SOME HAUNTOLOGOGIES
When I talked to you on Zoom last time, I was the recipient of an unusual and unsolicited experience. It was disconcerting. During my presentation the images or logos of each participant kept appearing for a while on my monitor, only to disappear, and then be replaced unbidden by another. As Dame Edna Everedge would say "Uncanny".
The format on my monitor was typical of a discussion forum, whereby the image of the person speaking, commenting, or asking a question, appears so that one can see, as well as hear, the speaker in question. But on this occasion I was the only one speaking. When you each appeared on my desktop, some were listening, others stroking cats, or smiling, or drinking from a mug, and occasionally grimacing. My dog Qtmir was present for the entire transmission. Apart from the occasional yawn, he was largely unfazed by the experience and you did not get to see him at all. Neither -it seems- did anybody appreciate that I was approaching panic pitch: wondering if my technology was beginning to breakdown..... or something worse!!
Fragments, Chasms, Lacks
These events happened whilst I was introducing the seminar to Klein's musings towards the end of her life when she was preparing a major work on loneliness. Klein, a pluralist of sorts, was reacting against therapeutic ideals -such as integration- which were supposed to be attainable through popular therapies. Though Klein herself talked about "integration" for example in the famous child analysis book about Richard. As a result of her work with the boy, she believed there to be a greater integration between death and live drives in his daily living. The important word is "greater": it is a comparison between more and less..... not an absolute condition. Klein thought perfection at any level of analysis was a damaging aspiration, as well as being a dangerously punitive one, for both the therapy, customer, and retailer.
This has always given me some hope. At the very end of her life Klein was brave enough to say "look possums... I have never been able to get it all together" -or words to that effect. Nevertheless she staunchly believed that the analyses she received and later gave herself, where worthwhile.
I attempted to suggest how Klein's approach to a human being believes an individual to be fragmented from the outset. The claim is that humans begin life with desperate, and sometimes frighteningly volcanic and conflicting needs, that almost tear them apart and could well be termed "psychotic" . This set of experiences is projected outwards onto nature, caregivers, institutions so that the real itself becomes depressing, persecutory, threatening. For example, seeing random images of people on screen- like I did during the last seminar- might push me into thinking that I must be mad, the technology is attacking me, or the digits can read my unconscious!!! Was I becoming out of control? Maybe it was part of an CBT conspiracy against psychoanalysis. Be that is it may, there are more benign analogous experiences.
Cats in Cheshire, as in some quantum theories, have a habit of being located in unexpected places at unexpected times; as well as the astonishing ability to fragment themselves -so that only a head or ear or smile or meow is available for public perception. Their comings, goings, traces, and tracks defy the normal laws or expectations that living beings are supposed to comply with. Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life! But the cat pointed out to Alice that his experience was very different from hers.
Arriving in Wonderland Alice was utterly confused and bewildered. In desperation she thought the cat was supposed to know the rudimentary elements of geography and location in this country of wonders. She urgently needed information for her orientation there. So after asking which way she should go
`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
In an updated version of Alice (a video game no less) the cat's philosophy of life is distilled into a startling few lines:
Only a very few find the way, and most of them don't recognize it when they do. Delusions, too, die hard. Only the savage regard the endurance of pain as the measure of worth. Forgetting pain is convenient, remembering it... agonizing. But recovering the truth is worth the suffering and our Wonderland, though damaged, is safe in memory... for now.
This Cheshire Cat
a psychedelic poster, designed by Joseph McHugh 1967, California, US. Museum no. E.3796-2004. © Victoria and Albert
This image is displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum's current exhibition of May 2021
"Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser "
Please note: I am not suggesting that psychosis is some wonderful post-liberal life style option.
What sunders, divides or fragments a Subject in Klein's theory is not a single lack or central lacuna (as some Lacanians would later teach very simplistically) but mass spectra of gaps, spaces, chasms -or what you will -between one's own internal experiences, emotions, and phantasies which may well be utterly unbridgeable. Here one's life ones life is constituted in varying degrees of dissolution and deconstruction. The same is true of the outwardly constructed or projected world: disintegration threatens both one's internal and external worlds from birth onwards.
This is how I approach the end of analysis, which was my reason for talking to you about Klein's final and unfinished pieces of work about loneliness.
Therapies may provide support, self-awareness, coping skills, promises of a liveable -if not successful- future: especially to those who wish to become professional therapists and analysts! But I doubt whether any amount therapy, analysis, or cognitive restructuring results in an absolute state that sets one up for life. The same goes for Lacan's recommendation that "absolute difference" is a sure recipe for avoiding upsetting entanglements or destructive "identifications" between therapists and their service users. In reality this apparently "absolute" state may only be partially and fleetingly attained. So when an analyst desires an absolute difference for her customers, she may well in fact be desiring something very similar to Melanie Klein's unsettling but unavoidable loneliness.
At the conclusion of a long analysis one of Melanie's own patients lamented "the glamour has gone". Something that made life attractive, special, liveable, and worthwhile had disappeared during psychoanalytic therapy. Often phantasies, hopes, yearnings, ideals -even about one's own favourite therapeutic technique- may need to loose some of their glamour for an end or loosening up (ana-lusis) to occur.
Revenants and Hauntologies
The other evening I made myself watch the 2015 movie called Revenant starring Leonardo Di' Capri. It was the beginning an update of the traditional cowboy genre, whereby the American dream used to triumph over savagery. In this movie triumphalism and savagery are distributed a little more evenly in this movie so that baddies and goodies become entangled in a post-colonial revision. I did not particularly like the movie, though it was a welcome antidote to the endless John Wayne movies I endured during childhood.
Tales about the living dead (or undead) are not new. The word Revenant originates from an Old French verb meaning to return.
One such tale, dating from the twelfth century, recalls how a notoriously wicked man, killed his wife during a fit of jealousy. Though eventually given a religious burial it benefited him little, for issuing
from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.
After a post-mortem killing spree of townsfolk,
snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames...
My first encounter with the word revenant was in an incredible work by the French analyst, Didier Anzieu. Relying upon published works by Freud -as well as unpublished manuscripts- he attempted to reconstruct the course of Sigmund's self analysis. Anzieu emphasised how a very young boy called Sigmund, thought himself to be very special to his mother, one might say her "favourite". His father Jakob was nevertheless the stronger competitor for Amelia's affections, despite being twenty years older than her. Archives suggest Sigmund also hated and despised Jakob for his weakness -particularly for what seemed cowardice towards anti-semitic bullying. The infant Freund, preferred mum to dad.
The word Anzieu uses for the spectre of Jakob in Freud's dreams, thoughts, and fantasies is revenant -precisely because his son, Schlomo, makes this image he created constantly return in dreams and dream-thoughts. Like the Ratman, he was haunted by his father. One could say that Jakob became Freud's symptom.
Haunted by the future?
Most zombies, vampires, revenants, golems, dibucks, ghosts, poltergeists come mainly from the past according to traditional fiction. Psychoanalysis too it would seem -particularly in its Hitchcockian version- is about an individual's past and infancy.
Recall the Bates home in Psycho. At one level -the ground floor- Norman is an ordinary human coming home after working in the motel. On the second floor he dialogues and argues with a bossy and threatening mother. But what is in the basement??? Perhaps you can tell me while I have a brief rest...........
I hope now to indicate how images, dreams, transferences, may visit from the future as well.
In order to survive, particularly in a digital age, it is unavoidable to live in a world of immediacy. Though dominated by current demands, hopes, and anxieties; the immediacy demanded by digital technology allows only "compressed space " for future and past events. But unconscious processes -according to Freud- possess times of their own that studiously ignore clock and digital time.... or reconfigure them into weird patterns.
An example of temporal shifts -even in conscious life- is portrayed in the poetry and reflections of Denise Riley in Time Lived without its Flow where she writes about her new experience of time following the death of her adult son
A child’s time is 'quietly uncoiling inside your own', so when the child’s life stops, 'the purely cognitive violence of it' freezes the parent’s time, too
In the words of a Guardian reviewer
The “altered condition of life” Riley experienced was “the curious sense of being pulled right outside of time”. For two to three years after her son’s death, she felt that time was arrested – stopped short – and most of the book records her contemporaneous efforts to write about this state of “bright emptiness”
These descriptions of time without her son, should not be reduced to euphemisms about the trauma of bereavement. No the very texture of reality had changed so much that she was living in a "pocket" of time with its own tembre and characteristics.
My approach to being haunted by the future is indebted not only to Klein, but Mark Fisher a critic, author, and blogger known online as K Punk. His devastating article "Exiting the Vampire Castle" appeared in 2013 was quickly followed by Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. He firmly believed that mental health should not ever be detached from bodily health -as well as from current political and cultural configurations of living. If you read anything as a result of this course, I hope it will be the article by Melanie Klein and a piece from the Guardian by Mark Fisher called Why mental health is a political issue dated 2012.
The word hauntology is a neologism that works better in French than in English. Its two components are "haunt" and "ontology'. Something about being that won't let you go. Fisher's work highlights popular music and bands like Joy Division about which I knew nothing until reading this book. Historians of such post-punk music suggested it is haunted by a future that never took place. After the victory of the second world war there were hopes that the welfare state and a renewed moral commitment for the good of all classes -members of which had all been bereaved- would create a very new Britain. You've never had it so good and a new Elizabethan Age were its ideological slogans.
If you view the 2008 video called "Joy Division" there are explicit references to post war Manchester, Salford, Mansfield; which along with many other northern cities were to undergo slum clearances.Traditional communities were uprooted and transferred into concrete barracks: which themselves became havens of crime, drugs, ill health. Singing and performing in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, in which the concept of the social was being dismantled and abolished, singers like Curtis who himself began to suffer from epilepsy and manic-depressive states could not shake off this unfulfilled future. A haunting atmosphere is chillingly created in music and lyrics:
Someone take these dreams away,that point me to another day,a duel of personalities,that stretch all true realities.That keep calling me,they keep calling me,keep on calling me,they keep calling me.Where figures from the past stand tall,and mocking voices ring the halls.imperialistic house of prayer,conquistadors who took their share.That keep calling me,they keep calling me,keep on calling me,they keep calling me.Calling me, calling me, calling me, calling me.They keep calling me,keep on calling me,they keep calling me,they keep calling me.
Dead Souls
In post modernist eras, ecology and the need to achieve now weighs heavily upon the "mental health" young people. It is hard to remain sane if your grand children and great grand children face devastation.
An alternative to despair, melancholy, and haunted living is the desire to change the future -if and when- anger or aggression can be deflected from oneself and channelled elsewhere to create difference -albeit not perhaps an absolute difference.
And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 10And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp 15Dare its deadly terrors clasp? .....Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Postscript : Support and Knowledge.
Anxieties of disintegration at the ending of a prolonged therapy or analysis are very real. Indeed the very prospect of ending an ongoing talking therapy might intensify them.
This particularly happens especially where the analyst is not so much seen as a support that allows an analysand to work, but rather as an absolute and enduring underpinning of everyday life. Should this occur, it does not imply failure on the part of the user, provider, or therapy. It means rather that anxieties of disintegration are so pressingly urgent, that the individual needs to believe there will aways be an analyst available to shore-up ones structures .... like an architectural scaffold maybe.
Another tragic anxiety is that knowledge provided by analysis, theories, and therapies is not real. The analyst is supposed to know how you can best lead your own life, the solution to life's enigmas and challenges, how to live well; or even provide an answer to social and political discontents of the day. This is a need or demand for An Answer -if not The Answer. Here, like a believer, the desperately aching question is: to who else do I go -you have the words of eternal life?
These deep, persistent, or gnawing needs are not only present in clients or patients. They become all the more tragic when analysts, therapists, counsellors, or doctors believe themselves to actually dispense such commodities.
Some References
Didier Anzieu Freud's Self-Analysis (The International Psycho-Analytical Library ; No. 118) 1987
Mark Fisher Why Mental Health is a Political Issue. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures 2014
Adam Phillips Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life 2013
Slavoj Zizek On Norman Bates' House 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKH6FmPV1_o
Fort-Da
Making things, people, history, disappear and reappear
Freud's mediations on watching his tiny relative play with a cotton reel/Real are to be found in
Sigmund Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Penguin Modern Classics 2003)
It is worthwhile looking at the encyclopaedia articles such as NO Subject:
Stephen Frosh Gone for good: Charting three generations of psychoanalysis. The Times Literary Supplement https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/anna-sigmund-ernest-freud-psychoanalysis/
This is a review by Frosh published in the TLS. He was reacting to a book about the sad later life of Freud's little grandson, Ernst..... the child whose game so intrigued Freud. Apart from Anna, he was the only other member of the Freud family circle to become an analyst.
For Alice Riley see John Self in the Guardian 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/12/time-lived-without-its-flow-denise-riley-selected-poems-review
ALICE
One could say that Fort-Da is one of the everyday "laws" of the real world of Wonderland. Quotations are taken from Lewis Carrol's famous book.
The other passage quoted is from Alice: Madness Returns a video game directed by American McGee, developed by Spicy Horse and published by Electronic Arts on June 14, 2011 in North America, June 16 in Europe, and July 21 in Japan for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Madness Returns crosses genres such as action-adventure, platforming, and fantasy horror.
Madness, however, was already part and parcel of the cat's discourse before well before Madness Returns.
Interesting though is the question of what madness meant for Carrol and the later video game.
