The pieces we have lost along the way
It must be thought about us, Westerners. It is curious that this is exactly the residual thought of this book’s reading, which concerns, at first, to the East thinking. It happens that since the beginning, the idiosyncratic weaving about China proposed by Bollas suggests that there is something missing in the Western mind, that we have been losing pieces along the path of civilization.
For Bollas, psychoanalysis can help to think about this flaw, these rifts in Western civilization (borrowed from the name of the ninth chapter of this book). He starts by diving into the quintessential material of psychoanalysis, the word, more specifically the differences between Eastern and Western languages. Apart from technical differences, he focuses on the very concept of what a language means for each of these two halves of the planet. Westerners excel in objective language; speaking is the same as communicating an idea precisely. Therefore, we establish our relationships under the aegis of the paternal verbal order. Oriental languages, on the other hand, are based on characters, drawings that communicate an image open to interpretation, which depends on the context and the relationship between the speakers. In the East, one thinks and communicates through the maternal pre-verbal order. No characters such as any I Ching trigram or hexagram mean a single thing. We speak in prose, we draw up contracts, Orientals speak, write and think in poetry.
Coming from poetry and his vast repertoire of literature, Bollas goes on to show how these different ways of thinking created characters, different models of life. For Westerners, Homer: the journey of the individual hero who goes out into the world making discoveries and unfolding his self; for Orientals, ordinary characters poetically immersed in powerful and yet simple images: a dog barking, a bicycle, a mountain... Speech and writing have, this way, a dialectical relationship with the stablishment of the reality and with the internal structures that put this reality reading together. Orientals and Westerners live in different worlds: the first, in the world of the maternal, sensorial order, deeply connected to the immediately perceptible environment; while Westerners live in the world of paternal order, black-and-white (or is it black and white? No shadows or tonnes…), a world in which rules represent obstacles to the self who wants to break through the world.
However, this book searches for bridges, not walls. The differences between Eastern and Western ways of thinking tend to be episodic rather than natural or intrinsic. After all, the West is also prolific in poetry and the East has its epics of heroic characters. It is not that Westerners and Easterners, respectively, lacked the ability to think poetically or the narrative objectivity, but rather that those parts developed unevenly in these two regions of the world.
It is here that, curiously, psychoanalysis appears as an unusual bridge between these two worlds. As objective as Western discourse is, what an analyst asks for a patient within the setting is exactly the opposite of this way of speaking; moreover, what the analyst hears is exactly what was not spoken, the in-between of the patient's words. Western by its birth, psychoanalysis has been attentive from the beginning to that gray zone of discourse, to the in-between, to the unconscious.
Psychoanalytic language seeks to listen to the Western discourse with eastern ears. Isn't the dream exactly a set of images translated into words, words that distort the dream experience¹ and its latent content?
Bollas' thesis advocates that, despite being Oedipal and centered on spoken discourse, psychoanalysis was born stained by the pre-verbal maternal order. Freud's invention of the setting (which Bollas calls the Freudian moment), with the analysand lying down (with the analyst behind him) freely associating is the unsuspecting re-creation of the world of the maternal order (or, as Khan² said, the recreation of the dreamer's intrapsychic state, which is similar).
Winnicott and Khan's psychoanalysis proposed a radical view of these initial pre-verbal stages, based on a deep study of the mother-infant relationship, thus, betting on a therapy based on this way of communicating. The setting experience gained importance at the expense of interpretation; this could interfere in a moment of relaxation/non-integration³ for the patient, that is, a good setting experience and environmental relationship. Bollas remembers that Winnicott told his patients to be silent; and that Khan interpreted in verses spoken in Persian. Always torn between his western and eastern self (even though it is not the orient we are talking about here), Masud Khan wrote: "The Eastern sensibilityis at once 'public' and also hidden and private. The English linguistic medium cannot transmit experiences both alien and unknowable to it⁴." What Bollas presents here is a deeply digested, insider reading of these two analysts’ practice, who viewed the linguistic media as more of a hindrance than a benefit to psychoanalytic treatment.
Even though these analysts’ practice was experimental and departed from what is the classical technique of psychoanalysis, it is undeniable that, even inadvertently, they saw a point of union between the eastern and western parts of the mind. After all, so that the individual, internal self could appear, the provision of something external was necessary, a facilitating environment. The true self only exists in its experience of the world.
As we go along with this book, the impression that we need to deal with two irreconcilable elements fades. The self’s singularities and the collective’s needs don’t have to exist in separate worlds only. The light that Bollas brings us is that we Westerners base the transcendence of the individual and heroic self on a negative hallucination of the group’s reality. It’s exactly this psychotic collective functioning that needs to come into question.
In a more recent work, Meaning and Melancholia (2018), our author dives deeply into group politics; he writes from a world which is already under the trumpism shadow in the USA (and, we would say, of bolsonarismo in Brazil) and explores how the limits of democracy made explicit by far-right political phenomena are a reflection of the poverty of narrative of the world and a self-absorption of the psychic process that is based on an operationalization of the world. For Bollas, psychoanalysis can offer a lexicon to explain the moment we went through/we were going through⁵.
We live in a moment in which there is an affective decathexis in Kultur's institutions; Not only did the End of History not happen, but what followed was the Age of Bewilderment (part of the subtitle of Meaning and Melancholia). We need to think about groups and China’s thinking – the most populated region in the world at all times – can offer us some paths. Still, psychoanalysis can offer us an instrument for this thinking. Mezan⁶ locates the investigation of collective cultural heritage as one of the three sources of psychoanalysis (along with Freud's self-analysis and clinical work) and indicates as a closed question that Totem and Taboo was Freud's favorite book. What if psychoanalysis started from the group and not from the individual?, Bollas wonders in Chapter 9. Well, it may have...
We live in a moment in which there is an affective decathexis in Kultur's institutions; Not only did the End of History not happen, but what followed was the Age of Bewilderment (part of the subtitle of Meaning and Melancholia). We need to think about groups and China’s thinking – the most populated region in the world at all times – can offer us some paths. Still, psychoanalysis can offer us an instrument for this thinking. Mezan⁶ locates the investigation of collective cultural heritage as one of the three sources of psychoanalysis (along with Freud's self-analysis and clinical work) and indicates as a closed question that Totem and Taboo was Freud's favorite book. What if psychoanalysis started from the group and not from the individual?, Bollas wonders in Chapter 9. Well, it may have...
What intoxicates our collective today is no longer the father figure of the sociopathic dictator, but the horde of supporters of those who place themselves above good, evil and institutions. It is impressive that this book was written before Trump, Bolsonaro and the invasion of the Capitol in Washington, on January 6, 2021. If the internal conflict between the instances of the mind has neurotic repression as its operator, the groups – Bollas remembers Bion – operate from psychotic defenses onto their own destructiveness. For this book, the conflict is not only internal, but also between the internal and the collective.
With its inherent consideration of the collective, Eastern thought can add new and valuable ingredients to an outlet for the individual self that can be harmonious along with the whole. Bollas evades the implicit morality of Confucianism trying to distill from Confucius a psychological theory that does not fall into the easy place of pointing fingers at Maoism. Our democracy, after all, increasingly seems more of a false simple answer to the needs of the self and the world.
If Oedipus is the subject's first group configuration, then a larger group appears – society –, leaving the father in a minority. The exit from Oedipus would not be such a submission to the father's law, but living in harmony with the collective laws of society, co-constructed by everyone, I risk, including non-human beings. Nothing is as difficult to imagine in the current moment in which the regulation of the world is dominated by private companies sponsoring the promotion of “entrepreneurs of their own”.
Bollas makes us think with new colors about the individual self exercising itself in the world from the moment the collective becomes an entity with which it is necessary to negotiate. Right in the Introduction, Bollas offers us the beautiful image of Haudricourt, who compares the oriental mentality to gardeners’. For them, the optimal conditions are those already given by nature.
NOTES
¹ Or the experience itself of dreaming, as Masud Khan calls it in “The Use and Abuse of Dream in Psychic Experience” (1972).
² “Dream Psychology and the Evolution of the Psycho-Analytical Situation”. In: Kahn (1974/1996), p.29.
³ For Winnicott, the state of non-integration (unlike disintegration) is a state of rest, of “relaxation proper to those who feel well supported” (Dias, 2003), from which – and only from which – the experience of integration can emerge.
⁴ In his Workbook (1979) apud Hopkins (2006).
⁵ For more on this book, still unpublished in Portuguese, I refer the reader to my article “Significado e Melancolia – A Poesia da Existência” in Jornal de Psicanálise – Instituto de Psicanálise “Durval Marcondes”, SBP-SP, v. 52, no. 96, June 2019.
⁶ Mezan, 1985, chap. 2.1.
² “Dream Psychology and the Evolution of the Psycho-Analytical Situation”. In: Kahn (1974/1996), p.29.
³ For Winnicott, the state of non-integration (unlike disintegration) is a state of rest, of “relaxation proper to those who feel well supported” (Dias, 2003), from which – and only from which – the experience of integration can emerge.
⁴ In his Workbook (1979) apud Hopkins (2006).
⁵ For more on this book, still unpublished in Portuguese, I refer the reader to my article “Significado e Melancolia – A Poesia da Existência” in Jornal de Psicanálise – Instituto de Psicanálise “Durval Marcondes”, SBP-SP, v. 52, no. 96, June 2019.
⁶ Mezan, 1985, chap. 2.1.
REFERENCES
Bollas, C. (2018). Meaning and Melancholia – Life in the Age of Bewilderment. Londres: Routledge.
Dias, E. O. (2003) A teoria do amadurecimento em Winnicott. São Paulo: Escuta.
Hopkins, L. (2006) False Self – The Life of Masud Khan. Londres: Karnac.
Khan, M. (1964/1996) The Privacy of the Self. Londres: Karnac.
_______. (1972) The Use and Abuse of Dream in Psychic Experience. In: Flan- ders, S. (1993/2005) The Dream Discourse Today. Londres: Routledge.
Mezan, R. (1985) Freud, pensador da cultura. São Paulo: Brasiliense.
Santos, L. F. (2019) Significado e Melancolia – A Poesia da Existência. Jornal de Psicanálise – Instituto de Psicanálise “Durval Marcondes”, SBP-SP, v. 52, n. 96, junho de 2019.