|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
ORIENTAL TRANSFERENCES
Maria de Fátima SIQUEIRA DE MADUREIRA
"Order is already implicit in the chaos of difficulty at
the beginning. So too the superior man has to arrange and organize
the inchoate profusion of such times of beginning, just as one sorts
out silk threads from a knotted tangle and binds them into skeins.
In order to find one's place in the infinity of being, one must be
able both to separate and to unite. "I CHING, "Difficulty at the Beginning", Hexagram 3 The Image
Guided by an internal certainty, a tacit knowledge sustained by the psychoanalytical practice, according to which the nature of listening is directly related to the nature of the transference, I paid special attention to the development of an oriental patient's treatment since its very beginning.
Whoever lives and works in São Paulo has the opportunity to raise cultural questions, within the consulting room, from the contact with several different cultures, since this is a city populated by immigrants from the most different corners of the world. Questions about the cultural experience itself, about psychoanalysis and its relevance or not as a remarkably occidental method and theory.
A psychonalyst's office is one of these places where such differences have to be noticed, considered and mainly welcome, at the risk that no transference will happen whatsoever.
The peculiar, the individual, the unique are present in any psychoanalytical treatment, but there is always the background given by universality through which it is possible to foresee and express a certain regularity. It is something remarkable, full of a unique harmony, to verify once again that the peculiarity of the language of a certain culture is always present in the transference.
However, to allow these peculiarities to come out the analyst has to be open for a transference that may not always happen through the verbal speech; many times it happens in a multi-dimensional way. It is necessary that he is inclined to be "affected" by the patient.
In the treatment described below, the subtlety of the oriental culture showed itself as it is: pictorial. In this particular case, to be limited by the listening of a verbal speech would have made any transference, any move towards the search for a meaning impossible to happen.
From the beginning, there was an unconscious communication way beyond verbalization. It was present in successive sessions in an almost "ideogramic" pattern. If, by any chance, the manoeuvres of time and space (absences, delays, etc.) performed by the patient were interpreted and understood as resistence, the search for meaning would have been interrupted. Since they, before representing a resistance to the analytical process, were a live expression of how that person was dealing with a subjective time and space; they were the expression of the person's self at that moment. Consciousness transcends verbalization.
The search for singularity, the costly and enduring work of forming one's own subjectivity, is a source of distress1 for any human being, whether belonging to an individualistic society as ours, whether belonging to a mithic society. The area of the singularity is always a source of distress and depends, invariably, on each one's elaboration and creativity. What changes is the way the anguish2 is expressed which, furthermore, is different from culture to culture.
Tai Chi has the following exercise (swing): a person standing up, feet in parallel, raise the arms diagonally to the body (hands at head level) and then move them to the other side of the body (downwards) many times. Before doing it, the instructor explains that this exercise is good for the intestine and the kidneys. After learning the exercise, I dreamt of a person that was collecting fluids from one side of the body, at head level, and pouring it out on the other side over the floor: the same move of the Tai Chi exercise. I immediately understood its symbolic effectiveness: to facilitate the elimination of metabolic material from the kidneys and intestines, to throw to the ground "the waters" to be eliminated.
The oriental culture is full of allegories such as this. The writing, very different from the occidental one, preserves the pictorial allegory intact: an ideogram represents an image, not a word.
If this is the main peculiarity of the oriental culture, the listening should also be open to a pictorial communication, present not only in dreams but in every hour and every move of the vigil. It is the way through which (and how) the symbolism is first communicated. It is the way through which the psychoanalytical listening should first happen.
In one of the sessions, I experienced a bodily listening. After a while, I was able to realize this also had an ideogramic content, like the Tai Chi exercise.
Emphasizing the need for an attentive and open listening, Mériti de Souza, in one of her works, says:
"The clinical practices and the theoretical studies directed to works on the subjectivity should pay attention to the specificities produced here, moving the focus away from the modern subject and from the individualized subjectivity, which are many times understood as idealized patterns and as paradigms to the functioning of the Brazilian man."
Involved with questions most of the time related to the modern individualism, the psychoanalyst is risking to become deaf to everything else not foreseen by a previously determined listening.
Mëriti was referring to the specificities of the Brazilian man and of the modern subject, but she introduces a valuable idea to psychoanalysis by raising the question of the analyst's demand and the nature of his expectation for a certain type of patient, not always the one who makes an appointment in the office.
Such a bias distorts the listening and narrows the senses, altering the transference flow. How does the subject live his conditions of subject and how does he choose to express his demand? Many times, the practice shows that the person who looks for us is not sure about the cause of his/her suffering.
The question of the patient's demand has been widely discussed in psychoanalysis, but in this case the matter of discussion is the analyst's demand.
For the analytical process of a Japanese to happen, the psychoanalyst needs to know the Japanese language. Not necessarily to speak the language, but be open to be "imprinted" by the listening of the non-verbal speech, closer to the primary process and even to the original process. This does not necessarily turns the patient into a psychotic: it is another cultural difference we have with them. In the Orient, the primary process participates in the symbolic, shares the organization of the subjective reality with the secondary process, starting with the written language.
A certain "polyglot" disposition becomes essential, as per the existential meaning of the word. Each and every way of expression is a fruit in the harvest basket.
The unconscious happens. It talks, dances, makes references, sings, dreams, suggests, implies. Poetically. And then what was unknown shows itself as coherence.
* * *
S.'s treatment was going on for a while when I had this dream:
I'm in the backyard of the house I lived when I was eight or nine
years old. The backyard of a small town with earth, woods, papaya tree,
washed cothes spread out to bleach in the sun, clothesline, pebbles,
washtub, the smell of soap bars, scorching sun.
In the dream, the backyard ends in a river, a harbour for those
who come from time to time, water opening to the world.
All of a sudden, a boat appears.
A Japanese young woman arrives, very distressed, running away
with her baby.
I hold the boat to the improvised harbour, tying the ropes
somewhere around and take the baby while she comes ashore, looking
back frightfully.
Holding the child I say:
What a beautiful baby is yours!
The Japanese woman, standing by my side, looks at me with a
weeping face and takes the baby
Don't say that, I can't stand it. I'm an empty shell, I don't deserve this baby and runs away with the boy.
She enters into a door, that could be a bathroom. I feel an
undefined anguish and look at someone standing by me:
She'll kill herself or the baby. I shouldn't have let her go.
I go after her and get into the bathroom. Somebody had already arrived
and is trying to save a faint baby that has a large piece of broken glass
pierced in the neck, in the area of the thyroid. I begin to cry and wake up.
* * *
S. (an oriental name) phoned the office one day to make an appointment. She talked fast. I ask about her schedule in order to make the appointment. She seems confused, stammers, coughs, but finally gives me three options. I suggest one of them for the interview.
The day before the appointment, S. phones again cancelling it.
A few weeks later, another call: she wanted to make a new appointment. I ask her to tell me when she would be available.
Day and hour re-appointed, S. shows up late in the doorway. Excited, curious, moving her oblique eyes quickly, perhaps to not let me see that she wants to know everything at once, everything that is around, what sort of place was that, who was I, afterall.
She enters, moving fast. Hesitates for an almost unnoticed second, such a subtle hesitation that is almost unshown. When entering the room she halts, glances around again and chooses the seat in front of me.
She sits carefully, trying the seat, paying attention to the move disguised , touching the upholstery with the fingers in a subtle gesture, feeling the texture. Then, stands up.
She walks to the couch, pretends to sit, looks at it, stops, tidying the skirt. Finally, she sits down.
She looks at me. All very fast, tiny; sharp movements that hide milimiters of indecision. Curiosity. A test.
When she talks, the first thing is to complain about the traffic, about her own delay. She takes the moment to curse a little her job, her colleagues, the noise of the city, anything that kills the time and distracts my attention while she observes a little more.
Still shyly, she begins to express her disappointment smiling... because I was so unpleasant to her !!! imposing such an inadequate hour for an appointment. She had to leave earlier from work, interrupt important activities, face a chaotic traffic, etc., etc., etc.
When she stops talking she looks at me waiting for an answer, still putting on a disguised smile.
I speak to her for the first time and tell that I am sorry for so much trouble but, in truth, the interview was appointed according to her free schedule, the one she herself had given to me when we talked on the phone.
Disorganization. My intention is to show her the obvious, but more than that to show her herself.
The sustained attitude falls down and S. decides to lean back. Still very tense, changing the purse from one side to the other, tidying the dress, blinking, coughing, raising and lowering the eyes. Then again she looks into my eyes, serious. It was possible to notice that the choice of coming was too much for her. Thus she was trying to make me responsible for choosing the appointed hour. For the choice of the analysis, perhaps.
She looked like a scared animal who suddenly realizes that it is possible to be off guard. The predator was going away, momentarily.
The session goes on full of half sentences, gestures of an apparent conciliation, while S. tries to, at the same time, check the environment, purge an old and restrained irritation and an evident curiosity.
The same pattern was kept during several months: she changed the schedule like she had changed seats, looking at me sometimes with curiosity, other times with hesitation, getting closer and then moving away from a possible analysis, trying my endurance to a systematic irritation, avoiding anything that could by far look like a conversatioin. Up to that moment, I didn't know what S. was doing there, why she had looked for psychoanalysis.
Sometimes, it seemed that she was preparing a place to hide. Her speech, her gestures, the images raised ... it was like she was bringing an object per day, timidly. Sometimes a cushion, a flower vase, splinters, a book, a samurai's sword, letters, an old bedspread, fragments of a dream ... preparing - who knows? - an air-raid shelter, the adequate atmosphere for a spell-out, the right time for a confession, a nest?
The sessions went on. Absences. Delays. Problems with the payment. Changes of schedule. And I along. Break camp here, make camp there, "I think I heard a roar over there, it's better to put the tents up on the other side. No, not there, the enemy is coming that way ..." And I along. Almost nothing was verbally expressed, only sets of phrases, memories, reports from a distant war, gestures, a kamikase soldier, the river banks, looks, still water, sensations.
Up to this moment, it was very important for her to know that I was capable of "keeping" her things. That I was not freaking out because of her absences. Not taking them as disregard, abandon, indifference. They were not. They were part of the make-believe, of an attempt to elaborate in a coming and going situation.
Her hesitating moves were trying to be organized, to know me, to think. They were the expression of her inner self at that moment.
This possibilitiy meant a great deal to her. For the first time S. could live an intangible indecision, a certain undefined sum of affection, preparing herself for the moment she would be ready for them.
She used to say very little about her intimate life, her family, children; she spoke with the body, the eyes, with fussy alterations in the setting. She always had many news on her job, the dispute among colleagues, hierarchy games, competitions ... her struggle.
From the first moment, since the cancelling of the initial interview, I was aware of her game and participated in it. Thanks to that, S. was slowly becoming able to recognize herself. If, in that initial moments, I had chosen to interpret her absences, delays and incoherent speeches as a resistence, S. would probably get scared and gone away. Because they were not. By understanding this, I went on gathering everything: pieces of our assembling game. I went on keeping them until she could do it herself.
And then, I had to move to another office. For several practical reasons, I had to break my own camp. I warned S., as well as the other patients, a month before moving, informing the new address, telephone number, etc.
S., busy as she was with the building of her shelter, didn't seem to have fixed the information.
New office, S. arrives very late and openly aggressive. Raincoat, umbrella, purse, packages, keys, sprinkles. While coming in, she struggles against herself, elbowing her way through the door, complaining about the delay, about my silence, about a "dry indifference behind which you always hide", as she told me. To keep the attack going, she then used a magnanimous tone, slightly cynical, to say that she knew this was me and "nobody could change that". Her anger visibly growing.
The moving of the office was too much on her. Until that moment, I thought S. was trying to find a place, her place, any place, as long as it was hers. For months, all her attempts to build a space that could make any sense had paraded in front of me, and she was incapable of even talking about it. When I moved to another office, it was like I had shown her my own autonomy, my capacity to come and go, build places, and take them as my own. She was deeply envious of that."It is generally understood that the reality principle involves the individual in anger and reactive destruction, but my thesis is that the destruction plays its part in making the reality, placing the object outside the self. For this to happen, favourable conditions are necessary (...) To use na object the subject must have developed a capacity to use objects. This is part of the change to the reality principle. This capacity canoot be said to be inborn, nor can its development in na individual be taken for granted. The development of a capacity to use na object is another example of the maturational process as something that depends on a facilitating environment."
(D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 105, 107)She never lay on the couch. Almost never relaxed the total watch. "Be alert, girl scout". For months and months, like a walker - wild cat - she changed seats, schedules, sessions, moving the eyes, insinuating low purrs, smiling afterwards, to reconcile. Wandering about somewhere in the Pacific. Expressing her nomad way of living in gestures, in the way she talked, behaved, in what she talked about.
Rarely did she facilitate things by connecting ideas, making associations, giving away (or at least suggesting) solutions for her charades. The building of the anti-raid shelter included putting together disconnected elements. At the most, she gave me some pieces of a broken gass to glue, to distract me (or please me?), entire isolated phrases, glimpses of images that floated in the air, lunar atmosphere. In the last session of this period, her envy of my autonomy (freedom?) was quite evident, as well as her indignation for feeling so openly exposed.
I tried to talk about it.
S. gave me an embarrassing answer: she told me that one of the first rules of a good Japanese upbringing is not to show one's feelings. Therefore, in addition to showing that I had poor upbringing, I was trying to subvert the first rule of a good Japanese upbringing. Immediately after, she told me she had decided to quit the analysis for a while and left.
It took me a while to understand what she was trying to say: she had, from the beginning, devoted herself to the building of a shelter, putting all her efforts into the construction of something we both didn't quite know what was. By not understanding very well the rules of her game, I interpreted it, thus causing a noisy interruption to her construction. The damage caused by the envy had already sprung up in her because of the moving of my office.
S. could not bear what was already being too much for her: the wish to elaborate her own singularity mixed up with a cutting guilt, and the envy because someone had dared to hold on to his/hers own freedom.
Entwined in all that, strings of the same necklace - thyroid, necklace? - was her relation with her mother, a traditional Japanese lady with a refined upbringing, always present in her complaints and irritations.
She went away.
During three years she kept distance, in silence. Strategically hidden in some corner, on the run." This thing that there is in between relating and use is the subject's placing of the object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent control; that is, the subject's perception of the object as an external phenomenon, not as a projective entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own right.3
This change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys the object. (...) After 'subject relates to object' comes 'subject destroys object' (as it becomes external); and then may come 'object survives destruction by the subject.(...) In psychoanalytic practice the positive changes that come about in this area can be profound. They depend on the analyst's survival of the attacks, which involves and includes the idea of the absence of a quality change to retaliation.(...) The essencial feature is the analyst's survival and the intactness of the psychoanalytic technique.»
(D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 105, 108)One day she was back. On the phone, introducing herself again "I don't know if you remember me ...". She wanted to make an appointment.
Her mother had died from cancer a few months back, after a long agony.
S.'s voice was spontaneous, cheerful. She had been able to accomplish her attack of unconscious anger by leaving me, "finishing with me".
Now she was back and stronger by knowing I had survived. By coming back and knowing that I (our bond) had not been hurt by her unconscious attack, she entered into a new phase, a more disclosed one. When I told her this, in a joking way, she told me she felt exactly like that: as if her mother had taken away with her all of S.'s bad humour...
But the building up of the place to hide went on. Furtive looks, gestures of escape, disguised cry, cracks. Except that now something more fertile, free from mortgages, could show up: she was telling stories of her childhood, of lunches and Sunday afternoons in Japan; the father's family was very strict, the mother's was a very loving one; mother, father, husband, children, the beloved "bachan", the arrival in Brazil still a child, blackberry shrubs, attempts to elaborate a narrative. The red silk of a kimono floating between words, a certain discomfort in the shock of spices, the onion not mixing with the soy sauce, the bitter-sweet taste of the grandmother-"bachan"'s rice milk replacing the mother's milk, her neighbourhood that is called Liberdade3.
Freedom. What S. was scheming, weaving and entwining was her freedom singularity.
There are still absences, delays, lack of payment. Still chaotic changes of week days and hours. Something is being built amid unavoidable drives storms. The trips to Japan every three years, the brothers still living in the country side, agricultural heritage, the memories of the mother, grasping voice, polite writing, cultivated education a lady, a cat?
She goes on hiding the paws and looking away. But she already crouches and sometimes it is like she wants to purr.
Something should not be said, so S. speaks.«... the pattern of the communication universe itself is also a means to escape it. A word can be at the same time an exchanged message and the denial of any message, it can declare itself a sign and the contrary of a sign. The Guayakis' singing then take us back to a double and essential nature of the language that sometimes manifest itself in its open communication function, other times in its closed function of constituting a Self: the language's capability of performing inverse functions is based on its possibility of being unfolded into sign and value.» (Pierre Clastres, «The Arc and the Basket» in «Society against the State», chapter 5, p. 87.)
And then one day, during a session, among her phrases of disguise, I felt my own body blocked: the head in one side, the rest in the other, legs here, shoulders there, things out of place, while S. recounts her ikebanas of peach-tree buds, a flowering cherry-tree, traces of a memory, odd feelings, the unknown, being literate in Brazilian style.
The bodily discomforting sensation happened at the moment I was capable of listening to S. with the body: her blocked reality was there and in Japan beyond the words, preserving the condensation, raw reference. A bodily ideogram of her cultural not-belonging, existential lack of adjustment.
S. was talking about ethnical cracks somewhere in the Pacific, her own displacement.
I had already dreamt for her and was now interpreting her ethnical fracture, translating into an intelligent bodily sensation an existential condition that was verbally mute, but yet of a strong expression.
A common repertoire was being developed from the moment I was able to understand her message at such a perceptive level. A common area for playing was formed after this unique conversation. Little by little I was learning not to be rough, not to interpret so much, "to talk less and play more", not exposing too much (to the rational light) the delicate nature of her objects. Not calling her ikebana a flower vase. Not interrupting our play by pointing out a glimpse of rage in her look. Paying more attention to the indefinitions that were trying to gush out.
By this time I had the dream of the Japanese woman and the baby.
This was the way I had to understand what S. was bringing up: her difficulty in living her own intense drives, the attempts to build a singularity. As if her subjectivity was not enough to welcome the baby-vitality, leaving her as an empty shell, desperate and on the run. Two of a kind in pain: empty shell mother-almost dead baby; two sides of the same coin.
The situation was aggravated by a recalcitrant guilt because of the debt and due to a culture that required her total adhesion; ancestral obligations to an ambivalent, restraining/crushing collectivization.
There was an existential displacement presenting itself through the transference: psychoanalysis was a foreign place to the Japanese traditional culture. For S., to be there meant to try to create something related to her singularity. But, at the same time, it was a betrayal to the promisses of loyalty to a culture that favours the collectivization. This tempts and threatens her, simultaneously the arms of her mother."The baby's experience of this reliability over a period of time gives rise in the baby and growing child to a feeling of confidence". The baby's and growing child to a feeling of confidence. The baby's confidence in the mother's reliability, and therefore in that of other people and things, makes possible a separating-out of the not-me frome the me. At the same time, however, it can be said that separation is avoided by the filling in of the potential space with creative playing, with the use of symbols, and with all that eventually adds up to a cultural life.
There is in many a failure in confidence which cramps the person's play-capacity because of the limitations of the potential space; likewise there is for many a poverty of play and cultural life because, although the person had a place for erudition, there was a relative failure on the part of those who constitute the child's world of persons to introduce cultural elements at the appropriate phases of the person's personality development.»
(D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 151-152)
At best, S. walked between the collective and the individual; sometimes allowing herself to search for a meaning associations, dreams, memories , other times rendering account to an ancient debt, forged in rules from archaic times, which she experienced as an obstacle to her singularity - absences, delays, rage, lack of payment.
Neither getting in, nor getting out; she didn't make her camp. She was leaving while arriving.
At his time, thanks to a valuable suggestion, I found a book called "The Japanese Thought", by a philosopher named Hitoshi Oshima.
Surprisingly, Oshima brought up, in his simplicity, an obviousness concerning the Japanese culture, which had been lost for a long time among half-forgotten things: "The Japanese people is mythical".
With such a happy recollection, new ways of understanding were open to me. I dived deeper yet trying to meet again my own Japanese, a wild representative of my own difficulty in living vital and spontaneous drives.
I started reading Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres and, being closer to Anthropology, I created a play in which all my animals went on parade, on the loose, in dreams. Trying to elaborate an existential answer that concerned S., as well as myself, I began to look for the foreign in me the beasts which had been domesticated so far.
The occidental viewpoint tends to regard cultural differences as superficial aspects of the same way of being, what is an ethnic-centered, diminishing and impoverishing supposition.
For a mythical people, community cohesion is very present in the life of the society: get and distribute food, make trades, marry, accomplish tasks, participate in the hierarchy, have a sexual identity, belong to a structure in which every born child inherits an assignment. Such cohesion is very strange to occidental eyes, born in an individualistic culture.
However, the most important is that this structure does not happen at randon, does not depend on an individual wish and preserves an internal relation by anallogy with all features of the mythic life, not leaving almost any feature out of it.
To the individual, the private, the peculiar the place left is to occupy some kind of a bordering space, at the boundary: some activity that assures the possibilitiy of elaborating one's own singularity, independently from what his/her people's social cohesion requires.
There are deep differences between the mythic and the individualistic cultures.
S. was living this dilemma.
Coming from a mythic people she brought with her, in the way to the Occident, a crack, almost a fracture, looking for healing. A basic existential matter - this is what her suffering was about. The moving to Brazil had deepen a question that she was not able to elaborate yet.«The western cultivation of secondary processes, by and large
at the expense of primary processes, contributes (almost inevitably) to a sense of disorientation among westerners who confront Indian culture for the first time. This confusion has often resulted in a foreclosure of experience and explicit and implicit negative value judgements of Indian mode of experiencing the world, rather than in a questioning of the basic cultural assumption. The different emphases placed by western and Indian cultures on one or the other of the two basic modes thus reflect two diametrically opposed stances to the inner and outer worlds.»
(Sudhir Kakar. The Inner World. chapter III, p.106-107)The crack was between S. and her mother, between S. and her motherland (culture), between S. and Brazil. Those were the entwined strings of the same necklace the arms of her mother that at the same time surround and kill (the attack to the thyroid).
During all the time, in the hesitations on the beginning of the sessions, in the gaze looks, the loose phrases, the diversions, this displacement was trying to speak with the eloquence of the non said things. It used systematic expressions of an unconscious aggressiviness that was trying to destroy the object in order to let it out.
S. was looking for a place to be, for the chance to act in the world without becoming insane, for the conquering of an unity cracked by a violent implant into a different cultural reality.
She came to Brazil in her early school years, but the crossing is still going on to this day.
By leaving behind her own culture in the search for another one, S. and her family expressed an ancestral resentment against an unsolved conflict: her mother and father had left post-war Japan to come to the other side of the world, longing for the recognition of their own singularity, searching for a place to elaborate what, according to them, had been denied by their own culture. There, in this place, they lived a hostile familiar problem; they felt like victims of family rules sustained and approved by the dogmas of the traditional culture. The struggle was within the family, with the mother, with the culture. S. brought the hate with her without knowing what to do with it; she attacked the analyst and her own analysis in the attempt to create her own space where she could, finally, shelter inside herself.
S. no longer belonged to Japan, nor did Japan belong to her. The split was open even before she left. She was living in transit, in and out of her own subjectivity, between camps and displacements, in a maddening borderline that didn't allow her to come and go, to exist."It is useful, then, to think of a third area of human living, one neither inside the individual nor outside in the world of shared reality. This intermediate living can be thought of as ocupying a potential space, negating the idea of space and separation between the baby and the mother, and all developments derived from this phenomenon. This potential space varies greatly from individual to individual, and its foundation is the baby's trust in the mother experienced over a long-enough period at the criticval stage of the separation of the not-me from the me, when the establishment of na autonomous self is at the initial stage. (...)
I have used the term cultural experience as na extension of the idea of transitional phenomena and of play without being certain that I can define the word 'culture'. The accent indeed is on experience. (...) The place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object). The same can be said of playing. Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested in play.»
(D. W. Winnicott. Playing and Reality, pp. 116, 118, 129)
In a treatment with such peculiarities, it is essential to think about the nature of the cultural phenomenum, the space and the place where it happens, the meaning of the cultural belonging for the subjectivity.
To understand a patient like the mother understands her baby doesn't mean to offer the lap, but to use the whole sensorial, sensitive and intellingent apparatus one has, as an interpreter-translator. It means to consider the dimensions of space, time and perception in an attempt to perceive one's inner self.
The transference is multidimensional. This is the level of the analyst's involvement; the same level of a mother who tries to understand her baby.
My Savage
By this time I had already started to read Lévi-Strauss' "The Savage Thought".
Bewildered, I began to think about what is required in amounts
of courage from a psychoanalyst to understand the drives ferocities.
One night I had the following dream:A woman was sitting in the middle of an illuminated room.
In her left hand she held a kitten, that was nibbling her face.
She worked in a circus, as a lion and tiger tamer.
Curious and surprised, I asked her which one of the animals was the most ferocious.
The woman tells me that it is not a matter of ferocity; one only has to know how to deal with them.
I asked once again:
" But do you turn your back on them?"
" You only have to know how to deal with them", she replies.
I wake up.
* * * In the following days, proceeding with Lévi-Strauss' text about the savage mind, I was happily surprised by something that had already been anticipated in my dream: in addition to the mythic people, some people of our own culture have the same relationship with nature and animals: the employees of a circus and the animal dealers of a zoo.
«The practical conditions of this sound knowledge, its
means, methods, the affectionate values that impregnate it,
all that can be found and observed quite near us, among
those contemporaries of ours whose tastes and professions
place them, facing the animals, in a situation that mutatis
mutandi is as much close as our civilization could tolerate
to the one usual to all hunting people, namely the persons
of the circus and the employees of the zoo.»
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, «The Savage Mind», p. 54.)
* * *
A recollection: some years ago I spent my vacations in a farm. The farm-hand used to go alligator hunting in the last hours of the day. Late afternoon, red sky, the farm-hand stocked the animal with his shot-gun at the opposite river bank. Waiting to get dark. At night, from a distance, he aimed at the alligator's forehead, between the eyes "Pity? What for? This is a bad animal!" , a well-aimed shot, a tail stroking in the air, splashing the dam still water. The farm-hand jumped into the water, barefoot, rolled up pants:
" Be careful or the alligator will catch you!"
" No, it won't!"Minutes later, the alligator and the farm-hand were coming out of the water, one in the other's hand. Bad animal with a bullet in the forehead and the farm-hand jumping out of the water, looking at his dinner.
* * *
Early morning, his wife takes the children to wash up at the dam. She enters into the water carefully and tells the children to get closer. Half alert and calm she begins to talk. I invite her to swim, but she says no. Better not get in the water, she has her period and "rather not provoke the piranhas".
Half astonished and disbelieving, I ask for more details on the water I was about to jump in. The woman reaffirms what she had said before: it is "crowded" with piranhas, "but they don't come over here, they are over there ...." and looks passed the water surface, surveying the mystery.
Fear? Certainly not. The eyes show caution, peaceful acquaintace, moderation in dealing with what could be provoked by blood.
The intimacy of someone who never lost contact with the beasts. * * *
Another dream about animals:A stable, horses, a horse tamer. The man gets a bunch of hay
with the fork, puts in a corner, brings water in a bucket. There are children
playing, running around him.
All of a sudden, a bear goes by, heavily walking on its hind legs.
"Tamer, I say is that a bear?"
Mocking laught:
"Yes, it is, madam!"
" But it could grab the children ..."
" No, it won't ...", more laughs.Tiger, lion, alligator, bear.
* * *
I still find myself in the office atmosphere, between S.'s red silks and rustling kimonos.
It has been a while since the animals/drives decide to join in.
One day, S. tells me the following dream:"I dreamt that my dog had died. I was mourning him, sad,
talking to some people, when I notice that part of his paw was
stuck in my hand. I try to take it off, but it won't come off. I'm
distressed. Then I see the little puppy stand up and come to get
the part of him that was glued on me."At this point, S. could already dream her own dreams, face her own animals, and also understand them. She didn't need me anymore to dream for her. She began to create images of a split experience, hand and paw still clung, awkward attempts to separate a mother-culture, mother-Japan fusion. She had already dreamt and articulated plots. Organizing her motives, separating and uniting, arranging her toys.
More research in Lévi-Strauss, more Winnicott, more associations. My office looked like Noah's arch; there were animals fluttering in my floating attention, among samurai's swords, a puppy, ikebana flowers and rice milk.
In the covering page of the "Pulsional" Magazine, some words by Manoel Berlinck:"I am more and more convinced there is a structural parallelism, already shown by Lévi-Strauss, between the psychoanalyst and the shaman. After I began to believe that the transference and the so called counter-transference are constituent and determinant phenomena of the psychoanalytical practice and that they happen inside the analyst's and the patient's body, I'm convinced that I belong to this pseudo-wise category, a bit like impostors, who claim to have healing powers and end up believing in what they say. But still, and always, even on the side of shamans, this far from reality attitude cultivated by the anthropologists doesn't leave me. And I believe this is very useful to my practice which I call psychoanalytical."
Provoked by S.'s furtive moves, my animals/drives throw a party, giving direction to my work through inumerous dreams that always make reference to a space for playing during the session.
A playing that started shyly, with hesitation from both sides, that is now able to leave the lair and run in the forest; it even dares to secretly observe some more venomous animals to learn how to deal with poison.
The "empty shell" of the initial dream, tree without a soul, void in herself, ethnical fracture still carried along by S., begins to be filled with heat, sometimes quite frightfully. But now and then she is able to let herself be involved in it. When I let myself play the savage I could find within myself, and S. in herself, a jungle of live drives that were emprisioned in letters (ideograms?), separated by cultural light-years, incommunicable, unless the potential and fertile space between us is used. But those drives were able to generate life and provide images of a rich and noisy world such as Noah's arch.
From time to time, S. protects herself from the diluge of unthoughtful anguishes and from the lack of meaning in bordering experiences.
The fainted child with the piece of broken glass in the throat, a reference to my alleged hypothyroidism, is therefore able to live again, to leave the hiding place.
Like a top that the more it spins the more it seems to be still, the animals in frank expression mean that the process is far from an end. While it lasts, I amuse myself in finding a common place between the psychoanalysis and the mythical society, between my animals and the samurai's swords brought so disguisedly by S. into our close association.
Between the shaman and the psychoanalysis, we are trying to call a spade a spade.
Gathering and separating the entwined threads of the silk, so that each one finds a place among the infinity of beings.September 1999
1. In Portuguese «angústia», a word of Latin origin that has the sense of constriction, restriction and intense distress; in psychoanalysis, it is used to designate the extreme tension caused by the accumulation of drives or instincts seeking representation. In a general sense, it differs from anxiety and suffering.
2. Idem.
3. «Liberdade» (Freedom) is a district of São Paulo City, mostly inhabited by Japanese immigrants and their descendants. The duality of meanings is lost in the translation.
4. The English language has not an adequate word for the Portuguese «pulsão», defined by Laplanche and Pontalis as « a dynamic process consisting of a pressure or force that drives the organism towards an objective: to suppress the state of tension that predominates in the «pulsional» source. (...) In German, there are the words «Instinkt» (instinct) and «Trieb» (trieben = impel). (...) The word «pulsão» has the advantage of evidencing the meaning of impulsão (impulse). The two words have clearly different meanings in Freud. When talking about Instinkt Freud is qualifying an animal behaviour determined by heredity, a characteristic of the species, pre-formed by its development and adapted to its objectives.»
In the text, I have chosen the English word 'drive' for its sense of impulse (Trieb) and movement, which is closer to the meaning of the Postuguese word «pulsão». The word «instinct», on the other hand, was avoided for its connotation related to the biological determinism, which differs from the psychoanalytical meaning of «pulsão» and from the Freudian concept of an energy that is, specifically and at the same time, somatic and psychic.
BOOK REFERENCES:
CAMPOS. Haroldo. (org.) Ideograma. São Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1977.
CLASTRES. Pierre. A Sociedade contra o Estado. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Francisco Alves, 1974.
DOI. Takeo. The Anatomy of Dependence.Tóquio: Kodansha International Ltda, 1977.
FREUD. Sigmund. Moisés e o Monoteísmo. Volume XXIII. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1980.
JOFFE. W. G. (org.) O Que é a Psicanálise? Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1972.
KAKAR. Sudhir. The Inner World. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
LÉVI-STRAUSS. Claude. O Pensamento Selvagem. Campinas, SP: Papirus Editora 1997.
OSHIMA. Hitoshi. O Pensamento Japonês. São Paulo: Editora Escuta, 1992.
ROLAND. Alan. Cultural Pluralism and Psychoanalysis. NovaYork: Routledge, 1996.
ROLAND.Alan. In Search of Self in India and Japan. Princeton: Princeton University, 1998.
SAFRA. Gilberto. A Face Estética do Self. São Paulo: Unimarco Editora, 1999.
SOUZA. Mériti. A experiência da lei e a lei da experiência. São Paulo: Fapesp e Editora Revan, 1999.
WEIL. Simone. The Need for Roots.. Nova York: Routledge, 1997.
WILHELM, Richard (adapt). I Ching. Tradução para o inglês de Cary F. Baynes. Londres: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.
WINNICOTT. D. W. Natureza Humana.. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1990.
WINNICOTT. D. W. O Brincar e a Realidade.. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1977.
|
