Quanta of Solace TRAGEDIES AND ENTANGLEMENTS : Introductory musings

                  Quanta of Solace?

TRAGEDIES AND ENTANGLEMENTS

entanglement.......is a state in which the location of one particle is closely correlated with that of another. In other words, it is the nearest practical thing to having a said particle in two places at once

Evolving  Science 2020

Overview

The term entanglement is not intended to re-introduce scientism into psychoanalysis; it is a metaphor to help me -and hopefully others- to explore the great complexities surrounding approaches to transference in both theory and practice.

Though popular psychoanalytic theory discourses endlessly about "the subject", human beings are also immersed in "otherhood" from conception onwards. Otherhood  includes human societies, culture, bodies, behaviours, the raw physicality of the environment. It is not just language. 

Entanglement is a necessity for human animals and their destiny: for their well and woe. Separation and Loss are inevitable; they may also become passages into other entanglements because no subject can live on island of absolute self sufficiency.

entire of itself; every man 

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 

own were; any man's death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

John Donne : modern  version of No Man is An Island

Transference Entanglement.

This is an eventful -and sometimes fateful- situation where one person (or maybe a group)  makes some other person (usually an expert) responsible for ones well-being and symptoms: especially their eradication or -at very least- their amelioration.

Lacan did not go far enough when he said the analyst is the subject who is supposed to know. Not merely knowledge is demanded of the professional. She is the subject who is supposed to satisfy  desires, longings, expectations, and not just know them.

There are always at least three demands in transference entanglements. Often it is the joys, hurts, fears and hatreds of a suffering individual that largely determine the situation and fantasy properties attributed to the expert. Next there are also market influencers : like health care systems, insurance, popular media nostrums, university departments, therapy trainings,  and professional associations. Third are the phantasies, ideas, and ideals coming from the therapist and his beliefs about the therapy he conducts.

Most theories about talking therapies hope that the experience or skills of the expert will reduce entanglement on his/her/its side. This ideal does not always attain fulfilment, because the expert imports a whole cache of personal entanglements into the talking session. Some traditions of psychoanalysis use the concept of counter-transference -which seems to me just one theoretical exploration of entanglement. 

So as well as expertise, "love", "understanding", "sympathy", and a whole host of other needs are also demanded by sufferers. For example on the more sinister side : one customer might want to kill her therapist. Another has a keen desire to stalk or rape you. Maybe a third has a great need to humiliate your expertise and prove your therapy wrong as well as to adore you.

Very often therapists or analysts for their part see themselves as somehow "giving" understanding, love, knowledge or some other emotional or intellectual gift to their clients. This is especially the case amongst those who wish to train others.

Indeed  phantasies about "empathy" and "training"  or "supervision" are rife in therapy organisations; and they have retro-effects on their providers.  So the whole problematic of giving and receiving intensifies entanglements even before a patient comes along.

An individual’s fantasies for hopes about love, desire, and satisfaction are like quanta. They are  minute unconscious object-like events from which bigger psychic realities  are constructed such as rewards, punishments, satisfaction, distress.

Externally they become entangled with what an individual calls reality. Not only private hopes or demands,  but relationships, one own physicality, that of others, as well as the enveloping cosmos. These are deep entanglements often stirring in transferences. Does analysis help reconfigure one’s love-loss fantasies along with the delights and anguishes they bring?

If transference is a sort of entanglement, then maybe the aim of a therapeutic process is a disentanglement. This will be considered amongst the tragic effects of transference; for one must ask is disentanglement at all possible without entering into other entanglements elsewhere?

Sequence

These considerations were originally Zoom talks. The title of each discourse was

 Mourning, Separations, and Losses

In Freud’s writings love, sexuality and loss implicate each other sometime asymmetrically, other times symmetrically. 

Transference becomes less of a comedy and more tragic. 

Some Hauntologies

Here begins an exploration of “endings” in  analysis and psychotherapy.  Maybe endings can be absolute or partial, as well ambivalent presences. Too there are imaginative scenarios which want to predict iii advance what a satisfactory ending might involve.

Dissolutions

The end of analysis as a dissolution/de-solution/desolation.

Reading

In the last series I mentioned how comedy, sleaze, and phallic fun may be found in transferences -both from the side of the client and that of the therapist. Now follows some tragedies.

As a prelude for this final series can you please read a very brave text I mentioned once before from Bryan Thorne. He is a man whom I have respected for decades, and a staunch promotor of the person-centred approach in the United Kingdom. Thorne gives an account of his therapeutic relations with a female client from his (the therapist's) view point. It is an exploration of "boundaries" in psychotherapy. This article became notorious for a while and earned its author much censure. However for me it is a wonderful introduction to the tragedies of transference and brave exposition of a therapists fantasies, entanglements, and ideals.

Next there is On the Sense of Loneliness by Melanie Klein. It is a short article published after her death. I found a copy of it on Google Read;  the text is also to be found in the third volume her Collected Works. Written towards the end of her life, there are different versions of the Loneliness text in the Klein archives. She broached the topic in a number of lectures, as well as discussing it with colleagues like Bion. The evidence suggests that Klein was preparing to write an entire book -or substantial monograph- on the topic of loneliness.

My final recommendation from professional writers dates from an even earlier period. It is from Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality. Essay two is about infantile sexuality: please dip into this if you can. It is old fashioned and the style off-putting and of course everybody knows what Freud had to say anyway. These essays are reminders that when Freud and his colleagues wrote about sexuality, libido, instincts ..... they were not referring to adult sexualities, relationships, pornography or coupledoms. If you read these essays carefully they are about basic, crude, though complex forms of satisfaction, enjoyment, pleasure. Often these occurred preverbally, though when accompanied by sounds and vibrations, the sounds themselves were part of this eroticism and its lacks. It is my belief that contemporary therapies tend to sanitise, tidy, prematurely mature their clients. The existence and perdurance of atavistic satisfactions is  needful in this situation.

Everybody will be able to recall novels and stories of their own about entanglements. My favourite for illustrating the tragic complexities of searching for an ultimate, complete, fulfilment is by Baron Corvo, otherwise known as Frederick William Rolfe in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Romance of Modern Venice. This text exits in a variety of editions and formats. An unexpected and amazing follow-up is offered by AJA Symons in The Quest For Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (New York Review Books Classics 2001).

My Preparation 

General Literature 

Lucy Foulkes: Losing Our Minds: What Mental Illness Really Is – and What It Isn’t Bodley Head 2021

Denise Riley:  Time Lived without its Flow

Clair Willis : Learning to Grieve: A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead. New York Review of Books November 19, 2020 issue

 

Freudian Tradition 

 

Sigmund Freud: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

see also the fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

Adam Phillips: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012)

Hauntology, Psychoanalysis, the living dead.

Didier Anzieu Freud's Self-Analysis (1987)

BBC Radio Four: The Green Lady in the Toilets 2020

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mj1m

Mark Fisher: Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014)

Stephen Frosh: Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (2013)

ibid : Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Studies in the Psychosocial 2019)

Suzanne O'Sullivan: The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

Picador 2021.

Kate Summerscale: The Haunting of Alma Fielding 2020

 Dissolutions

Peter Ackroyd: Poe: A life cut short. Chatto and Windus 2009

Jean Allouch Erotique du Deuil au Temps de la Mort Sèche. For an English translation of the introduction to Erotics of Mourning in Times of Dry Death

http://www.jeanallouch.com/pdf/226: mourning is not simply a work, it is also an act.

Jean Allouch: Lacan Love: Melbourne Seminars and others Works. 2007

Marie Bonaparte: Edgar Poe: étude psychanalytique. (2 Volumes 1933ff) there is also a very rare English translation dating from 1949 with an introduction by Freud)

Edgar Allan Poe: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.  This is a short story dating from 1845. It is available online and in countless publications, The story contains references to mesmerism; some early readers deemed to be an account of an actual medical experiment. During the nineteenth century there was renewed fascination about mesmerism and its potential advantages as a cure. Eventually mesmerism disappeared into hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Contemporaries sometimes regarded the early Freud as a "curer" in this tradition.

Quotation from Jean Allouch

"Psychoanalysis has been submerged under a tsunami of different psycho-techniques; from psycho-logy, psycho-coaching and psycho-self-help, to psycho-tropic drugs, and so on and so forth. This, among others, is one of the reasons to consider that the method inaugurated by Freud, and duly subverted by the path followed by Lacan, has neither an assured continuation nor a certain future. Rather than being either didactic or exhaustive, our intention is to caution the reader. It has become clear that the symptom in psychoanalysis – jouissance and suffering – manifests itself when something does not work, when the imaginary cracks and it cannot any longer hold the realm of common sense; reality. This is something ignored both by the soul-managers and the soma-managers who, a contrario, and aided by some Lacanians, renovate and reinforce common sense, trying to suppress the symptom whilst simultaneously attempting to reject it.The multiple religious promotions of psycho-techniques, born out of it, are the attempts to return to the statu-quo-ante.Lacan used to repeat that life is like a river going from bank to bank, knowing nothing of itself. And it is in this same non-sensical river that the psychoanalyst, like the analysand, is up to his neck. The psychoanalytic method as such does not offer the consolation of religion, philosophy, or a Weltanschauung. It is for these reasons that a certain degree of reticence, if not scepticism, is not only welcome but also necessary when we are confronted with the Promethean popularity of psychoanalysis. Such recognition, or denigration, even when apparently addressed to psychoanalysis, often shows that the addressees are instead the different and varied aforementioned psycho-versions. Perhaps it is preferable, and also timely, to inaugurate the figure of the transference as the subject supposed not to know rather than the misused and abused aphorism of Lacan concerning the subject-supposed-to-know. This in fact would not be antithetical with the notion of the unconscious as a knowledge that is not known" 

See http://www.jeanallouch.com

ENTANGLEMENT AND THE COMEDIES OF TRANSFERENCE 3. Artist and Model

 ARTIST AND MODEL

Of all the seminars this term, it is this one that caused me the most heartache. 

Lucian Freud The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer 2004/5 Public Domain

Lucian Freud, a grandson of Sigmund,  wanted to die whilst still painting. He very nearly fulfilled this ambition, but like so many, he was stricken with serial illnesses that thwarted his plans for old age and death. 

Though both the founder of psychoanalysis and his talented grandson had a surname in common, Lucian staunchly upheld the dignity of art vis-a vis reductive or generalising accounts from science, social science, psychology. Fine paintings could neither be enhanced nor rubbished by psychobabble, however seemingly erudite. He once said of Sigmund, that he certainly read some books by his grandfather, but only for the jokes. Nevertheless hefty royalties from Sigmund’s writings were no laughing matter. They enabled Lucian to pursue art; later bailed him out of gambling debts on many occasion.

Lucian Freud was certainly one of the greatest artists of this era. Particularly interesting for me is his later work which depicted the raw flesh of  a myriad sexualities with a realism and honesty quite unparalleled. The painting above,  about the artist being surprised by an admiring model has many particular memories for me. In my middle years I would return to Venice at least once a month during Spring and Autumn, often simply to enjoy its unique ambiance; sometimes to read and write. 

Normally I avoid Venice in the summer: it is too hot and touristy for me. But returning in Autumn, always seemed magical.  The temperature is warmer than in the UK; there is the added pungent luxury of Venetos truffles and fungi on display at the city’s main vegetable market in Cannarreggio

I soon discovered that from June to October 2005 a Lucian Freud  exhibition was showing at one of the main art galleries in St Mark’s Square. Although I had seen this exhibition several times in London, I was keen to visit it again at the Correr and was rewarded a new  painting that dominated the exhibition.

According to Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian:

The paint is barely dry on Lucian Freud's latest self-portrait, titled - with a rare hint of humour - The Painter Is Surprised by a Naked Admirer.

Ten days ago, the great 82-year-old artist finished the work, after six months of nocturnal toil in his famously paint-splattered studio.

Today, it goes on view to the public, for three and a half weeks only, at the National Portrait Gallery in London, before heading to the Museo Correr in Venice for a major Freud exhibition…….

The self-portrait presented Freud with a number of technical challenges. He used a full-length mirror in which to observe himself and his model, but because he positioned the easel at some distance from himself, he would have to disengage himself from the pose to paint, "moving to and fro, doing one dab after another", Mr Feaver said.

The portrait is, in effect, a painting of a mirror image of a painting being painted - although, in fact, Freud has also added another smudged easel in the painting-within-a-painting: making it a painting of a mirror image of a painting of a painting being painted

.

"It's got a funny feeling; it looks as if it were done long ago," Freud told Mr Feaver. "Not the idiom: it's to do with the distance and things. It's like doing it on another planet.”

The work could, in part, be read as a meditation on the urge to paint. As Freud said to Mr Feaver: "'Dirty bastard' becomes 'Hey, he can still do it’."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/apr/13/arts.artsnews2

By contrast the focus of an article in the Times newspaper was elsewhere namely, “Who is the naked woman in Freud’s picture?, with the journalist offering three distinct candidates. See further : 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/who-is-the-naked-woman-in-freuds-picture-22sqr50d3dt  

Artist and Model at work Vanity Fair Freud, Interrupted February 2012, article by Kemp

There are a few points I would like to make about Lucian , his life, art, and work for the purposes of this seminar.

1. Many people loved being painted by Lucian- so much so that several females wanted to have his babies.... and did so. The painter’s demands on his subjects were notoriously strict. David Hockney sat for 120 hours

I would arrive every morning at 8.30 and leave at noon. My best time of day. We usually had a cup of tea first. I walked up through Holland Park and watched the spring arrive, making me very aware how uneventful they were in southern California.He works very slowly, I also knew he abandoned some portraits, and as I was going to sit a lot I did not want that to happen. So I co-operated. He liked a particular jacket and a blue shirt. I always wore them. I was fascinated to see his methods.

David Hockney in Lucian Freud's studio 2002 - A spread from Lucian Freud: A Life

Dawson 2002 

All people who met him were immediately fascinated ... He was thin, he wore very  well-tailored, well worn clothes.

It was a very memorable and enjoyable experience

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/david-hockney-pays-tribute-to-painter-lucian-freud-who-has-died-at-88-6424858.html

Nicola Bowery modelled around three years for Freud who worked frequent night shifts 

The night paintings would start between 18:30-20:30pm depending on whether it was dark enough to continue and the light was right, as in winter it got dark early, but it was more variable in the summer. Lucian would always cook us dinner of partridge, lamb chops or oysters or lobster with a green salad and a raspberry vinaigrette, followed by custard and raspberry jelly tart I can't remember the name of. Lucian thought that a well-fed model would be more docile and settled, and would sit for longer sessions at a time. These night paintings would go on until 1-2:00am, and Lucian would give us money for cabs home. A typical painting by Lucian could take 6 to 9 months for him to complete.

Whilst sitting for Girl in the Attic (1994/5), Nicola’s husband became seriously ill and died unexpectedly within five weeks. Following Leigh Bowery’s death, 

Lucian continued to paint this picture, and basically looked after me by demanding me to come and sit for him and getting me a job with his daughter Bella Freud. The two of them kept me very busy, and with my family's help I managed to overcome my total devastation and grief of the death of Leigh, whom I loved with all my heart.  

https://www.phillips.com/article/15840995/sitting-for-lucian-a-british-models-memories-of-freud

2. Long sessions, tediously slow work, months of being observed and engaged in free-flowing conversation, often in a reclining position, all this sounds to me just a little bit like analysis….. but without Sigmund’s rule of abstinence. Some sitters, including this women who initially disliked him, did become lovers.

3. It might be tempting to attribute some hidden charism to both Sigmund as well as to Lucian and speculate about the intensity of their male gazes and/or seductive curiosity. Nevertheless the subject or model is also creative. Not a work of art maybe, but as author of an equally incredible act of transformation. The ear, eye, nose, or touch metamorphoses into a well rounded o object with its promising entrances, exists, fascinations. In the apertures a space is created -opened up- which offers love, wisdom, knowledge, satisfaction ….more than you will ever need.

4. Next I would like to return for some final thoughts to The Painter surprised by a Naked Admirer. What initially amazed me about this work of art, were its many ironies. I don’t think the painter is at all surprised. On the contrary there seems to be something very contrived -almost manufactured or even staged- about the poses of both the painter and his admirer. Moreover, I have the impression that the artist in this picture -especially his face- seems somewhat wooden, almost non-emotional, and therefore not particularly surprised. The great painter of human flesh, seems to have “failed” in this self portrait. His hands and face seem to have a texture and colouration a little bit like the wall, which over the years had been the receptacle for excess paint on the artist’s brush. Is Lucian Freud himself becoming paint? And what are the hands doing? Are they about to engage in some painting? Is holding a pallet knife ? But maybe not: perhaps the hands have become gestures like the face. 

5 Finally I refer once more to the comments of Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian. She noted how Freud used a full length mirror through which he observed both himself and the admirer. In order to paint, he had to break his pose. He also added an easel and other bits and pieces of art paraphernalia to this work of art. The mirror and additions resulted in “a painting of a mirror image of a painting of a painting being painted” .

People attending this group may have heard about Lacan’s so-called “mirror stage” . This notion, is in effect a metaphor. When looking in a mirror, a child begins to create a sense of “my body and me” that is -to create a psycho-physico identity. Lacan, like Melanie Klein, believed the infants' psychic world to be essentially chaotic. With the mirror stage  a sense of self, identity, and differentiation from others is set in motion. It is an act of sheer imagination and creativity. I believe the presence of a mirror and mirror-images in the painting of an 82 year old man, is not accidental. 

When you look carefully at the painting clearly there is a “reflection” of the painting in the painting itself. But where is the mirror… (and the series of reflecting mirrors) which made this portrait possible. Has it disappeared?? There is something almost comic here: which Charlie Chaplin exploited in his “mirror maze scene” from The Circus of 1928.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMBU5gk9HC4

But there is something a little scary at work in Lucian’s painting. The mirror disappears visually, but yet remains as an unpainted presence. Here is an object O, very real because imaginatively created it but also absent.  There are no mysteries beyond or behind  round O objects, they all belong to their creators.  In transference, in love, one remains in one’s own O object. It does not belong to anOther.

Mirror images might differ dramatically from the subject they “mirror”.  Like love, they too can be very scary. Here is a clip from another mirror maze scene, this time from It Chapter 2 released in 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvJWIFbUgBQ

Your rounded objects for love, pleasure, and hate need your creativity to exist and function. But they always remain your objects, created specially by yourself, for yourself. They are your images, your mirrors, your lenses.

*************************************************

The conversations following this presentation were truly helpful to me.

Where is the mirror?

It was a relief  to hear that others could not detect any direct representation of the mirror Freud used to observe his model, himself and their environment. On the other hand, the entire completed canvass proclaims its hidden presence.

Invisibility of the "small o object"

Art helps me to appreciate the complexity of human beings and helps a little with psychoanalytic theory. Definitely not vice versa.

1. My use of "round O object" is indebted to Cormac Gallagher's translations of, and papers about, Lacan's psychoanalysis. One would have thought that o objects are so crucial for an individual's loves and transferences, that they would be massively obvious to both the individual and onlookers ( whether analyst, artist, interviewer, audience). I would now argue that a "rounded o object" might not be present  at all much during an analysis. May be it will be "hidden" or concealed by what Freud called "repression". Maybe like Vesuvius it is just not particularly active at the moment.

2. The discussion about Lucian's existing but non-present mirror, helped me to appreciate more the object petit a. It is massively influential and crucial for the construction of an individual's love phantasies, but if it is not accessible to speech it is as good as good as absent -or hidden. Like some mystics said of their god, he is not present like everything else is present. He/she/it is beyond both human talk and intellectual understand. Something similar can be said of transference and love.

An object petit a is like a quantum object: it does strange things. Sometimes intrusively present, but often absent. A human subject cannot control this class of objects -it is rather the reverse. Observing and theorising about their effects on beings that use language, is insecure and unstable. Why is the Cheshire Cat present, absent, then present as bits and pieces? Like the rabbit hole Alice manages to slip through (another round o-hole) it may not be easily found again Also it leads to any strange number of compartments, odd scenarios, distortions containing other subjects, different logics, along with odd mathematics, sciences, and biologies. Why do babies change into piglets? The cook's explantations are not at all convincing, though she had strong hunches, intuitions, senses, that such a thing would most likely happen to the unfortunate infant.

One transference-loves (and hates) amount to non-standard objects and the languages used to portray them has its own evanescences. The demand to be told the truth about love can be as eager and as anguished as "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me???"

3. Blind prejudice led me to assume that the "o" was always on the body -like some sort of orifice or inscribed mark. Years of familiarity with Lucian Freud's art led me to think that flesh was the Extrance point for him and most humans. Since the Venice exhibition, I incline more to the view that the artist's mirror was Lucian's object petit a. The implications for psychoanalytic theory and practice are many. One is that objects petit a may well be prosthetic, add-ons to the body including, as with Lucian Freud, aviewing aids, which can be anything from the noble or curved mirror, the camera obscura,  to modern digital imaging enhancements.

Artist, models, and performing hysterias

The performative dimensions of hysteria implicated clinicians, audiences, and sufferers from the outset. However hysteria may have originated and functioned, for the afflicted individual it was experienced as real suffering. Nineteenth century practitioners -whether mesmerists, hypnotists, water-spa technicians- performance and fees were as important, if not more important, than the promised cures. There was also something "cathartic" about these performances for practitioners and afflicted alike - as well as audiences and readers.

It seems to me there is something very definitely performative about "painter surprised" too.

Flesh and Touch (to be completed)

Flesh, Waste Products, and Paint (to be continued)

THE COMEDIES OF TRANSFERENCE 2. What is Love??

Three Loves: Aphrodite, Eros, Pan.

The original marble group of statues most likely dates from Hellenistic Times. They are on public display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Aphrodite carries a shoe or slipper in her right hand.

According to Cabaret Songs:

Your feelings when you meet it,

I am told you can’t forget,

I’ve sought it since I was a child

But haven’t found it yet.

I’m getting on for thirty-five,

And still I do not know

What kind of creature it can be

That bothers people so.

Cabaret Songs were composed by Benjamin Britten, lyrics by W H Auden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65QEIgkXdPI

Throughout intellectual, literary, and cultural history rarely has there been just “one” love. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates says it was a woman who taught him the true meaning of love. Her name was Diotima; and she is probably the first female philosopher in recorded history.

Later, we will discuss her reported philosophy of love in more detail; suffice  it to say for the moment that although she acknowledged a great variety of loves, she had a unified theory for the entire field of love.

Typology of Loves

CS  Lewis was an author, academic, philosopher, religious thinker popular in the UK during the 1950's. and early sixties. He wrote The Chronicles of Narnia as well as science fiction and academic tomes. In the book below, published in 1960, he wrote about four loves.

The four loves championed by Lewis were

• Empathy-identification
• Friendship
• Romantic love
• Agape (Christian love)

However seminal the book, it was very Western in its orientation. For example, in addition to the four loves Lewis could have added a few more such as:

• Chesed חֶסֶד, (Hebrew) faithfulness

• Neo-Platonic love, chaste love, and courtly love celebrated by troubadours in Mediaeval times 

• عشق  Ishq in Suffi poetry which is a passionate love dedicated to God through poetry, dance, music

But Lewis didn't.

With the sixties came a mix counter-cultures involving indian mysticism, meditation, rejection of capitalist systems, sexual exploration, psychedelic drugs, rejection of family structures. The Age of Aquarius was a very different world from Oxbridge of Tolkein and Lewis...... and so was its loves.

Custom & Morality: Highbrow & Low-grade Love.

Typologies of love, such as Lewis's, quickly become obsolescent. Far from speaking about the eternal value of a particular set of loves, they tend to depict the ideals, hopes, and fears of just one particular era. In other words philosophies or psychologies of love are often prejudices in disguise.

In Plato's Symposium a legal expert, Pausianas, explains there is not just one love, but two. There is first of all "heavenly love" which is about honouring one's partner; particularly by praising publicly his beauty, intelligence, and wisdom!!! Another form of love was "common Aphrodite" or love according to the masses. Here the objective of love wsa to satisfy one's erotic desires whether for men, women or youths. Love is getting what you want as soon as possible without worrying too much whether the love-object wants you or not. Love is principally about satisfaction and gratification. This characterisation is indebted to customs about homosexuality in Athens. The most cherished form of homosexual love in Athens was between an older, usually married man, and a youth aged 12/13 +. It was predominantly practised by aristocrats and men of high culture, it was both supported and restricted by an incredible amount of upper-class custom and social intimidation. Some Greek cities did not tolerate pederasty at all: it was illegal and proscribed. In other city-states, like Athens during some periods of its history, this odd social mixture of homosexuality, apprenticeship, and eroticism, thrived. Pausianas,  like Lewis, was a man of his time with his own particular prejudices. Meanwhile the supporters of common love, did not worry one jot about the aristocratic peccadilloes of Pausianas and his friends.

Over twenty years ago I recall attending a day-long meeting in Manchester that attracted hundreds of participants. The meeting had been called because lots of gay men and women had became activists, supporters, or buddies during the Aids crisis. After counsellor training, some of these former volunteers now wished to train in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This caused tremendous consternation amongst the analytic training organisations and their graduates members! 

As late as August 21 1994, The Independent on Sunday commented

A new report suggests that discrimination against gays and lesbians working in some psychoanalytical and therapy circles is accepted practice and that classical psychoanalytic theory lies behind it - a serious worry not only for those who want to practise as therapists, but also for those who end up on the couch………

'When I applied to be a psycho-analyst I was a homosexual in conflict and so, because no one thought that I was 'really' gay, I was accepted.'I went into psychoanalysis, for 10 years. I came out married with two kids. It wasn't until I was free of the analysis that six months on I recognised that I was in fact gay.' He says that all his clients now are gays: many have come to him for more therapy after the same distressing (and expensive) experience

Bits & Pieces: Small Round Extrances

An exit is way out. Entrances are how you get in to some place or other. 

Extrances are -simultaneously or separately- both . I like this neologism  because present in it is the word extra:  in the language of advertising there are lots of them, great choice, offering more satisfaction the you ever conceived. Below a mouth is depicted in a skull lacking ear holes and nostrils. Inside the skull offers a startling array of corridors, compartments, and mazes to explore -both going in, coming out or inquisitively wondering around.

During the first seminar in this series,  I asked whether transference is necessarily a whole unified package. For example it might be supposed clients could be transferring the needs of a child, adolescent or lonely adult onto the practitioner. This supposition is understandable given the moral importance afforded to individual subjectivity in Western liberalism. Because people and the personal are so valorised, there is a natural tendency to feel that everything concerning human beings has to be personal.

Not so with either transference or love. Living and  loving have their entrances and exists.... which are prized, hated or desired for oneself.

How many entrances/exits are there in the average human body?

• nostrils, for breathing and sense of smell
• mouth: eating, breathing, vocalization: alarm, pleasure, speech
• ear canals: hearing 
• lacrimal ducts: carry tears from the lacrimal sac into the nasal cavity 
• anus
• males, the urinary meatus, for urination and ejaculation
• females, the urinary meatus
• females, the vagina: menstruation, sexual intercourse and childbirth
• nipple orifices

Here I am beginning to introduce you to an important element of 

Lacan's teaching that was stressed during the late 1950's and early 60's. What he called l'Objet petit a is perhaps best translated as "a small round 'o' object" Such objects -be they partial, apparently empty, or even initially repulsive- form the building blocks of love for babies and adults alike.

You may be reminded of "erogenous zones" -parts of the human body which are particularly sensitive -so that when caressed, kissed, pulled, or stretched, an erotic response invariable occurs. These zones do not necessarily coincide with Lacan's round o objects -either in number or location. 

The "o" Lacan speaks about is the Other, some other being or an-other. It is a cause of your desire because this Other seems to draw you to itself whether it be a person, idea, image, animal, or ideology that you love. For example, some people adore being looked at. Next week we will learn how artist Lucian Freud attracted scores of models -many of whom wanted to have his babies- by the interrogation of his gaze even during all-night sessions

So maybe what a client might love about you ... are your eyes or your mouth or maybe your nose. In everyday terms, maybe your eyes are quite ordinary: but if they become a small round object O for somebody ...... Oh my........ what  incredible eyes you've got. Just looking at them (or being beholden by them) you are close to love ....and transference .....and the promise of unlimited jouissance. Unlike Artemisia, you need not be a great artist to become the bearer of another's small O object. In fact it is given, lent, or donated to you by the admiring subject.

One could go through the extransces listed above - and find lots of objects to admire!  Skin, touch, aroma, hearing. The small round o object is a Wonderland: like Alice's rabbit hole it affords entrance to incredible worlds of desire and satisfaction or disgust.

When talking of greek literary traditions, I mentioned how love may be viewed as comedy, tragedy or sleaze. Above you will observe a bronze representing male love (Eros), female love (Aphrodite) plus the figure of Pan or a Satyr -a horny animalistic being that lives in woods and forests. There are still in existence Satyr plays from classical times, but very few were preserved. It is from this animalistic-phallic figure that the word satyriasis derives -an eventually dangerous condition for men. There the phallus stops being funny.

Plato's Symposium ends with a sleazy satyr-like episode. The party is noisily broken up by one of the most talented, handsome, and spirited man of Athens (who could also be quite treacherous). His name was Alciabides. He interrupts the polite symposium with his drunken friends in a most rowdy way. He himself proposes to speak about love ...... especially his own love of Socrates.  There is a great deal of ironic comedy in the closing scene of Symposium. Socrates was infamous for being one of the ugliest men in Athens.

Bust of Socrates. Vatican Museums 

in the public domain

Alciabides by contrast, was supposed to be the most desired of men. In this final section, Alciabides narrates his admiration, adoration and love for Socrates. The text makes clear, these are not intellectualized or ideal loves, but deeply sexualised desires as well. We are told how Alciabides, even as a youth attempted to seduce Socrates: but got nowhere. I really encourage you to read the conclusion of Symposium it is great world literature.

A seemingly strange Coda to Alciabides' encomium or praise of Socrates, is an account of the low-grade, crude, words often used by Socrates that contrast with their high-value content.

“For there is a point I omitted when I began—how his talk most of all resembles the Silenuses  that are made to open. If you chose to listen to Socrates' discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases—all, of course, the gift of a mocking satyr. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when these are opened, and you obtain a fresh view of them by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are the only speeches which have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely—nay, so completely—intent on all things proper for the study of such as would attain both grace and worth.

“This, gentlemen, is the praise I give to Socrates: at the same time, I have seasoned it with a little fault-finding, and have told you his rude behavior towards me.

So in one way, listening to words coming from Socrates' mouth -the round o object- you have just the crude, sexualised and disappointing language of Pan & Satyrs. However, if you can go beyond those words  and somehow peer inside the o object you will find something unique in his words. Socrates' discourse is divine, full of virtue and extreme, endless wisdom.

 πᾶς ἂν τῶν λόγων καταγελάσειεν. διοιγομένους δὲ ἰδὼν ἄν τις καὶ ἐντὸς αὐτῶν γιγνόμενος πρῶτον μὲν νοῦνἔχοντας ἔνδον μόνους εὑρήσει τῶν λόγων, ἔπειτα θειοτάτους καὶ πλεῖστα ἀγάλματ᾽ ἀρετῆς ἐν αὑτοῖς ἔχοντας καὶἐπὶ πλεῖστον τείνοντας, μᾶλλον δὲ ἐπὶ πᾶν ὅσον προσήκει σκοπεῖν τῷ μέλλοντι καλῷ κἀγαθῷ ἔσεσθαι.

ταῦτ᾽ ἐστίν, ὦ ἄνδρες, ἃ ἐγὼ Σωκράτη ἐπαινῶ: καὶ αὖ ἃ μέμφομαι συμμείξας ὑμῖν εἶπον ἅ με ὕβρισεν. καὶ μέντοι

The words of his mouth are agalmata: delights, like beautiful statues, memorials to greek divinities.

Retractions

I am not sporting the view that all loves and transferences are necessary related to parts -bits and pieces- rather than wholes. However I am trying to say that far too often, the bits and pieces  of Extrances have been ignored in the practice of psychoanalysis.