lead to undeniable results.
We
are led finally after many years to break this rhythm at less to take account
of the sensory signals specific to our vision of the world. The pressure
exerted on us being the weight of the look of the Other on one’s image of oneself.
The
access to this common representation is strengthened and enriched more
especially as our putting into sensory form agrees with this representation,
i.e. accentuates in our putting into sensory form that which goes with the
meanings of the Other and weakens what moves us away from the others.
In
the C vector, the goal of m+ is well being, to find oneself well and calm; each
one has his own way of being well (to sleep, to speak, to be satiated, to eat:
each one has his choice). The m- has chosen the ascetic position, “I do not
need anything” (Compare to the mental anorexic), “the less I have, the better
it is,” “I feel good because I do not depend on anything.” The well-being
itself is an absolute; there are two absolutes: that of m+ that is in the
fullness and that of m-, the complete ascetic who does not need anything. The
means for the well-being resides in d.
The
m- person is “the monk who isolates himself to concentrate on his being and
cuts his contact with the world.” The ascetic position of autonomy. No demand
for contact. This is a being disconnected from the world.
The
tendency m - corresponds to cutting contact. Its most positive effect is to
make oneself free and to take up one’s autonomy.
Kinable
(15, p. 201) specifies:
It is more primarily
about the possibility of taking the personal initiative “to make his play
individually,” possibility of being oneself one’s own possibility that Maldiney
has rightly qualified as the “silent and always threatened possibility.”
m
+ is the resumption of contact, the inscription in a demand for contact. It is
a being connected to the world. (Mediation of oneself through the Other.)
The
tendency m + means the taking of a close contact that binds the person to his
or her environment.
Kinable
quotes J. Horn (15, p. 157): The tendency m + is the basic tendency and “to some extent the queen function, that which
the others contribute to structure it and that where the essence of the
operation, all in all, does without even making contact.”
According
to J. Mélon and Ph. Lekeuche, the accent is put on the movement that imposes contacting one to one’s environment; and when
the entourage appears, the contacting person disappears in the fusional contact.
m + and m - express the
dialectical world of feeling by locating the extreme limits of the experience (15, p. 167).
The
tendencies d - and d + are mediating between the two primaries (m + and m -).
If m + is the queen function where the operation of making contact is played
out, J. Kinable adds that the factor m - is the director as the factor of
separation.
Kinable
(15, p. 157) states that the d -/d +
polarity
“intervenes as a mediator owing to the fact that it allows the working out, in
this area, of the question even of choice.”
It
is very interesting to consider the factor d because it joins together
pro-creative characteristics.
It is the accelerator of
thought that uncouples the mooring ropes of the attachment to things.
Desire
to accelerate, to take off, to uncouple.
The tendency d + is the
requirement of shifting in view of a replacement. d + shows the wish for a new
contact to come that mobilizes the contacting person while making him outline
himself the movement of his future; here there is the will to change one’s life
because the old one is not satisfactory any more. (Dessoy, 11, p. 168)
According
to Kinable (15, pp. 193, 198):
It is the same question
of the attachment to the lost primal object that is closed again over the past
in d - while it opens on the future in d +… to formulate the instinctual
requirement here in activity, let us think of this injunction of the agent of
the police force: “TO CIRCULATE!”. Whatever your path, your destination, no
matter where, but go forward, do not remain there.
The search for something signifies the distance
from what satisfied before. To leave the known one supposes the mourning of
something known that made us function before and that does not make us function
any more, we do not want any more of this known. To make a search is in some
sort to lose the bond with something to which we were attached. We necessarily
do not have a different thing in compensation for it, there is a time delay
inherent in the process of the search. However, in the inquiring diagnosis of
the depressive forms of existence, we find d +.
According
to Anzieu, creation is connoted by depressive facets (3, p. 12):
To create, Mélanie Klein
has understood that first the creator has to repair the object loved, destroyed
and lost, and to restore it as a symbolic object, symbolizing and symbolized,
i.e. ensured of a certain permanence in interior reality. It is, by repairing
it, to be repaired oneself of the loss, mourning, and sorrow.
“d- is the brake that
moors us to things and that makes us faithful.” Either faithfulness or the
slowing down of the excessive movement of thought in the sense that one gives
it: to slow down the thought in order to use it. Patrick, very often giving d-,
stated: “I am not able to manage all the information that comes in through the
“6” senses.” It is the clinging to the interior object that one does not want
to lose.
d-
is to have contacted and to stick obstinately to this first contact while
trying to retain it and by this preventing the possibility of contacting a new
environment. The person is not any more directly taking on things but is
focused on his last catch. Szondi speaks about the tendency to preserve, to
persist, and to stick to the old object.
Kinable
stated in connection with d- (15, p. 176):
(...) like the tendency
to get rid of and to challenge the new (refusal to let oneself be summoned by
it in order to put oneself in search of this new thing or person) in order to
stay, to remain there, not to seek and to refuse any change about it.
We
have chosen the ego vector as the base for our diagram in the sense where Jean
Mélon (18) stated:
The comparison that one
has since always made is the comparison to psychosis. That means that if there
is an analogy to the pathological level, it is necessarily to psychosis that
creation must be put into relationship. The ego according to Szondi is
represented by the psychotics, i.e. those who have a problem on the level of
the ego.
Mélon
refers to Henri Maldiney (17) who himself was inspired by Wilhelm Worringer
(“Abstraction and Einfühlung,” Klincksieck, 1978). Two axes are set up. The
first relates to the representational facet -- Abstraction -- and the second is centered more on the sensory
facets -- Einfülhung [empathy with,
sensitivity, understanding of] .
The idea of the
opposition between the two axes is a recurring idea in Maldiney because he
opposes the two great forms of art: Abstraction and Einfühlung [Empathy]. These two concepts are drawn from an article
of Worringer that goes back to 1911. k + is the formal position; it is the
position of putting into form [mise en
forme]. k – going in the sense of the destruction of these forms. (Mélon,
18).
The
representational axis is the axis of the factor p while the sensory axis of
putting into form is that of the factor k. We thus lay out the ego vector
according to two axes -- the axis p and k -- each that have two poles: the pole
of l’ipséité [the self, the
individual, I] and that of l’altérité
[the Other, they]. k+ and p+ are the two
positions of each axis for l’ipséité.
p- and k - are the positions that illustrate the pole of l’altérité on the two axes.
[Axe sensorial = sensory axis; Axe représentationnel = representational axis]
On
the axis p, the “I” is in p + and the “they” in p -. His own look at his
representation of self is in p + and the look of the others on his
representation of self is in p-.
It is the
representational axis that relates to an image of oneself according to two
poles: through his own look and that of the Other. With the axis k, it is about the axis of putting into sensory
form. It relates to the sensory baggage according to two poles: that directed
towards oneself and that directed towards the Other.
The
access to the representation passes through the sensory and the emotional. The
sensory makes a lever for the representation. To change representation, it is
necessary to gain access to the sensory lever by a reshaping of one’s senses.
“To play another part, the actor must initially not incarnate the preceding
role anymore.”
With
the two axes we can break up the general schema into four quarters: k + p -, k
+ p +, k - p + and k - p -.
We
think that each quarter constitutes a stage in the course of the creator.
We
can design two aspects according to whether one looks from the point of view of
k + towards p - or that one looks at oneself from the point of view of p - that
looks at k +. We think that the nature from the points of view between these
two positions is sufficiently different “to make them to be considered.”
To
locate the aspect of k + turned
towards p -, the position of R. D. Laing is rather explicit within the framework
of the current of anti-psychiatry to illustrate the point of view of k +
compared to a p-. Indeed, one of its broad topics consists of what the
experience and the behavior considered schizophrenic would represent as a
particular strategy that a person would invent to support an unbearable situation.
But
Maldiney is more categorical to underline the “combat of Titans” that hides
sometimes in the search of l’ipseity
[the self] faced with l’altérité [the Other]:
The delirium is a combat
of the Ego for existence, in order to maintain a certain precession [going
first] of oneself to escape stagnation of its own possibility, delivered to the
helpless supremacy of a destiny of no meaning and to the fatal consciousness
“of being made” and “of being taken”… by another or others or by the altérité anonymity. The effort to be
oneself through a presence in check of oneself is registered in the delirious
language. Undoubtedly one pays attention to the common language. But how could
the common language become the language of a world at the margin of the common
world? How especially the capacity-being of a man threatened in his ipseity [individuality] could he try to
bring into the light of day, in words absolutely his, by means of the concepts
and of the categories of the ordinary language of communication, which is
repugnant, by construction, to the expression of the singular? (Maldiney, 17, p.
65)
To
enter virtuality by detachment makes one dismiss the influence of reality and
the wounds to oneself coming from a world that can harm his world in himself.
The detachment is an invisible barrier that protects the ego by a capitalistic
withdrawal of the libido from one’s objects.
The
aspect of p - turned towards k + is the point of view of the social (p-), and according
to it, the look of k+ is disputed more. Indeed, a free and uncontrolled
activity, controlled by pleasure, is incompatible with an economy based on
saving, self-control and precaution.
It
is here between these two points of view -- that of k + and that of p - -- that
we find a schism in the nature of the viewpoints [des regards] that clash. One of these viewpoints is a judicious
managing that eliminates the conflict:
Any schizophrenia is a psychic
organization ready to last and a defense against the catastrophe. (...) This
psychosis is thus a managing. (Racamier, 25, pp. 50-51)
The
other viewpoint [regard] is that of a
society on an individual who belongs to a system of laws and rules valid for
all.
This
is the passage of the half-circle k - to the half-circle k +. What occurs when
one passes from k - to k +?
One
regresses in relation to the circuit of the ego. One leaves the reality
principle to enter the pleasure principle. Reality leaves the place to the
imagination. The sacrifice of the self is erased to the profit of a
narcissistic position. We pass from the negation of oneself to introjection. We
in turn pass from a centrifugal movement in k - (directed towards the Other and
a distancing in relation to oneself) to a centripetal movement (directed
towards oneself and a distancing in relation to the Other). The center of
“perceptive and sensory gravity” moves from the other towards oneself. A great
movement of internalization is set up. The libido leaves its objects and
invests in the ego. “The ameba retracts its pseudopodes.”
One
passes from a self-critical no to an oppositional no. In k -, the potential
self-destruction nourished in a kind of hate of oneself is transformed into an
omnipotence potential introjecting person of everything and nourished with a
kind of hate for the Other. The hate seems to reinvest what the libido had
abandoned and the libido seems to reinvest what the hate had abandoned.
The
oppositional no person is necessary in this process to preserve his or feelings
and his or her vision of things and to go further in order to perceive another
thing. The oppositional no of k+ (“No!, I do not want to function any more like
that even if two-thirds of the planet does so”) that is in opposition to
something is different from the k – no that criticizes and that negates (“what
I tell you is bragging, pay no attention”), i.e. which denies its own words.
The oppositional no person forms a reaction against something. The
self-critical no deconstructs.
To
be opposed to something that is harmful to us, it is imperative to know to
detect it, to understand it, and to encompass it in order to apply to it the
negation that separates by the uttering of “no.” How to be opposed to what does
not have a form, a face, a trace? Without this recognition, there is no opposition.
Very
often, we have only a mixed intuition mitigated rather than a full and solid
recognition that directs our course. The stage that consists in transforming
this vague intuition into an effective and certain recognition of what can harm
our identity is by far the most difficult stage to cross. All the procedure of
the creative act will consist in capturing by means of putting it into form, through
color and in words that of which one had the intuition.
While
thus passing from k- to k+, one passes from an anti-creative reaction to a
pro-creative reaction. Indeed, the attachment to the Other yields its place
with the detachment. For the k+, the Other tends to virtuality [that which is not realized; that which does
not have actual effect; potential existence]. This contamination of this
virtual facet suitable for the detachment will also invade the rules and
conventions of the Other. The law of the Other tends to become invisible.
Questions appear and will fit in relational cement with the Other and, like the
roots of the trees, these questions will fissure and tear apart the relation
with the Other until the “block of stone breaks into pieces under the pressure
of the roots.” The questions abound and the answers tend to being more precise
and also more distinct; certain questions obtain answers that will not any more
be called into question: choices are made. After a string of questions and
answers, the view [le regard] toward
things changes; the interest given to things changes. Then, a new viewpoint [regard] appears; it has came silently.
k-
tends to render virtual the world of the individual in his fantasy and
narcissistic realm and to give a feeling of reality to what relates to the
world of others. k+ does the reverse; it makes virtual the Other and what
relates to it and it gives a feeling of reality to his own imagination. With k
+, the senses and perception are quasi educated to take only into account what
interests the creator, the rest holds on to that which it is: remains.
The
“break” could be defined as the discontinuity of the participation and as a crisis
in the object relation.
We
observe in the personal history of the creators during their youth the fact
that they felt in their relation with the Other a negation of what they were.
They would have undergone the look of extinction, the look of Gorgon. If the
persons who denied them were the most important, then the interior blow is
unspeakable. As Corneille said, the more the offender is beloved, the greater
is the offense.
We
will let the words of Alberoni (1, pp. 118-119) describe for us what each one
of us perhaps can most fear in one’s life.
Little by little, in
order to no more desire the person whom he has loved, he will have to find in
himself the reasons to release himself from this love and he will have to seek
to rebuild what he has experienced, investing with hate for all that was. By
the hate he will try to destroy the past. (...) He must achieve the absolute
transgression that consists in destroying what is the base of any value and of
any hope. Then, all desire abandons it and the ego, which has lost its
ontological dimension, is pushed back into the universe of appearances. Nothing
has any more value and nothing does not any more have meanings. To act, he can
only copy the gestures of the others, the everyday gestures such as he sees
them and repeat what he knows to prove feelings that he had learned and to
pronounce words emptied of their contents; it is petrification. The only true, deep feeling that he has experienced,
marked from the painful stamp of authenticity, is nostalgia, the nostalgia of a lost reality. And to deny oneself
nostalgia, one is constrained to fight with the past, to feed in oneself
resentment and hate. He had known the good, the being who says yes; the bad,
then, was only not to be. Now he must build
the bad as being, the being who says no, the bad like the power of the negative.
The
“being who says no,” because to say yes would be to disappear. Energy deployed
to create resembles to be mistaken there with these colossal energies that are
sourced in total despair and in vital urgency, when imagination starts to
imagine its own scenarios of destruction.
Nobody knows where a
point of no return is. The only signs are an interior revolt, a despair, an
anticipation -- sometimes for a few hours -- of petrification. (Alberoni, 1, p.
136)
When
the countdown started, the point of no return was in front of one, then like a
last mischievousness, a “playful” jump, one diverts the energy of the urgency
into a project that will crystallize what remains of his own forces. The hate
is always a good adviser in these moments. Hate as the “ultimate essential
reaction.”
This
extract locates how the hate can be essential for leaving the petrification.
Georges
near the age of four was abandoned by his parents who “could not care for him
any more.” Jean-Marie was a teenager disjointed in relation to his environment,
he was stared at and he stared at “the people there” at thirteen; he knew that
he would leave his social environment because he did not feel any more at home
there. Violence was usual for him by several methods going up to the most
subtle: blackmail of a mother with death. Jeanne also knows violence, struck by
her father for not having obtained 80% (she had obtained 79%) at school; she
remembers another incident: having been pursued by her father with an axe in
his hand, she took refuge in a church. JP had been in prison and had known the
deep malaise of believing in values that society hid. Joseph was struck with
poliomyelitis in
Zénon
d'Elée was rather in the norm, a boy who followed the others and who did not
feel the necessity of a creative course. Little before being registered at the
university, he went to find his father to inform him of his decision. For him,
this was a big step since the shock of the divorce of his parents had left him
confused. Arrived at the home of his father, he speaks about his decision and
at this point in time his father, speaking to him with the warmth of a
benevolent father, says to him that he is absolutely not capable to do higher
learning and who even advises him -- benevolent council -- “to give up all
these ideas that are not made for you.” It is shortly after that Zénon felt
profound shock; his father had not paid attention. A few years afterwards,
Zénon had wolfed down book after book and had found himself with a first
license [bachelor degree] at a university. Since this conversation with his
father his internal search became a necessity for him. All his world was shaken.
These
elements underline the shock and the violence that expels the creator from his
old world.
At
the beginning, the question then is in the relation with the Other: to be or
not to be? Afterwards, following more wisdom, the question becomes: how not to
be in order to be? That is, how to reconcile the negation of oneself in relation
with the Other in order to exist with this other? What in oneself cannot be
modified and what in oneself can be? The answer is to know oneself and creation
is a path among the others.
The rage while being situated in a reflexive
process that engulfs becomes a “tool.” A rage for the rage is sterile because
not workable. Hate is a powerful factor of individualization. To discover the
object in the hate creates a state in a process of the emergence of one’s own
perception without which there would not be an I.
Let us see in what way hate is “productive of an
altérité [an Other]” according to the
expression of Jean Baudrillard.
“I hate” and this hate
does not have an object; there is a passion without an object. It is as if “I express”
or “I assume.” It is the kind of expression where the words creates themselves.
They are formulated in the first person, but the object has disappeared. The
hate is a subject without an object that speaks. (...) The hate is perhaps
something that remains and that survives any definable object. (...) The
hate remains an energy that lives on with all definable objects. The hate
remains an energy, even if it is negative or reactionary. The hate
belongs to this paradigm of a reactionary and reparational passion: I reject, I
do not want any of it, I will not enter into the consensus. That is not
negotiated; that can not be reconciled. (Baudrillard, 6, p. 20)
Indeed,
“I have hate,” and it is like a kind of final capital. But there is
nevertheless a kind of altérité
[otherness], somebody opposite, that can be always negotiated with in one way
or another.
Returning
from
The aboriginals --
anthropological extreme, but revealing -- have kinds of visceral and deep denial
of what we can represent and of what we can be. As if these people had also
hatred. There is something of the irremediable and of the irreducible. One will
be able to lavish all the universal charity on them of which we are capable,
trying to understand them and to love them; there is in them a kind of radical altérité [otherness] that does not want
to be understood and that will never be. (Baudrillard, 6, p. 21)
The
hate described here is not comparable to the hate of the classes according to
Baudrillard. The hate of classes is different:
This hatred had an
objective; it could be theorized and this has been done. It was formulated, it
had a possible action, and it bore a historical and social action. It had a
subject, the proletariat, structures, the classes, contradictions.
(Baudrillard, 6, p. 21)
According
to Baudrillard, the communication, while becoming universal, was accompanied by
a fantastic loss of the altérité [otherness]. There is no more other. Perhaps
that people seek a radical altérité,
and the best way of revealing it, as exorcizing it is perhaps the hate,
desperate forms of production of the Other. In these meanings, the hate would
be a passion in the form of provocation and challenge. The hate is something
strong; it must provoke a poignant adversity….
The
hate would be also the violent reaction to the fact that there is no solution
and that there is no possible resolution of all the problems that history had
posed.
That which remains of
the energy would be reversed into a negative passion, a rejection, a repulsion.
The identity today is in the rejection; it hardly has any more a positive
foundation. It does not remain any more but with the anti-determiner by the
expulsion of the other rather than by relation or emotional dialectical with
him. (Baudrillard, 6, p. 22)
But
Baudrillard goes further: he embeds hate in the human species as a reaction of
life deeply engraved in us.
Perhaps the hate is
vital, vital in the sense that if you do not have any more an enemy, an
adversity, an antagonism, at least virtual, it is the worst that can happen.
Remove from a species its natural predators, and it destroys itself. There is a
vital transformation, a kind of balance that implies that there is an other,
and a malicious other, an enemy. If one does not have to defend oneself any
more, one ends up destroying oneself. This is what I called depredation, depredation in the sense that one is deprived of predators. Hate is
perhaps also an ultimate vital reaction. (...) There is a residue that is
not treated because it is not treatable; it becomes inevitably residual and
negative, and changes naturally into hate. (Baudrillard, 6, p. 23)
It is, we think, this force that is underlying
the creative course. We think we are able to locate it in k + in partnership
with e -. This hate appears in the profiles when the creator is opposed in his
search often in relation to concerns coming from the other persons. On the
other hand, when he can give himself to creation, the hate seems “consumed” by
the process. We even think that the hate can take the face of d +! which, in
the case of Anne, would mean: “I cannot hate the others without my being made
to feel guilty; then I transfigure the hate by an intense search that
unceasingly cuts the ties that are created.” We will try to clear up this last
point in the analysis of the results.
The
qualitative jump of no of the catatonia in its negative aspect (k-) into its
positive aspect (k+) that passes from critical no to oppositional no is also a
passage from an anti-creative position to a creative position.
The
idea would be that the oppositional no person realigns the individual if he is
associated with a center of p + gravity that enables him to enter into
creation. The emotional engine that gives this coherence and this cement of the
person vis-à-vis the world would be the hate. Hate as the ultimate generating
vital reaction of the altérité
[otherness]. The enemy is in front of oneself and no more in oneself; the
“combat” can start.
If
participation originates in fusion with the Other, the stage of
pre-subject--pre-object, the relation mother-child; then, the break [la faille] considered as a rupture of the
projection-participation is a process that originates in the separation of the
mother with the child.
If
we take as established the psychoanalytical fact that stipulates a desire of
returning to the origins, to the womb of the mother, in a world without
tension, of total plenitude; we can consider without too much digression that
the incestuous desire is one of the principal methods of this desire of
returning to the origins.
The
break [la faille] becomes thus the reactualization of the non-participation
and, to extrapolate, it is also non-satisfaction of the incestuous desire in
reality and the incompleteness that will follow from this. We wish to state
that the break [la faille] would be
the total impossibility of being able to
satisfy in reality the greatest and most powerful of our unconscious desires:
the desire for union with one’s origin.
The
creators say no, they react against. This would be a symbolic murder of the
father because of saying “no” to the others. However, reason, the law (of the
others) is inscribed in the figure of the father.
To create is always in a
certain way to kill somebody, the killing being facilitated if this somebody
has just died because one can kill him or her with less feeling of guilt. One
of the largest internal obstacles to creation remains indeed culpability. (...)
The creative course, let us repeat, is not unequivocal: according to the types
of geniuses, or productive times, to create, for them, consists in killing
symbolically a death person and, for others, in killing symbolically the
living. (Anzieu, 3, p. 10)
The
culpability of the creators is strong and as Michel Mathieu stressed it (3, pp.
104-105):
This culpability is
attached to the fantasy act that the creator perpetrates on the person of the
father: a symbolic murder. As through the symbolic murder of the father, it is
the question of the Oedipal identification that is in play -- here am I --
indeed, at the heart of the problem. (...) The sudden appearance of the
creative energy would aim at surpassing the father, replacing the investment of
the object by a transformation, total or partial, of oneself.
Michel
Mathieu (3, p.112) goes further in proclaiming that:
For Freud, the artist
kills the father symbolically; he becomes through that a recognized hero of the
public.
Classically,
the murder of the father is a matter of affects initially. If this should be
located in some part in the Szondian schema, it is from the side of e -. It is
initially an affect. The idea of the murder of the father is generated by the
fact that there is an obstacle that, suddenly, emerges on the path of the
realization of the desire. The father is the object of hate only because he
comes to interpose.
The
conception of Chasseguet-Smirgel starts from a Freudian conception of the
artist as an anarchist who refuses the law and who refuses to be subjected to
the common law. He does not want to be k - because to be k - would be like
saying one accepts the common reason.
This
is the title of an article of Eric Clémens on the thought of Max Loreau entitled
“La genèse des phénomènes” [The Genesis of Phenomena] in the editions of
Minuit,
Max
Loreau is located in the phenomenological tradition all while introducing a
conception that tends to put him “at the end point” of phenomenological thought.
Undoubtedly, his thought
tends towards the phenomenon, of which he inflects already appearance as
innate, but his stand is reinforced with what this genesis cannot have a place,
for philosophy itself is in a logical fiction…. (Clémens, 10, p. 78)
According
to Clémens, Loreau thinks of phenomenon as formation, history, appearance,
becoming -- but excluding of any form, of any end, of all views or all givens
and of any presence or any appropriation.
Besides to determine always
comes back to deny or to deprive, a venerable philosophical story, and to deny
a determination and to deny a negation does not make change of course. The
rigorous criticism that leads Loreau faced with any negative ontology [in
philosophy, the nature of reality], all “retreats,” any regressive or
destructive method (...) appears to me logically unanswerable. It follows
from that that another thought can only be itself a beginning in order to think
the beginning, the genesis, the emergence. If necessary to be specific it is
not in any case the search for a point of origin that would be the oldest, but
well its requirement is to be itself a movement of birth and origination?
(Clémens, 10, p. 79)
Thus,
according to Clémens, the method of Loreau is based on a logical criticism that
requires that what is rejected does not serve for negative reference and does
not dictate with a wrong side what will be the progressive thought; it calls on
the contrary, in any consequence, with the pure and simple disappearance of
what it criticizes.
In short, it passes
logically and methodically from the criticism of logic to the genetic fiction.
Better: since the logical consequence of criticism is the requirement of
nothing of the presupposed, of the given view and of denial-reversed, it
obliges with the creation and with the original shaping, which can be said only
to be like fiction, since nothing of the original imagination, but without ever
giving up the rigor: what makes a philosophical fiction of it. (Clémens, 10, p.
80)
The
question is not: is there or is not there a world? but: how does it emerge?
The genesis is at the
same time splitting and formation. The question becomes consequently: what made
at the same time the irruption and the formation -- and of what kind can it be
as anterior to oneself? Neither things, nor even bodies, nothing else than the
words, which are nothing before being uttered. It is not a question to say that
before the genesis there is nothing: before the genesis there is nothing to
say. But it is a question of saying the genesis that is nothing and can be only
nothing. However, from a different point of view, the word is never given, it
is a movement of becoming: the genesis is rightly the genesis of the word --
first approach of fiction. Not in the sense of the utterance, but the word as
“dissidence” or “discordance” whose rupture involves another relation to the
language that is the given, constituted, determined language. (Clémens, 10, p.
83)
According
to Clémens, when the word is not folded back on an already-seen or
already-heard, it does not belong to what is visible, it carries in it an other
element that occurs in the visible one. The word breaks the continuity of the
visible and the unity of the view and of the seen, the only way of establishing
the contact with the visible. In the uttering, it makes itself heard, it is
“hearing” that means to move away to within oneself, to lay out and
consequently produce a gap in the visible without which this one would not be
seen: “for the procession of the sight, one needs a view of the view that
interrupts and discerns” (Clémens, 10, p. 83).
This double differenced,
in the utterance and the vision, introduced a double fiction by a double
contact: the utterance causes a contact with the visible that involves a
contact of visible with itself. And this double contact is entirely imaginary;
it is a fiction of feeling and logos [the
word: in Plato: the god of ideas]
that forms what one could call the unlimited body of fundamental imagination.
All separations -- of sight and other meanings like front and back -- formative
of the body born from there and do not cease being born: the fiction is the
perpetual change without which no phenomenon appears. (Clémens, 10, p. 83)
The
fiction is thus according to Loreau the infinite self-becoming [l’auto-avènement] of the logos of the
body. But how does this rupture made its formation? How does the dissidence of
the word become fiction? How doesn't it
remain with this yawning abyss and with chaos open between front and back and
seeing and not-seeing?
The logos, the occurring
word, the utterance takes place only on the mode of “as if”: the thought makes as if the logos were not yet, although
it makes use of it. It is the same condition so that anything new and inventive
emerges there. This implies that the word does not answer to any end and to any
determination, therefore it can only appear “gaping chaos” that it opens. But
at the same time, it opens itself, it is placed outside itself, it is made
logos of logos -- thus relation and first formation. (Clémens, 10, p. 84)
The rupture produces the
discrepancy that by the distance from oneself with oneself operates a returning
where the difference becomes a formative relation: such is the essence of the
genesis and its fiction.
The
formation is indeed a view, but a doubled view, a view of the view (from a
distance), a view imagined originally by the word that frees itself and
clarifies itself.
Only the cry, the
utterance of the inhuman, which does not say anything, but which draws aside
from itself and deviates from itself, can make a return on oneself and
understand what it is, to address oneself to oneself -- to become oneself, to
become human. (...) If the fiction is indeed
the self-construction of the beginning, the logos of the logos is the
fiction since in it “the logos is the fiction of the logos. (...) The fiction
is rolling up on oneself of the logos, through this “fiction of oneself,”
“self-construction of the logos.” (Clémens, 10, p. 85)
The
fiction is recounted in two times. Initially, logos of the moment is a dazzling
rip and cry that hollows the vacuum. Then, it can continue only in the vacuum
thus created, that to traverse it and to be discovered there by discovering it,
to be logos of logos whose movement of differentiation generates phenomenality.
“Only, the instantaneous effect operates for establishment of the logos among
the phenomena of the world.” (Clémens, 10, p.85)
… to think becomes to be
born, give birth to, to think is the fiction of birth where the being and the
thought, the phenomenon and the saying appearing as co-births. Always
threatened by indifference and death, the fiction is the infinite birth of the
difference, of the body, of the language, of the world of the man who is
finished only for infinity. (Clémens, 10, p. 86)
Each
person has a logos that constitutes the collection of lived experiences, the
collection of the ideas to which this person adheres, the theoretical base on
which each one performs one’s choices in life, which gives meanings to the
actions that we carry out in our life.
The
break [La faille] could be
conceptualized as the rupture of the logos and the rupture of the continuity of
the logos. New logos, if all goes well, will install itself, i.e. the logos of
the logos. More precisely, logos of his old logos, like a view of the old view.
It is henceforth a question of seeing oneself seeing the things, to see oneself
understanding the things. The new logos is in a “méta” [in between] position
compared to the old logos.
This
logos of the logos will be built gradually. The essence of what one lived is
altered in a new logos. The passage of old to new would be this fissure [faille] where the elements are suspended
in the course of the things by the thought.
The
logos is generally a collection of representations. Those calibrate perceptions
so that they agree with the image of oneself that one wants to promote. To find
a new logos then requires an altering of its representations. This is possible
if one’s sensibility allows the construction of such representations. What
wants to be expressed in order to nourish the new representations is
undoubtedly necessary to reconfigure one’s own perceptive capture as its
putting into form in a design different from the old way.
The
break [La faille] would be this
experience-limit that inexorably leads us to detach ourselves from to what we
were attached, with this logos previous to the break. The break makes a
distance of oneself to oneself.
In
the uttered word, we find, according to Max Loreau, this view of the view. This
star-like distance of the visible that becomes perceptible through an outside
thanks to the word.
The
break ejects us from our logos and the load-bearing word leads us towards a
precession [going first] of saving oneself in the act of uttering its new
logos. When this is made a body, representations, and finally a new image of
oneself, we will have found an identity.
To
say to oneself: “I would like to be such or such a thing” or “I will manage to
achieve my goal” or “I was this way, but henceforth I will not let myself any
more be like that”; this leads to a relation to oneself by means of a word that
expresses a self in the state of becoming. This self in the state of becoming is in filiation with the subject
that states the “I” of discourse, but this self anticipated and uttered in the
word is a self that carries the mark of an altérité
[otherness]. This altérité results
owing to the fact that the object of the discourse is a self that one has
constructed, it is a self that does not exist yet. Its altérité [otherness] rests on the concept that the I of the
discourse is offered towards an image of a self that will be integrated in a
reflexive relation with oneself. But it is initially necessary to consolidate
this image in a formation. This I who is the object of the discourse is not
accessible as I-reflexive but as an I-image anticipated from oneself in a
creative fiction of oneself.
Let
us see in what Henri Maldiney detects the altérité
[otherness] registered in the object of creation (17, p. 62):
What Schelling called
“the objectivity” of the work and that is -- more radically -- its reality, is
imposed on us, like any reality, in a meeting. Any meeting is meeting of
another, of an altérité [otherness].
(...) But the altérité [the other] of
the work of art, in its radiant and fetching manifestation, has this of the
specific and the paradoxical that it is a transparent
altérité [otherness], and not opaque like that of the thing. (...) The characteristic
of esthetic perception is not to be intentional. Structures constitutive of our
presence with it and, through it, all -- beginning with our driving space --
are the same structures of the work. Our opening to the work is a co-presence
at the foundation of participation. It blames directly the question indivisibly
ontological and ethics which is most fundamental of existence -- that of the
relation of l’ipséité* and l’altérité [the Other]. [*l’ipséité: oneself; in philosophy: that
which makes a being oneself and not the other]
Thus,
this word between oneself and a “self becoming” makes it possible to create a
relation with oneself. This precession* of oneself allows an exchange between
two entities: that which express the movement to being and that which is the
object of this movement. It inscribes between oneself and oneself a specular
relation with oneself. Indeed, it is “I-reflexive” that creates and anticipates
another I and to anticipate it creates an “I-image” as when we look at ourselves
in a mirror: I see in the mirror an image of myself that I can use to guide
myself. It is in this sense that the word can make emerge a specular relation
with oneself. At the same time, this word installs between oneself and oneself
a real exchange that makes it possible for I-reflexive to occur of itself
because this word prevents, in the best case, from closing itself with oneself
in a mental autarky that does not evolve any more -- being satisfied with
itself. [*precession: a movement of a
rotating body that -- from the exertion of two bodies – proceeds on its course]
This
word puts a distance between oneself and oneself and by doing this, it
registers a fissure [une faille] in
our unity. To accept this incompleteness that pushes us with going towards others
opens in us the possibility of changing. But, for that to occur, it is
necessary to accept this fissure of our unity in order to have the required
time to pass through the transition between what I am now and what I will be
afterwards.
This
incompleteness is basically intrinsic to the movement of the desire. The
thought of Lacan tends in this sense; listen to one of his disciples (Nasio,
23, p. 52).
Where the desire does
not achieve its goal, I want to say where the desire fails, a positive creation
emerges, a creative act is constituted.
The
desire rests on a lack of something, it aims the spirit towards something. It
is concomitant of this fissure [faille]
in us. We could even dare to add that without this fissure [faille], there is no desire.
For this reason Lacan
characterized the desire hysterical and, therefore, any desire as fundamentally
dissatisfied, since it is never realized fully; it is realized only with
fantasies and through symptoms. It seems important to me to stress this always
dissatisfied character of the desire. (Nasio, 23, p. 49)
It
is in the sense that the most powerful unconscious desire, the incestuous
desire, the desire for returning to the origin is generated by an insuperable
break [faille] and that could be
formulated as follows: “If I exist as a differentiated being, it is because I
am the movement that separates me from my origins, i.e. the point where all
turns over towards the lack of differentiation.” In other words, the break [la faille] is not the result of the
omnipotence of the incestuous desire. According to Lacan, any desire diverts
this fundamental tension into multiples of small wishing tensions.
Therefore,
where the word -- a word of the exchange with an altérité is registered in oneself or in the other -- stops, the
precession of oneself grows blurred. There is no more opening in anticipation
of one’s own being.
To
abolish the indivisible space between the desire for a return to the origin and
its satisfaction is to become again fetal. To maintain this indivisible space
is to register in our being the rupture [faille]
of the desire; it is to maintain the impetus of the desire, i.e. the movement
tending towards others and things.
To
bear one’s fault [faille] is to carry
one’s destiny-choice as a differentiated being who moves away, the heart in the
soul, of the lack of differentiation of the beginnings where time was folded up
in only one movement.
Henri
Maldiney (17, p.61) allows us to make the connection with the Szondian system.
Let us leave the last word to him:
The ego “pontifex oppositorum,” builder and
promoter of bridges between opposites, builds initially its own interior
bridge. The first break [faille] that
it has to cross and on which all the others depend is that which it is. It
constitutes a line of fracture and division corresponding to the diffraction of
the Ego according to two plans of presence: that of the analysis of the destiny
named destiny-constraint and destiny-choice. According to the first the ego is
only drive, i.e. nature. According to the second it only exists in a strict and
full sense of the word: it exists to anticipate itself through its instinctual
constitution that it goes beyond all the possibilities that open in itself in
this precession of oneself. It is starting from this issue that it originates.
(...) Whether it crosses the break or not, it gives a meaning to the break [la faille]: a meaning of direction from
nature to freedom.
This
word of the destiny-choice will be load-bearing if it remains and if it is
registered and materializes into a putting into form. This capture of this word
injects in it a materiality and a density that makes it pass imperceptibly into
the concrete.
So
that this word destiny-choice takes
shape, it needs a “body” articulated according to written words, words uttered
again and again, gestures, movements, colors, forms…. This “plastic” facet
(Roget definition: Who has the capacity to give form) of the creative word is
the mark of his furrow in the mental.
The
anchoring of the new logos (which has its source in the word uttered in the
precession of oneself in the place known as the fault [la faille]) in reality thus behaves as a plastic stage.
It (the work of art)
only exists to cross the fault [la faille]
that it opens in itself, while realizing, in the evidence of its appearance,
the impossible passage of freedom to nature. (...) It requires and exceeds the
operation that produces it. This is an act of freedom. However the work is
presented as a “objectivity” that goes beyond the subjective side of the
conscious and free activity. We can follow indeed in it the paths of its
creation. (Maldiney, 17, p. 61)
If
our life is of a “distracting” continuity, it is not very favorable to creation
because the motivation to find a logos is not felt because the actual logos
fulfills its role well. The persons who enter into creation very often do not
have a choice. They feel badly at ease and do not find their center of
existential gravity within the model recommended and developed by their
society. If they want to continue to function as they wish it, they must
reinvent a new logos that will become their personal myth.
The
fault [La faille] would take its
place as the solution of continuity between the basic look [le regard basal] and the look of the
look [le regard du regard], the
passage from the inside of a system towards the outside of this system. The
basic look can be described as the participative look; it is a look inside the
things and that tends clearly not to break away from this thing. The look of
the look is a perception on this first perception: that tends “to break” the
participation.
If
the “I” of the creative discourse and of the creative fiction is an “I” that
takes its essence in the looking at the participative looking, it can be only
in p+. The creative fiction being either with a participative looking (p-) or
with a self-constitutional looking (p+). On the other hand, the root and the
source of the creative intuition can be only in the “flux of the world” and in
the universe as containing all our individualities, i.e. in p -. The trajectory
of creation is consequently that which goes from the root to “I” thinking about
its root. From the material to the abstract, a vast movement of making a distance
is organized in order to make emerge the human thought bearing the “spirit of
creation.”
From
the fetus to the psychoanalyst man, the thought procreates his trajectory in
order better to play “the Play of Creation,” a play that consists in surpassing
oneself more and more and whose finality consists in knowing the program that
makes us function so as to push still further. The destiny-choice is perhaps to
arrive at the point of his program in order to create the continuation. All art
to create would then consist in not entering a dead end, i.e. to repeat
indefinitely the same thing.
This
is a profile “outside the course” of Anne, dated 7/28/95. She says herself that
she is attracted by fusion and she fights against it. Concretely, that means
for her that she is in “lack of the Other” and that she wants to plunge into it
and to forget her personal search. She feels bad. She presents symptoms as a
“swelling” in the throat and of esophagi-gastric acidity; she has been anorexic
for a few days. She tends to drink many beers and to leave in debt at bars
strongly attended by a multitude of people wanting to have fun.
She
presents an ego k + p -. Her comments summarizes the situation: “I have
brilliant ideas for my dissertation,” [k+] and she adds “but I am afraid that
they will not be accepted within the framework of the academic view.” (p -).
profile: Av = h -! s 0 e ± hy ± k 0
p 0 d + m -
Ar =
h 0 s ± e 0 hy 0 k +! p -! d + m ±
[Av
= Foreground; Ar = Background [E.K.P., not Th.K.P.]
We
can schematize her profile like this:
From
the start, we see with the foreground, an “empty” ego in Sch and the affects in
P in a “catastrophe” position: all the positions are present as if facing a threat.
By
referring to the positions on the cross, we see a tugging between a specular
reference in the glance of the other (p -!) that is at this time the only
judge; and, a secondarily in k +! that pushes strongly for a strictly private
use of her senses and her perceptions for the capture of a representation that
is alas personal, i.e. situated in k +. It is thus incompatible for Anne to
accept this personal assumption without calling in question this viewpoint [regard] of the Other.
However,
on the side of the affects is indecision, a superego faced side by side with
the hate. Indeed, the superego e+ hy- and the hate not censured e- hy + are
both present in e± hy±. The affects are not for her a great use to slice
through this situation because they say yes and no. What to do: to act or to
submit? The same thing is the blocking in the questioning situated in the
ambivalence in factor s.
The
question is: aren't these brilliant ideas too “disturbing” in one way or
another for ethics and the viewpoint of the Other, specifically the university
and its famous requirements? Finally, one can pose the question: what am I
worth? My ideas that I believe brilliant are they indeed brilliant? It is in
these remote regions where one feels pushed to one side and repulsed from the
other side that the choice is imposed especially when the stake is high. How to
choose?
It
is at this crossroads that the affects can slice through and decide between
those that are accepted and those that are denied in order to leave the place
to the viewpoint of the Other whatever be their reason.
What
affect can slice through the situation? The answer is the hate that says no to
the other and strengthens one’s own being in the defensive in order to preserve
what the individual regards as essential. The productive hate for the l’altérité as Bachelard puts it.
Or
then in fact the superego says “drop it, the stake is not worth a candle.”
However, precisely with Anne, who has a rather powerful superego that makes her
feel guilty and that prevents her from yielding to her hate, this affect that
could help her not to waste time while being blocked. Indeed, she does not want
to let go of her ideas, but she does not know how to do it. She knows herself
to be subjected to the influence of her superego: “Each time I was aggressive
with somebody, I must repair even for my animals tricks; then, I say the things
with the smile. That sticks!”.
It
is the choice between keeping silent under the common viewpoint [regard] and to be “afraid” of it and the
fact of assuming one’s being, one’s sensory style, one’s viewpoint [regard] and one’s destiny. The second solution requires one to negotiate
with one’s superego, to activate less social affects, in short, to make in some
part a symbolic murder of an important person in her eyes and of her substitutes.
This
is an illustration of what we call the fault [la faille], i.e. the moment when the participation with the other
is called into question in important existential realms. The others have some
part in us and imprint a “Northern” direction. But in one’s soul and
conscience, the individual knows at the same time as to what one feels as one’s
own being calls it in a “Southern” direction. One must choose because the two tendencies
are strong and fight to take “its share of the cake.” It is all the psychic
economy that seems to us at play in these moments.
To
pass the fault [la faille] is “to
lose much” and “to gain enormously”
because henceforth, there are two points of view: that of the others and yours.
To choose a point of view gives the sense of a trajectory. In the case of one’s
own point of view, it is the trajectory of the differentiation of the Other in
oneself and of the distance in relation to the Other in order to come closer to
oneself. It is a trajectory that tends towards creation.
Bateson
states that at the base of the perceptive act itself, there is a difference. To
perceive is to see a difference. To perceive something mental, it is necessary
to bring about a difference within one’s own self. We will reconsider this
facet amply when we speak about the sensory and perceptive capture.
By
doing this we redouble ourselves in the act even of perceiving, i.e. to perceive
that which one wants to distance from oneself as being different henceforth
from oneself while still forming part of oneself. All this stresses the great
importance of a reappropriation of what one wants to be within one’s self.
One of the functions of
k + would be the reappropriation of its mental fields by a distancing
(withdrawal of investment from what makes an obstacle) that is expressed by the
oppositional no to what tends to limit and to close our possibility of
imagination’s expansion. That would mean the negation of the negation of k -,
oppositional no distancing itself from the self-criticism no, k + denies k -.
This
is also to enter a “narcissistic field.”
It
seems preferable to us to speak about a narcissistic relation to oneself within
the meaning of a specular relation with oneself rather than to speak about
narcissism and about a narcissistic structure. Jean Mélon (18) thinks that “the
work, be it plastic or literary, has always something to be seen as the image
of the body. Therefore, whoever builds his house, builds it according to his
image of the body, but there are obviously people who do not invest like that.
But if one is invested, one builds it with the image of the body.”
To
speak about a relation induces the idea of a distance to oneself. Jean Mélon
(18) thinks:
“that
there are several narcissisms and that this narcissism k + is a narcissism of
form and thus that returns us to the first form that is the image of the body.
To put into form is always to find again the jubilation that Lacan evokes in
connection with the mirror stage; it is the same jubilation in front of the
work of art; the artist is a little like a father who would abandon his children.”
We
will try to question the relation between the perception and the world of
senses. We will base our ideas on the thesis of Etienne Dessoy (11, pp.
293-301) who allows us to enter clearly the world of the senses according to
Erwing Straus, “Le sens des sens. Contribution à l’étude des fondements de la
psychologie” [The Meanings of the Senses. Contribution to the Study of
the Basics of Psychology] (29).
If
fusion is tested in the world of the senses and that perception detaches the
look [le regard] from its object of
perception, this detachment is a rupture in the link that plunges us within the
senses. How is that possible since we bathe continuously in this sensory bath?
Dessoy
(11, p. 293) answers that:
Perceptions are produced
by a going beyond the perspective link defined by each particular point of view
and by a going beyond of the horizon of the landscape. In other words,
perceptions can appear only while being temporarily released from the senses.
Straus insists on this necessity of a jump or a rupture with the senses in
order to reach perceiving. He stresses that if perception is an objective
knowledge, it is only on the condition that perception is sensory perception
and the determination of the sensory impression. But he warns us: this
determination is not an actual “fusion of impression” and lasting because in
the process of determination, the immediate character of the sensory impression
is sacrificed; it is in this meaning that it should be understood that by
showing something, we break the horizon of the sensory experience and we enter
a new world.
Dessoy
quotes E. Straus (29, p. 531):
Perception is not a
simple summary, a simple repetition of the impressions of the world of
sensation. It is not the summary of a process of comparison and
differentiation; only the rupture of the horizon of the sensory experience
makes possible the comparison and the determination.
E.
Straus insists on the fact of differentiating the sensation of perceiving and
on the fact of not making the perceived an entity that would synthesize or
would summarize the sensation. For him, to sense can appear in no manner as a
prefiguration or a primitive form of perceiving. It makes of sensing a world
“with full membership.”
“Perception is a
reflexive process.” Straus stresses that the word perception has also a reflexive significance, in the act of
perceiving, “I stop the closed-circuit current of sensation in order to orient
myself towards the object, but also towards myself.
At
the same time, if the object is taken as one “in oneself,” the look [le regard] that we put in our perception
of the object can also be to it taken as one “in oneself.” From there is born
the idea of a look on a look [un regard
sur un regard].
By
doing this, the object of perception does not any more concern the subject,
and, in fact, this object does not any more prevent the subject from being
detached from its object.
It
is the distinctive feature of the participative look [regard] to consolidate on the same base that which looks at and the
looked-at thing, i.e. that makes the subject to participate in the inside of
the looked-at thing, which makes it possible to form a unit with the looked-at
thing. The prototypic example of this participative look is the look of the
baby with respect to its mother. The amorous look in him is obvious to
understand as this type of look makes us “stick” to the looked-at thing without
possibility of emerging from the inside of this sensation. It is a look that
tends to the lack of differentiation. Without a difference, there is no separation.
The
manner of being in the sensation falls under a ceaseless communication between
the subject and the object where it becomes almost impossible to divide the two
entities in as much the world of sensation obliges the “subject” to form a unit
with its “object.” Dessoy speaks about pre-subject in the world of sensation.
On
the other hand, it is exactly the reverse of this participative look that
occurs in the look that pursues the trajectory of the creative process. The
basic logical movement of this trajectory is, according to us, the distancing.
The distancing is finalized in the process itself. That means that the process
sets in motion itself -- it is in its nature -- the distancing. It is expressed
in the principle of differentiation: the difference as indivisible distance.
On
this trajectory is a passage that corresponds to an exiting of the world of
sensation via the perceptive act. In “detaching” the look of the subject placed
in the pre-subject in the world of sensation, the perception “strikes” [sidère] the world of sensation and makes
occur the source of this look as a subject.
It
is not esoteric to postulate at this time the establishment of what we could
call “a perceptive interiorized center of gravity” that imprints with
perception a center of which operates its original filiation. It is the
participation with the other that is destroyed in the sense where it revolves
around a center of gravity located in the relational interval or inside of the
bond of sensation that ties the looking to the looked-at thing. The passage
from sensation to perception would be reducible to the displacement of the
center of gravity of our being to the world in us, i.e. apart from this interval.
In these senses, the rupture of the contact is a
push towards objective differentiation to the condition that the person does
not cease reconnecting. On the contrary, the fusional contact imposes the lack
of differentiation…. (Dessoy, 11, p. 301)
In
the passage between sensation and perception, the position m + -- especially if
it is associated with p - -- is that which is consistent with sensation, in the
inside of the look that participates, the look that tends to the lack of
differentiation. It is the look that cancels the differences. Its existential
center of gravity is located in the interval.
The
position m - assumes the rupture of the contact with the world of sensation
especially if it is associated with a p+. The position m - is registered
consequently apart from the participation, in the look that tends to
differentiation, therefore, that tends to make emerge differences. Its
existential center of gravity is interiorized. As a rupture of the horizon of
the sensory experience, it is a position favorable to the establishment of
perception.
If
you are followed by a wandering dog that will not stop following you in spite
of your efforts to dissuade it from following you and if you cannot detach it
from you, you are then obliged “once and for all to strike” [sidérer] this dog by showing him once
and for all your clear intention in this connection by a kick, a cry, a
throwing of an object, etc. By doing this the dog “is focused” on you as a
subject and stops following you. Consequently, between you two, a distance is
created, a distance that would not have been possible if the dog had stuck all
along the way with you.
This
is a little like the same thing on the level of perception. To make visible an
object of perception, it is necessary initially a striking [sidérer], give it a contour, a limit, a
seizable form by the senses,…. Once this sideration is established, perception
can consequently be unblocked and can place an external look at this object
that is seen such as it is.
The
refusal of the verisimilitude of things is registered accordingly. Kandinsky is
rather eloquent on this subject:
The disintegration of the atom meant for me the
disintegration of the whole world. In one moment, the thickest barriers
crumbled. All became uncertain, unsteady, weak. I would have been by no means
astonished to see a stone dissolving in the air and thus disappearing
completely. (Dûchting, 12, pp. 10-11)
Marcel
Proust in “A la recherche du temps perdu” [Remembrance
of Things Past] gives us a possibility of introducing this facet.
In order to go for a
drive, it is not necessary to have the most powerful automobile, but an
automobile that does not continue to run ahead and cross a vertical the line
that it followed is able to convert into upward force its horizontal speed. In
the same way those who produce brilliant works are not those who live in the
most delicate environment and who have the most brilliant conversation and the
most extensive culture, but those who have the capacity, abruptly stopping [all
this] to live for themselves, making their personality similar to a mirror, so
that their life, if mediocre indeed in that it could be mundane and even, in a
certain sense, intellectually speaking, reflect itself there, the consistent
genius in the reflecting capacity and not in the intrinsic quality of the
reflected view. (24, p. 555)
We
have here in this extract the possibility of illustrating the distancing
movement of creation by using the metaphor of Marcel Proust on the course of an
automobile. It is a matter, in fact, of passing from a horizontal line to a
vertical line “without raising the resistance,” i.e. in a solution of
continuity in any course. What Proust proposes metaphorically is a passage
between two planes. The important thing is not to locate each plane in
themselves but in the relationship between them. It is the crossing, not the
contents, that is the movement of creation.
How
to reach this upward movement on the basis of a horizontal movement? It is the
logic of the movement of the creation that gives us the key. In fact, according
to us, creation obeys this basic logical formula: to move away as much as possible.
The
horizontal line gives the movement from which it is necessary to move away. How
to move away as much as possible? The maximum distance is situated at an angle
of 90 degrees. If we are below this angle, we do not move away as much as is
possible. Beyond 90 degree, our distance brings us closer to the base line. In
this case, it is a little as if one took the counter-current but all the while
always locating in the same realm, the same plane. This is what illustrates the
two dotted arrows that lean towards the direction of the base line.
The
only direction that moves away as much as possible is the vertical, upward
line. Indeed, this direction is that of another plane. No possibility of
approaching the base line with this direction.
Here
illustrated metaphorically and schematically the disengaging, the detachment,
the movement of which the beginning of the creative movement that, according to
us, is to move oneself away as much as possible.
The authors who were
interested in the experimental study of creativity defined this time as that of
“divergent thought,” i.e. which diverges from the stereotypes and the
standards, by dissociation from the usually associated elements. A correct
description, but impoverishing, of the process.... (Anzieu, 3, p. 4)
If
the person’s look [regard] follows
this upward movement with respect to oneself, it opens for itself the
possibility of a specular [mirror-like] relation. One can look at oneself
living, thinking, speaking, and even reasoning. This is a mirror to oneself.
The
person’s look becomes the object of his looking and by doing this, the looking
at the look [le regard du regard] is
the result of a qualitative jump and of another nature according to two
different planes inscribed under the same banner, that of the unity of the
creator beyond this specular relation with himself or herself.
We
tried to trace the trajectory of the creative look and its principle of
direction in its logical nakedness. Simply and terribly effective, the logic of
the moving away “as much as possible” infallibly will lead us to return our
looking on our own looking. And, there is only one looking of another nature
that can move away from this basic looking.
The
possibility of being affected by this looking on a looking is registered in the
experience of the detachment whose paroxysm is located at the moment when it is
our own looking that is the object of this “disengaging.”
Thus,
from another side, there is a capture in the sense where what one wants to
promote must be captured in order to be injected in oneself and in order to
collect and to capture in the ceaseless flux of what is happening in order to
prevent it from escaping. Thus, the putting into form that which corresponds
henceforth to oneself will consist in selecting in the sensory and conceptual
flux what corresponds to the new image of what one wants to promote. This is
the function of k +.
In
k +, there is seizure of an image of oneself in its sensibility, all the more
strong as its identity is threatened with disintegration. This is what the
catatonic schizophrenic expresses intensely. It has a movement of capture in
our perception and of putting into form of what is judged to be oneself. We
will draw from the immense flood of information that our senses collect at every
moment:
By the sensory organs,
we collect in the environment a tremendous amount of information (a billion
bits) of which only one weak part (ten to hundred bits) becomes conscious to us. (28, p. 274)
Music,
ceramics, painting, the sculpture…requires on the whole a perceptive capturing
that is worked out in a personal relation.
The
creators use their senses for their use to build an image of oneself by oneself.
By defining us as passive agents of perception, the
language dissimulates how we take part in our sensory experience. For example,
each one of us knows that electric bulbs produce light, and it seems natural to
say “to extinguish the light” or “to light the light.” But does the bulb
produce the light? A physicist would say that the electrons are propagated in
the filament of the bulb that, when it became rather hot, emits electromagnetic
waves that act on the rods and the cones of the retina of the eye. Under these
conditions, an observer situated in an appropriate way and with the nervous
system functions normally, has the experience of the light. (...) By defining
the light as a property of the electric bulb, the language dissimulates how we
take part ourselves in our sensory experience, since the light is then defined
as an objective property of the world, i.e. independent of the observer.
(Segal, 27, pp. 55-56)
We
turn now to Bateson to question the subjective threshold of our
representations.
The thesis of this
book…rests on the idea that science is a way of perceiving and to give what one
can call “a meaning” to the perceived things. But perception is carried out
only by differences. To receive information, it is necessarily to receive
awareness of a difference, and any perception (of a difference) is limited by a
threshold. The too feeble differences or those that intervene too slowly are
not perceptible: they cannot be used as food for perception. It follows from
that that what we, as scientists, can perceive will always be limited by a
threshold. That means that all that is subliminal will not bring water to our
mill. Knowledge at every given moment will be a function of the thresholds of
our means of available perception. (Bateson, 5, p. 35)
This
is what makes Bateson state that “science probes; it does not prove” (Bateson,
5, p.36). Indeed, for him, science can assert only to be entitled to be a
method of perception limited in its capacity to collect the external and
visible signs of what could constitute the truth.
All
the subjectivity of our experience is what is proposed here. Just like our
personal knowledge, the collective knowledge rests on a perception oriented
according to finalities. But those of the ordinary “oblige” our sensibility to
“seeing correctly” what it is necessary to see or not to see in order to live
in society according to the rules that this society enacts.
Any experience is
subjective…our brain creates the images that we think of perceiving. (...) The
experience of the outside world is only possible except by our particular
sensors and by nervous pathways. To this
degree, the objects are my creation, and the experience that I have of them is
subjective, not objective (boldfaced by us). (Bateson, 5, p. 37)
The
analysis of the Rorschach protocols puts the finger for the diagnosis of
psychotic troubles on the quite relative notion of reality. The teaching of
this “reality” to the future psychologists rests on some concepts of which we
will form here state according to one of our professors of psychology in the
University of Liege, Chairperson Mormont, in an article entitled: “Rigueur et
mise en doute de la perception dans le diagnostic de psychose au
Rorschach” [Rigor and Setting into Doubt of Perception in the Diagnosis
of Psychosis in the Rorschach]. (Mormont, 22). On the first page, we can read:
It is that we know only
what our sensory and conceptual systems allow us to integrate; we are thus in
the impossibility of seizing and of even guessing the share of reality that
escapes these systems. And consequently, to verify our perception up to the
degree that gives justice to reality that, for us, can be only virtual and
unknowable in its totality and its “truth.” In fact, what we call reality is
our share of the world that we apprehend by our senses.
Thus
usually, the analysis of the psychotic processes rests on data that are: 1 -
precision of the quality of perception (F+%), 2 - the conformist aspect of this
perception (A%) and 3 - to be in agreement with the collective thought (Ban%).
But even with these criteria, there remain remote regions because always
according to Mormont (22, p. 9):
Empirically, one
observes that often the psychologists dismiss the hypothesis of psychosis if
these variables (“adaptive triad”) reach satisfactory values. However, certain
psychotics (in particular the delirious that are not dissociated), preserve a
rigorous perception of reality associated with putting in doubt this
perception. In this case, the adaptive triad can be excellent whereas the
individual is openly psychotic.
To
preserve a perception of reality rigorously associated with a putting in doubt
of this perception is a frequent process in creators according to their own
statements. If, with Chairperson Mormont, we pay attention not to too quickly
label certain persons in one way or another, it is undeniable that a creator
faced with this kind of evaluation is a “particular case” that calls for
prudence in the analysis.
It
is here that we invite the psychologist to remember that it is possible to
function as a “psychotic,” as a “pervert,” as a “depressive,” and as a
“narcissist” without structuring itself as such. There would be “times” and
“situations” to which the creator subjects himself for his own pursuit.
Obviously, the creator can “go off the rails” but all do not do so.
We
will finish here with the thought of Gaston Bachelard (4, p. 10).
For all, it is necessary
to become aware of the fact that the new experience said no to the old experience, without that, obviously, it is not a
question of a new experience. But this no is never final for a spirit that
knows logically to discuss his principles, to constitute in himself the new
kinds of evidence, to enrich its corpus of explanation without giving any
privilege to what would be a corpus of natural explanation suitable to explain
everything.
Let
us return to Bateson because he highlights what, in perception, is perception.
It is the perception of a difference, an intangible concept but however quite
present at every moment of our life.
Of all the examples, the
simplest but the most profound is the fact that one needs at least two things
to create a difference. In order to create the “awareness” of the difference,
i.e. information, one needs two
entities (real or imaginary) such as the difference that exists between them can
belong by rights to their mutual relation. (Bateson, 5, p. 74)
A
spirit, according to Bateson, is a collection of parts, or components, in
interaction. The interaction between the parts of a spirit is brought about by a
difference, and the difference is a nonmaterial phenomenon, to which one cannot
assign a place in space or time: “the difference is to be brought closer to the
negation of entropy and the entropy* more than of energy. ” (Bateson, 5,
p. 98) [*entropy = measure of the unpredictability of energy]
Thus,
that which does not change is unperceivable unless we decide to be changed by
relationship to it.
The difference, being of
the same nature as the relation, is situated outside of time or of space. One
says that the white mark is “there,” “in the middle of the blackboard,” but the
difference between the mark and the blackboard is not “there.” It is not in the
mark; it is not in the blackboard; it is not either in the space ranging
between the blackboard and the chalk. (Bateson, 5, p. 105)
Obviously,
a context where there is no perceptible difference between two stimuli is not a
context allowing a discrimination.
In
any object, there exists an infinite number of differences. Of this infinity of
differences, we select a very limited number of differences that become
information. In fact, that which we indicate by information -- the basic unit
of information -- is a difference that creates a difference. A perceived
difference constitutes information because a black spot on a white sheet raises
a difference that will create a difference on my retina and then in my brain.
Thus, this difference will constitute an information. The difference is an
abstraction; it is contained neither in the sheet nor in the black spot. It is
the relation between the two.
Without
a difference and without a distinction, there is no possible relation. Even in
the cases of the relation between a human being and himself or herself, one
distinguishes then the entities that communicate among themselves. Part of the
individual is made a spectator of the totality of the individual of which he is
a participant.
It
is the difference that permits the distancing between two things, two objects,
two ideas.
If
we take the functional definition of the senses, we conceive the senses as
channels of related information that inform us about our internal state and the
environment. Each sense is regulated on a basic level and the variations
related to this level indicate the value of received information to us. There
is thus a sensory reference that is to some extent a “zero,” a thermostat.
Indeed, since the sensibility is perceptive, we recall that, according to G.
Bateson, perception is only possible with the condition that it is
discriminating, i.e. it is based on a perceptive difference. It is here that
the sensory reference plays its part.
There
are consequently classically the five senses that relates to the body. But by
analogy, mood (joy, anxiety, anger), the sense of the other and oneself, the
sense of time, the sense of space, the sense of the specularity and in another
the sense of continuity are all of the processes comparable to the functional
definition of the senses. We could continue with the “sense of honor” that
indicates to us if our conduct is in the traditional, in the image of oneself
where if the image deviates from it; that which is in oneself a related
information that informs us about our representations compared to a reference.
[*Specularity: related
to a mirror and its reflection]
But
let us return more particularly to the meaning of specularity. The “specular”
term returns us to the mirror but we would say more simply than that that it
returns us to something supposed to give us a representation of oneselves. When
we look at ourselves in a mirror, the mirror returns to us our image. We seize
this image and we make use of it to guide us and to evaluate what we are
outside given that the image is an exact reflection of our external appearance.
If
the sense of the specularity is correctly a sense, it must be necessarily
regulated perceptively by relation to a reference. The sense of the specularity
is an analogy of the mirror applied to the realm of our internal, mental, and
representational perceptions.
If
we speak of a specular relation to the Other, that would mean that the
reference is the Other. We are, in this case, in a participative relation (p
-).
On
the other hand, a specular relation with oneself would mean that the reference
is to oneself, i.e. our project of being. We are, in this case, in an inverse
relation to that of participation; this is the individualizing position of p +.
What
we highlight in this matter on the specular relation is the primacy of one’s
view [regard] or the view of the
Other as a perceptive reference to a representation of oneself. Being
understood that what we call the view of the Other or oneself constitutes this
image in this mirror where we look at ourselves internally to situate ourselves.
In
fact, it is the bond in the origin that maintains the specular relation: “I
look at myself in the glass and I know that it is me because when I move, the
image in the glass moves. It is thus my will that arranges this image. This
image is me in the sense where the I that looks at me is exactly the origin of
this image. Therefore, as a beginning, this image belongs to me since a change
in the origin (to blink my eyes) is reflected automatically in the image.”
Pierre
Legendre is more explicit in this respect:
The essence here is to
discern that the function of the mirror…returns to the problem of the relation
to causality. Thus, the opening of the narcissistic problem to the problem of
the thought is revealed. I will say: if
that, “this shade of the image, sends back to your looking” according to
the Ovidian formula, is the image of
oneself because that is recognized as a different self, such a proposal
includes that the subject entered into its own division, i.e. it exists
there as a caused subject
(underlined by us). (Legendre, 16, p. 80)
From
the start, the function of the mirror is announced as a “schizophrenic”
function but in the higher sense of the term, i.e. which institutes a relation
with oneself, a relation of the relation: the ego function. Let us listen to a
continuation of the above:
One can conceive that,
under this relation, the mirror can be
for the person the causes of the self. (...) The reflexivity is the only
possible return of the looking on oneself, the obliged way of the looking that sees itself: the
reflexivity orchestrates the dialectical schema of the causation of the
subject. (...) Of the kind, the relation of identity, by the stage of the
metaphor of the mirror, introduced the person to causality as external to the subject. (Legendre, 16, p. 81)
And
Legendre states that the subject “is caused” starting from the image that makes
a return to him or her.
It
is, we think, the heart of the creation that gives insight by means of this
specular relation with an other of oneself that gives us our “existential
causality.” Indeed, since the bond of origin connects the image to its source,
the creator reads in his creation that it comes from him. His creation would act
as a mirror that gives an image to him of what he has become while creating.
That would make it possible to a human being to be created through the images
that he creates.
There is art only if the
word is laid out and formed in a deposit in a representation, a form that the
matter seizes. (Mathieu, 3, p. 162)
This
sensory material selected by our k + “forms a deposit” in thoughts that are
strictly personal for us (in agreement with our project of being: p+) because
they are constituted by our own sensory history. Each one has one’s sensory
mode of apprehension and each person sees events whose results gradually mark
an eminently personal trajectory. It is that which we call a sensory history.
The
capture of the senses and the thoughts results in repeating an “imprint” that
is engraved a little more each day in our mental realm; it acquires a weight
and an importance in our eyes. One turns to it when one looks in the direction
of one’s own being. “What the mouth is accustomed to say, the heart is
accustomed to believe it” as Baudelaire states it. Therefore, sedimentation
implies a temporal recurrence; it acts to maintain something.
This
sedimentation maintains the perceptive and conceptual elements to which we
adhere. It is an injection of a material in our image of oneself. This process
stresses the great availability for oneself that it is necessary to have.
We
speak about an autocentric relation in k+ p+. It is interesting to note with Jean
Mélon in his Doctorate thesis that:
The interpretation of
Rorschach, which sees in the banal answers the sign of the “participation in
the manner of conceiving of the community,” has never been disputed. The more a
subject is a conformist, the more Ban% has the tendency to rise; the more it is
original, or autistic, the more the Ban% is low. (...) Ban% is highest
(>30%) when the functions of negation (k-)
and participation (p-) are coupled.
The Ban% is lowest in the group (Sch) ++. (...) The percentage of the Ban
confirms the adaptive character of (Sch)
- - and, on the other hand, the hyper-originality connected to (Sch) + +. (Mélon, 19, p. 77)
The
relation to oneself is an engine of powerful development thanks to the detachment
of the relationship to others and the strength of one’s look on that of the
others. But the narcissistic
relation can become an absolute relation in the sense where the Other is
excluded as a specular reference in one’s relation to oneself. There is nothing
any more but oneself and oneself: it is in this sense where that becomes
absolute. Because if in oneself, there is no more the negation of oneself, the
system can get carried away.
The Absolute Aspect of the Narcissistic
Relation
The
absolute aspect of the narcissistic relation prevents the access to what is not
registered in this relation, i.e. the Other. In this sense, narcissism is an
obstacle to self-knowledge that is basically relative. Perception is based on
the perception of a difference. From this perception is born knowledge. If its
own perception is enclosed in an absolute relation with oneself, it is not very
probable that the perception can capture what would be different from oneself,
i.e., to some extent, that could call in question this self. Perception would
capture only what the individual wants to see to maintain his or her absolute
relation with himself or herself.
The Relative Aspect of the Narcissistic
Relation
A
person postulates a relation with oneself in the sense where, for example, we
anticipate ourselves with ourselves a personal project that we are alone to
carry out. The relative aspect would result owing to the fact that this
individual is conscious that he will have difficulties and perhaps that other
persons who judged this project negatively are not wrong….
It
is this amalgam of doubt and personal convictions that maintains the relation
with the Other. Their view [regard]
is put between parentheses but it remains a delicate pattern in the background.
Sometimes, the subject will dash towards his personal belief in his or her
choice and will decrease the influence of the judgment of the others; and at
other times, he will doubt so much that it will take two hands to stop his project.
But,
to advance in his creative project, he will have to fit it continuously in a
relation with himself. Within this relation, he or she will waver between two
poles: that of the Other apart from the project and that, omnipotent, of an
absolute relation to himself or herself. It is a good balance between these two
poles when the subject can be confined to a project without losing the relation
with the Other. On the other hand, excesses will push him towards impotence in
relation to his project when it is located too much in the viewpoint [le regard] of the Other; maybe towards
the entry of the mechanisms more psychotic if he evacuates the viewpoint of the
Other.
Thus,
it is truly the positioning of the individual compared to his own negation or
more precisely compared to introjection of what can deny him what is essential
to situate him when he enters a specular relation to his powerful self.
The
creator as long as he does not completely invest his ego in its production, as
long as he makes creation second to more human aspects, and as long as he
counts creation as a means -- he is ensured to remain in a specular relation
with himself that maintains the distance between the imaginary and the reality
through the symbolic system that holds the place of a guardrail. If this
relation is fulfilled, he endorses his creation instead of his being and blocks
any process of revival and of distance in relation to his own productions.
The
majority of people invest a relation with somebody and live out a desire for
fusion with this Other in reality. For the creator, it seems that, rightly, his
ego feels itself in danger faced with an intense fusional pressure. That is
deduced by reversing the general direction of the creative process. If we know towards
what this one tends, we know at the same time what it moves away from.
Thus,
the more creation is indispensable to the creator, the more there is a danger
not to move away from it towards what the creative process moves away from.
This conception of creation rests on a vision of it as a possible mechanism of
defense. It is in the disproportion of the process that is born the intuition
of the observer that consequently suspects the not innocent nature of the process.
That
is all the more obvious as there exist creators who cannot tear themselves away
with their creative process to that which he clings at all costs to a life
buoy. The question that jumps at one
then is: Are they afraid of something by releasing creation? And then, in the
affirmative: of what are they afraid?
Consequently,
in order to know more, we question the creative process itself and while
turning around its direction in the exactly the opposite meaning, we have the
possibility of comprehending from where or from what it moves away from.
· The first thing that we
will see is the Other (“popular masses”), the common run (and the leveling and
the lack of differentiation of oneself in the mass), the collective (><
solitary creator).
· The second is a fusion with
the Other, the participation with it without any distancing.
· The third thing is reality.
Why
vigorously move away from these three elements in the name of an omnipotent and
imaginary I? It is that this I is in danger. More precisely, the ego of the
creator is in danger.
In
danger of what? Danger of drowning oneself in fusion with the Other in reality.
More precisely, the limits of the ego are so permeable that it is likely to
disappear in the participation with the Other.
We
would say that, in the creators, their ego tends with them naturally towards
openness. Thus, one of the principal activities of their ego would consist in
fighting against this basic tendency to open their ego. That could explain
their great capacity to enter into resonance with people. Their great empathic
capacity would result from this basic permeability of their ego. Thus, the
creators conceal a very great sensitivity that is often at this point excessive
so that they lose themselves in the sensory flood that inundates them.
By
doing this, the limits of their ego would arrive at being so “porous” and so
permeable with the Other that the distinction between oneself and the Other
would become very difficult.
A
real effort at paying attention is then necessary to make a dam for this
sensory flow in order to channel it. Putting into form their sensibility is
often a necessity to preserve this excessive sensitivity. This putting into
form would correspond to a systole of ego with a specific use: this is the
function of the factor k +.
From
there to use this potential for other things, there is only one step that they
briskly cross while creating.
It
is important to moderate the permeability of the ego. The ego can be plastic*,
i.e. there can yield the place to the other while remaining itself. And, in the
extreme, the ego can become porous and, in this case, the creation
becomes a defense against a psychotic mechanism. [*plastic = easily molded or shaped; easily influenced; impressionable]
Thus,
to move away from reality would make it possible for the ego to keep its
borders. The creative process gives the exchange to the desire of fusion while
allowing it to live itself through the imagination. Still it is necessary to
create a self that can be taken for this Other. Once the actors are established
on the imaginary created scene, the great fusion can begin. It is in this sense
that the p + can “be taken” for a p - and that one sees appearing in the test
the people with p - who are registered under the benevolence of a p + sitting
enthroned above the scene.
Thus,
the creative process would allow a satisfaction of a desire for fusion without
putting the ego in danger since the place of this lack of differentiation is
imaginary. An imagination held tightly by a p + that orchestrates the setting
of the scene of fusion. The I thinking of p + would have sufficient distance
not to be “fooled” by its own fiction that is played on the imaginary scene of
creation. The implicit influence of p + in creation is placed hierarchically
above this imaginary fusion because it is from its intention that is born this
creative fiction because creation is
above all a fiction.
We
think that the creative intention is in p + and not in p -. Situated in p -,
creation would not have a director within the meaning of an external I that
thinks up the course of the creative fiction. And p+ is the most developed
position at the level of the ego.
Since
creation is a fiction, we are able to state that one of the elements of this
fiction consists correctly with the fact that the p + permits itself to be p -
from time to time.
Hate
allows a differentiation because it is producing an altérité [otherness]. It allows its own space that can become a
place of creation. But the creative process paradoxically seems to nourish the
desire for returning to the origins, a desire for a lack of differentiation.
There
is a paradox because it distances one from others in reality in order to create
and, at the same time, it tends towards the lack of differentiation and toward
the Other in one’s imaginary. This paradox can be raised by adjusting the
reality and imaginary plans.
If
the creator is somebody who has a strong desire of fusion, the lack of
differentiation, he seems to figure out the threat with this desire. He wants,
on the one hand, to satisfy this desire there and, on the other hand, there is
a whole psychic mechanism that tends to preserve the integrity of ego faced
with this tension towards the lack of differentiation.
The
idea would be that, in creation, he can live out what he cannot live out in
reality otherwise he really loses himself. In imagination, that remains
imaginary and fusion with the Other preserves his ego that does not risk
anything since all that is imaginary.
In
k+ p +, the creator would draw from his essence his potentiality to be in order
to resituate himself or herself in the pure movement of the absolute choice.
This potentiality to be, registered in each one of us, would consist with to be
everything and to have everything in potentiality because no effective choice
would be made. The imaginary has this property virtually to allow choices that
are not each time at each moment renewed. “L’homme, ce voyageur disponible
[Man, This Available Traveler] .” (Beaujon, 7, p. 192)
The
absolute choice is the possibility of choosing everything without choosing
anything.
Not
to choose is to have the possibility of choosing everything; it is total
freedom. Freedom because it is not attached; total insofar as one would not
choose anything specific, that is to say everything. This is a movement of
thought that tends towards the lack of differentiation.
We
can speak about the opposition between to be [l’être] and being [l’étant].
Being is what, from to be, appears on the level of the phenomena. It is what we
can perceive from to be. The being itself escapes us, to be is with the
principle of being but one never has a good grasp of it in phenomenon and,
thus, one can only know that which is of the order of being.
In
the viewpoint by what preceded, to be [l’être]
presents itself as the negation of being [l’étant]
that is sensitive, i.e. accessible to the senses. To be is a “movement of an
occurrence tended towards something.” Being has this property to be accessible
to the senses, i.e. to fall under a reality that confines it and that removes
from it this “dimension of potentiality.” In the same way, conversely, being
would be the negation of to be.
· To choose an existence
is to plunge in being [l’étant] --
something that is maintained and is accessible to the senses. This is to deny
the possibility of all the other possibilities of existence, i.e. the choice
allowed all positions. Being would seem here to be a process of differentiation.
· To choose the choice for
everything is not to exist in such or such other direction. This is to be at a
crossroad of paths without deciding for one or for the other. To be [l’être] would seem here to be a process
of the lack of differentiation.
To
create would be to plunge one’s self in one’s essence. This would be to some
extent a reminiscence of our being [être],
to remember that one has a movement to be [être]
transcendent, continuously to happen beyond any choice. This would be to
remember that we can escape all constraints some of which are by releasing us
from our choices of existence. To remember this freedom registered in each one
of us, that is the omniscience of the absolute choice.
The
creator would tend towards to be [l’être]
while letting himself move towards the deconstruction* of his choices of
existence. He will let come what may come; he would let go and would not
register the free movement of his thought in reality; he would not choose as
much as he has not decided on it. The only limit that he would set is to limit
the limitation. He turns around the process of limitation against itself. He
short-circuits the brakes of thought that, consequently, carries it away to not
finishing. [*Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in
order to demonstrate that, rather than being a unified whole, any given text
has irreconcilably contradictory meanings.]
After
to be [être] goes in its essence to
detach itself from its existence, it would make a return to its existence by
posing certain choices that would be maintained at all cost. This return could
be done only by the negation of its to be [être]
potential and of this potentiality to be [être]
everything. The choice that the creators would have made would consequently be
actualized as new data resulting from their return to the sources of their
existence. k- and p- move towards a process of limitation and of differentiation.
In
the final analysis, the choice would rest on the desire to give body to his
choices. That would stipulate the space-time inscription of his choices that
would defer to the creator the decision that he took to choose something.
Therefore,
to choose and to be held to it (a kind of capture) would logically make us
leave the infinite fields of the potentiality to be [l’être]. “Main-tenir ” [“Main-tenir“
= literally: to hold (tenir)
in one’s hand (
Then,
to register this body in space by giving it forms, colors, and words is to give
to the carried out choice a sensual body, i.e. that can be harnessed by the senses.
The
conjunction of the effect of time and the effect of space makes this choice
real. It takes part with space-time reality and, so it tends to exist. To some
extent, it also tends towards the irreversible. Therefore, the space-time
inscription in the procedure of the choice puts aside the potentiality (which
could lead back this choice towards the imagination and cause its
disintegration in the movement to be [l’être]
by the lack of differentiation) by giving a body to the work.
With
the inverse -- with remaining too long in creation -- one risks remaining in a
total lack of differentiation.
The
creative journey would make it possible to control the impact of the lack of
differentiation and to live that in his imagination. That avoids him from
wanting to live that in reality. The goal of the creative play then consists in
preserving one’s ego from an intense sensibility to the desire of the Other in
order not to drown there.
The
creative process would make it possible in the imagination to drown in an Other
that would be, in fact, a self created and taken for an Other. The principal
characteristic of creation being to create something of the unknown thus
inevitably different from the Other in reality. That would be equivalent,
perhaps, very well to convince himself or herself that it is not a question of
the Other that exists in reality. There is possibility of confusion between
oneself and oneself in creation because one of his or her two selves is taken
for the Other in order to satisfy the desire for fusion and a lack of
differentiation.
The
self taken for the Other should consequently have sufficient distance in
relation to the genuine, alive Other in reality and it is in this sense that
the creative act should create something of the new, something of the
different, and something of the imaginary l’altérité
[otherness] for which there cannot be confusion between the self-other and the
real Other. The new character of creation would prevent this possible confusion.
Once
this self-other is set up, the self begins to enter into fusion with this
self-other and fully satisfies in the imagination the desire for fusion.
Afterwards, he or she has lived this fusion in his or her imagination, he or
she should not seek as much this fusion in reality. The push for a lack of
differentiation is calmed; he or she can find the Other in reality (the real
other) without putting in danger his or her ego.
He
always keeps his self-other in him for the situation where a fusional push has
suddenly put the integrity of his ego in danger. This imaginary self-other
would act as a protector of the limits of the ego when faced with the Other
that in reality becomes too invasive. If there is danger of disintegration of
the ego in reality through the relation with the Other, he can find in his
imagination all its mechanism that satisfies the desire for fusion while
remaining himself.
This
matter would open a door for the explanation of the emergence of the psychotic
process in the creators.
To
create the new one in oneself, the Other of oneself would thus correspond to a
psychic defense that consists in preventing any possible confusion between the
imaginary Other created by oneself and the Other in reality with which fusion
is dangerous.
The
oppositional no can say no to the Other in spite of the force of the desire for
fusion with this Other implicit in creation because this desire finds its full
expression in the imagination.
At
the exit from the creative process, a step towards differentiation in the
relationship with the (real) Other will have been taken. To want to give birth
to oneself by oneself would indicate the desire to be a different self and to
exist for oneself. Conversely, that indicates the implicit primacy of the Other
in the imagination of the creator and the omnipotence of the parental imagoes
against which it is necessary to fight to exist: to reject them is to be in
oneself one’s own creator.
Thus,
the first stage would be of producing l’altérité
by the hate as a defense against a desire for fusion in order to differentiate
oneself in reality (the role of the detachment).
The
second phase would consist in producing an imaginary self-other in the creative
process not to be different without putting the ego in danger thanks to the
maintenance of the specular relation.
The
third stage would be, after the going beyond the desire for fusion operated in
the imagination, the return towards the Other in reality within the framework
of a healthy differentiation.
Jean
Mélon (18) underlines the fact that people very often consider that a work
expresses something. In fact, it never expresses anything; it is itself itself.
A work once it is realized is like a person; it is sufficient for itself. It
does not represent anything.
The
artist is a kind of medium from this viewpoint. The creator is a medium in the
sense where the creation passes through him and he himself does not know for
that matter how that is done. He lets himself become immersed; it is necessary
to abandon himself in order to create; it is necessary to let come something
that one does not know from where that it comes exactly.
A
work is. Autonomous, released from its creator, it does not express anything
except its existence.
The
filiation between the creator and the work within the framework of the specular
relation to oneself (in the precession of oneself) can allow the illusion of
the sameness (relation of ipseity [individual,
individuality]) between the creator and his creation. This illusion can make it
possible to maintain an imaginary lack of differentiation between oneself and
the other by means of the work. On the other hand, the strangeness of work and
from its origin has this sufficient altérité
“to incarnate” in imagination this Other that lives in reality.
The
quarter k + p + suggests a configuration of existence [l’être] according to a principle of self-emergence. The term that gives
form to this configuration is “autopoièse” [self-creation]. We think that the
quarter k + p + is an organization of an
autoplastic and autocentric self. It is the direction of the movements of the
thought and the senses towards a virtual center of gravity located in oneself
that poses the idea of an interpretation of this virtual center as a reference
for oneself. This centripetal movement and this reference in oneself are what
one cannot more significantly present than in the term “autopoièse” [self-creation].
It is in this sense that we hope that the clarity of this concept will make it
possible to illustrate our subject.
The Chilean
neurophilosophers Varela, Maturana and Uribe formed the term “autopoièse” with
two Greek words: auto (oneself) and poesis (poetry, or creation). This
suggests something that makes itself. (Segal, 27, p. 163)
Andrew
(2, p. 359) defines autopoièse as
“the capacity that alive systems have to develop and to maintain their own
organization, the organization that is developed and maintained being identical
to what achieves its development and its maintenance.” Varela (30, p. 13)
described an autopoiétique [self-creative] machine as “a homeostatic system (or
rather composed of stable relations) that has its own organization (defined as
a network of relations) for fundamental invariability.”
The systems autopoiétiques [self-creative] are
autonomous. They determine their own operations. If they do not do this, they
disintegrate and die. A system is autonomous when it controls itself and
defines for itself its own laws. (Segal, p. 164)
We
think that it is in the quarter k + p + that this concept of autopoièse [self-creation] is carried to
its acme.
The
reaction k - p + is a reaction of a sophist; it is also the reaction of the
rational individual. But it is above all the reaction of a subject who defends
his opinion.
The
individual who functions in the myth is opposed to that which is positioned in
the logos; they are irreducible enemies. Indeed, the sophist destroys myth and
what counts is the subject who speaks his mind. That brings us to Descartes: I
think, therefore I am (the only thing that I know is that I am a thinking
thing). The position k - p + is a Cartesian position, i.e. a position of doubt
or rather it is what succeeds the doubt. Descartes states: “I doubt
everything,”; it is really that which does not believe any more in anything.
The
one who is in the mythical position himself believes. k + p - absolutely needs
to believe; in order to exist, he believes. If we adopt the opposite position,
we adopt the Cartesian position: “I doubt, it is perhaps true, it is perhaps
false; I decide that the only thing that I know is that I think therefore I
am.”
p+
is “I think.” k - p + is the claim of its word of oneself against an imposed
word (I believe in myself as a giver of
an answer). p+ is a transcendental position: “I dominate the world.”
In
a culture like ours, let us say logos (oratio,
ratio, proportio [oratory, reason, and proper relation between parts]),
this position is the ideal that is imposed on each person (Compare the
obligation of the dissertation for the advanced student). One does not have a
choice; one is practically obliged to function like that. If one does not do
that, one is outside of the system; therefore, this is a constraint.
The
position k - p + is the position that one meets most often in neurotics because
it pertains to what one has tried to encompass: this ambition and, at the same time,
this obligation to be oneself and to free oneself from something that would be
this mythical universe of which we do not take part any more.
In
the reaction k - p +, there is an inhibition, but what does it mean to inhibit?
Hemmung (inhibition) is understood in
the Freudian sense and in the metapsychologic* sense, i.e. to perceive the
object in its external reality, it is necessary to inhibit the hallucinatory
activity. However, the hallucinatory activity implies belief: “I believe, thus
I hallucinate”. “If I believe, I will end up hallucinating (Compare:
spiritualism, a trance).” [*metapsychologic: beyond the psychological]
The
person who puts himself or herself in this position k - p + is inhibited in the
sense where he or she refuses to be in this state of influence where the
hallucinatory capacity is released. Hemmung
is the refusal to enter the hallucinatory process, which explains why k - p +
is the position of the individual of logos, i.e. the rational individual who
bases his conduct on reason. k - is a realistic position.
According
to Mélon, when one does a research task, one is all the time hallucinating.
Then, one is obliged to do an anti-hallucinating work; if not, one lets oneself
be carried away.
Creation
is the fact that one lets oneself be
carried away by something that is not of the order of p+. The root of
creation is necessarily found in p- and thus
in adhesion to what comes to us by the channel of intuition. That implies that one believes, that one
lets oneself be infiltrated by an idea that can be absurd but to which one
adheres to as little as it is. “I believe that,” it should be done. The one
who is k - p + will not budge, he or she is too realistic, too scientific one
could say, too much a checker, and too cautious to create. To create, it is
necessary to be let oneself be carried away by no matter what.
Hemmung means also that it is
fixed, blocked, stopped because it is very good at stopping the hallucination,
otherwise one is autistic, but if one adopts the exactly opposite position that
is to adhere only to what is absolutely sure and certain, one is not allowed to
innovate. There is nothing to do with the above since a creative thought
implies a paradox because to create, it is absolutely necessary to pass by that
position since it is necessary to give up this position and, at the same time,
to restore it. There is all the time a balancing that must take place.
In
the population that seeks advice, k - p + is the most frequent. These are the
ordinary neurotics who are the people who suffer from inhibition; they lack
fantasies; one would readily say to them: “Let yourself go.” They are people
who are perfectly integrated into the system; it is not false to say that they
are the sick from civilization. In fact, they adhere so much to what is imposed
on all of us, which is the Cartesian ideal, an ideal which is very castrating
from that point of view, which does not allow any more any fantasies and which
is the purist scientific ideal. The devastations of this ideal are immense because
it is a true castration at the level of thought.
k
- p + is the most widespread position among civilized people in our culture
because they adhere to this ideology of the individual in the sense that it is
necessary to become someone: “You must, it is necessary to go to school, to
miss one year and the world collapses….” Even if it is true that it is a
position of progress, it is paradoxically very inhibiting because it imposes an
ideal that is in the final analysis unreachable.
The
ambition is p+ and the means is the verification, k-. From time to time, one is
k+ also; one lets oneself go. p+, “to be everything,” is what characterizes the
ideal of our culture, i.e. to be sufficient for oneself, independent,
autonomous. It is a paradox because, how still to form a community when the
ideology pushes individuation to the maximum?
On
the other hand, attachment is a force that it is necessary to take into account
as a human because it forms an integral part of our beginning and of our
source.
Thus
the entry in the quarter p + k - supposes in the creator the capacity to deny
his creative course as a defense in order to open in himself a space available
for a very real Other. The presence of the Other in his real life, the place
that it gives him is largely dependant on his capacity to withdraw from his
personal psychic economy the libido that he will concede to the Other. To give
to the Other, it will be necessary for him to deduct from his capital of
narcissistic libido.
All
that is possible with the condition that his defenses allow to him to do it,
i.e. his ego does not feel any more in danger in a relation with the Other. The
condition of clinging to the Other rests thus on unhooking of oneself and of
his creation.
The
quarter k - p +, stage of the (neurotic) negation of omnipotence, is the
anteroom of the quarter k - p -, which is the time of the cycle the most in
agreement with the Other.
According
to Jean Mélon (18):
A profile of a creator in
the phase of creation resembles enough a profile of a psychotic that there is
hardly any difference between the creators and the psychotics; it is known that
there are many great creators who became psychotics. the border between the two
can be very thin. In all truth, artists say firstly that they cannot be
prevented from creating and secondly that it is a permanent grief. It is
nevertheless not funny. If one does not create any more, that is alarming;
therefore, all that is close to a psychosis. The psychotic is either in his
delirium or he is nothing at all.
Not
to enter a dead end is to maintain in oneself the possibility of being able to
go beyond oneself, i.e. to be able to deny the choices that one made in
greatest confidence. To enter a dead end is to block the going beyond and is to
be fixed with a choice that excludes other choices. It is to have a total
relationship to one’s choice to the point of no more being able to reject it.
It is vital to being able to be turned back to oneself.
If
we pose the possibility of a negation of oneself (k-) with reference to a
related connection to oneself and its absence for an absolute relation to
oneself, we must question the nature of this negation of oneself within the
framework of creation.
We
had on an occasion during the Szondi conference in 1994 at
Narcissism
would be the height of sexuality since it is a search in oneself of the sex
object that one initially goes to seek in the Other. This firm nucleus is
always present in the heart of narcissism. There is narcissism through the
return of the libido to one’s own sex, even if this libido irradiates then in
the whole body.
Because it is really of
the legend that states that Narcissus would have fallen in love with his own
image to the point of sinking into his own contemplation. (...) It is to be in
love with his own sex that requires one to say, a sex that he prefers to that
of the Echo nymph who has made signs of love to him and who does not obtain the
favors that she hopes for. Not that Narcissus is there completely indifferent
to this pretty nymph; she pleases him; she awakens in him desire but he
estimates that what she has to offer to him is not worth what he has already.
The more that he finds it in him in a manner much more reassuring and
satisfying. (Bonnet, p. 31)
Narcissus
died in his contemplation. This is nevertheless the true problem that is posed
in this history. However, if the unconscious is unaware of death, it is not
unaware of disappearing. The anxiety of castration is the fear that our sexual
organ disappears, and, if one is afraid at this point, it is because this
possibility of its disappearance is anchored very deeply in the unconscious.
But, it is very well
that is the subject in the history of Narcissus. This is the young man who
disappears, he dissolves literally in the pond where he contemplates his image.
And it is truly destiny that it is necessary for us today to reintroduce into
the heart of psychoanalysis in order to operate the second dismantling. (Bonnet,
p. 31)
Why
this disappearance? To answer, it is rightly necessary to go beyond the legend
in order to rejoin it to the true myth. Bonnet relies upon the book of Pascal
Tignard, which is entitled Le sexe et
l'effroi [Sex and Fear] where he
has analyzed in a rather traditional way the history of Narcissus.
A
hunter is dumbfounded [médusé] by a
look [regard] of which he is unaware
that it is his. He perceives it on the surface of a brook in the forest. He
falls into the reflection that fascinates him and is killed by the frontal
look. And according to Tignard, the ancients are positive that it is not the
love that he has for his double that kills him but it is the look. According to
this theory, Narcissus would have died executed by a look, his look. In other
words, the error that he made is not to be absorbing himself in the
contemplation of his image; it would be rather the fact that he was exposed to
the look carried by this image and by this sex. It is this look that comes to
strike him in full force.
One
can ask what made this look to have been so dangerous?
Pascal
Tignard, in relying on the texts of antiquity, provides the first explanation.
That is due to the very nature of this look that is a sexual look, that which
he calls the look of fascination, the look intended for the sex. This is thus a
look that freezes, which sets and which establishes and which only can, in
fact, fill in and divert.
In antiquity, the
exhibition of the phallus was judicious to exorcize this look in order to
alleviate it. The old cults relied on for centuries to fix this look by the
exhibition of the phallus under all their forms to divert the misdeeds of them
that are in the villages, in the fascistic cults and in the mystery cults. It
was a question of displaying the phallus in one way or another, so as to keep
the members in the shelter of the values carried by the look made to return on
them. (Bonnet, p. 32)
According
to this conception, the look would be
humiliated owing to the fact that it is diverted from its natural object that
is the sex itself.
Unconsciously,
we pay homage to God Phallus in the sense of homosexuality; we pay, at the same
time, homage to our own phallus so as to resist all the threatening looks as we
feel are formed on us. It is finally the equivalent of a ritualized sexuality
and codified for internal use.
According
to Tignard, finally, if Narcissus died, it is especially because he had the
gall to look opposite this look. That is to say that he wanted to scan this
look and to pierce its meaning. And, it is based besides on the passage of Ovid
that states: “Why did I see something? Why do I made my eyes guilty?”.
Therefore,
Narcissus is punished for having dared
to look in face of the look on the sex and what it means.
The analysis leads us to
think that we can be maintained in existence only insofar as we render to the
phallus the worship that is appropriate to it and in the form that is
appropriate for us through our symptoms. In the same way, that brings us also
to believe that with each time a misfortune or a difficulty happens to us and,
indeed, it is because we refused to subject ourselves blindly to it. From where
resistances and from where this kind of palpitations of the symptom. I found a
phallus, and it will not annoy me to find what that wants to say. It is to look
at the look. Therefore, it is a kind of way of saying: “Do not seek to know the
look that is opposite” and one returns to something rather traditional and that
is the fault of Adam and Eve, who wanted to pierce the secrecy of the Tree of
Life. One touches there, I would say to the sources for the submission to the
leader, the star, the scientist, and the psychoanalyst; with all these people
who make mysteries and to whom we must simply return a worship in order to
ensure our simple survival. (Bonnet, p. 32)
It
is the narcissism as such that is a trap. In the myth such as we derive it from
Ovid and the disastrous fate that is played with Narcissus, with his
imprudence, is not the fruit of chance, his imprudence or even a whim.
Narcissus
was a good hunter, he is more accustomed to set traps than to let himself be caught
by them. If he lets himself be caught, it is because he was made for that, i.e.:
This trap is a drive and
it is a retaliatory measure and not just for anybody, since we state that the
story is the fate of Nemesis in person. Nemesis is the goddess of revenge, of
the cold, terrible revenge for which there is no possible reply. Narcissus
is carefree and a very fine young man, and suddenly here it is that the nymphs
fall in love with him and, in particular, the Echo nymph. He repulses her and
will let her die as she will become anorexic. Thus what happened to Narcissus,
I would say his narcissism, and indeed, it is presented as an action of
revenge. That is to say Echo and the nymphs called to Nemesis and Nemesis says
that will not occur like that, and poor Narcissus, he can be nothing there and
he is made a flower in an instance. (Bonnet, p. 33)
That
wants to say that, well beyond the problem of the look, the looking on the sex
that is never only a bait and elements of the trap, and indeed, the true problem of narcissistic love is
that this love for our own sex has a price and a compensation.
From the time when I
seek in myself what I would find in the other, and, indeed, I make disappear
this other, I reduce the other to nothing. More exactly, he throws back into
the darkness the living and dynamic relation that was awakened at the
beginning. (Bonnet, p. 33)
All
the drama of Narcissus and even of Narcissus in the analytical sense is that at
any moment he risks the return to him of disappearing and of the desire for the
disappearance that he inflicted on the Other. And all the maneuvers that are
evoked up to now in the worship of the phallus, looking at the looking [regard sur le regard], are finally only
attempts to delay this payment.
You know the famous
phrase of Freud: “The shadow of the object hovers over me.” It is in connection
with the destiny of the melancholic person that is the most terrible of
manifestations, and, indeed, I would say rather than the shadow of the relation
to this object hovers over us all. And this shadow of a relation is indelible
in that it is that which woke up us with love and that at any moment, it can
sweep down on us and destroy us. (Bonnet, p. 33)
There
is no pleasure for anyone insofar as we will find in oneself an equivalent not
of the sex of the Other, but of the pleasure which we initially experienced
with the Other. That is to find in us what the Other gave birth in us and that
we appropriate to ourselves.
From the time when I make
it mine, and indeed, there occurs something that is indeed like a kind of
putting to death and a rejection of the initial relation. This is essential
but, as of the moment when the subject is in a phase to find and to want to
profit, I would say that what was set up in the first relation, then suddenly
there happens the repercussions of the act by which he is separated from his
first relation; in other words, Nemesis takes part by threatening him of the
fate that he has made the other to undergo. Here, in my sense, that means that
any narcissism is also a drama of narcissism. (Bonnet, p. 34)
The
nymph Echo remains where she is; she is repulsed. Bonnet compares this process
to repression.
What does the word repression
mean? At that time, repression is formulated in term of Aufhebung, to abolish, to remove. In other words, repression is
something that means not simply the act to imitate but “Go! Out of here!
Disappear!”. In this case, the term repression
is to be taken literally. A little like the small children who cry when their
mom leaves them but also one often hears these small children say: “Go mom, go
away!” with an extraordinary self-confidence, go somewhere else, I want to
amuse myself with my buddies or to be all alone. (Bonnet, p. 34)
This
is experienced by all children, in the unconscious, in the strongest sense of
the term; it is a terrible realism. That is equivalent to the murder of the thing and in the
unconscious, it is experienced like a set
and irreversible act.
Poussin
has devoted a picture that represents Narcissus and the nymph Echo and, in the
center of the picture, there is a young boy representing a person who holds a
torch. It is the torch that will light the pyre that will reduce Narcissus to ashes.
It is extraordinary
because, in the texts of Ovid, there is made allusion in two words to pyre and
that, in fact, the pyre is not used since Narcissus instead will go into the
water that is the opposite of fire. Basically, Poussin understood very well
that the drama of Narcissus is this
confrontation with self-destruction and with “You will disappear, you will
be reduced to ashes.” (Bonnet, p. 34)
In
the myth, this boomerang effect is
presented in such terms that is inescapable. Why inescapable? This is because
there is an effect of structure. In
other words, if the desire for libido autonomy is made to return with this
violence, it is also because it is found on the side of these primary relations
of the things that seriously posed problems. They are these things that the
adults injected into the relation without realizing it and that the subject
finds in the relation of today at certain times.
Leonardo
was born from the union of a certain Pierre and his mistress from that time who
was called Catherina. Shortly after this affair, about a year,
Therefore,
he marries a new woman younger than his mistress and, at the same time, he
takes along Leonardo to his new hearth when Leonardo was between 1 year and 18
months. As
In
the large pictures of his maturity, with the Virgin and Saint Anne, there are
always women, and women who ought to have normally, like the mother and the
daughter, a difference in age but who have very little difference in age.
Therefore,
the first thing that appears astonishing, a young woman who represents the love
of the beginnings, and then, the very little older woman, often associated with
Jean Baptist, or an object that symbolizes a difficult and distressing destiny.
One can thus think that it is not without relationship with his first relations.
Bonnet
advances that the picture represents the mirror on which are reflected the
Narcissus who is Leonardo. But there should be there what threatens him and
that looks at him since always and that could kill him if he does not take
guard there.
What
threatens him is not the look as such but what has happened in his primary
relations. Therefore, here is how he tries to be released from this by putting
that in the images and separating himself from all the looks that threaten in
order to exorcize them in certain a way and to use them to his own profit.
Leonardo
developed his great production at a crucial moment of his life. He was with the
service of Ludovic More in
It is at the time when
he passes from one patron to another that happened to him what had occurred
when he passed from one mother to another. At the time when he looks at the
past and happens to him a revival of this one. It is necessary that he then put
in an image what had happened in the first relation that served him as a
lightning conductor. (Bonnet, p. 35)
Therefore,
according to Bonnet, the misunderstanding of the narcissistic mortifying
situations comes rightly from the double origin of this threat. The subject
interprets and it is inevitable, the violence
of the threat that weighs on him like the inevitable counterpart of his desire
for autonomy; in other words, as the return of the act by which he put an end
unilaterally to the first relations. From where comes his culpability
(Narcissistic and non-Oedipal).
But
that would probably not be exteriorized there if nothing in his life today had
come to make an “echo.”
The
destiny of Narcissus is not only one attempt of structure but also the
resultant of a unique history under the original conditions that are specific
to each one and that became really dangerous only as from the time when the
history has made a return to him.
The
question is: “What can we do rightly to
try to give us a respite?”.
Then, I believe that it
is possible there are two ways in order to look at and to limit the complaint.
There is that of the way that the myth indicates to us and then there is the
way that psychoanalysis indicates to us. Therefore, the first recommended thought is a kind of worship for the phallus and for
the sex, and God knows if our civilization of today is completely on these
inventions and that our culture is in the course of resuscitating these
worships not only in our neuroses, but even on the public stage. And then, the analytical theory is not so foreign to the worship of the phallus
but not in the sense that we analyze it. We will try to find a device to
keep us from this evil eye and from this kind of repercussion from the things
of the past. It is a question of some share of constituting an artificial
apparatus in order to face these things that will fall to them from above and
that for some would be unbearable. (Bonnet, p. 35)
The
“analytical setting” would be, for Bonnet, the replay of the history of
Narcissus. When one lies on the couch, we are like Narcissus; we make disappear
Echo who is the analyst. That will be nothing any more but an echo. And then
what occurs?
And indeed, obviously, I
expect to receive reprisals because Nemesis is going to put them in there.
Therefore, I put myself in the situation of Narcissus, I have mirrors and I
tell about my life. (Bonnet, p. 37)
Only,
the difference, we know that it is not truth; in other words, one does not
speak about it. One speaks and one speaks about all that distressingly happens
today in order to articulate it with all that that happened during the life of
yesterday.
In
other words, without realizing some of it, one replays, one makes a
psychodrama, one replays the history of
Narcissus with this difference that at the same time one is Perseus, i.e. one
puts on a shield to reflect (the look of disappearing; Compare to “The myth
of the Gorgon”). Finally, basically, the end of the analysis is the time when
one interiorized the system, i.e. we are not any more at the mercy of the
distressing look of the Other and that we understand and we know to make use of
it in order to say: “Hold, light signal, there is something that makes a change
in me, all is well.” We could also say to ourselves: “Be calm. We are not
worked up.”
Narcissistic sexuality
can be integrated and take place among the others only insofar as the subject
can formulate through it a certain number of messages that he carries in him in
the form of translations. When Narcissus turns towards the mirror of the other,
he comes to realize, like all the suicides of the world, that he really could
not love and that these questions could not be posed. Therefore he throws
himself finally into the water in merging himself with the object of his
desire. (Bonnet, p. 40)
The greatest paradox of
this history is that any narcissistic expression that turns around is the
remainder of a love letter that did not arrive at its destination.
It
is often said that the children who were not sufficiently loved suffer
thereafter from deprivations of all kinds. Let us not forget the children who
could not love sufficiently, i.e. those who could not answer the echo that they
believed to perceive coming from the origins of their life and that however
enabled them to survive.
Of course, they try to
understand what has happened but, when they do not find anything, they run up
against the desire of disappearing that one day or the another they inflicted
on the other and this desire there rebounds to them like a boomerang effect. I
would say that, in all the cases, it is Echo who lies to them, it is Echo who
calls to them, and it is Echo who kills them. (Bonnet, p. 40)
The
look of the disappearing [Le regard de la
disparition] that the creator brings to the other persons leads him to a
position that brings him closer to Narcissus. However, according to Bonnet, Narcissus
is punished for having made disappear this Other by rejecting the advances from
the nymph Echo. Nemesis intervenes then in plunging Narcissus into nothingness
of his own disappearance, i.e. his death.
The
analysis of Bonnet highlights the fact that this look of disappearance can be
made to return. This is the “recoil.” To guard against this recoil, Bonnet
cites the worship of the Phallus as a shield. He goes further in postulating
that knowledge is a worship than one dedicates to a judicious omnipotence to
protect us from this look of the disappearing that would return to us.
In
this sense, the creator is in danger of seeing being turned onto him this look
of disappearing and to have a presentiment of the effects of it by a
self-destruction of his course. It is here that can be registered the negation
of oneself. But, just as Perseus repulses the look of the Medusa with his
shield, the creator can repulse the look of the disappearing that would be made
to return on him while being protected with a shield. This shield would be his
works and the worship of his works without which he would vanish.
In
the ruin inherent in excess, the Greeks saw the action of Nemesis.
The excess inflicted on the
nature of things causes energy able to bring back them to appropriate limits.
The Greeks have called this energy Nemesis. (Beaujon, 7, p. 81)
Designating
at the same time a divinity and a feeling, sometimes a proper name and
sometimes a substantive, the word Nemesis
(or némésis) is derived from a Greek
word meaning to divide and to distribute. The feeling of the Nemesis is that which determines and
appreciates without indulgence the sharing of things and, finding it badly
done, rejects this distribution and calls for another. The spirit animated by
the feeling of Nemesis understands
that the order of the world is in question and that going beyond the limits
will set in motion the force that will reduce the committed excess.
In all the areas where
our activity is exerted, certain limits seem vital necessities, or regulating
principles. If thus one gave the name of Nemesis to the collection of the
forces that regulate and limit human enterprise and that is likely in the case
where one would ignore the limits and be made to feel as a kind of recoil or
devastating flow of energy backward, one would transpose into the current mode
the exact significance that Nemesis took in the eyes of the Greeks. (Beaujon,
7, pp. 81-82)
To
contain what must be contained: this is the complete problem of the limit. “To
contain is not necessarily to repress or to restrict: it is to be included in a
vaster reality.” (Beaujon, 7, p.17)
That
calls for a dialectical process that could be described as a vision that covers
the fields open to experience so as to discover the elements there by which
they link, in their opposition even, the extremes of this field.
The word dialectical (dia, through) finds here
the significance that the Greeks gave it: search of the truth by the opposition
of points of view and the dialoguing persons the path of the distance between
these points of view…. (Beaujon, 7, p. 160)
Thus,
the limitation with the creative process rests on a threshold that consists in
not going beyond an excess. This being understood as the preponderance of a
force in relation to another, both being dependant upon their dialectical
nature. What genuine excess would be threatened to the creator?
But it happens that the image stops the vision
and captures the intelligence, instead of promoting them. The image is
disguised as an absolute and becomes an idol. The myths of the nation, the
race, indefinite progress, and revolution prove their power by history. The
myth (a developed metaphor) is a misleading discourse in the degree where,
managing to turn the attention onto a certain image, the myth frees this image
from its limitation and thus removes the capacity of it to be incorporated into
a higher synthesis. (Beaujon, 7, p. 50)
The
complete man appears as a crossing, a crossroads between two worlds, a node of
relations. The most necessary act for him is most difficult: to realize his
unity. He cannot be conceived without the multiplicity that is the extreme
opposite. One and multiple: such is revealed to us with our own eyes. But it is
the “images of oneself” that are so absolute that they do not suffer any
comparison with others going so far as to deny their own negation. And in that,
k + is the negation of its own possibility of negation, k-. A creator must
circulate in these two positions if not his k + will carry it towards a form of
absolute relation with himself that will then land him in the arms of Nemesis,
in fact, a self-destruction located in k- and to the degree of the imprint of
the k+.
It
is truly a safety measure of being able “dialectically to divide his being”
between the conviction of being able to be everything and that of being only a
“finished nonentity” and “an error on two legs.”
From this plurality, the
dialectical works out the organizing principle, the limit, suitable to unify
what, from his single movement, would slide into the unlimited. (Beaujon, 7, p.
180)
One
impoverishes reality to the exact degree where one removes oneself from one’s
dialectical nature.
If man is a dialectical
being, his normal state is the drama, i.e. the play of its interior plurality.
There is no dialectical without drama. (p. 206, 7, Beaujon)
If
we leave the desire of control of the creator on his internal world, arriving
to an extreme, his encompassing vision must be able to transcend his desire for
control. This vision must comprise the antithesis of oneself: a radical altérité [otherness]. In other words, to
deny itself without abolishing and being integrated in something vaster than
oneself. Concretely, the creator releases the pressure and enters a
laissez-faire or let one act [laisser-agir]
favorable to an introjecter that will allow a synthesis. Therefore, the desire
for excessive control hems in the spirit in one facet by denying the other facet.
Thus,
it seems that faced with the desire for omnipotence of a human being, nature
answers by a desire of self-destruction that has its source in the same
unconscious root. This would be a principle of balancing thanks to two
antithetic forces that would lead the creator to succumb in a way to an
emptiness that can become the way to an abyss. This one would be understood
like a “signal”; a luminous indicator is ignited; it is time to rejoin the
others. To exceed this course, there is no more balance and there is an excess
and working against nature.
If
nature has registered in the depths of us the relation with the Other within
the center even of our body and of our beginning; we think that “our nature”
cannot bear a process that tends to deny in an absolute manner this relation
with the Other. It is, it seems to us, that we read this, above all, in the
myth of Narcissus. The formula of this logic once amplified and carried to its
height would become: “Any entrance of
omnipotence calls for an entrance of self-destruction in a degree proportioned
to the omnipotence”. “A system endowed from an autonomous capacity of
ridiculing of the system” (Michaux, 21, p.117)
All
the hypnotic processes have in common a capture of attention. It is a matter of
tiring the attention by means of weak and regular sensory stimulations.
Attention, in the broad sense, corresponds to the setting up an awakening of
our senses. However, in hypnosis, we observe a harnessing by the hypnotist of
these senses. Whereas the hypnotized behaves with respect to the outside world
like a sleeper, i.e. diverted all its senses from it, he is awakened with
respect to the person who plunged him into hypnosis and only hears and only
sees him, and understands and answers him.
According
to Freud, this phenomenon called hypnotic relation has characteristic
consequences:
But there is not only
this reduction, so to speak, to the world of the hypnotized with the hypnotist.
In addition the fact that the first becomes completely docile with regard to
the second, obeying and credulous,
and that in a quasi-unlimited way in the case of deep hypnosis. (Freud, 13, p.
15)
Envisioned
under the aspect of putting into sensory form, hypnosis clarifies in an obvious
way the diverting of oneself from one’s own senses in a relation with the Other
leading to a true transfer of representations:
The hypnotist says: “You
see a snake, you smell the perfume of a rose, you hear the most beautiful
music,” and the hypnotized sees, smells, and hears what is required of him by
the suggested representation (...) He behaves completely as if that were real,
manifests all the corresponding affects, and can if required give an account,
after hypnosis, of his perceptions and his imaginary experiences. (Freud, 13, p.
16)
Thus,
the harnessing of the sensibility of a person by another person leads to the
hypnotic process that is characterized by a powerful obedience and credulity.
There is literally a transfer of representations of a person to the other on
the basis of a powerful common sensory bond.
It
is at this point of our subject that we locate the common sensory baggage as
the primordial basis of the attachment, i.e. the sharing of his senses and his
representations with other persons.
There
is a libido investment with the object of attachment. We presuppose that the
more common the sensibility is to both persons who are attached one to the
other, the more is installed between them an obedience to the Other, credulity
towards the other, and the abandonment of oneself. To illustrate this concept
of attachment -- common sensory division -- let us return to Freud:
One can notice in
passing that apart from hypnosis, in real life, a credulity like that of which
hypnotized gives proof with regard to his hypnotist is found only in the attitude of the child with regard to the
loved parents; and that this way of granting with such a submission its own
psychic life onto that of another person has a unique but perfect equivalent in
certain love affairs characterized by a total abandonment of oneself. The union
of exclusive attachment and credulous obedience generally counts among the
traits characteristic of love. (Freud, 13, pp. 16-17)
In
the Anglo-Saxon world, the concept of attachment made its appearance following
the work of Bowlby on the deprivation of maternal affection, work inspired by
those well-known of Spitz on the hospitalized. In 1958, Bowlby and Harlow
published two articles each one of a different orientation but convergent on
the bonds that link the child with his mother. These two works, according to
Bucher, can be regarded as starting point of this psychology that caused many
researches both in ethologic and in genetic psychology.
K.
Lorenz and R. Zazzo contributed their share afterwards. Less known was the
contribution of the “
To Szondi comes the
merit to have grasped the importance of work of Hermann, and to have drawn from
it the conclusions that were essential: that the phenomena of clinging and of
attachment are highly significant, as certainly first outlines of
socialization, but more still as a basis of the complex psychic structuring of
the human being. (Bucher, 8, p. 331)
Here
is sealed the destiny of individuals through that of other human beings. But it
is not sufficient thus that socialization takes place. The one, in the full
meaning of the term, depends nevertheless on a symbolic law that alone founds
the social dimension of others.
Even
the symbiosis of mother-child is not a phenomenon that arises strictly from
Contact, “It would find its basis in the vector of the ego, namely in the
function p - of participation” (Bucher, 8, p. 332).
The
dependence of the union mother-child is transformed gradually into an object
relation, i.e. intermittent with regard to an object that to him or her confers
essential care and food satisfactions, and of which the child recognizes little
by little its existence as a non-ego element.
This recognition and
this “becoming conscious” is possible insofar as the child gives up the dual
participation (reaction p -), and directs himself towards the pole of an
individualized self-assertion (p +), where the desires are not any more
projected and lived in the other, but assumed in their ambitendencies*.
(Bucher, p. 332) [*ambitendencies: a tendency to act in opposite ways or
directions; the presence of opposing behavioral drives]
Let
us reconsider now with this subject this force that “attaches” us to the others
and that is located at the root of our being. We can usefully refer to the
Winnicottean concept of holding and of maintenance. It would be according to
Winnicott the experience of the dual union and of the “primary relation,” which
confers on the child, from the continuity of reliable maternal care the sense
of security allowing him a structuring integration of the ego. This one then
becomes ready to support conditions of anxiety resulting at the same time from
internal instinctual experiences and discontinuity, even of the temporary
disintegration of the states of unity already acquired.
Szondi
proposes a concept equivalent to that of “holding,” that of Halt, to hold, to retain, to support or
to maintain. Szondi affirms the importance of the Haltobjekt [support object], a support object that carries us, that
confers the security to be able to have a reliable support and one’s own; and
still it is a matter of objects to which he or she can hold and by which he or
she is maintained.
Bucher
announces that Szondi, unlike Winnicott, insists more on the effect that the
maternal “holding” produced on the child than on the activity of the mother
herself.
This effect results in
the putting one’s “self” on its feet, a “spinal column” that “holds” the
individual and allows him “to hold himself” in front of others. As far as the
degree to which then object relations are constituted, the substitute objects
can be invested that, in their turn come to corroborate the support and the
self-confidence of the subject. (Bucher, 8, p. 335)
At
the beginning, the attachment with the mother rests, in the other, on the
illusion of being the Other and vice versa. This illusion appears in the vector
of the ego under the reaction of participation (Sch O -): the child creates for
itself the maternal breast; it is the breast and from the effect of the magic
omnipotence that characterizes the participation.
In
what of this illusion is to be found again in the dynamic that makes us tend
towards the Other?
To speak with Winnicott:
the beneficial experience of the primary illusion provides the child with the
capacity of (re) creating substitute desires for the first desire, and this by
the means of representations and fantasies giving aid to the primary illusion.
It is enough to point out the positive aspects that Szondi as well as Winnicott
confer on this transformation of the illusion: imaginative, artistic, and
scientific creativity, the relationship with the arts, religion, the spirit,
and human values in general…. (Bucher, 8, p. 337)
What
is indicated here is, we think, the feeling of working in a human communion
that gives to each being his participative dimension. This feeling answers in
an echo the more powerful feeling of union with the mother, a kind of “logical
premise” to all mental activity whatever it be. The attachment is the rich time
of the irreducible bond to the Other.
From
the Szondian point of view, the attachment registered basically in the contact
is essential to establish object relations.
The C (contact) vector
represents this drive that has as its specific task the search for the object;
that its tension comes from its internal bipolar articulation; that it is
nourished by specific (but hypothetical) energy sources; and finally, that its
satisfaction consists in the establishment of object relations, but in close
interaction with the other six drive needs, and particularly in drive alliance
with the two needs for the S vector of sexuality. The vector of the
Contact thus occupies a particular place in the drive system. It would
constitute initially the base of this system, in the sense where is essential
its “entering into action,” establishing “bridges” so that the other drive
tendencies can reach satisfaction. (Bucher, 8, p. 339)
Whether
this bond is an instinct or a drive, that goes beyond our scope. The important
thing in our eyes remains the obviousness of a power that pushes us towards the
others. We indicate there the term “attachment” while knowing that this term
returns to a process that is built primarily with the whole beginning of the
life of a child whereas we speak about a force that acts at any age of life.
The
forces resulting from this source are not in the strict sense the same realm as
that of attachment such as it is described in the very first stages of the
child, but we think that these forces originate in this source, and in this
degree, we will give them the same name for more “simplicity.”
The
detachment is that which detaches, therefore, decreases the constraints of
attachment and increases the degrees of freedom of the one who is detached.
Inversely, the attachment tends to attach and “to imprison” something by something.
From
the point of view of movement, the detachment increases the degree of freedom,
contrary to the attachment that tends to immobilize and to contain the movement
by an attachment.
Life
is movement. All that is alive moves. The ionic exchanges of Na+ through the
cellular membrane are the condition of its potential of a membrane and of its
internal movements. Inside the body, everything moves unceasingly.
Attachment,
on the other hand, slows down the movement and contains it. At the end of the
extreme attachment resides death, total immobility. But the extreme detachment
also leads it to a morbid process as a disintegration of the structures.
It
is in the dialectical between these two extremes that we want to locate the
cycle of creation. A half-cycle where reigns the attachment (k-) to the Other,
and a half-cycle (k+) where reigns the detachment from the Other. Neither one
nor the Other are in oneself solutions; it is rather a question of circulating
between these positions in order to guarantee the good balance between the
forces that move us away from the Other and those that bring us closer.
Normalization
or normative adaptation is combined with creation, breath of life, to
orchestrate the ballet of the destiny of a person who would like himself or
herself to be and to be human, i.e. capable for the self-to-emerge in a relation
with oneself and capable to belong to a species, to a community: that of humanity.
The man is a being with brakes. If he releases
one of them, he shouts his freedom (poor fellow!); however he holds hundred of
others well in place of them. The speed of the images and of the ideas is due
to the loss of control. Only the brakes make the thought slow and usable. It is
naturally extremely fast, madly fast. (Michaux, 21, p. 241)
Henri
Michaux has experimented with the action of psychedelic drugs under medical
supervision. His exploration led him to write a book that tells of his experience
under the light of a tight analysis and a meticulous description.
We
consider that the experiences under psychedelic drugs can clarify the
trajectory of a thought detached from reality. For us to convince some of this,
we will quote the first lines of his book.
Any drug modifies your
supports. The support that you take in your senses, the support that your
senses took in the world, the support that you take in your general impression to
be. They yield. A vast redistribution of the sensitivity is made, which makes
everything bizarre, a complex and continual redistribution of the sensibility.
You feel less here, and more there. Where is “here”? Where is “there”? In tens
of “here,” in tens of “there,” that you do not know and that you do not
recognize. Obscure zones that were clear. Light things that were heavy. It is
not any more with you where you and reality end and even the objects, losing
their mass and their stiffness, cease a serious resistance to a strength to
omnipresent mobility transformer. (...) You undergo multiples and different
invitations to let go…. (Michaux, 21, pp. 9-10)
If
we take again the dialectical of attachment and detachment, here also too much
attached to the thought brakes it and extinguishes it. While too much
detachment propels it at such a speed that it becomes demonic, paralyzing, and
wild and resembles a torrent that carries in its path all the representations
and all the stable ties. Nothing resists a thought that was detached; it
reaches an exponential trajectory.
We
will illustrate one of the premier harmful effects of the detachment of the
thought by the concept of “neotenic* thought”:
Before a thought is
achieved and comes to maturity; it gives birth to a new thing, and this is
hardly born, incompletely formed, and puts in the world another, a brood of
others that similarly are answered in unexpected and irretrievable references
and that until now I have not succeeded to portray. (Michaux, 21, p. 92)
[*neotenic = an evolutionary trend to be born earlier so
that development is cut off at an earlier stage and juvenile characteristics
are retained in adults of the species]
The
psychedelic experiment shows also phenomena that points out curiously what one
can observe in a detachment of intense thought such as empty abstractions:
I witness a collapse of
the concrete, a few excited moments ago, that does not thus leave its passage
thus that I do not know what it is, special abstraction by sudden
impoverishment, precipitous exhaustion (of the sensibility), by cataclysmic
deconcretisation. Abstraction suis
generis*. Phenomenon here frequent. A marvel that each time leaves you
confused. A good model undoubtedly of other “analysed” secrecies. … But that is
inserted like a nail. (...). Autonomous abstraction, which does not work and
does not bind us to others, sufficient to itself and that leaves us
dumbfounded. (Michaux, 21, p. 128)
[*suis generis = constituting a class alone; unique]
These
abstractions that do not help us to think but that invade the mental fields by
leaving the look of that of the one who undergoes them completely dumbfounded
is a phenomenon that one meets in a thought strongly detached from reality as
much as one who is under the effect of drugs.
There
exists many other traps that await the thought of the creator when he detaches
it from reality. We are not able to give further information on these aspects;
nevertheless, we will finish this subject with one of the most frightening traps
of the thought that self-feeds and that we would indicate as the loss of the
North Pole for a compass, the deviation from the feeling of certainty.
This
feeling is the emotional basis of all intellectual thought; it guarantees it
the emotional density as its content. It is vital for the spirit that this
feeling is regulated to perfection on solid references. A spirit that would not
realize any more that its feeling of certainty is fundamentally biased is a
spirit dedicated to a total blind alley. All the critical equipment of our
spirit rests on the force of feeling and on the conviction that this feeling
establishes in us. To touch the bases of this feeling in somebody is to make it
tremble in the soul because it does know any more to position itself to what exists.
This
phenomenon is the point of no return. Indeed, it can happen that a creator
denied in his course by others is closed again in his world and devotes all his
energy to his quest. He can be identified at this point with his quest that he
cannot any more live without thinking of it continuously. The detachment of his
thought operating during many months can lead him to an extreme that we locate
as a point of no return. The psychedelic experiment of H. Michaux illustrates
perfectly of what consists a point of no return at the psychic level following
an excess of detachment. This extract is long but it has the great merit to
approach the danger that threatens the creator if he goes too far in the detachment.
And continue to present
to him traps, as he has never met and of which he would not have even had the
idea to be wary. In the tragedy of the disproportionate reinforcements where he
advances, here comes (and he does not see it) the most serious perhaps that
which will be made the doors of refuge to be closed again on him, the feeling of total certainty. Because of this
feeling he continues to go along in “his life parades” that ought not resist a
critical examination. But they resist and perfectly. He has received a blinding
message of the Truth. This feeling of the obvious fact there, without
relationship to the feeling current with the obvious fact, is something that is
necessary to have known during the mescaline intoxication, in its suddenness,
its punch, its almost mechanical caricatures, in order to understand that there is no possible parade (stressed
by us). The idea closes again on oneself, as the lid of a strong box that has
shut. No more exit. The idea finishes the loop; the idea in one moment
completed, final, immured. Becomes truth with a capital ‘T’. Sometimes, it
happened sometimes to an experimenter of mescaline to see an idea, especially
if it is strange for him (that somebody has just communicated to him on the
spot or by telephone); it comes to him, in a last time of freedom (two seconds
are enough), to see it seize him, and to grab it. The lunatic does not see
himself grabbed. He is it before having seen it. He remains; he will remain in
the abyss of being convinced of the truth of it, innocent, slave, ignoramus who
is a slave. Without the incomparable increase in the feeling of certainty, not
of the lunatic. The faith makes the madness, makes him remain there, not
enabling him to correct himself, nor with the assistance of others, the
absorbing idea to which he has given his support. To this idea he has succumbed, he submitted
himself to this suggestion as somebody who submitted himself to the suggestion
of a hypnotist. Totally. The operation in love at first sight is not even
necessary. There can not be any awareness of the meeting. In one moment he is
within it. Immersed in the obviousness of the Truth that from all sides
advances and radiates, and rains on him. Though the “idea” appears to others
absurd, delirious, limited (because they see only the outcrops of it), it is
for him an incomparable idea, an idea with answer to everything, a cathedral
idea that places it outside of petty criticisms and, in a certain way, falls
under the secret laws of the Universe. His knowledge, which is to be known by
illumination, does not have anything common with other knowledge and resides in
him like a phantom without borders and that criticism cannot examine. Not any
more. Of that which fascinates one cannot examine. He finds that an idea at
present has power over him. Before, his spirit would have had power over it.
Now it alone has power. And he is under its power, without reserve, without
“but,” without any saying no. (...) Not being able to have foreseen this
dominating idea, not being able, not having been able to see his absorption by
the absorbing idea, thus does he not feel anything? If. And (new appearance of
persecution) he almost always knows, as more or less said of hundreds of
thousands of the mentally ill, than “there occurs something in his back,” even
if he believes himself Emperor of the emperors. Every lunatic knows that
something of importance has escaped him. (Michaux, 21, pp. 215-217)
When
a being prefers to obey the laws of the Universe, the law of men seems quite
ridiculous. Who is wrong? Who is right? In creation, the creator opens areas
where the law of the men has not stepped in yet while he appropriately feels
well the presence of the laws of the universe that guides him. Finally, he knows himself as a creature in
the universe like all the other men, if so then which reference to choose? This
is the crossroads of the devil: each path leads to a radically different
destiny and it is necessary to choose which road to take without knowing too
much where they all go… Nobody knows where a point of no return is and sometimes
it is too late when he has seen it.
The
love of the Other is the investment of libido in an object of love. This
investment is only possible with the condition -- let us take the case of
heterosexuality -- that the narcissistic libido capital decreases in order to
allow the libido “charge” of the object of love. The “center of gravity” of the
libido is deported into the Other.
This
economy -- a little simplistic -- of the heart plunges us in the stake of the
love of the other faced with creation. The creative process detaches the
individual from the other persons in one way or another. Very often, it is
given birth from a “fissure” in the participation with the Other that we
suppose puts at a given moment the ego in danger. Creation clearly seems to
have a color, let us say that is defensive or rather protective. It is a
powerful autocentric process whose power seems to be correlative of “the wound
to the Other.” Then how to leave this process to go towards this Other? And why
go towards this Other?
We
think that the elements of the answers are to be drawn from the love relation.
The adult love requires a double aptitude to
establish a symbiotic state and to return to the limits of one’s own ego. This
capacity to adopt and to leave one or the other pattern without difficulties
and at the opportune moment is essential there. (Besdine, 3, p. 204)
According
to Alberoni (1, p. 131), the incipient love feeds from this differential
tension that must become single. For him (1, p. 9): “What is it to fall in
love? It is the state born from a
collective movement of the two of them.”
The budding love separates what was close-knit
and links what was separate; but the union is done in a particular way, because
it is presented in the form of a structural alternative to a structured
relation. The new structure defies the old structure up to its roots and
reduces it to a thing deprived of any value. In parallel, it builds the new
community on an absolute value, an absolute right, and reorganizes all the rest
around this right. This new organization does not occur immediately but during
a process. What appears at the moment is the pure object of Eros. This object appears to us as a revelation.
(Alberoni, 1, p. 31)
The
very nature of the budding love implies that one trusts the Other, that one
relies on him or her, and that one abandons oneself to the other. The love in a
budding state tends to fusion, but to
the fusion of two different persons. For that the love to be born requires that
there be diversity and the budding love is a will, a force to overcome this
diversity that however exists and must exist. The loved person interests one
because he or she is different and because he or she is bearer of his or her
own specificity and that one can not confuse with any other person.
The budding state
involves a way of thinking, of seeing, of feeling, and of living completely
different. Those who find themselves in this situation and in this state
understand one another deeply. Although their personal history is radically
different, their relation in the world is identical. This is why, in the great
collective movements, composed of the thousands and the thousands of persons of
different ages and of different social environments, “recognize themselves” and
form a collective unit, a “we.” The same phenomenon occurs when one falls in
love. (Alberoni, 1, pp. 70-71)
The
love of the Other can generate a negation of one’s course in transfiguring one
by the union with the Other. It seems that the thesis of Alberoni goes in the
sense of a major negation of oneself in order to fall in love.
Actually, they are not
predisposed to fall in love, even if they wish it. The love that they wish,
even ardently, does not correspond to a necessity to break completely with the
past and with a necessity to call into question their life and to take the risk
of being projected into an absolute innovation. Nobody falls in love if he or
she is, even partially, satisfied with what he or she has and with what he or
she is. Love is born from a depressive overload that is characterized by the
impossibility of finding in everyday existence something that is worth taking
any trouble about. The “symptom” of the predisposition to love is not the
conscious desire of falling in love, nor the intense desire to enrich one’s
existence; but the profound feeling not to exist, not to have any value and
shame at not having some value. The feeling of nothingness and the shame of
one’s own nullity: such are the harbingers of the state in love. (...) It is
not the longing for love that pushes us to fall in love, but the certainty of
not having anything to lose in becoming what we become; it is the prospect of
nothing in front of us. At this point in time this pattern develops in us to
face a different situation and to take risks and this propensity to throw
oneself into any adventure and something that those who are satisfied with
themselves cannot know. (Alberoni, 1, p. 78)
Here
is developed the masterly action of Nemesis through the self-destruction of one’s
ego allowing the opening the Other, the friendship footbridge or bond of love,
at all events, the friendship is still a manner of loving. For Alberoni, the
budding state’s source is in the depressive overload.
The
Other in that it is a reference of oneself is a break of the absolute relation
to oneself and introduces a relative relation to oneself, i.e. mediated by the
Other.
To know our shared love,
we are made to perceive who the being that we are, if modest that is to say the
judgment that we bear on ourselves, compared to that which we are and what the
others are worth hold a certain value. This value is the being loved that
confers it to us, which incarnates any potential value. (Alberoni, 1, p. 113)
To
break the detachment, attachment is needed. For a human being, that would be
called love; it is to love a person who becomes the ambassadress for all the others.
k
- and p - are the mark of the Other in the sense where the limit comes from
what is not me. Oedipus is there to recall for us that, without the law of the
Other, the father, there is no limit to the desire for omnipotence. The idea is
that the limit to our desire for omnipotence can only come from what is not us
and what limits imagination is the Other and reality. And k- p- is reality and
the Other.
k-
indicates the negation of one’s world of fantasy and p- indicates the
participative position. This is the reaction of the man in the street without
personal ambitions and inhibited in his imaginative function. This is somebody
altogether very available and who fits in society like a fish in water.
k-
p- is thus a position that we will not develop but only signals to us as being
a stage for setting out a night light in the creative process. This is the
complete relation with the Other, without variation and without distance: one
does not believe at all. One participates, one obeys, the world turns and we
follow it.
When
the creator rejoins this position of k- p-, he has succeeded in leaving his
course to join the others. He is in the common sensory bath and he shares the
common representations. It is in the sense that he is not delirious because he
possesses this baggage. He thus has a will of sharing, of communication, and of
availability to the other.
The
creative act has its base in the fact that a person takes again into account
his senses. At this time, he does not seek any more to share the same sensory
baggage (“sensory autarky”: k+). The individual orients his senses for his own representations
and finally his own image of himself (“representational autarky*”: p+).
[*autarky = self-sufficiency]
But,
from a social point of view, as soon as a person modifies and calibrates his or
her sensibility and his or her perception to his or her own ends, this person
is likely to move away from the codes, the standards, and conventions that lay
down the social rules and that set up communication. The more specifically this
person invests what corresponds to his or her manner of being at the perceptive
level, the more we have the probability that this person shares less his or her
perceptive baggage with that of others.
If
this personal perception forms a deposit in a representation and that this
representation specific to oneself invades the mental fields, there are strong
chances that the common representations registered in this person are disinvested.
This
process can open a door towards a mechanism of the psychotic type if the
individual structures himself according to his perceptions without taking
account of “the manner of being social” such as the interpretation of the
Rorschach (Ban%, F+%) and of the T.A.T. stresses it for the diagnoses of
psychosis. In any case, the least that one can anticipate is an antisocial behavior.
The
total rupture with the Other can be avoided by a reciprocating movement that
makes the ego to travel into the different positions. This cyclic aspect is
known as the factor of balance in particular in the cycle of the contact
(clinging – contact; unhooking – rupture of the contact). That would make it
possible to avoid an excessive structuring in one or the other poles. It is in
the sense that the quarter k- p- is an essential stage in the creative process
to prevent that it does not go wrong.
Jean
Mélon (18) points out the importance of the object with which to fusion with in
creation. The Other (a close relation) is a continual presence-absence. If this
other is too intrusive, creation is not possible any more. If he moves away too
far, things do not go well any more. All creative space is supported by an
invisible but efficient framework that is the symbolic maternal presence.
To
enter in k- p- is to join this Other. The participation is set up (p-), the
attachment is powerful, “I am the other.” k - maintains in us the place
that the Other will be able to take: k - removes from our narcissistic economy
the libido that is redistributed to the Other (p -). The union is realized,
agreement reigns.
We
are indebted in Jean Mélon (18) for having allowed us to have access to a
popularization of the complex thought of Maldiney. The subject matter that will
follow is largely inspired by the Szondi seminars 1995 that Mélon gave at the
There
are kinds of homology between the work of art and the ego on the level of
structure. The ego constructs itself as a work of art is built. And conversely,
a work of art is built in the manner of the ego. (Maldiney, 17)
Szondi
calls the ego the “pontifex oppositorum ego.” Ego is a fault [faille]. According to the destiny of
constraint, the ego is only a drive, i.e. natural, and (on the other side of
the fault [la faille]) according to
the second destiny, the ego exists by the destiny of choice. The choice is what
allows existence in other words.
With
Maldiney, the opposition that he applies to Szondi is the opposition between
constraint and choice. This is not between constraint and freedom because
freedom, that which conditions even the possibility of being free, is that one
has choice obviously. If one does not have a choice, one cannot speak about
freedom. Freedom implies that choice is possible.
p
+ is the human possibility par excellence but it is obviously that which leads
to madness because the p + is that which has the ambition to be everything or
any being. The point of view of absolute p + is a solipsist point of view: what
I think is true and with me alone, I fill up the whole world. That is what
realizes the megalomania paranoiac.
According
to Mélon, philosophy is the normal form of paranoia. Paranoia is the morbid
form of a manner of philosophical, i.e. systematic, thinking.
Paranoia
is characterized by this systematic side; it interprets everything according to
a postulate that proves to be indefensible. Since there has been philosophy,
i.e. since the Greeks, the Pre-Socratics deal with the whole; they seized the
world as a totality. The ambition of philosophy since its beginnings is always
to seize again the whole.
1. Fusco and Catatonia
Maldiney
makes the analysis of the painting of Fusco starting from the Szondian
positions of the ego: p +/ p -, k +/ k-.
Fusco
is a complete catatonic who does not speak, who does not move, and then who
suddenly starts to paint. He paints on the walls with materials collected even
from the ground. He refused to use the material that one gave him except
towards the end when he agreed to paint on paper. His works are in
The
essence of the catatonia is paradoxically the assertion of nothing. The
catatonic does not say anything, does not do anything, and does not move. The
typical symptom of catatonia is the negativism; he is a negativist on all
levels; he destroys everything. It is among them that one finds the “troubles”
of the language of schizophrenia that wishes to say nothing any more, the
jargon “cacacam, emegna, gnacacac.”
When
they want indeed to speak, it is like that that they speak. There is like that
a kind of destruction and a devalorization of everything.
Therefore,
with the catatonic, his fundamental attitude is negativist. When he wants
indeed to say something to us, he says that he does not exist, that he does not
have a body, that he is dead; and he expresses all this in his very being since
he is there like a stone. One always compares the catatonic to a rock and to a
stone. What remains to him of existence does not produce anything else than
this non-life that he incarnates. He is a mummy, he is completely fossilized.
When he devotes himself to an activity, it is an activity of destruction.
This
leaves the assumption that, at the beginning, if he were catatonic, he ought to
have the reaction of the catatonic ego k -! p O.
Maldiney
poses as a postulate that k-! p O is the anti-creative reaction par excellence.
k-! p O is to be interpreted in the sense of opposing the background that
Szondi calls the theoretical background, i.e. the exactly opposite reaction: k
+! p ±. Maldiney suggests that at the most creative moment of this crude artist
ought to be in this position: k +! p ±.
k
- goes against creation. All that k- can do is to deform or to deny the forms
that were really created. k - destroys what is of the order of creation. Maintaining
all rational thought is, from this point, destructive; it is in any case
anti-creative. If we do not let ourselves go with this creative pressure that,
so to speak, comes spontaneously, we let us start to erase, and then in the
final analysis one is able no more to make anything at all because that is the
danger.
What
Maldiney stresses most vigorously is that the anti-creative position par
excellence is the position k -, especially if it is associated with p O: k - p
O.
k
- is the third position of the circuit. Maldiney makes it the catatonic
position, but it should indeed be seen as the negative aspect of catatonia.
k
-! is also the reaction of the neurotic; k -! is the neurotic reaction par
excellence. The neurotic who is not obviously negativist but who, to himself,
lives in the negation and who, owing to the fact that he or she is in the
negation, excludes certain possibilities of being and in particular that which
corresponds to the inverse, opposite position, i.e. k +.
To
be a creator all the time is impossible. Most of the time, we are in k -
because our culture obliges us to be in k- and to be critical with respect to
all that we do and produce. The creative individuals today are necessarily
revolutionists. They must take the opposite course to the general position.
Whereas
there are people who are naturally creators and are those who favor the
position k +. Primitives create spontaneously. The child creates spontaneously.
The drawings of child are from creation. Children are in the position k+ p -.
The day when he or she passes into k- (around 8 years), he or she cannot draw
any more; that is finished. The splendid drawings of the child stop at the
entry into elementary school.
Once
one learns how to read and write, all that collapses. The influence of
rationality makes the creativity to die except among rebels. Therefore the
creators are necessarily more or less noisy rebels, more or less breakers of
things. The true breakers are k- who prevent the others from creating.
2. Work-Made [Faire-oeuvre]
And
Maldiney will affirm that what is fundamental in the work-made [faire-oeuvre] is the passage from a
position p, which is p + or p -, with the resumption of this position in k. To make
a work is always to produce something that is put into a form.
What
is fundamental in the time of making a work is k + because it is the systolic
element that gathers and that gives form to this desire to be that which is
expressed on the level p.
What
is important is that it is good to see what the function k+ represents.
Whatever is the form of creativity, be it in art or in science, k + has the
meaning of putting into form, thus giving form to that which, at the beginning,
does not have any form.
If it is not in the
opening, i.e. out of p and if there is no tension from the side p + or the side
p -, one cannot create either. Therefore, p O is a position that is also
anti-creative in the sense where there is no tension nor in the sense of
producing a formula, an abstract form, and no tension to seize again through a
form of the sensory intuitions.
k
+ slows down p + in the sense of a deflation by introjection: this is the
operative [opérotrope] action of k +
that obliges certain choices. Thus, p + would be the creative intention and k +
its operative [opérotrope] tool.
3. Ego Systole and Ego Diastole