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Secrets of Da Vinci's The Last Supper
2023.03.22 02:26 menorahman100 Secrets of Da Vinci's The Last Supper
 | The theme we will address has never attracted as much attention as it does in the current days. The recent success editorial of the book "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown instigated the imaginary, through a narrative that involves all of these matters related to the life of Christ questioning and presenting conjectures and theories, some credible and many others, in my view, without a lot of reasons, such as the mention of the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, "the Last Supper". submitted by menorahman100 to SaturnStormCube [link] [comments] https://youtu.be/i6-drL7fuqs Before we talk about the meaning of Leonardo's work, let's quickly address some aspects of his life to understand the context in which all his work developed. Leonardo was born in April 1452 in Vinci, a village near by the Florence, son of Piero da Vinci, a notary, and a servant. Leonardo was an illegitimate child, having no rights to his father's estate. But his father, zealous, did not abandon him, having assumed his creation. We must remember that Leonardo was born in the middle ages. The end of the middle ages is determined by the fall of Constantinople in May 1453. Of course the change from one period to another does not occur through a single event. This is a process of transition that involves multiple events. With the end of the Middle Ages we have the Renaissance, with the resurgence of the appreciation of man as a factor of relevance in all contexts. Begins Humanism, a movement that revolutionized the thought, emerging new concepts and worldviews. This new concept is a precursor of specialization of knowledge, resulting later in the systematization of human knowledge, with scientism and segregation of knowledge that until then was unified. Leonardo is more a medieval wise man than a person aligned with trends Renaissance because he was not restricted in specifics knowledge like other geniuses contemporaries geniuses. He had a broad knowledge. He was not only a painter. He was a sculptor, musician, architect, engineer, inventor, anatomist, and also an astrologer, although his biography does not to mention about the universe of hidden knowledge. In short he had a universal knowledge. In all areas he left the mark of his genius. When he turned 14, his father had placed him as an apprentice in the arts studio of Verrocchio who was a great master of Florence. The art workshops held not only artistic works such as paintings and sculptures, but also construction of buildings, bridges and works of engineering, metallurgy, war machines, everything that required creativity of man to make some kind of artifact. Leonardo soon excelled in all these arts, having participated in the production of a painting by Verrocchio, by order of Lorenzo Medici, ruler of Florence. He did paint an angel face on a canvas and the delicacy of the lines and the play of light, called the attention of the Medici family, who came to protect him. At this time, the success did not depend on talent, but especially the figure of a protector, a Maecenas. The Italian peninsula, at that time, was a region of many disputes, without the identity of a country, which has consolidated only in the second half of the nineteenth century with Garibaldi. There were city-states, which they lived in strife. Wars were fought systematically, in order to solidify the power of the clergy. In this context, a war was deflagrated against Florence, promoted by the Vatican, for there were many interests of political composition, dominance, hegemony and economic supremacy. Leonardo facing this situation, after serving the powerful others, as the Borgia, for example, just moving to Milan, had offered his services to the Duke Ludovico Sforza. Just to get an idea of the talents of Leonardo, he presents his resume as primarily military engineer, as he liked to be recognized, Architect, Builder Weapons, inventor, musician and at the end of the list of qualifications is painter and this is just his ability is that Duke engages him. Ludovico became the new protector of Leonardo. Among the many works that Leonardo executed custom Ludovico is the "Last Supper." The work should decorate the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The work began in 1495 and was completed in 1497. In reality it did not complete. By the way, no work of Leonardo, except St. John and baby Jesus was completed. Were several lawsuits filed against Leonardo because he did not fulfill contract. Leonardo spoke "creation is divine, execution is slavish!" https://preview.redd.it/fk3rhe5hz6pa1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fd7f147e06e72dca0ff296f65317c3163733a3fb The Last Supper was painted on the walls of the hall and Leonardo developed a new technique. It is often said that it is a fresco, but in reality a fresco is a painting done on a layer of newly applied plaster still wet. This technique does not allow error and touches later. As Leonardo was primarily a perfectionist, he wanted a technique that could shorten the drying process of the ink This does not mean he was not an expert, but he wanted the drying delay to execute the work with the greatest perfection imagined. So he developed certain dyes and pigments that have been shown ineffective in relation to conservation. The fresco has been constantly attacked by the action of fungi that decompose, requiring constant maintenance and restoration. Disrespect for art is not a fact that occurs only in our days. Note that, by the need to create a passage for a next room, was opened and then closed the door just about painting, destroying forever a part of the base. A similar fact occurred with the Mona Lisa, which is a painting done on wood panel, which had the sides sawn. Let us now turn to analyze the picture presented. We see that the figure of Christ is placed exactly in the center and if we trace two perpendicular lines, projecting the vanishing point, we have this convergence point exactly on the right eye of Christ. https://preview.redd.it/2q63a9akz6pa1.jpg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=82b77c2509d79e82fc218c31cb234f3c988e6a78 Thus we have the picture, with Christ at the center position and the apostles distributed on both sides. Around Christ is formed a circle passing through the arc of the door at the back, forming a triangle with the apex up ward and the other with the apex downwards. In the book "The Da Vinci Code", Dan Brown speaks of these symbols in a simplistic way, relating them to the masculine principles, personified by the figure of Christ, and the female, formed between him and John standing right beside him. As John's features are feminine Dan Brown claims to be Mary Magdalene, who had been his wife and mother of his daughter Sara, giving rise to the dynasty of the Merovingian, the first kings francs (?). He argues that even Jesus to be a Rabbi, could not be single, and would necessarily have to be married. This is true among the Pharisees, but if we consider Jesus as Essene it would not be a fact, because the Essenes took vows of chastity and poverty of course he could not be married. (See studies on Essenes in the Dead Sea Scrolls). But that does not interest to the narrative of Dan Brown, because it would invalidate the book. Dan Brown is a researcher and I believe he has his knowledge, but I also believe that it is not interested because it contradicts with their commercial interest, because the truth does not sell. This symbolism is represented with two triangles with opposite vertices, is actually very deep, being present in different traditions such as Vedic and Hebrew, which presents two interlocking triangles, forming the six-pointed star. The six-pointed star, although it is known as the Star of David or Seal of Solomon is present five thousand years ago in the Vedas This symbol contains hermetic principles, such as correspondence, the polarity, as well as the sex and this cannot be reduced simply to a phallic reference. We are not depreciating the work of Dan Brown and recognize who never spoke much about these matters. These works have never been as visited as it is today and this in itself already has its importance, but we have to put things in their right places. We can relate the triangle with vertex upwards (upper triad=Spirit), containing the principles Will, Wisdom and Mind (Consciousness). The triangle with the apex downwards relates to the matter (unconsciousness). Thus when the two overlapping triangles results in the manifestation of life. It is the projection of spirit into matter, as we can also see in the painting of Narcissus (below right), by Caravaggio, where he falls in love with his own image reflected in the mirror of water, going to deny its divine origin and losing in the webs of illusion of the world of things, which is transitory, local and temporal. The world of things is composed of the four elements (Fire, Air, Water and Earth). https://preview.redd.it/3cia4wisz6pa1.jpg?width=557&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b8024928bfecb087a46324137ea80e2edca43f5 The combination of the three higher attributes mathematically generates the four material elements. Let's see. By combining the primary elements, i.e., "A", "B" and "C", produce the four elements, where "A" is associated with "B", "A" is associated with "C", "B "associates with" C "," A "is associated with" B "and" C ". Thus we have four secondary elements. We also make an analogy with the primary colors, which are blue, yellow and red, that combined together form the four secondary colors, constituting the structure of the septenary manifestation (seven colors of the prism, seven musical notes, seven days a week seven deadly sins, etc...). Thus, the higher will generate the ternary quaternary, with a combination of three with four, resulting in the twelve that reflect the different basic types of energy, or twelve human archetypes. The three, four, seven and twelve numbers are sacred numbers, since summarize the constitution of the universe. The pyramid, for example, is a splendid symbol, it is the ternary seated on a quaternary basis (I and II). https://preview.redd.it/dx1id0ruz6pa1.jpg?width=545&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=119fc354d756fded879d65a69a9aa453f691579f If we look at the pyramid over its apex, we shall see the division four equal parts (III). If these parts are opened (IV) will produce 12 angles (combinatorial analysis 3 of 4). This results in the Maltese cross, or Templar cross (V), where the center is located the eye of God, who sees everything (omniscience), precisely the right eye of Christ, who is the central vanishing point in Leonardo painting (ternary on the quaternary). In astrology there are three primary types (come Primary Cause is the Absolute = Universal) and four secondary. The three primary types show human behavior. The secondary indicate the human temperament. Human behavior is determined by the mode of expression (Cardinal, or the one who initiates an action. The fixed stabilizes the action. The mutable amend the action). It´s is the gunas of the Vedic tradition: Rajas, Tamas and Sattva, which make up matter. We can represent these correlations through the diagram below, where the archetypes are formed considering the kinetic and static manifestation of matter and its modulation with three forms of behavior, producing the twelve basic types of temperaments, according to the diagram: https://preview.redd.it/4cmpcwgxz6pa1.jpg?width=571&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f443519d8945c6a60906232c7464e8aaab40c41f We speak of the qualifications of Leonardo that among them he held the astrological knowledge. It is precisely this knowledge that is being revealed in his work. He had deep knowledge of archetypes, detailing its characteristics, perfectly demonstrating the zodiac with the twelve signs of the Sun (Christ) as the center of events and creation, which becomes more evident if we observe that the apostles were arranged in four groups of three. Thus, we have four groups, linking them to the four seasons of the year with an apostle for each sign. Each station has three months and consequently three signs, starting in the spring, which is the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere, with the months of March, April and May, related to Aries, Taurus and Gemini. The summer, with the months of June, July and August, related to Cancer, Leo and Virgo. The autumn, with the months of September, October and November, related to Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius and winter, including December, January and February, related to Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. https://preview.redd.it/wdvzgvr007pa1.jpg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1ac4ccd825092e43176e5222127031f01ceee4fd Another way to demonstrate this is the figure we see a three-dimensional form, with the figure of Christ and the apostles to the center divided in the ecliptic (the Sun's equator). https://preview.redd.it/wkna4mf307pa1.jpg?width=243&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=111e3684719940bb7716d259977049919937a630 In the zodiacal wheel, we have divided the signs forming axes, where a sign has his virtuous characteristics, and the difficulties are experienced in the sign placed in opposition. This refers to the principle of polarity, which says that everything has two poles, and they are similar in nature, varying; however the degree and that these polarities can be reconcilable (The Kybalion - Hermes Trismegistus). To overcome the difficulties represented by shadow, there to seek the virtues that which is light, located in their opposition. In reality what must determine between the two poles is the search for balance, i.e., the central point is that the figure of Christ. It is to live the way of temperance, the middle path. The consciousness. Associating the different disciples (nominated by Leonardo himself), we have the representation in the figure below: https://preview.redd.it/bssqcv8607pa1.jpg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=75601f90d3a08f1dd18d2fe6da25ec0d1cbd5d11 Jesus opens his left hand upward, feeding those placed his left. Are the seasons of spring and summer, where there is the birth and growth. The right hand side down in an act of absorption of energy and experiences accumulated by the autumn and winter seasons, related to maturity and death. This demonstrates the zodiacal cycle of birth and death. It is noted that the same correlation is made in that the light is projected to the left and the right shade Christ. The same polar duality is also represented in the mantle of Jesus delimiting the two hemispheres. At the head of the table, to the extreme left side of Christ, we have the figure of Simon, representing Aries. Leonardo represents in the order of left to right, since the signs, as seen from the earth moving anti-clockwise. Aries, the sign that opens the zodiac, is the pioneering characteristics, leadership, initiative, and this is exactly the role demonstrated by Simon, sit at the head table. Aries rules the head and the head of Simon are displayed prominently. The position of Simon's ascendancy over the others. But not only is the position occupied by Simon Aries denoting this role but what the theme suggests, because everything results from something spoken by Simon, as the other apostles are commenting, arguing and watching Simon himself, it was told. If Aries is related to the self, the personality, Libra corresponds to the other, the relationship and the satisfaction of the need of the partner. It is ideal for Libra living relationship in an atmosphere of peace, beauty, balance and harmony. The figure of John, diametrically opposed to Simon receives and absorbs the full impact of what was spoken, causing it to assume a posture of submission and retirement. John's hands are placed in position reconciliation. The figure actually has a female face, because Libra, seeking harmony is associated with receptive condition. The garment also refers to balance, in that is divided in two colors. Libra is ruled by Venus and Aries by Mars. This is the axis of individuality, and Aries representing the personification of the psychological ego and Libra the other with whom the ego relates. Next we have Judas Thaddaeus. It is related to the sign of Taurus. Taurus is characterized by personal values, possessions, to have. Taurus has the need to develop a solid structure, have support. In the painting we see that is the only apostle to lean on the table, put the left arm using the table as a shield. The size of the Taurus is solid, strong. Taurus rules the neck and throat and this is very evident in the painting. The attitude of Judas is prudence. He argues and accepted. This is the value axis and power, having one side of Taurus and Scorpio on the other. Scorpio is represented by Judas Iscariot. Scorpio relates to the values of the other, the collective values. Judas, for he was treasurer of the group. Scorpio is the sign of the depths, transformation, regeneration or death. Ruled by Pluto or Hades, represents all that is profound and transformative. The role of Judas Iscariot, as misinterpreted by the Christian traditions, was critical to the tragic outcome of the drama that is the passion and resurrection. Judas Iscariot somehow was the most loyal of the apostles, because he did fulfill the scriptures. He took the most painful mission of the group fulfilling the order to terminate the Sinedrion following the proper order of Jesus, when he said, "Judas, would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss? (Luke 22:48). Actually Scorpio is the dynamo of the Zodiac, because it determines the transformation processes necessary for evolution of life. Judas Iscariot in the painting is presented as a spectator, watching the unfolding drama, examining the course of events. These are characteristics of Scorpio. Deeply analyzes, traces the strategies and act at the right time, accurately. Next we have Matthew, related to Gemini whose ruler is Mercury. Gemini is related to the whole mental process and communication. The mental concrete, the process of accumulation of cognitive and applied knowledge to material reality. The natives of Gemini are slender and agile, jovial, looking curious and considering all possible variables facing situations. They can be considered, sometimes contradictory, unstable, and fickle. Matthew demonstrates some of these features. He is communicating with Simon, looking at him, but arguing with hands and arms as if he had considering all aspects of what was said. May also appear an ambiguity between what was said and what the group thinks. As Gemini is related to communication and speech relates anatomically to the shoulders, arms and hands and this is what we also noted the figure of Matthew, who is also considered the reporter of Christ, like Mercury (Hermes), the messenger of Jupiter (Zeus). We have here the axis of knowledge and wisdom. Peter opposes Matthew, representing Sagittarius. It is the sign associated with religion. Sagittarius governs the higher subjects, abstract knowledge and spontaneously puts into the unknown. Sometimes it is brutish and can express themselves with excessive frankness. This corresponds to the spirit of Peter, who founded the Church, or the Christian religion, with Paul (Saulo de Tarsus). The faith when taken to its ultimate consequences may be blind and in his defense all can be allowed. Peter's hand is holding a knife to defend his own ideals, not in a threatening attitude to John, by some want to believe, even argued by Dan Brown. Sagittarius, the centaur wields the bow with the arrow to be thrown. Anatomically Sagittarius governs the hips and this is evident in the painting. The right hand rests on it. The disposition of the body of Peter remembers the design of the symbol of Sagittarius. In the sequel we have Philip, associated to Cancer. Here we come to the bottom of the Zodiac, or Imum Coeli (Latin for "bottom of the sky"), is the axial point of the unconscious corresponding to all devotional manifestation, the maternal feeling, the origins and traditions. This relates to home and family and Philip embodies this archetype. With distinctly feminine face, Philip takes his two hands to his chest, as if calling everyone as children to be reconciled. Indeed, precisely Cancer governs the breasts, stomach and uterus. Hands with arms also form a figure that resembles the claws of the crab is the cancer itself. This is the time axis, with the past and destiny. The past is associated to cancer, the mother, and the future (Capricorn) with father. So Capricorn governs the destination, i.e., what we seek as a career, as the goal of life and social role as we seek and desire recognition. It concerns the authority. So, Andrew as Capricorn is clearly a Capricorn attitude. Capricorn is cautious and practical and could be cold and pessimistic. As Philip says "come to me," Andrew seems to say "depart from me", because to assume the responsibilities is to calculate and plan what should be done. Capricorn corresponds anatomically to the entire bone structure, knees, skin. In painting Andrew is the one who has hands with bony fingers, demonstrating the bone structure. Alongside Philip, we see James the Less, related to Lion. Leo is sovereign. Charismatic, flashy, creative, dramatic, seeks recognition through the exhibition. It is ruled by the Sun and radiates its light. Leo governs the heart that is analogous to body sun. These characteristics are clearly incorporated to James Minor. Surely he is the most beautiful scenic figure painting. James to take the attitude of open arms, exposing the light, standing next to Christ himself. Demonstrates an open chest, the heart of generosity, a typically leonine behavior, which sometimes comes to be naïve and centered on vanity and self-centeredness. This is the axis of the power of creation. If Leo is the maintenance of creation, Aquarius is change and renewal which is also creation. Leo governs the power of the king, the monarch. Aquariums are the collective power, the group, society. This axis is that occur the struggle for power. Aquarius, with Uranus the ruler promotes all sorts of abrupt changes, meaning always drastic changes. Often in the name of innovation is deposed monarch for the establishment of a new regime, to then become similar with the previous model. It is what is observed with the Aquarian revolutions like the French Revolution, with the deposition of Louis XVI. Napoleon was later crowned as emperor (Leo). Recently, we have the Cuban Revolution, with the deposition of Dictator Fulgencio Batista and Fidel ruling as King-Dictator. Aquarius is associated in this way, the actions of libertarian, to rebellion, radicalism because it is engaged with human values, such as progressive values, but it is impersonal. Analyzing the figure of James the Greater, we see that it does not appear in the foreground. He does not expose himself alone, but through the group, through diplomacy and see: Aquarius is the sign of friendship and we see James hugging Andrew and Peter, demonstrating that the strength comes from the group and not on individual attitudes. Finally, we have Thomas, representing the Virgin. The Virgo is related to the practicality, analysis and criticism. It also ruled by Mercury, but here the mental focuses on utilitarian and practical application to be given to all things. For that reason they questioned him, details and discriminate. Virgos is in extreme need to feel useful and provide their service, but to do so he needs to understand the cause of things. Within these characteristics we see the figure of Thomas. Thomas needs to see to believe. Thomas in his act of inquisitor asks to Christ himself, in that puts her right in front of Jesus forefinger. As Virgo tends toward shyness and humility, Thomas is also placed in a position away from the table. This is the axis of the serve, having Virgin correspond to service pragmatic and Pisces, the humanist service, sometimes not very clear and perceptible, which may lead Pisces to live in a state of unreality. Pisces is associated with the dreamer inspiration and understanding. Are compassionate, emotional, intuitive and romantic, but for this state of contemplation, if not well channeled, can lead to evasion and fanciful attitudes, having difficulty perceiving reality. Bartholomew the Apostle is which closes the zodiacal circle. He is on the other side of the table. It clearly demonstrates the Piscean characteristics. It seems that his vision is directed to a point that goes beyond the environment portrayed, a point diffuse and may not realize exactly what is going on. Does not speak, only observes, contemplates and accepts. Pisces rules the feet are just his feet, interlaced, which are illuminated under the table. Pisces has great intuitive potential, but needs to know how he can transform his nature, his sense of serving humanity in a more practical and constructive way. Thus we come complete cycle of the zodiac, sounding clear that the message displayed in this painting, as in other works of genius. It conveys much more than seemingly suggests. True knowledge was hidden in encrypted form by the need to preserve it, protecting it from the misunderstanding of those who thought they possessed the truth. What is hidden, veiled, does not mean it is not to be seen. It is only unveiled to those with eyes to see. Leonardo leaves us that genuine arcane wisdom was, is and will be the knowledge which guides humanity toward enlightenment through awareness. Astrology, by the psychological approach is a process that allows us to analyze, understanding paradoxes, our conflicts, our shadow, our projections, and perhaps, through self-knowledge, doing the reintegration of contents for consciousness, so we can promote the process of transforming into true human, and better integrated with the sacred. The path continues to be followed. Astrology shall be understood in this view, showing that the splendor of diversity means that we may above all be tolerant and compassionate, understand the nature of the differences and accept them as a manifestation of the same source of life. |
2023.03.22 01:43 Hurtzdonut13 First new build in 7 years, now stuck in 1080P resolution, asking for a part replacement suggestion
I've recently replaced my older machine (that had some parts more than a decade old) with a completely new build. After getting over the culture shock that CD ROMs aren't a thing anymore, I put together a new machine that I'm still working a few kinks out of but otherwise I'm happy with.
I use the machine for working from home software development work remoted into my office, playing video games, and occasionally watching a show or movie on it.
Currently even with the new build I'm limited to 1920x1080 resolution and 60hz. I'm pretty sure it's my screen limiting me, so I'd like a suggestion on a replacement.
Right now the screen is mounted on a stand and while working or gaming I'm about four and a half feet from it, and I'm farther back if I'm watching a show. I do like the size and placement of it and would prefer something with a similar size or mounting scheme but maybe there are some good reasons for why what I'm doing is wrong and I could be talked down.
Thanks in advance,
Here's my current (new) build minus mouse/keyboard:
PCPartPicker Part List
submitted by Hurtzdonut13 to buildapc [link] [comments]
I use the machine for working from home software development work remoted into my office, playing video games, and occasionally watching a show or movie on it.
Currently even with the new build I'm limited to 1920x1080 resolution and 60hz. I'm pretty sure it's my screen limiting me, so I'd like a suggestion on a replacement.
Right now the screen is mounted on a stand and while working or gaming I'm about four and a half feet from it, and I'm farther back if I'm watching a show. I do like the size and placement of it and would prefer something with a similar size or mounting scheme but maybe there are some good reasons for why what I'm doing is wrong and I could be talked down.
Thanks in advance,
Here's my current (new) build minus mouse/keyboard:
PCPartPicker Part List
2023.03.21 20:51 Friendly-Army-8748 Mid-West Drag Racing Series 2023 Season Opener Postponed
 | submitted by Friendly-Army-8748 to dragracing [link] [comments] Announcement from MWDRS website Full text of announcement from last week follows: We feel it is in the best interest of our racers and fans to postpone the season-opener at Xtreme Raceway Park this coming weekend. |
2023.03.21 19:29 MirkWorks City & Soul by James Hillman
5
From Mirror to Window: Curing Psychoanalysis of its Narcissism
The apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch. Neurosis is thus nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem. - C.G. Jung (1912)
Narcissism is now the rage, the universal diagnosis. In Freud's world, the new attention was on conversion hysteria; in Bleuler's, on dementia praecox. Earlier we find all ills attributed to the English malady, to the spleen, to hypochondriasis, to melancholia, to chlorosis; in Paris, a myriad of phobies and délires. Different time and places, different syndromes.
Narcissism has its theoreticians - Kohut, Kernberg, Lacan - and modern Jungians are following the rage. The collective consciousness of psychology makes us collectively unconscious, much as Jung said when writing about the collective ideas in his day. Being "with it" also means being in it. The epidemic diagnosis Narcissism states that the condition is already endemic to the psychology that makes the diagnosis. It sees narcissism because it sees narcissistically. So let us not take this diagnosis so literally, but place it within the historical parade of Western diagnoses.
Eminent cultural critics - Karl Krauss, Thomas Szasz, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, Paul Zweig, and the notorious Dr. Jeffrey Masson - have each seen that psychoanalysis breeds a narcissistic subjectivism inflicting on the culture an iatrogenic disorder, that is, a disease brought by the methods of the doctors who would cure it.
I shall continue their line of thought, but I shall use a method that Wolfgang Giegerich has so brilliantly exposed in many of his papers. If depth psychology itself suffers from a narcissistic disorder, then what we analysts need first to probe is the unconscious narcissism in analysis itself. Our first patient is neither the patient nor ourselves, but the phenomenon called "analysis" that has brought us both to the consulting room.
The term "Narcissism" is probably British. Havelock Ellis is credited with its invention, though Freud gave us its psychoanalytic meaning. What did Freud say? As I go through some of his descriptions, let us hear them narcissistically, as self-referents, descriptive of psychology and of ourselves in psychology.
1917: "We employ the term narcissism in relation to little children and it is to excessive narcissism of primitive man that we ascribe his belief in the omnipotence of his thoughts and consequent attempts to influence the course of events in the other world by magical practices." Does not analysis have this primitive omnipotence fantasy of influencing events in the outer world by its magical practices? The omnipotence of subjective reflection is attested to by many classic Jungians like Harding, Bernard, Meier, von Franz, Baumann, etc. As Jung himself says, we are each "the makeweight that tips the scales" that determine the outcome of world history." The rituals of self-engagement remove projections from the world so that, supposedly, the world itself is transformed by psychoanalysis.
1922: "... narcissistic disorders are characterized by a withdrawal of the libido from objects." The withdrawal of the libido from from objects - I ask you to remember this statement. We shall come back to it.
1925: Freud describes three historic blows to humankind's narcissism. These, he says, are the cosmological blow of Copernicus, the blow of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the psychoanalytic blow (of Freud) which wounded the omnipotence fantasy, or narcissism, of the ego as sole self-willed ruler. Here, psychoanalysis becomes itself a giant omnipotence fantasy, a creation myth of our culture equivalent with astronomy and biology, promulgating itself with narcissistic grandeur.
This pronouncement appears in Freud's discussion on resistance to psychoanalysis. By means of this idea resistance, analysis brilliantly maintains its invulnerability to criticism. Questioning the validity of analysis is impugned as resistance to it. Even more: the very attacks demonstrate resistance and therefore help to validate analytical theory. As Freud says, "The triumph of narcissism, the ego's victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality ... It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world."
Later Freud considered narcissism not to be rooted in love at all, i.e., as self-love, but to be rather a defense against aggressive impulses. Let us consider for a moment the value of "aggressive impulses," at least and at best they take the object, the world out there, into account: I feel enraged about societal injustice, nuclear danger, media crap, industrial callousness, the corporate mind, political ideologues, hideous architecture, etc. But, owing to my narcissistic defenses against the involving call of aggression, I go to the spa, work out, meditate, jog, diet, reduce stress, relax my body armor, improve my orgasms, get a new hairstyle, and take a vacation. And see my therapist: very expensive, very good for me, because he or she devotes complete attention to my problems, especially our transferential frame. Instead of the world and my outrage, I work on my analysis, myself, the Self. This Self, too, fits a narcissistic definition: "the incorporation of grandiose object images as defense against anxiety and guilt" or, as Fenichel puts it, one feels oneself in "reunion with an omnipotent force, be that force an archetype, a god or goddess, the unus mundus, or the numinosity of analysis itself.
Freud's paper "On Narcissism" states that both introspection and conscience or "being watched" derive from and serve narcissism. Yet, psychotherapy practices self-scrutiny as the principal method in its treatment and "being watched" or supervision as the principal component of its training. A candidate goes to hour after hour of institutionalized narcissism of watching and being watched.
The institutionalization of narcissism in our profession - the idea of resistance, the idealization of the Self, the practices of introspection and supervision, the omnipotence fantasies about its own importance in world history, its technique of referring all events back to itself as the vessel, the mirror, the temenos, the frame - bears immediately upon that central obsession of analysis today, transference.
*
By transference, here, I mean that self-gratifying analytical habit which refers the emotions of life to the analysis. Transference habitually deflects object libido, that is, love for anything outside analysis, into a narcissistic reflection upon analysis. We feed analysis with life. The mirror that walks down the road of life (Flaubert) replaces the actual road, and the mirror no longer reflects the world, only the walking companions. They may as well have stayed indoors, less distracted by the trees and the traffic.
The principal content of analytical reflection as transference is the child we once were, a fact which accords with Freud's observation that the object choice of the narcissist is "someone he once was.” This helps account for the faddish popularity of Alice Miller’s writings. Her idealized children exhibit what Freud said: the narcissist is “not willing to forego his narcissistic perfection in his childhood” and “seeks to recover the early perfection.” The focus on childhood traps the libido only further into subjectivity, and therefore we must recognize that erotic compulsions in analysis are produced primarily by the analysis, rather than by the persons. Analysis acts itself out through them quite impersonally so that they often feel betrayed and ashamed by the impersonality of the emotions they undergo and are unable to recognize that what they are suffering is the object libido trying to find a way out of analysis. Instead, the narcissistic viciousness of our theory says that transference emotions are compelling the persons to go deeper into analysis.
Let us recognize that the other person - patient or analyst - embodies the only possibility within an analysis to whom object libido can flow. The person in the other chair represents cure of analytical narcissism simply by being there as an Other. Moreover, the patient for the analyst and the analyst for the patient become such numinous objects because they have also been tabooed as libidinal possibilities. Analyst and patient may not act their desire for each other. The narcissism of the situation makes them absolutely necessary to each other, while the taboo sets them absolutely outside of each other. This outside object however, is also inside the analysis. So, patient for doctor and doctor for patient become the symbolic mode of ending analysis by means of love.
Of course, the persons are often torn by what Freud calls the love dilemma of the narcissistic patient: “the cure by love,” which he generally refers to as cure by analysis. We must ask whether this neurotic choice, as Freud calls it, arises from the narcissisms of the patient or from the narcissism of the analytical system in which the patient is situated. After all, the fantasy of an opposition between love and analysis occurs within the prior fantasy of cure which has brought the persons together in the first place.
By elaborating ethical codes, malpractice insurance, investigations, and expulsions that blame the participants, analysis protects itself from wounding insights about its own narcissism. The vulnerability of analysis - that its effectiveness is always in question, that it is neither science nor medicine, that it is aging into professional mediocrity and may have lost its soul to power years ago despite its idealized language by growth and creativity (a language by the way, never used by its founders) - this vulnerability is overcome by idealizing the transference.
As well as transference love, there is also hatred. Perhaps the client’s hatred of the analyst and the hatred of the analyst for the client are also not personal. Perhaps, these intense oppressive feelings against each other arise in both to present both with the fact that they are in a hateful situation: the object libido hates the attachment of transference. Analysis hates itself in order to break the narcissistic vessel imprisoning the libido that would go out into the soul in the world.
The horned dilemmas of transference, including the analyst’s stare into the mirror of his own counter-transference, the feelings of love and hatred, this agony and ecstasy and romantic torture convince the participants that what is going on is of intense importance: first, because these phenomena are expected by the theory and provide proof of it, and second, because these phenomena re-enact what analysis once was in its own childhood in Vienna and Zurich, analysis in primary fusion with its origins in Breuer and Freud and Jung, in Dora and Anna and Sabina. The feelings are cast in therapeutic guise because this is the healing fiction of the analytic situation. In other words, transference is less necessary to the doctor and the patient than it is to analysis by means of which it intensifies its narcissistic idealization, staying in love with itself. We therapists do not sit in our chambers so many hours a day only for the money, or the power, but because we are addicted to analytical narcissism. Our individual narcissism is both obscured and reinforced by the approved narcissism of the analytical profession.
When one partner imagines a tryst or the other imagines resisting a seduction, or when either imagines that love is a solution to misery, then they are framed in the romantic conflicts of Madame Bovary, Wuthering Heights, and Anna Karenina, reconstituting the Romanticisms of the nineteenth century and the origins of psychoanalysis, not in your or my personal childhoods, but in its own cultural childhood. This means we have to locate the narcissism of contemporary analysis within a much wider narcissism: the Romantic movement.
*
Literary tradition differentiates at least four principal traits of this genre. We have already spoken of one, “idealization of the love object.” And indeed analysis idealizes the patient as an “interesting case,” “difficult patient,” “good patient,” “borderline personality.” Or consider all the literary fabulations that have made patients into eternal literary figures - Dora, Ellen West, Babette, Miss Miller, Wolfman, Ratman, Little Hands, all the way to Freud and Jung themselves in the novels The White Hotel and The House of Glass. Think of the Romanticism of our theoretical constructs: Love and Death, Empathy, Transformation, Growth, The Child, The Great Mother, The Mirror, Desire and Jouissance, and the Transitional Object. In the patient there takes place such idealized events as a hieros gamos, a quest for self-discovery and a journey into wholeness. Synchronicities outside of causal laws, transcendent functions, integration of the shadow and the realization of the Self on whom the future of civilization depends. We record our idealization of the love object, i.e., analysis, in taped and filmed analytic sessions, paying meticulous and expensive attention to trivial conversations and gestures. Analysis is in love with its idealized image.
A second essential trait of Romanticism is said to be the opposition between bourgeois society and the inner self that, with its dreams, desires and inspirations, tends to oppose, even contradict, the outer world of usual things. Psychoanalysis from its beginnings imagines itself fundamentally opposed to the civilization and its institutions of religion, family, medicine, and the political community disdained as “the collective.” Freud’s emphasis on himself as Jew and hence marginal, as well as Jung’s favorite position as heretical old hermit (despite the bourgeois lives they led and values they held) still shapes the imagination of the profession and distorts its relation to the ordinary world.
Third, imprisonment another basic theme in Romanticism, especially French and Russian. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Maria’s song says: “This tiny cell suffices me, there I will dwell my soul to save.” The consulting room provides the confining physical place for the psychic imprisonment of analysis as such its devotion to the secret nooks and crannies of the private world, decorating with reconstructive rococo (i.e., psycho-dynamic intricacies) the narcissistic cell of personality.
Fourth, the Romantic genre has been defined as one that simultaneously seeks and postpones a particular end. This fits therapy. Its entire procedure seeks to restore the person to the world, yet postpones this return indefinitely. (Meanwhile, do not make major changes in your actual life. Don’t act out. The cure of analysis becomes more analysis-another analyst, another school - and the improvement of training becomes ever more hours.) The simultaneity of seeking and postponing an end occurs in the basic conundrum of every analysis, its contradictory two commandments: encourage the desires of the unconscious (Thou Shall Not Repress) and forbid gratification (Thou Shall Not Act Out). Our work is with the libidinous and our method is by way of abstention. The end is unforeseeable; there is no completion. Analysis interminable, as Freud said. This is the Romanticism of eternal longing.
There is no way out of Romanticism’s consulting room and the subjectivism of its eros, unless we turn to what is beyond its purview, turn to what narcissism and romanticism leave out: the objects, the unidealized, immediately given, actual world of dull and urban things. By turning psychological attention from the mirror of self-reflection to the world through the window, we release “object libido” to seek its goal beyond narcissistic confinement in analysis. For “object libido” is but a psychoanalytic name for the drive which loves the world, the erotic desire for Anima Mundi, for Soul in the World.
Perhaps it becomes clearer why I have been emphasizing John Keats’s remarkable phrase; “Call the world … The vale of Soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world.” Also, you will understand why I have held myself back from that side of Jung which expounds upon meaning, Self, individuation, unus mundus, wholeness, mandalas, etc. . These large and introverted ideas envelop me and usually my patients with a grandiose, invulnerable aura. As well, I keep a distance from the current Kohut craze and Lacanian mystique. Although recognizing narcissism as the syndrome of the times (even if the groundwork for this was prepared long ago in the metaphysical catastrophe of Augustinian and Cartesian subjectivism); yet, Kohut attempts its cure by the same means of narcissistic obsession: an ever more detailed observation of subjectivity. And a subjectivity within the oppressive confines of a negatively reconstructed childhood. The child archetype dominates contemporary therapy, keeping patients (and analysts) safe from the world. For this archetype feels always endangered by the actual world, lives not in the present but in futurity, and is addicted to its own powerless infantilism. By so focusing on the child, analysis disenfranchises itself from wider realm of soul-making in the adult community of polis.
Nevertheless I must confess to a serious long-standing error on my part regarding Keats’s phrase. I always considered the world out there to be useful for making one’s own soul. Narcissism again. My soul, your soul - not its soul. For the Romantics, however, ensouling the world was a crucial part of their program. They recognized the traps of narcissistic subjectivity in their vision. Hence, they sought the spirit in physical nature, the brotherhood of all mankind or Gemeinschaftsgefühl, political revolution, and a return to the classic gods and goddesses, attempting to revivify the soul of the world with pantheism.
We must therefore read Keats as saying we go through the world for the sake of its soul-making, thereby our own. This reading suggests a true object libido, beyond narcissism, in keeping with Otto Fenichel’s definition of love. Love can only be called such when “one’s own satisfaction is impossible without satisfying the object too. If the world is not satisfied by our going through it, no matter how much beauty and pleasure our souls may receive from it, then we live in its vale without love.
There is a way out, or I wouldn’t be standing here. For my specific style of narcissism, my pose before the mirror, today is heroic. My style insists on resolution of the issues raised. The method I shall be using here follows the method which I usually empty for resolving issues. First, we look back into the history of psychoanalysis for a model; second, we turn to some peculiar bit of pathologizing for a clue; and third, we resolve problems by dissolving them into images and metaphors.
So, let us turn back to the first psychoanalytic case, Anna O., and her doctor, Josef Breuer, who, with Freud, wrote Studies in Hysteria. As you recall, after a year of almost daily sessions often of several hours, he suddenly terminated. You recall also the intensity of her transference, that she developed a hysterical pregnancy and childbirth, after Breuer tried to end the treatment. He, according to Jones, after a final visit to her “fled the house in a cold sweat. The next day he and his wife left for Venice to spend a second honeymoon which resulted in the conception of a daughter.” Whether fact or not, and Ellenberger says not, the fantasy shows a founding patron of our work escaping both cure by analysis and cure by love for the beauty of Venice and the conception of a daughter. His object libido returns from the oppressive narcissism of psychoanalysis to the Romanticism of the wider world.
This wide world remains merely that, merely a place of escape or acting out, so long as the world “out the window” is imagined only in the Cartesian model as sheer res extensa, only dead matter. To show more vividly how that world is, as Keats said, a place of soul, let us go straight through the window into the world. Let us take a walk in a Japanese garden, in particular the strolling garden, the one with water, hills, trees, and stones. While we walk, let us imagine the garden as an emblem for the peripatetic teacher or the therapeutic guide (psychopompos), the world itself as psychoanalyst showing us soul, showing us how to be in it soulfully.
I turn to the garden and to Japan because of insights given while in Kyoto gardens several years ago, and also because the garden as metaphor expresses some of the deepest longings - from Hesperides, to Eden’s paradise, and Maria’s hortus inclusus - for the world as home of the soul. So by entering into the Japanese garden now we shall be stepping through the window into the anima mundi.
First we notice that the garden has no central place to stand and view it all. We can but scrutinize a part at a time. Instead of overview and wholeness, there is perspective and eachness. The world changes as we move. Here a clump of iris, there a mossy rock. Instead of a center (with its etymological roots in the Greek kentron, “goad” or “prick,” and being compelled toward a goal by means of abstract geometric distancing), there are shifts of focus relative to the body’s location and attitude.
Second: as one strolls, each vista is seen again from a different perspective. The maple branching down to the pond edge, the floating leaves appear less melancholic after the path bends. These shifts of seeing again are precisely what the word “respect” means. To look again is to “respect.” Each time we look at the same thing again, we gain respect for it and add respect to it, curiously discovering the innate relation of “looks” - of regarding and being regarded, words in English that refer to dignity.
Third: when the garden, rather than the dream or the symptom or the unconscious, becomes the via regia of psyche, then we are forced to think anew about the word “in.” “In” is the dominant preposition of all psychoanalysis - not with, not from, not for, but “in.” We look in our souls, we look in a mirror. "In” has been utterly literally, as an invisible, spacelesss psychic stuff inside our skins, or meanings inside our dreams and symptoms, or the memories locked in the past. Interiority of the garden, however, is wholly present and wholly displayed. “In” holds the meanings of included, engaged, involved, embraced. Or, as Jung said, the psyche is not in us; we are in the psyche. This feeling of being in the psyche becomes most palpable when inside the ruins of a Greek temple, in an Egyptian tomb of a king, in a dance or a ritual, and in a Japanese garden. Jung’s phrase “esse in anima” takes on concreteness then, as it does in a clear-cut forest, a bombed city, a cancer ward, a cemetery. Ecology, architecture, interior design are other modes of feeling the anima mundi. Instead of the usual notion of psyche in body, the body strolling through the garden is in the psyche. The world itself is a psychic body; and our bodies as we move, stand, look, pause, turn, and sit are performing an activity of psychic reflection, an activity we formerly considered only mentally possible in the mirror of introspection.
Fourth: the idea of individuality also changes, for in the Japanese garden trees are trimmed at the top and encouraged to grow sideways. Rather than an individuality of the lone tree, towering (and Jung said the single tree is a major symbol of the individuating Self), these trees stretch their branches toward others. Individuality is within community and, takes its definition from community. Furthermore, each tuft in the soft branches of the pine trees is plucked by gardeners. They pull out needles, allowing emptiness to individualize the shape of each twig. It is as if nothing can be individualized unless it is surrounded by emptiness and yet also very, very close to what it is most like. Individuality is therefore more visible within the estrange separateness and close similarity, for instance, of family than in trying to be “different” from family.
Fifth: not only are aged trees supported with crutches and encouraged to flower - blossoming belonging therefore not only to youth - but also the garden includes dead trees. What more wounds our narcissism than these images of old age, these crutched, dependent, twisted and dead trees? < “At least Aurora didn’t reject Tithonus, old, didn’t allow him to lie there lonely in the House of Dawn. She often fondled him, descending into her waters, before she bathed her yoked horses with care. She, when she rested in his arms, by neighbouring India, lamented that day returned too soon.”>
Sixth: the Karesanui gardens, or Zen-inspired gardens, present mainly white sand and found stones, rarely trees. In this bare place the mind watches itself making interpretations. The nine rocks in the raked sand are a tiger family swimming through the sea; the nine rocks are mountain tops peaking through white mist and clouds; the nine rocks are simply rocks, aesthetically placed with genius. One legend after another, one philosophy, theory or literary criticism, or psychological interpretation rises to the mind and falls back into the white sand. The garden becomes wholly metaphor, both what it is and what it is not, presence and absence at once. The concrete koan of the rock garden transforms the mind itself into metaphor, its thought transient while image endures, so that the mind cannot identify with its own subjectivism - narcissism overcome.
‘“Hegel introduces this notion of ‘oppositional determination” in his logic of essence, when he discusses the relationship between identity and difference; his point there is not only that identity is always the identity of identity and difference, but that difference itself is also always the difference between itself and identity; in the same way, it is not only necessity that encompasses both itself and contingency, but also - and more fundamentally - it is contingency itself which encompasses both itself and necessity. Or, with regard to the tension between essence and appearance, the fact that essence has to appear within the domain of appearances, as a hint that “appearances are not all” but are “merely appearances.”’ - Zizek, Less than Nothing>
*
Finally, I shall insist that the garden is not natural; nor is psyche natural. The garden was designed and is tended to maintain an artificiality that imitates nature. In Fort Worth, Texas, a large and marvelous Japanese garden was constructed years ago. But since adequate funds were not set aside for gardeners from Japan, nature slowly destroys that garden. Without the pruners’ perverted twist to each inch of nature, the garden declines into merely another part of the forest. A garden’s elaborate display of soul-in-the-world is an opus contra naturam, like alchemy. Like alchemy, the garden is a work of intense culture. Unlike alchemy, its matter, its body, is out there, rather than inside the glass vessel.
Because the garden is artificial, as the alchemist was called artifex, all conceptions of soul must be plucked of naturalistic fallacies. The soul as opus contra naturam will not be served adequately by fallacious comparisons with organic growth, cyclical process, and myths of nature goddesses. Nor does the garden shelter the child from which grows the creative person as psychotherapy is found to believe. By insisting upon the artificiality of our work with soul, I am trying to keep us from the Romantic error of confusing the ideal (Eden and the Elysian fields; Horaiko, in Japanese) with the natural. The garden as metaphor offers a romantic vision that saves us from Naturalistic Romanticism by twisting and sophisticating nature through art.
This twist to nature that wounds idealizations of garden is presented in our culture, as in Roman culture, by our ancient god of gardens and gardeners, Priapus. Priapus is neither young nor beautiful. Unlike lovely Narcissus, unlike the semi-divine figures of Adam and Eve, Priapus is mature, bald and paunchy, and so distorted that his mother, Venus, deserted him at birth. His very presence repels romantic idealizations and the gaze into the mirror of Venusian vanity as well as Narcissus’s rapt reflection. Priapic reflection starts the other way around; his preposterous swollen condition reflects the vitality of the world. The same force displays in him as in the buds and germinating pods. By means of distortion which deceptively seems “only natural,” Priapus invites the grotesque pathologized disproportions of imagination - and imagination, says Bachelard, works by deformation.
So, when I invoke Priapus, I am not speaking of priapismus; I am not speaking of machismo; and I am not anti-feminine. Let me be quite clear. I am speaking of the generative artificiality that is the essence of the garden and of the psyche. Each dream, each fantasy, and each symptomatic complication of natural health and normative humanity bears witness to the psyche’s libidinal pleasure in exaggeration, its fertile genius for imaginative distortion. If this god of gardens is also a god of psychoanalysis - and from Charcot through Lacan the priapic has been invoked - he brings to its work an archaic reflex beyond the romantic or baroque, a rousing urgency forward and outward. (Priapus was not permitted indoors in Hestia’s closed rooms where his presence becomes only violent and obscene.)
Moreover, this god needs no mirror to know himself, for his self is wholly displayed. His nature cannot be concealed within, so he is quite free of hidden meanings and subtle innuendos that keep psychoanalysis hopefully addicted to one more revelation, one more transformation, interminable. Priapus knows no metamorphosis, no transfigurations. Priapus is without ambiguity; metaphor is forbidden to him; he displays all, reveals nothing. Like the garden, all there. The rocks are the rocks.
<"And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." - Matthew 16:18>
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From Mirror to Window: Curing Psychoanalysis of its Narcissism
The apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch. Neurosis is thus nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem. - C.G. Jung (1912)
Narcissism is now the rage, the universal diagnosis. In Freud's world, the new attention was on conversion hysteria; in Bleuler's, on dementia praecox. Earlier we find all ills attributed to the English malady, to the spleen, to hypochondriasis, to melancholia, to chlorosis; in Paris, a myriad of phobies and délires. Different time and places, different syndromes.
Narcissism has its theoreticians - Kohut, Kernberg, Lacan - and modern Jungians are following the rage. The collective consciousness of psychology makes us collectively unconscious, much as Jung said when writing about the collective ideas in his day. Being "with it" also means being in it. The epidemic diagnosis Narcissism states that the condition is already endemic to the psychology that makes the diagnosis. It sees narcissism because it sees narcissistically. So let us not take this diagnosis so literally, but place it within the historical parade of Western diagnoses.
Eminent cultural critics - Karl Krauss, Thomas Szasz, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, Paul Zweig, and the notorious Dr. Jeffrey Masson - have each seen that psychoanalysis breeds a narcissistic subjectivism inflicting on the culture an iatrogenic disorder, that is, a disease brought by the methods of the doctors who would cure it.
I shall continue their line of thought, but I shall use a method that Wolfgang Giegerich has so brilliantly exposed in many of his papers. If depth psychology itself suffers from a narcissistic disorder, then what we analysts need first to probe is the unconscious narcissism in analysis itself. Our first patient is neither the patient nor ourselves, but the phenomenon called "analysis" that has brought us both to the consulting room.
The term "Narcissism" is probably British
1917: "We employ the term narcissism in relation to little children and it is to excessive narcissism of primitive man that we ascribe his belief in the omnipotence of his thoughts and consequent attempts to influence the course of events in the other world by magical practices." Does not analysis have this primitive omnipotence fantasy of influencing events in the outer world by its magical practices? The omnipotence of subjective reflection is attested to by many classic Jungians like Harding, Bernard, Meier, von Franz, Baumann, etc. As Jung himself says, we are each "the makeweight that tips the scales" that determine the outcome of world history." The rituals of self-engagement remove projections from the world so that, supposedly, the world itself is transformed by psychoanalysis.
1922: "... narcissistic disorders are characterized by a withdrawal of the libido from objects." The withdrawal of the libido from from objects - I ask you to remember this statement. We shall come back to it.
1925: Freud describes three historic blows to humankind's narcissism. These, he says, are the cosmological blow of Copernicus, the blow of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the psychoanalytic blow (of Freud) which wounded the omnipotence fantasy, or narcissism, of the ego as sole self-willed ruler. Here, psychoanalysis becomes itself a giant omnipotence fantasy, a creation myth of our culture equivalent with astronomy and biology, promulgating itself with narcissistic grandeur.
This pronouncement appears in Freud's discussion on resistance to psychoanalysis. By means of this idea resistance, analysis brilliantly maintains its invulnerability to criticism. Questioning the validity of analysis is impugned as resistance to it. Even more: the very attacks demonstrate resistance and therefore help to validate analytical theory. As Freud says, "The triumph of narcissism, the ego's victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality ... It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world."
Later Freud considered narcissism not to be rooted in love at all, i.e., as self-love, but to be rather a defense against aggressive impulses. Let us consider for a moment the value of "aggressive impulses," at least and at best they take the object, the world out there, into account: I feel enraged about societal injustice, nuclear danger, media crap, industrial callousness, the corporate mind, political ideologues, hideous architecture, etc. But, owing to my narcissistic defenses against the involving call of aggression, I go to the spa, work out, meditate, jog, diet, reduce stress, relax my body armor, improve my orgasms, get a new hairstyle, and take a vacation. And see my therapist: very expensive, very good for me, because he or she devotes complete attention to my problems, especially our transferential frame. Instead of the world and my outrage, I work on my analysis, myself, the Self. This Self, too, fits a narcissistic definition: "the incorporation of grandiose object images as defense against anxiety and guilt" or, as Fenichel puts it, one feels oneself in "reunion with an omnipotent force, be that force an archetype, a god or goddess, the unus mundus, or the numinosity of analysis itself.
Freud's paper "On Narcissism" states that both introspection and conscience or "being watched" derive from and serve narcissism. Yet, psychotherapy practices self-scrutiny as the principal method in its treatment and "being watched" or supervision as the principal component of its training. A candidate goes to hour after hour of institutionalized narcissism of watching and being watched.
The institutionalization of narcissism in our profession - the idea of resistance, the idealization of the Self, the practices of introspection and supervision, the omnipotence fantasies about its own importance in world history, its technique of referring all events back to itself as the vessel, the mirror, the temenos, the frame - bears immediately upon that central obsession of analysis today, transference.
*
By transference, here, I mean that self-gratifying analytical habit which refers the emotions of life to the analysis. Transference habitually deflects object libido, that is, love for anything outside analysis, into a narcissistic reflection upon analysis. We feed analysis with life. The mirror that walks down the road of life (Flaubert) replaces the actual road, and the mirror no longer reflects the world, only the walking companions. They may as well have stayed indoors, less distracted by the trees and the traffic.
The principal content of analytical reflection as transference is the child we once were, a fact which accords with Freud's observation that the object choice of the narcissist is "someone he once was.” This helps account for the faddish popularity of Alice Miller’s writings. Her idealized children exhibit what Freud said: the narcissist is “not willing to forego his narcissistic perfection in his childhood” and “seeks to recover the early perfection.” The focus on childhood traps the libido only further into subjectivity, and therefore we must recognize that erotic compulsions in analysis are produced primarily by the analysis, rather than by the persons. Analysis acts itself out through them quite impersonally so that they often feel betrayed and ashamed by the impersonality of the emotions they undergo and are unable to recognize that what they are suffering is the object libido trying to find a way out of analysis. Instead, the narcissistic viciousness of our theory says that transference emotions are compelling the persons to go deeper into analysis.
Let us recognize that the other person - patient or analyst - embodies the only possibility within an analysis to whom object libido can flow. The person in the other chair represents cure of analytical narcissism simply by being there as an Other. Moreover, the patient for the analyst and the analyst for the patient become such numinous objects because they have also been tabooed as libidinal possibilities. Analyst and patient may not act their desire for each other. The narcissism of the situation makes them absolutely necessary to each other, while the taboo sets them absolutely outside of each other. This outside object however, is also inside the analysis. So, patient for doctor and doctor for patient become the symbolic mode of ending analysis by means of love.
Of course, the persons are often torn by what Freud calls the love dilemma of the narcissistic patient: “the cure by love,” which he generally refers to as cure by analysis. We must ask whether this neurotic choice, as Freud calls it, arises from the narcissisms of the patient or from the narcissism of the analytical system in which the patient is situated. After all, the fantasy of an opposition between love and analysis occurs within the prior fantasy of cure which has brought the persons together in the first place.
By elaborating ethical codes, malpractice insurance, investigations, and expulsions that blame the participants, analysis protects itself from wounding insights about its own narcissism. The vulnerability of analysis - that its effectiveness is always in question, that it is neither science nor medicine, that it is aging into professional mediocrity and may have lost its soul to power years ago despite its idealized language by growth and creativity (a language by the way, never used by its founders) - this vulnerability is overcome by idealizing the transference.
As well as transference love, there is also hatred. Perhaps the client’s hatred of the analyst and the hatred of the analyst for the client are also not personal. Perhaps, these intense oppressive feelings against each other arise in both to present both with the fact that they are in a hateful situation: the object libido hates the attachment of transference. Analysis hates itself in order to break the narcissistic vessel imprisoning the libido that would go out into the soul in the world.
The horned dilemmas of transference, including the analyst’s stare into the mirror of his own counter-transference, the feelings of love and hatred, this agony and ecstasy and romantic torture convince the participants that what is going on is of intense importance: first, because these phenomena are expected by the theory and provide proof of it, and second, because these phenomena re-enact what analysis once was in its own childhood in Vienna and Zurich, analysis in primary fusion with its origins in Breuer and Freud and Jung, in Dora and Anna and Sabina. The feelings are cast in therapeutic guise because this is the healing fiction of the analytic situation. In other words, transference is less necessary to the doctor and the patient than it is to analysis by means of which it intensifies its narcissistic idealization, staying in love with itself. We therapists do not sit in our chambers so many hours a day only for the money, or the power, but because we are addicted to analytical narcissism. Our individual narcissism is both obscured and reinforced by the approved narcissism of the analytical profession.
When one partner imagines a tryst or the other imagines resisting a seduction, or when either imagines that love is a solution to misery, then they are framed in the romantic conflicts of Madame Bovary, Wuthering Heights, and Anna Karenina, reconstituting the Romanticisms of the nineteenth century and the origins of psychoanalysis, not in your or my personal childhoods, but in its own cultural childhood. This means we have to locate the narcissism of contemporary analysis within a much wider narcissism: the Romantic movement.
*
Literary tradition differentiates at least four principal traits of this genre. We have already spoken of one, “idealization of the love object.” And indeed analysis idealizes the patient as an “interesting case,” “difficult patient,” “good patient,” “borderline personality.” Or consider all the literary fabulations that have made patients into eternal literary figures - Dora, Ellen West, Babette, Miss Miller, Wolfman, Ratman, Little Hands, all the way to Freud and Jung themselves in the novels The White Hotel and The House of Glass. Think of the Romanticism of our theoretical constructs: Love and Death, Empathy, Transformation, Growth, The Child, The Great Mother, The Mirror, Desire and Jouissance, and the Transitional Object. In the patient there takes place such idealized events as a hieros gamos, a quest for self-discovery and a journey into wholeness. Synchronicities outside of causal laws, transcendent functions, integration of the shadow and the realization of the Self on whom the future of civilization depends. We record our idealization of the love object, i.e., analysis, in taped and filmed analytic sessions, paying meticulous and expensive attention to trivial conversations and gestures. Analysis is in love with its idealized image.
A second essential trait of Romanticism is said to be the opposition between bourgeois society and the inner self that, with its dreams, desires and inspirations, tends to oppose, even contradict, the outer world of usual things. Psychoanalysis from its beginnings imagines itself fundamentally opposed to the civilization and its institutions of religion, family, medicine, and the political community disdained as “the collective.”
Third, imprisonment another basic theme in Romanticism, especially French and Russian. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Maria’s song says: “This tiny cell suffices me, there I will dwell my soul to save.” The consulting room provides the confining physical place for the psychic imprisonment of analysis as such its devotion to the secret nooks and crannies of the private world, decorating with reconstructive rococo (i.e., psycho-dynamic intricacies) the narcissistic cell of personality.
Fourth, the Romantic genre has been defined as one that simultaneously seeks and postpones a particular end. This fits therapy. Its entire procedure seeks to restore the person to the world, yet postpones this return indefinitely. (Meanwhile, do not make major changes in your actual life. Don’t act out. The cure of analysis becomes more analysis-another analyst, another school - and the improvement of training becomes ever more hours.) The simultaneity of seeking and postponing an end occurs in the basic conundrum of every analysis, its contradictory two commandments: encourage the desires of the unconscious (Thou Shall Not Repress) and forbid gratification (Thou Shall Not Act Out). Our work is with the libidinous and our method is by way of abstention. The end is unforeseeable; there is no completion. Analysis interminable, as Freud said. This is the Romanticism of eternal longing.
There is no way out of Romanticism’s consulting room and the subjectivism of its eros, unless we turn to what is beyond its purview, turn to what narcissism and romanticism leave out: the objects, the unidealized, immediately given, actual world of dull and urban things
Perhaps it becomes clearer why I have been emphasizing John Keats’s remarkable phrase; “Call the world … The vale of Soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world.” Also, you will understand why I have held myself back from that side of Jung which expounds upon meaning, Self, individuation, unus mundus, wholeness, mandalas, etc. . These large and introverted ideas envelop me and usually my patients with a grandiose, invulnerable aura. As well, I keep a distance from the current Kohut craze and Lacanian mystique. Although recognizing narcissism as the syndrome of the times (even if the groundwork for this was prepared long ago in the metaphysical catastrophe of Augustinian and Cartesian subjectivism); yet, Kohut attempts its cure by the same means of narcissistic obsession: an ever more detailed observation of subjectivity. And a subjectivity within the oppressive confines of a negatively reconstructed childhood. The child archetype dominates contemporary therapy, keeping patients (and analysts) safe from the world. For this archetype feels always endangered by the actual world, lives not in the present but in futurity, and is addicted to its own powerless infantilism. By so focusing on the child, analysis disenfranchises itself from wider realm of soul-making in the adult community of polis.
Nevertheless I must confess to a serious long-standing error on my part regarding Keats’s phrase. I always considered the world out there to be useful for making one’s own soul. Narcissism again. My soul, your soul - not its soul. For the Romantics, however, ensouling the world was a crucial part of their program. They recognized the traps of narcissistic subjectivity in their vision. Hence, they sought the spirit in physical nature, the brotherhood of all mankind or Gemeinschaftsgefühl, political revolution, and a return to the classic gods and goddesses, attempting to revivify the soul of the world with pantheism.
We must therefore read Keats as saying we go through the world for the sake of its soul-making, thereby our own. This reading suggests a true object libido, beyond narcissism, in keeping with Otto Fenichel’s definition of love. Love can only be called such when “one’s own satisfaction is impossible without satisfying the object too. If the world is not satisfied by our going through it, no matter how much beauty and pleasure our souls may receive from it, then we live in its vale without love.
There is a way out, or I wouldn’t be standing here. For my specific style of narcissism, my pose before the mirror, today is heroic. My style insists on resolution of the issues raised. The method I shall be using here follows the method which I usually empty for resolving issues. First, we look back into the history of psychoanalysis for a model; second, we turn to some peculiar bit of pathologizing for a clue; and third, we resolve problems by dissolving them into images and metaphors.
So, let us turn back to the first psychoanalytic case, Anna O., and her doctor, Josef Breuer, who, with Freud, wrote Studies in Hysteria. As you recall, after a year of almost daily sessions often of several hours, he suddenly terminated. You recall also the intensity of her transference, that she developed a hysterical pregnancy and childbirth, after Breuer tried to end the treatment. He, according to Jones, after a final visit to her “fled the house in a cold sweat. The next day he and his wife left for Venice to spend a second honeymoon which resulted in the conception of a daughter.” Whether fact or not, and Ellenberger says not, the fantasy shows a founding patron of our work escaping both cure by analysis and cure by love for the beauty of Venice and the conception of a daughter. His object libido returns from the oppressive narcissism of psychoanalysis to the Romanticism of the wider world.
This wide world remains merely that, merely a place of escape or acting out, so long as the world “out the window” is imagined only in the Cartesian model as sheer res extensa, only dead matter. To show more vividly how that world is, as Keats said, a place of soul, let us go straight through the window into the world. Let us take a walk in a Japanese garden, in particular the strolling garden, the one with water, hills, trees, and stones. While we walk, let us imagine the garden as an emblem for the peripatetic teacher or the therapeutic guide (psychopompos), the world itself as psychoanalyst showing us soul, showing us how to be in it soulfully.
I turn to the garden and to Japan because of insights given while in Kyoto gardens several years ago, and also because the garden as metaphor expresses some of the deepest longings - from Hesperides, to Eden’s paradise, and Maria’s hortus inclusus - for the world as home of the soul. So by entering into the Japanese garden now we shall be stepping through the window into the anima mundi.
First we notice that the garden has no central place to stand and view it all. We can but scrutinize a part at a time. Instead of overview and wholeness, there is perspective and eachness. The world changes as we move. Here a clump of iris, there a mossy rock. Instead of a center (with its etymological roots in the Greek kentron, “goad” or “prick,” and being compelled toward a goal by means of abstract geometric distancing), there are shifts of focus relative to the body’s location and attitude.
Second: as one strolls, each vista is seen again from a different perspective. The maple branching down to the pond edge, the floating leaves appear less melancholic after the path bends. These shifts of seeing again are precisely what the word “respect” means. To look again is to “respect.” Each time we look at the same thing again, we gain respect for it and add respect to it, curiously discovering the innate relation of “looks” - of regarding and being regarded, words in English that refer to dignity.
Third: when the garden, rather than the dream or the symptom or the unconscious, becomes the via regia of psyche, then we are forced to think anew about the word “in.” “In” is the dominant preposition of all psychoanalysis - not with, not from, not for, but “in.” We look in our souls, we look in a mirror. "In” has been utterly literally, as an invisible, spacelesss psychic stuff inside our skins, or meanings inside our dreams and symptoms, or the memories locked in the past. Interiority of the garden, however, is wholly present and wholly displayed. “In” holds the meanings of included, engaged, involved, embraced. Or, as Jung said, the psyche is not in us; we are in the psyche. This feeling of being in the psyche becomes most palpable when inside the ruins of a Greek temple, in an Egyptian tomb of a king, in a dance or a ritual, and in a Japanese garden. Jung’s phrase “esse in anima” takes on concreteness then, as it does in a clear-cut forest, a bombed city, a cancer ward, a cemetery. Ecology, architecture, interior design are other modes of feeling the anima mundi. Instead of the usual notion of psyche in body, the body strolling through the garden is in the psyche. The world itself is a psychic body; and our bodies as we move, stand, look, pause, turn, and sit are performing an activity of psychic reflection, an activity we formerly considered only mentally possible in the mirror of introspection.
Fourth: the idea of individuality also changes, for in the Japanese garden trees are trimmed at the top and encouraged to grow sideways. Rather than an individuality of the lone tree, towering (and Jung said the single tree is a major symbol of the individuating Self), these trees stretch their branches toward others. Individuality is within community and, takes its definition from community. Furthermore, each tuft in the soft branches of the pine trees is plucked by gardeners. They pull out needles, allowing emptiness to individualize the shape of each twig. It is as if nothing can be individualized unless it is surrounded by emptiness and yet also very, very close to what it is most like. Individuality is therefore more visible within the estrange separateness and close similarity, for instance, of family than in trying to be “different” from family.
Fifth: not only are aged trees supported with crutches and encouraged to flower - blossoming belonging therefore not only to youth - but also the garden includes dead trees. What more wounds our narcissism than these images of old age, these crutched, dependent, twisted and dead trees? < “At least Aurora didn’t reject Tithonus, old, didn’t allow him to lie there lonely in the House of Dawn. She often fondled him, descending into her waters, before she bathed her yoked horses with care. She, when she rested in his arms, by neighbouring India, lamented that day returned too soon.”>
Sixth: the Karesanui gardens, or Zen-inspired gardens, present mainly white sand and found stones, rarely trees. In this bare place the mind watches itself making interpretations. The nine rocks in the raked sand are a tiger family swimming through the sea; the nine rocks are mountain tops peaking through white mist and clouds; the nine rocks are simply rocks, aesthetically placed with genius. One legend after another, one philosophy, theory or literary criticism, or psychological interpretation rises to the mind and falls back into the white sand. The garden becomes wholly metaphor, both what it is and what it is not, presence and absence at once. The concrete koan of the rock garden transforms the mind itself into metaphor, its thought transient while image endures, so that the mind cannot identify with its own subjectivism - narcissism overcome.
‘“Hegel introduces this notion of ‘oppositional determination” in his logic of essence, when he discusses the relationship between identity and difference; his point there is not only that identity is always the identity of identity and difference, but that difference itself is also always the difference between itself and identity; in the same way, it is not only necessity that encompasses both itself and contingency, but also - and more fundamentally - it is contingency itself which encompasses both itself and necessity. Or, with regard to the tension between essence and appearance, the fact that essence has to appear within the domain of appearances, as a hint that “appearances are not all” but are “merely appearances.”’ - Zizek, Less than Nothing>
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Finally, I shall insist that the garden is not natural; nor is psyche natural. The garden was designed and is tended to maintain an artificiality that imitates nature
Because the garden is artificial, as the alchemist was called artifex, all conceptions of soul must be plucked of naturalistic fallacies. The soul as opus contra naturam will not be served adequately by fallacious comparisons with organic growth, cyclical process, and myths of nature goddesses. Nor does the garden shelter the child from which grows the creative person as psychotherapy is found to believe. By insisting upon the artificiality of our work with soul, I am trying to keep us from the Romantic error of confusing the ideal (Eden and the Elysian fields; Horaiko, in Japanese) with the natural. The garden as metaphor offers a romantic vision that saves us from Naturalistic Romanticism by twisting and sophisticating nature through art.
This twist to nature that wounds idealizations of garden is presented in our culture, as in Roman culture, by our ancient god of gardens and gardeners, Priapus. Priapus is neither young nor beautiful. Unlike lovely Narcissus, unlike the semi-divine figures of Adam and Eve, Priapus is mature, bald and paunchy, and so distorted that his mother, Venus, deserted him at birth. His very presence repels romantic idealizations and the gaze into the mirror of Venusian vanity as well as Narcissus’s rapt reflection. Priapic reflection starts the other way around; his preposterous swollen condition reflects the vitality of the world. The same force displays in him as in the buds and germinating pods. By means of distortion which deceptively seems “only natural,” Priapus invites the grotesque pathologized disproportions of imagination - and imagination, says Bachelard, works by deformation.
So, when I invoke Priapus, I am not speaking of priapismus; I am not speaking of machismo; and I am not anti-feminine. Let me be quite clear. I am speaking of the generative artificiality that is the essence of the garden and of the psyche. Each dream, each fantasy, and each symptomatic complication of natural health and normative humanity bears witness to the psyche’s libidinal pleasure in exaggeration, its fertile genius for imaginative distortion. If this god of gardens is also a god of psychoanalysis - and from Charcot through Lacan the priapic has been invoked - he brings to its work an archaic reflex beyond the romantic or baroque, a rousing urgency forward and outward. (Priapus was not permitted indoors in Hestia’s closed rooms where his presence becomes only violent and obscene.)
Moreover, this god needs no mirror to know himself, for his self is wholly displayed. His nature cannot be concealed within, so he is quite free of hidden meanings and subtle innuendos that keep psychoanalysis hopefully addicted to one more revelation, one more transformation, interminable. Priapus knows no metamorphosis, no transfigurations. Priapus is without ambiguity; metaphor is forbidden to him; he displays all, reveals nothing. Like the garden, all there. The rocks are the rocks.
<"And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." - Matthew 16:18>
2023.03.21 12:56 highvolkage DIY mid century budget bathroom remodel (under $2k)
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