Multitudes

"[Mannie Ghent's] expression of his personal vision in the form of a Credo (Ghent, 1989) became an invitation for others to write their Credos - a task he literally set for analytic candidates in his seminar" (186)"The subtitle of this paper, "Containing of Multitudes," I chose from Whitman (1855), who, of course, was the great exemplar of this tradition of uniquely personal, subjective expression in American letters and whose lines I choose as an epigraph for this dedication: "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"" (186)"What is the Big Energy? I explained, it's what people used to mean by God, or Truth, but you can think of it differently or call it something else - I said that I thought "The Big Energy" is not a bad term for it. The Little Energy, the charge you get from money, status, fame, and the like can't be gainsaid, but it isn't the same" (187)"The assignment to present a paper about "Why I Write" faced me with the task of putting these kinds of thoughts on paper" (187)"To talk about what really underlies the act of writing for me, that is, about my own relation to creativity and the Big Energy, seemed far too personal. As a result, the process of writing the paper itself became my subject matter, I began attending to how I write as well as what I write. In effect, I began to focus on the equivalent of what we consider the implicit, procedural dimension in the psychoanalytic process, the moment-to-moment "how" of it all. I realized once again that doing something and thinking about doing it are quite different - even when the thing being done is thinking. Writing for me is not unlike speaking, just a more refined and corrigible version of thinking aloud" (187)"And, it occurs to me now, I used to argue this point with Mannie at times, impatience with the Little Energy can be a disturbance in the analytic field. It becomes itself an observing judgment that discourages really allowing all the parts of self, including the hooked parts, to emerge and reveal their meanings. In short, it can promote splitting" (188)"I am always trying to pull everything back toward a center. I write in order to know myself. I go "outside" to the manifold to bring what I find "inside," to connect with and recognize myself in others I read and know. Thinking about the formal process of writing, I realized that I am always trying to straddle and bridge opposition, to find an underlying thread that ties together disparate things, to turn the many into one without reducing or dedifferentiating" (188)"the problem with thinking centripetally is that there might be any number of spokes that meet in the center, and you have to decide at which point on the wheel, with which spoke, you begin" (188)"What I was about to talk about was the distinction between two states of consciousness: the one in which we immerse or float or allow ourselves to be carried by association of ideas and one in which we have a definite intention" (188-189)"In particular I had an association between the state of subjective awareness and a kind of "tarrying with teh negative" (Hegel, 1807), which Keats called "Negative Capability - that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after face and unreason." By way of illustration, Keats continuities, "Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated versimilitude caught from the Pentralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge" (cited in DiPrima, 1978). Now, for obvious reasons, psychoanalysts in recent years have become fond of talking about negative capability; a term that elevates tolerating uncertainty and mystery should be dear to our hearts. But after many years, as the idea of negative capability has become more commonplace, what caught my attention is what he went on to say about Coleridge. What do we lose when we lose specificity, detail, or image in favor of abstraction?" (189)"As Schachtel (1959) described with the notion of the allocentric vision, investing full attention in the object allows the self to become one with it. To find the object in this way is to release the true self, to separate from the false self that is attacked or clinging, which Eastern tradition calls ego - to surrender. Mannie emphasized, however, that surrender is precisely not to the object or other, that the relinquishing of ego works to discover on'es sense of self. Again, the sense of one's own wholeness is enhanced, not diminished, by the sense of unity with other living beings (Ghent, 1990). This paradoxical relation of losing and finding the self is parallel to the central paradox in the tradition of Buddhist thought, wherein liberation comes through acceptance" (189)"Evelyn Keller (1983), in her critique of a science predicated on the radical dichotomy of subject and object, supports an alternative vision of knowledge as communion with the object by referring to the biologist Barbara McClintock" (189-190)"And while my efforts to think ahead of time about what I want to say feel ineffectual, experience tells me that this paper will write itself, since writing itself IS a kind of thinking, and not merely a conveyance, a translation of the already thought. Forgetting myself, I can become myself" (190)"Her intention was to suggest that, by writing poetry one tries to receive, to become a receiving tube. DiPrima suggested that before writing you start with an imprecise idea,"a feel of something about to happen there... and at that point, that's all you have... when you enter into the act of composing, at that point you have nothing - everything drops away and you have only what you're receiving. Your whole purpose ... is to make yourself a fine enough organism to most precisely receive, and most precisely transmit [p. 19]" (190-191)"the idea of receptivity... "You dream of negative capability, but you love resolution"" (191)"Citing Schiller, Freud says (in a letter unearthed by Rank), that the difficulty in writing proceeds from"the constraint imposed by your reason upon you imagination... It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in - at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but i may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn our to form a most effective link... [w]here there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me - relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass. You critics... are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds [Freud, 1900, p. 103]" (191-192)"As for us latecomers, when it comes to writing, we know that without Freud to reassure us that all our thoughts, however trivial or fantastic, are interesting, we are often quite unable to counter the voice of critical scrutiny. As Schiller says, if you let that in too soon, it closes the gates. Then you have only the uninspired voice of the gatekeeper, the servant of the Little Energy, the slave of appearances, who can roll off citations or literature reviews, or tell you why everything you have written is banal and has been said better by someone else. Then at best you can chop up sentences into manageable parts or write (expand or cut) in the margins. The gatekeeper closes, but the light comes through only when the gates are open" (192)"We are multiple selves, but we are also one" (192)"Furthermore, I find the voice that adds, subtracts, edits, and regulates the opening and closing of gates to be no mere slave of convention, but a concerned friend, a rigorous thinker, if not always inspired, and sometimes difficult to distinguish from the enthusiast, the dreamer. In any dialectical vision, in any version of complexity. Opening requires its friendly opposite, Closing. The anxiety of authorship lies not only with the critic as gatekeeper, with the fear of judgment or exposure, though that fear can be quite powerful. The idea of fearing the inner critic is a simplification. That the gatekeeper also serves as organizer, that she is needed, suggests that the issue is how we relate to self-consciousness, whether we enlist it to avoid anxiety or help contain it" (193)"The possible danger in trying to order the whole is that it introduces the perspective of the outside, objective self-awareness and so may interrupt the connection to the object" (193)"These ruminations, which may seem to be "insight," serve in the moment to rescue her from the fantasy of immersion and, indeed, immersion on the couch in the experience she has too hastily named: "oblivion." Her intellectual observation is not false, but neither is it connected to an experience of what she fears: loss in the process of surrender. (Mannie would perhaps see here a fine illustration of the struggle between false-self protectiveness and true-self desire)" (194)"Letting go into open space, the space of pleasure and the anxiety of immersion and creation, of awe and openness to the new, brings her to close to ... what? Some fearful state she names the void, oblivion - yet the difficulty is to be really in contact with that fear, to surrender to it rather than simply shut the gates in its name" (195)"Reason, as Schiller (cited in Freud, 1900) called it, or reality in Freud's schema, is actually a metaphor for a container that offers security at the price of constricting the satisfaction of the little energy at the price of enervating, which requires performance but denies power" (195)"Thus I might arrive at yet another argument for my case that the truest form of concentrated attention to the object is actually subjective, that objective consciousness is fantastical" (196)"Because the process of writing has something to do with faith in desire, in the process of following a thread, swimming along with the current. This process has everything to do with "the area of faith" as Eigen (1981) called it, and faith in this process is essential to all psychoanalytic work, of whatever orientation. Without surrendering to a process of often discovery, to acceptance of the unknown, how can we not be doomed to mere repetition?" (196)"Resolution, I am thinking, ought to be able to take the form of accepting the presence, the necessity, of countervailing forces, living with, not eliminating contradiction. Resolution and receptivity, openness and closure - I want them to function like dissonance and harmony, to be mutually enhancing rather than crudely opposite. Union and dispersal, the one and the many - the voice I would like to find would weave between them. It would come from the place of the third. Contradictions, I think, can be like storms that sweep over the waters. They can be frightening if you are at sea, but heady and fully of wild energy to watch from the beach. I am talking about a place of thirdness, inside, below, in between, from which to experience contradictions (another way of thinking about Winnicott's (1971) transitional experience) that gives us a different relationship to opposites" (196-197)"My image of thirdness is based on a musical metaphor, an image of two or more people following a score, not one they have already read but one that reveals itself only as they go along. Indeed, as they play their notes, the score is being written, becoming what it is, realizing itself. This image is meant to capture the intersubjective process by which two people cocreate or follow a pattern, an interaction in which neither person leads and neither simply reacts. In the space of thirdness, as Winnicott (1971) said of the transitional experience, it is unclear whether truth is invented or discovered" (197)"Thus, surrender, or the place of thirdness, can be seen as transcending the split between immersion and self-consciousness. That is, thirdness can allow self-consciousness in without having it impinge, or wreck, the attention to the subject. That is where the Big Energy enters, in the open space of the third. If we think in terms of the opposition between oneness- union and twoness-difference, then in thirdness these two states come together and these dissonant elements are momentarily resolved" (197-198)"The thing we recognize as the beginning, the One we return to, is different because of that exploration" (198)"He referred me to Octavio Paz's (1988) biography of Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, an analysis of the neo-Platonist hermeticism of that 17th-century Latin American poet. Paz cites Plotinus, who said, "The One is perfect.. and being perfect, it overflows, and thus its superabundance produces an Other... Whenever anything reaches its own perfection, we can see that it cannot endure to remain in itself, but generates and produces some other thing"" (199)"It is not possible (even for God) to simply contain multitudes (or, differently put, excitement, arousal) without creating something other than itself" (199)"For me, what is interesting in writing, finally, like composing, is taking a theme that involves contradiction and raising it to a higher level, in order to experience this stretch, this tension. The point is to see how much dissonance you can create and still resolve the harmony, because the greater the dissonance, the more intense the resolution" (199-200)"the multitudes are contained, but still free to move around" (200)