contribucion de Desy
Why Bother? : From Indifference to Passion
Desy Safán-Gerard, Ph.D.
The purpose of this workshop is to examine passion in light of current developments in analytic thinking. I have decided to consider the following features of passion which I hope will cover some of its different aspects.
1. History of the concept and its role in psychoanalysis.
2. Precursors of passion such as attending, noticing and linking.
3. Development of interest as a more elaborate precursor of
passion.
4. The absorption dimension.
5. Dealing with passionless patients: autism, narcissism. The counter-transference in dealing with these patients.
6. Fostering passion in patients, in oneself.
7. Neruda’s poem
1. History
From a Freudian and Lacanian point of view André Green examines passions in chapter 9 of his book On Private Madness (1986) entitled, Passions and their Vicissitudes. In a previous book, Le discours vivant. La conception psychoanalytique de l’affect (1973) he considered affect as a representative and a signifier of the flesh; in this book he argues that affect is the representative of passion. Green’s work calls for a re-interpretation of Lacan’s work.
Early on in the history of psychiatry madness was exiled from our vocabulary. One was not mad, but suffered from nerves. Madness was also banished from professional jargon. Madness disappeared from the classification of disorders as a shameful reference, concerned as psychiatry was with having a scientific bearing. Madness and possession were not scientific notions. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance madness was embellished with an aura that made a mystery of it, in the religious sense of the term. Something of the order of the divine or the demoniac showed through it. It was in league with passion. For the mystics there could be no happy passion except in the acceptance of the Way of the Cross. Psychiatrists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced an awkward situation with the mystics. They wanted to distinguish divine from malignant manifestations.
The link between madness and passion has been endorsed by literature. Shakespeare offers many references to madness and its link with passion. The ideal of the Renaissance recognizes this conjunction which simultaneously inspires fascination, respect and fear. Green considers madness and passion tributaries of the same river.
The triumph of reason resulted not only in the repression of madness but in that of passion as well. This was still allowed within limits in the theater. Rationalism chased passion from philosophy. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the concept of Nature had already begun its task of undermining God and religious passion. Psychiatry was born of this mutation. The eye wishes to be objective, that is to say, without passion.
Today there is little discussion of passion in psychiatry and practically none in psychoanalysis. If psychoanalytic thought did not deem necessary to attach particular interest to the psychoses the reason was probably because for psychoanalysis it is implicit that all delusions are the fruit of repressed passion.
Freud was blind to madness on two scores. First, his work was born of neurosis (principally hysteria) looking at psychosis from this angle only. Freud maintained that the narcissistic neurosis (which are the psychoses of traditional psychiatry) were unanalyzable. He was overlooking the psychotic as a person. The case of Schreber’s Memoirs represents the analysis of a written work and not that of a patient undergoing analysis. Freud approached neurosis in such a way as to purge it simultaneously of the passion and the madness that it continued nevertheless to transmit. Psychoanalytic theory has itself carried the mark of this repression.
Analysts find comfort with the feeling of a correlation between theory and practice. When this doesn’t happen and analysts are confused in the middle of a session they infer the existence of a psychotic core or a latent psychotic structure. Freud favored the field of neurosis and based on it the whole construction of psychoanalytic metapsychology. Freud neurotified hysteria. By interesting himself exclusively with the theatrical fantasying in hysteria, Freud abandoned at the same time the pole of passion – the hysterical madness that left its trace in the ‘attack’. Green says, “In fact, these hysterics were no more neurotic than psychotic. They were ‘mad’”(Green p.220). Although a hysterical character no longer has attacks, he continues to make scenes, sometimes in the consulting room, but more often in the private space of the bedroom. What remains of this in the session? A story that purges the event of its momentary madness.
The audatiousness of tackling a field dominated by the stigma of morality forced Freud to adopt a cool, lucid and objective attitude and to consider the subjects under his scrutiny with the eye of the entomologist. When we compare these descriptions with what we learn in the analysis of a pervert, we recognize the mechanisms described, but something is missing from the description, the passionate frenzy linked to an instinctual upsurge which pushes him to acts which can compromise his entire life. One is struck by the sudden encroachment of what seems to be a derangement of the senses, or of sense. For Freud the state of being in love or of amorous passion represents a short madness, a view that has been held by many analysts after him. All the vicissitudes of eros are tainted with a potential madness which is at the core of what they manifest.
Rather than characterize madness as a disorder of reason one should on the contrary stress the affective, passionate element which modifies the subject’s relation to reality. Philosophy failed in its quest for wisdom and truth about passion because it could not recognize the roots at the origin of this madness. Freud fully recognized, first in sexuality and then in the Eros of the final theory of the instincts, the fundamental role played by them in structuring the normal and the pathological human psyche. But he minimized their intrinsically mad essence, which subsists in the normal individual as in the neurotic and the pervert. There comes a time when the feeling arises in the analyst’s counter-transference, that he is at grips with mad mental functioning; it is a passing moment but, for Green, it is crucial. If one evokes the most evolved outcome of the instincts, that is to say
sublimation, this is far from bringing us wisdom and serenity: the lives of artists show them to be prey to the same madness, not only in their private lives but in their relation to their work. Scientists are no better off: the history of science abounds with examples where the official body of knowledge has been purged of all the aberrations that bind scientists to their science. Alongside sublimated accomplishment of instinctual developments there remains a pole of blind passion which scientific virtue passes over in silence.
Passion and madness were banished from neurosis at the same time and this is borne out in Freud’s theoretical writings and in his case studies. In Freud’s case histories of neurosis, psychosis, borderline cases, amorous passion reappears within the transference. However, Freud was more at ease with the analysis of infantile sexuality, which belonged to a repressed past, and with the daydreams connected to it, than with the reality of love in the psychoanalytic situation. Dora really is ‘mad’; she is capable of anything because her feelings of love push her not only to transfer them but to act them out in acts of vengeance. For Green, to master the transference is to safeguard against the storms of passion and their consequent avalanches. To approach unconscious meaning by means of dreams, like Freud did, is to introduce a mediating distance because this road is well guarded against dangerous false connections. Freud’s counter-transference drove him to give a watered-down version of passion.
Psychoanalysis then deserves to be called the analysis of passions because it also situates them at the intersection of mind and body. According to Green, the hysteric converts somatically, the obsessional into thought and between the two the phobic is anxious. Libido is everywhere, but above all it is ‘between’. The Wolf Man is between madness and psychosis. The only case in the five analysis where Freud’s transference was not unduly taxed is in the ‘Rat Man’.
Between the ‘grande’ hysterie’ of the Studies (1896) and the petit hysterie of Dora, passion and madness had been expurgated. Most authors agree on ‘localizing’ passion where body and soul unite. Freud did not but could not escape this tradition. Passion is opposed to action as suffering is the opposite of acting. The ego submits to the instincts as the psychical submits to the corporal. The subject suffers his passion. He is no longer the agent but the patient. Passion dominates him and subverts his reason – his entire mind in fact. It alienates him from his objects. It commands his actions. He no longer acts but is acted upon.
Arguments raged in France over the respective functions of representations and affects in Freud’s work. The debate is not over.
Lacanians exclude affect altogether showering sarcasm on all who refer to it and they take representation to the bare essentials, to the extreme concept of the matheme. The unconscious is no longer structured like a verbal language but like a mathematical language. In his Metapsychology Freud not only gave precedence to representations over affects but in certain places he uses instinctual representative synonymously with its ideational representative. But he claims that “the system Ucs contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true object cathexes” (Freud 1915 e p 201). But he asks, “Objects of what?” The answer to Freud is instincts and Green adds, passion. Freud always linked quantity to affect but the importance of the affective factor went unrecognized for too long. What is the strength of the instincts or the nature of their fixation? Nothing less than the intensity of passion and its attachment to its object. Here we enter into the world of a baby and his mother. The love object, the object of the baby’s passion is unique and irreplaceable.
Both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts know that passionate structures develop into delusional transferences. Paranoia, psychosis passionale is the analyst’s bete noir. Green distinguishes between madness and psychosis. Madness is present in all transference. When it is not experienced with the transference, it shows up clearly outside the analysis, in the analysand who acts out. Transference psychosis is different. Psychotic transference is characterized by its parasitic nature and its sole objective is to destroy the analytic setting, whether emanating from the analysand’s communication or the analyst’s interpretation.
Green asks if the persisting effects of ill-being which justify all requests for re-analysis, do not arise from the exclusion of the madness and from the relation of this hidden madness to the psychotic part of the personality. It seems essential to re-establish madness in the place where it has to be recognized, for all time: at the heart of human desire.
Like the Id the Ego is blind. The Ego originates in the id and thus bears the stigmata of passion like a label of origin. Ego: made in id. Besides this it is blinded by a no less passional agency: the superego (born from a split in the ego and it also takes root in the id). These 3 concepts only collaborate to optimum effect when they are applied to the non-human world. At the opposite extreme, we find the political passion, be it mad or psychotic. It is by recognizing it that one is better equipped not to reduce it but to transform it through analysis, to see to it that Eros wins over the destructive instincts. This requires that the analyst no longer shuts the door to this madness and that he consents to receive it and to share it by analyzing it. To do this one must recognize the true dimension of affect. For Green, “to take the full force of transference passion is doubtless exhausting but it is the price to be paid by the analyst if the analysis is to succeed. Needless to say, the counter-transference comes to the fore here” (p 241).
Green proposes to rehabilitate the old term of madness in order not to forget the unfurling of passion which is the language of the instincts. The restrictions of the analytic setting make us lose sight of the way the enactment of instinct functions as well as the impact of passion which accompanies its aberrations. The opposition between madness and psychosis fits better with the final theory of the instincts. The true antagonist of the sexual instincts is represented by the destructive instincts and one has to allow more and more of this in psychosis. One has to think of splitting and disavowal which one finds in psychosis but which have a far more general influence.
“Madness, which is a component of the human being, is linked to the vicissitudes of primordial Eros, which are in constant conflict with the destructive instincts. When Eros prevails, it is because the passions which inhabit it become bound , and psychosis is averted. But when the destructive instincts triumph over Eros, the unbinding process is stronger than binding, and psychosis wins through” (p243). For Green psychosis emerges when the subject is forced to mobilize his destructive instincts as a means of putting an end to a fusional relationship with a primordial object. He asserts, “I do believe that psychosis is a conjuration of the object” (p243)
In Le Discours Vivant (1973) Green wrote about affect as a signifier of the flesh. In On Private Madness (1986) he argues that affect is the representative of passion. His later book calls for a re-interpretation of Lacan’s work.
3. Interests
Neither traditional psychoanalytic theory nor psychoanalytic ego psychology account for the development and significance of having interests. Morris Eagle draws from a variety of different sources, eg. physiological, experimental, anecdotal and sociological in explaining an aspect of personality of particular importance to psychoanalytic theory. He attempts to understand those behaviors pertaining to the development of an interest in objects and the psychological significance and functions of such interests. Eagle’s claims are that interests are best understood as object relational phenomena and that they play a central role in maintaining personality intactness and integrity, particularly in extreme circumstances. He draws on evidence from autobiographical accounts, animal investigations, epidemiological studies, clinical impressions and studies of infant behavior.
As it is ordinarily used “interest” conveys the qualities of cognitive and affective involvement with an object, of modulated pleasure, and of the capacity of the object in which one is interested to hold one’s attention. Individuals can have a wide versus a narrow range of interests, deep and intense versus shallow and superficial interests.
The concept in psychoanalytic theory most germane to an understanding of the development of interests is sublimation. Sublimation results from “the instinct directing itself toward an aim other than and remote from that of sexual satisfaction” (Freud, 1914/1957, p 94). Interests are the product of the diversion of sexual aims to “higher” pursuits. The capacity to develop cultural interests depends on one’s ability to sublimate or “neutralize” sexual energy.
However, a formulation of interests in terms of the concept of sublimation does not adequately take account their development and psychological function. Eagle argues that interests are most meaningfully understood as object relations that involve cognitive and affective links to objects in the world and serve some of the same psychological functions served by more traditionally viewed object relations. Observations regarding the importance of “having something to live for” point to recent epidemiological studies supporting the informal observation that the survivor in a long relationship in which one of the partners has recently died is more susceptible of death and to illness than others of his or her age group. The “something to live for” sustaining role can also, however be played by other objects as well as by abiding interests and values. There are many autobiographical accounts of people under the dire conditions of imprisonment and concentration camps that show the role of interests and values in increasing the likelihood of survival and in maintaining psychological integrity.
Lack of interest is a negative prognostic indicator in an analysis. On the other hand, a creative talent or gift, and the intense interest that can accompany it, often can serve to sustain people with considerable pathology. Without this center of creative interests, such people would decompensate. Whether or not, as an adult, one has acquired abiding interests is not a casual or peripheral aspect of an individual’s behavior, but a central feature of personality.
There is enough evidence to indicate that an interest in objects as well as the development of affectional bonds is not simply a derivative or outgrowth of libidinal energies and aims or a consequence of gratification of other needs, but is a critical independent aspect of development that expresses inborn propensities to establish cognitive and affective links to object in the world. The acquisition of interests is intimately bound up with and is, indeed, an expression of the separation-individuation process. An important later aspect of the processes of differentiation and individuation is the child’s participation in what Mahler (1968) aptly calls the “hatching” process, a process in which the child directs interest and attention to the outside world. Separation-individuation not only involves a move away from mother, but toward a new social context of peers and juveniles. The role of peers in development has been relatively underemphazised. Infant monkeys separated from each other show the same depression-regression pattern as infants separated from mother (Harlow, 1974). While secure attachment is associated with curiosity, play, and the capacity to explore and become interested in the world, insecure attachment interferes with these activities and capacities. Both mature object relations and autonomous interests require an individuated self relating to and establishing cognitive, affective and value ties to independent objects in the world.
Winnicot has related “transitional phenomena” to the establishment of cultural interests. The transitional object is transitional in the movement from concrete representation to the achievement of a true symbol. Giving external objects the capacity to soothe and comfort permits a freer and safer exploration of and interest in the external world. In the course of development the transitional objects of childhood are given up and “there is a gradual extension of range of interest” (p.232). A process that began with external transitional objects becomes internalized as cultural interests and values. Cultural phenomena reflect both inner and outer reality. Because they are internalized, they are deeply personal and can be carried around.
Difficulties in experiencing deep interests play a prominent part in the symptomatology reported by patients today. Patients report experiencing meaninglessness and emptiness, including lack of meaningful interests, ideals and values, rather than for example simply circumscribed depression or anxiety. Analysts are preoccupied with narcissistic personality disorders while political scientists, literary critics, historians and writers are writing about the “new narcissism” as a widespread cultural phenomenon. A critical feature is the lack of interest in the object per se. Interest is dictated mainly by the aims of self-enhancement and self-aggrandizement.
An interest in objects is a critical feature of the development of object relations, based on the inborn propensity to establish cognitive and affective links to objects in the world. Current evidence from a wide range of research areas all argue against the proposition that successful interests necessarily represent a sublimation and channeling of presumably more basic instinctual drives. Individuals are capable of interest in activities and objects for their own sake, that is, of being intrinsically motivated. Although the potential for intrinsic motivation is inborn, the development of this capacity is linked to one’s developmental history. The quality of adult interests reflects important aspects of the fate of the inborn propensity to establish links to objects.
4 . Absorption dimension
One of the manifestations of passion is the capacity to absorb oneself in something outside the self. Absorption as a relatively new dimension of personality is derived from personality research by Tellegen (1992) and Block (2002). The psychological disposition to enter into states of absorption appears to coexist with a meaningful and implicative pattern of personality shared by both sexes. It is characterized by openness to aesthetic experiences, breath of interests and humor suggests that absorption is related, in both sexes, to a willingness to destructure conventional and everyday pragmatic modes of cognitive and perceptual processing. Absorption has been linked with imagery ability, synesthesia, fantasy proneness, daydreaming, experiential involvement and alterations in attention. It has been alternatively labeled openness to experience. In females the capacity for absorption is correlated with descriptions by observers that conclude that such women
66 enjoy aesthetic impressions and are aesthetically reactive,
57 are interesting, arresting persons
39 think and associates ideas in unusual ways
46 engages in personal fantasy and daydreams
3 have a wide range of interests
The observers conclude that in females a capacity for absorption is negatively correlated with the following features:
7 favors conservative values in a variety of areas
33 calm, relaxed in manner
97 is unemotional, emotionally bland
63 judges self and others in conventional terms
12 tends to be self-defensive
For young men the observers conclude that the capacity for absorption is positively correlated with the following features:
5 behaves in a giving way with others.; generous
35 has warmth, capacity for close relationships; compassionate
66 enjoys aesthetic impression; aesthetically reactive
28 tends to arouse liking and acceptance
21 arouses nurturant feelings in others.
The observers conclude that a capacity for absorption is negatively correlated with the following:
36 is subtly negativistic; undermines and obstructs
12 tends to be self-defensive
37 is guileful and deceitful; manipulative
23 extrapunitive; tends to transfer or project blame
5. Passionless patients and counter-transference
According to Anne Alvarez who has written extensively on the treatment of autism there are three aspects of the mother equipment which have a particular bearing on her baby’s developing sense of identity, on his emotional security and on his cognitive capacities. These 3 aspects are her ability to give her baby her full attention and to respond appropriately to his initiatives; her ability to keep him in mind while attending to something else; and her ability to wait quietly and with interest while his own interest is deployed elsewhere. If these 3 conditions are met the baby experiences a sense of abundance: a sense of people who are rich in loving relationships and of a world of thought that is rich in exciting possibilities which his parents encourage him to discover. Maria Rhodes gives an account of Anthony, an autistic boy whose sense of abundance was tragically negated in terms of the capacity for thought as well as personal relationships.
It is important to note that these patients can generate powerful counter- transference feelings in their analysts. After Mrs. Rhodes made an attempt to join the boy in a song and was ignored by him she writes, “Anthony completely ignored me in a way that crushed hope” (p130)…”I felt I might as well not have bothered” (p 131). She had to find solace in little signs of contact: “This had been a moment of shared attention, but it had been a moment in which the two of us had paid attention to the same thing” (p131). Alvarez (1980) has written about the need for the therapist to “ reclaim” a child with autism. This was certainly the case with Rhodes’s young patient. She says, “perhaps with him it was less a matter of going in search for someone who needed to be found, and more a matter of holding onto my belief in the memory of someone who had given indications, however fleeting, of being present” (p131).
Communication with Anthony first got going in connection with an object ‘out there’, not directly between she and him. It was as though the threesome of joint attention had to be securely established before the child could dare to attempt a direct “you and me” relationship with his therapist. This corresponds to the observation of adult patients. Lombardi (2006) has written about analysands who are driven to analysis primarily by an inability to feel alive. His patient Antonio only felt alive when he gambled.
From the start of the analysis he tended to keep silent and not to respond to any attempt to stimulate his participation. When asked directly he claimed he felt nothing and thought nothing. However, Lombardi observed Antonio’s extraordinary ability to convey violent hatred which his analyst found it very hard to contain. He noticed that he tended to absent himself from emotional feeling which probably was Antonio’s solution for managing his hatred, absenting himself mentally. But his analysis didn’t give up: “The fact that I did not give in to the blandishments of absence and silence was, I believe, an important element in catalyzing development’(p2). The link between this treatment and Rhodes treatment of Anthony (same name) rest in the way they came to deal with the transference. When Lombardi’s comments were aimed at the transference, they were met with rigidity or they were totally rejected. His patient’s reaction seemed more constructive when the analyst spoke of hatred in general and of his propensity to ignore it. In other words, Lombardi was spurring Antonio to observe his way of relating to hatred rather than to emphasize his hatred of him. Antonio seemed to use silence as a demolition of being. His analyst felt that it didn’t matter what they spoke about “the essential thing was keeping the dialogue going in order to develop a relationship and to evolve a way of thinking based on reality and common sense” (p 3). Antonio was by no means indifferent to his analyst’s contribution as he persisted in pretending. His tendency toward silence and paralysis returned in massive form with the approach of the first long interruption of analysis.
Insisting that the patient continues to express what is happening to him in the here and now of the experience meant for the Lombardi’s “facing my own violent participation in his hatred, which I felt quite tangibly in the form of strong nausea. While Antonio absented himself mentally his violent feelings were projected onto his analyst. Lombardi says, “ I neither considered nor interpreted his hatred as directed principally at me, but instead understood it as a signal of his approach to sharing an area which until that moment had been dissociated and acted out” (p3). He believes that the experience of hatred in the session represented some progress towards the world of emotions and not an attack upon the analytic relationship. Encouraging him to be present and to register the experience of temporal limits represented by the approach of a separation was particularly useful. This was confirmed by the patient’s acceptance of a third weekly session.
Let us go back to the counter transference with these patients. David Taylor has studied a pattern encountered in a group of patients with problems in linking, noticing and attending which he considers as functions of consciousness and I see as precursors of passion. They are associated with a profoundly passive position at some deep or early level of the personality. These patients are not able to be independent initiators of action. Their lack of response seems to have arisen in infancy or childhood because of some emotional failing in the primary object. The patient has had to disengage an infantile part of the personality and resort to other routes to deal with potentially intolerable or impossible states of mind. In the treatment of more obviously damaged and fragmented patients the analyst may need a lively and alert predictive sense to anticipate the likely future significance of a preparatory cue. For Bion, the analyst needs to be an advance scout of attention whose function is to recognize what is anticipatory. The development of the potential growth depends on the analyst’s sensitivity and alertness to their presence in the patients. In other words, the analyst needs to be particularly alert to the smallest signs of attention, linking and noticing in the patient. Taylor feels the analyst needs to champion and support these developments. In fact, the analyst needs to be attentive to what is incipient rather than making an item of what is already obvious. In Attention and Interpretation ( ) Bion adopted the term pre-monition in describing forewarnings of emotions about to develop. The effects of these constant dynamic movements of consciousness can be observed in the link between the analyst and the analysand as they make for connection or disconnection, fluency or awkwardness between them.
Taylor offers an account of the treatment of a very damaged patient who lived as a derilect and whom he only saw every other week for some years. Initially and for the first 3 years the patient the patient sat on a chair far from the analyst, was unable to keep eye contact and the interactions were stilted. Taylor was responsive to any signs of attention, noticing and linking. Eventually eye contact was sustained and the patient began to notice objects in the office. Taylor supported these signs by responding immediately to their appearance. At the beginning of the sessions he found himself attending closely but then his attention drifted off. At times the lack of reciprocity in the interchange made Taylor feel “Why bother” and tempted him with giving up trying to keep the contact alive. He writes that at times he felt intellectually ‘not up to it”. The compound feelings of connection and loss of connection evoked had an effect which the analyst compared to an emotional roller coaster. O’ Shaughnessy , E. (1999) has written about the earliest ruptures in the relationship between self and object. It can be very difficult for a mother to know how to interest an infant who seems not to have develop the approach responses. In a similar way it must be very difficult for the infant when the mother doesn’t have the maternal equivalents of the sucking motion.
Linking is a particular kind of emotionally dynamic relationship between objects in which they are ‘affected by each other”. In the interactions between people we talk about a kind of reciprocity of the interchange. After some years Taylor once realized that the patient was noticing a painting in the consulting room. It eventually became clear that even with such small signs of relatedness the patient was quite aware of impending vacations and breaks in the treatment.
Precursors of passion such as noticing, attending, linking begin to appear in the later stages of an analysis and especially during termination. Patients begin to notice paintings and objects in the consulting room they had been oblivious off for sometimes a very long time. These movements of consciousness as Taylor calls them are indications of mental health and an improved capacity to relate to objects and to objects in the external world .
6. Fostering passion
Is it possible to engage with passion in an activity without a secure base to come back to? Studies on attachment show that the toddler will engage in exploratory activities and in play when the mother or the caretaker is close by and that the toddler will interrupt his play to go back to mother for some kind of emotional re-fueling. Others than caretakers may fulfill that role in the adult. The notion that there is somebody there in the background may allow an artist, for example, to engage in hours of art making. A colleague was telling me of a very productive 6 weeks of writing in an isolated place this summer. He was certain that if he didn’t have his wife across the country and that he would be joining her, he would have never been able to immerse himself in his work the way he did. Last Sunday I felt reluctant to work on this paper the whole afternoon without a prospect of seeing anyone the whole day. I made plans to have dinner with a friend for that evening and with that idea I could go to the computer and work steadily for 2 or 3 hours. I knew I would be getting my emotional re-fueling from her later on. And I remember the pleasure of many hours in my studio or at the computer when I knew that my husband was nearby reading, writing or watching TV. This is reminiscent of Winnicot’s statement regarding the capacity to be alone in the presence of another. We may want to see the capacity to be alone as a sign of maturity ignoring that perhaps no matter how old and mature we have become we still need the connection to a significant other.
I thought of working on a paper on passion because in the last 3 years I have noticed that my passion has diminished and wanted to somehow understand that. Of course I blame the 3 and a half years of mourning my husband and I thought that I would recover my passion some day when the mourning could be over. But I have come to think that I will still need the presence of another. I spoke for example with a gallery owner about my recent work which she didn’t particularly like. She thought my best work was my monoprints and suggested that I try to do that kind of work on canvas. Inspired by our meeting I went to the art store and purchased 2 stretched canvases to start experimenting. The following day, a lonely Sunday, I forced myself to my studio. With the help of one of Shostakovich pieces, a piano quintet that a dear friend gave me, I was able to work steadily for 3 hours. I believe I found my re-fueling in the love of my composer friend who gave me the Shostakovich CD and the music itself. We seem to find different ways to bolster our passion by having a background object to support us. My art teacher worked with the radio on and it had to be a station where there were interviews and talking. If the radio was not working he could not paint. A writer I know does his best work at Starbucks where the people around him become the background object. I have written my best papers during flights. I experience great comfort in being surrounded by the other passengers and in being catered to.
From a developmental point of view these strategies to find emotional refueling may be indicative of an immature ego where the internalization of a good parental couple has not taken hold in the internal world. This goes along with the notion that the capacity to be alone and to work alone are signs of mental health, a notion that tallies with the American culture where independence and self-reliance are highly valued. One could argue that the more internalized the parental couple the more the person is able to supply the background object needed for re-fueling. Fairbairn ( ) wrote about a mature dependency rather than independency. For him the idea of independence is fostered by a schizoid fantasy of not needing anyone. Along the same lines Sidney Blatt ( )has written about the necessity for a healthy integration between autonomy and self-definition and relatedness. Likewise, the feminists at The Stone Center have emphasized the necessity for balance between independence and reliance on others.
7. Neruda
I hope that by now we have come to an understanding about how difficult it is for the analyst to keep the patient’s passion alive and how much that demands of the analyst. It brings to mind a poem by poet Pablo Neruda entitled Who Dies, that applies well to passion. It concludes by saying: Let’s avoid the death in soft installments, remembering always that being alive requires an effort much greater than simply breathing.
Desy Safán-Gerard, Ph.D.
The purpose of this workshop is to examine passion in light of current developments in analytic thinking. I have decided to consider the following features of passion which I hope will cover some of its different aspects.
1. History of the concept and its role in psychoanalysis.
2. Precursors of passion such as attending, noticing and linking.
3. Development of interest as a more elaborate precursor of
passion.
4. The absorption dimension.
5. Dealing with passionless patients: autism, narcissism. The counter-transference in dealing with these patients.
6. Fostering passion in patients, in oneself.
7. Neruda’s poem
1. History
From a Freudian and Lacanian point of view André Green examines passions in chapter 9 of his book On Private Madness (1986) entitled, Passions and their Vicissitudes. In a previous book, Le discours vivant. La conception psychoanalytique de l’affect (1973) he considered affect as a representative and a signifier of the flesh; in this book he argues that affect is the representative of passion. Green’s work calls for a re-interpretation of Lacan’s work.
Early on in the history of psychiatry madness was exiled from our vocabulary. One was not mad, but suffered from nerves. Madness was also banished from professional jargon. Madness disappeared from the classification of disorders as a shameful reference, concerned as psychiatry was with having a scientific bearing. Madness and possession were not scientific notions. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance madness was embellished with an aura that made a mystery of it, in the religious sense of the term. Something of the order of the divine or the demoniac showed through it. It was in league with passion. For the mystics there could be no happy passion except in the acceptance of the Way of the Cross. Psychiatrists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced an awkward situation with the mystics. They wanted to distinguish divine from malignant manifestations.
The link between madness and passion has been endorsed by literature. Shakespeare offers many references to madness and its link with passion. The ideal of the Renaissance recognizes this conjunction which simultaneously inspires fascination, respect and fear. Green considers madness and passion tributaries of the same river.
The triumph of reason resulted not only in the repression of madness but in that of passion as well. This was still allowed within limits in the theater. Rationalism chased passion from philosophy. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the concept of Nature had already begun its task of undermining God and religious passion. Psychiatry was born of this mutation. The eye wishes to be objective, that is to say, without passion.
Today there is little discussion of passion in psychiatry and practically none in psychoanalysis. If psychoanalytic thought did not deem necessary to attach particular interest to the psychoses the reason was probably because for psychoanalysis it is implicit that all delusions are the fruit of repressed passion.
Freud was blind to madness on two scores. First, his work was born of neurosis (principally hysteria) looking at psychosis from this angle only. Freud maintained that the narcissistic neurosis (which are the psychoses of traditional psychiatry) were unanalyzable. He was overlooking the psychotic as a person. The case of Schreber’s Memoirs represents the analysis of a written work and not that of a patient undergoing analysis. Freud approached neurosis in such a way as to purge it simultaneously of the passion and the madness that it continued nevertheless to transmit. Psychoanalytic theory has itself carried the mark of this repression.
Analysts find comfort with the feeling of a correlation between theory and practice. When this doesn’t happen and analysts are confused in the middle of a session they infer the existence of a psychotic core or a latent psychotic structure. Freud favored the field of neurosis and based on it the whole construction of psychoanalytic metapsychology. Freud neurotified hysteria. By interesting himself exclusively with the theatrical fantasying in hysteria, Freud abandoned at the same time the pole of passion – the hysterical madness that left its trace in the ‘attack’. Green says, “In fact, these hysterics were no more neurotic than psychotic. They were ‘mad’”(Green p.220). Although a hysterical character no longer has attacks, he continues to make scenes, sometimes in the consulting room, but more often in the private space of the bedroom. What remains of this in the session? A story that purges the event of its momentary madness.
The audatiousness of tackling a field dominated by the stigma of morality forced Freud to adopt a cool, lucid and objective attitude and to consider the subjects under his scrutiny with the eye of the entomologist. When we compare these descriptions with what we learn in the analysis of a pervert, we recognize the mechanisms described, but something is missing from the description, the passionate frenzy linked to an instinctual upsurge which pushes him to acts which can compromise his entire life. One is struck by the sudden encroachment of what seems to be a derangement of the senses, or of sense. For Freud the state of being in love or of amorous passion represents a short madness, a view that has been held by many analysts after him. All the vicissitudes of eros are tainted with a potential madness which is at the core of what they manifest.
Rather than characterize madness as a disorder of reason one should on the contrary stress the affective, passionate element which modifies the subject’s relation to reality. Philosophy failed in its quest for wisdom and truth about passion because it could not recognize the roots at the origin of this madness. Freud fully recognized, first in sexuality and then in the Eros of the final theory of the instincts, the fundamental role played by them in structuring the normal and the pathological human psyche. But he minimized their intrinsically mad essence, which subsists in the normal individual as in the neurotic and the pervert. There comes a time when the feeling arises in the analyst’s counter-transference, that he is at grips with mad mental functioning; it is a passing moment but, for Green, it is crucial. If one evokes the most evolved outcome of the instincts, that is to say
sublimation, this is far from bringing us wisdom and serenity: the lives of artists show them to be prey to the same madness, not only in their private lives but in their relation to their work. Scientists are no better off: the history of science abounds with examples where the official body of knowledge has been purged of all the aberrations that bind scientists to their science. Alongside sublimated accomplishment of instinctual developments there remains a pole of blind passion which scientific virtue passes over in silence.
Passion and madness were banished from neurosis at the same time and this is borne out in Freud’s theoretical writings and in his case studies. In Freud’s case histories of neurosis, psychosis, borderline cases, amorous passion reappears within the transference. However, Freud was more at ease with the analysis of infantile sexuality, which belonged to a repressed past, and with the daydreams connected to it, than with the reality of love in the psychoanalytic situation. Dora really is ‘mad’; she is capable of anything because her feelings of love push her not only to transfer them but to act them out in acts of vengeance. For Green, to master the transference is to safeguard against the storms of passion and their consequent avalanches. To approach unconscious meaning by means of dreams, like Freud did, is to introduce a mediating distance because this road is well guarded against dangerous false connections. Freud’s counter-transference drove him to give a watered-down version of passion.
Psychoanalysis then deserves to be called the analysis of passions because it also situates them at the intersection of mind and body. According to Green, the hysteric converts somatically, the obsessional into thought and between the two the phobic is anxious. Libido is everywhere, but above all it is ‘between’. The Wolf Man is between madness and psychosis. The only case in the five analysis where Freud’s transference was not unduly taxed is in the ‘Rat Man’.
Between the ‘grande’ hysterie’ of the Studies (1896) and the petit hysterie of Dora, passion and madness had been expurgated. Most authors agree on ‘localizing’ passion where body and soul unite. Freud did not but could not escape this tradition. Passion is opposed to action as suffering is the opposite of acting. The ego submits to the instincts as the psychical submits to the corporal. The subject suffers his passion. He is no longer the agent but the patient. Passion dominates him and subverts his reason – his entire mind in fact. It alienates him from his objects. It commands his actions. He no longer acts but is acted upon.
Arguments raged in France over the respective functions of representations and affects in Freud’s work. The debate is not over.
Lacanians exclude affect altogether showering sarcasm on all who refer to it and they take representation to the bare essentials, to the extreme concept of the matheme. The unconscious is no longer structured like a verbal language but like a mathematical language. In his Metapsychology Freud not only gave precedence to representations over affects but in certain places he uses instinctual representative synonymously with its ideational representative. But he claims that “the system Ucs contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true object cathexes” (Freud 1915 e p 201). But he asks, “Objects of what?” The answer to Freud is instincts and Green adds, passion. Freud always linked quantity to affect but the importance of the affective factor went unrecognized for too long. What is the strength of the instincts or the nature of their fixation? Nothing less than the intensity of passion and its attachment to its object. Here we enter into the world of a baby and his mother. The love object, the object of the baby’s passion is unique and irreplaceable.
Both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts know that passionate structures develop into delusional transferences. Paranoia, psychosis passionale is the analyst’s bete noir. Green distinguishes between madness and psychosis. Madness is present in all transference. When it is not experienced with the transference, it shows up clearly outside the analysis, in the analysand who acts out. Transference psychosis is different. Psychotic transference is characterized by its parasitic nature and its sole objective is to destroy the analytic setting, whether emanating from the analysand’s communication or the analyst’s interpretation.
Green asks if the persisting effects of ill-being which justify all requests for re-analysis, do not arise from the exclusion of the madness and from the relation of this hidden madness to the psychotic part of the personality. It seems essential to re-establish madness in the place where it has to be recognized, for all time: at the heart of human desire.
Like the Id the Ego is blind. The Ego originates in the id and thus bears the stigmata of passion like a label of origin. Ego: made in id. Besides this it is blinded by a no less passional agency: the superego (born from a split in the ego and it also takes root in the id). These 3 concepts only collaborate to optimum effect when they are applied to the non-human world. At the opposite extreme, we find the political passion, be it mad or psychotic. It is by recognizing it that one is better equipped not to reduce it but to transform it through analysis, to see to it that Eros wins over the destructive instincts. This requires that the analyst no longer shuts the door to this madness and that he consents to receive it and to share it by analyzing it. To do this one must recognize the true dimension of affect. For Green, “to take the full force of transference passion is doubtless exhausting but it is the price to be paid by the analyst if the analysis is to succeed. Needless to say, the counter-transference comes to the fore here” (p 241).
Green proposes to rehabilitate the old term of madness in order not to forget the unfurling of passion which is the language of the instincts. The restrictions of the analytic setting make us lose sight of the way the enactment of instinct functions as well as the impact of passion which accompanies its aberrations. The opposition between madness and psychosis fits better with the final theory of the instincts. The true antagonist of the sexual instincts is represented by the destructive instincts and one has to allow more and more of this in psychosis. One has to think of splitting and disavowal which one finds in psychosis but which have a far more general influence.
“Madness, which is a component of the human being, is linked to the vicissitudes of primordial Eros, which are in constant conflict with the destructive instincts. When Eros prevails, it is because the passions which inhabit it become bound , and psychosis is averted. But when the destructive instincts triumph over Eros, the unbinding process is stronger than binding, and psychosis wins through” (p243). For Green psychosis emerges when the subject is forced to mobilize his destructive instincts as a means of putting an end to a fusional relationship with a primordial object. He asserts, “I do believe that psychosis is a conjuration of the object” (p243)
In Le Discours Vivant (1973) Green wrote about affect as a signifier of the flesh. In On Private Madness (1986) he argues that affect is the representative of passion. His later book calls for a re-interpretation of Lacan’s work.
3. Interests
Neither traditional psychoanalytic theory nor psychoanalytic ego psychology account for the development and significance of having interests. Morris Eagle draws from a variety of different sources, eg. physiological, experimental, anecdotal and sociological in explaining an aspect of personality of particular importance to psychoanalytic theory. He attempts to understand those behaviors pertaining to the development of an interest in objects and the psychological significance and functions of such interests. Eagle’s claims are that interests are best understood as object relational phenomena and that they play a central role in maintaining personality intactness and integrity, particularly in extreme circumstances. He draws on evidence from autobiographical accounts, animal investigations, epidemiological studies, clinical impressions and studies of infant behavior.
As it is ordinarily used “interest” conveys the qualities of cognitive and affective involvement with an object, of modulated pleasure, and of the capacity of the object in which one is interested to hold one’s attention. Individuals can have a wide versus a narrow range of interests, deep and intense versus shallow and superficial interests.
The concept in psychoanalytic theory most germane to an understanding of the development of interests is sublimation. Sublimation results from “the instinct directing itself toward an aim other than and remote from that of sexual satisfaction” (Freud, 1914/1957, p 94). Interests are the product of the diversion of sexual aims to “higher” pursuits. The capacity to develop cultural interests depends on one’s ability to sublimate or “neutralize” sexual energy.
However, a formulation of interests in terms of the concept of sublimation does not adequately take account their development and psychological function. Eagle argues that interests are most meaningfully understood as object relations that involve cognitive and affective links to objects in the world and serve some of the same psychological functions served by more traditionally viewed object relations. Observations regarding the importance of “having something to live for” point to recent epidemiological studies supporting the informal observation that the survivor in a long relationship in which one of the partners has recently died is more susceptible of death and to illness than others of his or her age group. The “something to live for” sustaining role can also, however be played by other objects as well as by abiding interests and values. There are many autobiographical accounts of people under the dire conditions of imprisonment and concentration camps that show the role of interests and values in increasing the likelihood of survival and in maintaining psychological integrity.
Lack of interest is a negative prognostic indicator in an analysis. On the other hand, a creative talent or gift, and the intense interest that can accompany it, often can serve to sustain people with considerable pathology. Without this center of creative interests, such people would decompensate. Whether or not, as an adult, one has acquired abiding interests is not a casual or peripheral aspect of an individual’s behavior, but a central feature of personality.
There is enough evidence to indicate that an interest in objects as well as the development of affectional bonds is not simply a derivative or outgrowth of libidinal energies and aims or a consequence of gratification of other needs, but is a critical independent aspect of development that expresses inborn propensities to establish cognitive and affective links to object in the world. The acquisition of interests is intimately bound up with and is, indeed, an expression of the separation-individuation process. An important later aspect of the processes of differentiation and individuation is the child’s participation in what Mahler (1968) aptly calls the “hatching” process, a process in which the child directs interest and attention to the outside world. Separation-individuation not only involves a move away from mother, but toward a new social context of peers and juveniles. The role of peers in development has been relatively underemphazised. Infant monkeys separated from each other show the same depression-regression pattern as infants separated from mother (Harlow, 1974). While secure attachment is associated with curiosity, play, and the capacity to explore and become interested in the world, insecure attachment interferes with these activities and capacities. Both mature object relations and autonomous interests require an individuated self relating to and establishing cognitive, affective and value ties to independent objects in the world.
Winnicot has related “transitional phenomena” to the establishment of cultural interests. The transitional object is transitional in the movement from concrete representation to the achievement of a true symbol. Giving external objects the capacity to soothe and comfort permits a freer and safer exploration of and interest in the external world. In the course of development the transitional objects of childhood are given up and “there is a gradual extension of range of interest” (p.232). A process that began with external transitional objects becomes internalized as cultural interests and values. Cultural phenomena reflect both inner and outer reality. Because they are internalized, they are deeply personal and can be carried around.
Difficulties in experiencing deep interests play a prominent part in the symptomatology reported by patients today. Patients report experiencing meaninglessness and emptiness, including lack of meaningful interests, ideals and values, rather than for example simply circumscribed depression or anxiety. Analysts are preoccupied with narcissistic personality disorders while political scientists, literary critics, historians and writers are writing about the “new narcissism” as a widespread cultural phenomenon. A critical feature is the lack of interest in the object per se. Interest is dictated mainly by the aims of self-enhancement and self-aggrandizement.
An interest in objects is a critical feature of the development of object relations, based on the inborn propensity to establish cognitive and affective links to objects in the world. Current evidence from a wide range of research areas all argue against the proposition that successful interests necessarily represent a sublimation and channeling of presumably more basic instinctual drives. Individuals are capable of interest in activities and objects for their own sake, that is, of being intrinsically motivated. Although the potential for intrinsic motivation is inborn, the development of this capacity is linked to one’s developmental history. The quality of adult interests reflects important aspects of the fate of the inborn propensity to establish links to objects.
4 . Absorption dimension
One of the manifestations of passion is the capacity to absorb oneself in something outside the self. Absorption as a relatively new dimension of personality is derived from personality research by Tellegen (1992) and Block (2002). The psychological disposition to enter into states of absorption appears to coexist with a meaningful and implicative pattern of personality shared by both sexes. It is characterized by openness to aesthetic experiences, breath of interests and humor suggests that absorption is related, in both sexes, to a willingness to destructure conventional and everyday pragmatic modes of cognitive and perceptual processing. Absorption has been linked with imagery ability, synesthesia, fantasy proneness, daydreaming, experiential involvement and alterations in attention. It has been alternatively labeled openness to experience. In females the capacity for absorption is correlated with descriptions by observers that conclude that such women
66 enjoy aesthetic impressions and are aesthetically reactive,
57 are interesting, arresting persons
39 think and associates ideas in unusual ways
46 engages in personal fantasy and daydreams
3 have a wide range of interests
The observers conclude that in females a capacity for absorption is negatively correlated with the following features:
7 favors conservative values in a variety of areas
33 calm, relaxed in manner
97 is unemotional, emotionally bland
63 judges self and others in conventional terms
12 tends to be self-defensive
For young men the observers conclude that the capacity for absorption is positively correlated with the following features:
5 behaves in a giving way with others.; generous
35 has warmth, capacity for close relationships; compassionate
66 enjoys aesthetic impression; aesthetically reactive
28 tends to arouse liking and acceptance
21 arouses nurturant feelings in others.
The observers conclude that a capacity for absorption is negatively correlated with the following:
36 is subtly negativistic; undermines and obstructs
12 tends to be self-defensive
37 is guileful and deceitful; manipulative
23 extrapunitive; tends to transfer or project blame
5. Passionless patients and counter-transference
According to Anne Alvarez who has written extensively on the treatment of autism there are three aspects of the mother equipment which have a particular bearing on her baby’s developing sense of identity, on his emotional security and on his cognitive capacities. These 3 aspects are her ability to give her baby her full attention and to respond appropriately to his initiatives; her ability to keep him in mind while attending to something else; and her ability to wait quietly and with interest while his own interest is deployed elsewhere. If these 3 conditions are met the baby experiences a sense of abundance: a sense of people who are rich in loving relationships and of a world of thought that is rich in exciting possibilities which his parents encourage him to discover. Maria Rhodes gives an account of Anthony, an autistic boy whose sense of abundance was tragically negated in terms of the capacity for thought as well as personal relationships.
It is important to note that these patients can generate powerful counter- transference feelings in their analysts. After Mrs. Rhodes made an attempt to join the boy in a song and was ignored by him she writes, “Anthony completely ignored me in a way that crushed hope” (p130)…”I felt I might as well not have bothered” (p 131). She had to find solace in little signs of contact: “This had been a moment of shared attention, but it had been a moment in which the two of us had paid attention to the same thing” (p131). Alvarez (1980) has written about the need for the therapist to “ reclaim” a child with autism. This was certainly the case with Rhodes’s young patient. She says, “perhaps with him it was less a matter of going in search for someone who needed to be found, and more a matter of holding onto my belief in the memory of someone who had given indications, however fleeting, of being present” (p131).
Communication with Anthony first got going in connection with an object ‘out there’, not directly between she and him. It was as though the threesome of joint attention had to be securely established before the child could dare to attempt a direct “you and me” relationship with his therapist. This corresponds to the observation of adult patients. Lombardi (2006) has written about analysands who are driven to analysis primarily by an inability to feel alive. His patient Antonio only felt alive when he gambled.
From the start of the analysis he tended to keep silent and not to respond to any attempt to stimulate his participation. When asked directly he claimed he felt nothing and thought nothing. However, Lombardi observed Antonio’s extraordinary ability to convey violent hatred which his analyst found it very hard to contain. He noticed that he tended to absent himself from emotional feeling which probably was Antonio’s solution for managing his hatred, absenting himself mentally. But his analysis didn’t give up: “The fact that I did not give in to the blandishments of absence and silence was, I believe, an important element in catalyzing development’(p2). The link between this treatment and Rhodes treatment of Anthony (same name) rest in the way they came to deal with the transference. When Lombardi’s comments were aimed at the transference, they were met with rigidity or they were totally rejected. His patient’s reaction seemed more constructive when the analyst spoke of hatred in general and of his propensity to ignore it. In other words, Lombardi was spurring Antonio to observe his way of relating to hatred rather than to emphasize his hatred of him. Antonio seemed to use silence as a demolition of being. His analyst felt that it didn’t matter what they spoke about “the essential thing was keeping the dialogue going in order to develop a relationship and to evolve a way of thinking based on reality and common sense” (p 3). Antonio was by no means indifferent to his analyst’s contribution as he persisted in pretending. His tendency toward silence and paralysis returned in massive form with the approach of the first long interruption of analysis.
Insisting that the patient continues to express what is happening to him in the here and now of the experience meant for the Lombardi’s “facing my own violent participation in his hatred, which I felt quite tangibly in the form of strong nausea. While Antonio absented himself mentally his violent feelings were projected onto his analyst. Lombardi says, “ I neither considered nor interpreted his hatred as directed principally at me, but instead understood it as a signal of his approach to sharing an area which until that moment had been dissociated and acted out” (p3). He believes that the experience of hatred in the session represented some progress towards the world of emotions and not an attack upon the analytic relationship. Encouraging him to be present and to register the experience of temporal limits represented by the approach of a separation was particularly useful. This was confirmed by the patient’s acceptance of a third weekly session.
Let us go back to the counter transference with these patients. David Taylor has studied a pattern encountered in a group of patients with problems in linking, noticing and attending which he considers as functions of consciousness and I see as precursors of passion. They are associated with a profoundly passive position at some deep or early level of the personality. These patients are not able to be independent initiators of action. Their lack of response seems to have arisen in infancy or childhood because of some emotional failing in the primary object. The patient has had to disengage an infantile part of the personality and resort to other routes to deal with potentially intolerable or impossible states of mind. In the treatment of more obviously damaged and fragmented patients the analyst may need a lively and alert predictive sense to anticipate the likely future significance of a preparatory cue. For Bion, the analyst needs to be an advance scout of attention whose function is to recognize what is anticipatory. The development of the potential growth depends on the analyst’s sensitivity and alertness to their presence in the patients. In other words, the analyst needs to be particularly alert to the smallest signs of attention, linking and noticing in the patient. Taylor feels the analyst needs to champion and support these developments. In fact, the analyst needs to be attentive to what is incipient rather than making an item of what is already obvious. In Attention and Interpretation ( ) Bion adopted the term pre-monition in describing forewarnings of emotions about to develop. The effects of these constant dynamic movements of consciousness can be observed in the link between the analyst and the analysand as they make for connection or disconnection, fluency or awkwardness between them.
Taylor offers an account of the treatment of a very damaged patient who lived as a derilect and whom he only saw every other week for some years. Initially and for the first 3 years the patient the patient sat on a chair far from the analyst, was unable to keep eye contact and the interactions were stilted. Taylor was responsive to any signs of attention, noticing and linking. Eventually eye contact was sustained and the patient began to notice objects in the office. Taylor supported these signs by responding immediately to their appearance. At the beginning of the sessions he found himself attending closely but then his attention drifted off. At times the lack of reciprocity in the interchange made Taylor feel “Why bother” and tempted him with giving up trying to keep the contact alive. He writes that at times he felt intellectually ‘not up to it”. The compound feelings of connection and loss of connection evoked had an effect which the analyst compared to an emotional roller coaster. O’ Shaughnessy , E. (1999) has written about the earliest ruptures in the relationship between self and object. It can be very difficult for a mother to know how to interest an infant who seems not to have develop the approach responses. In a similar way it must be very difficult for the infant when the mother doesn’t have the maternal equivalents of the sucking motion.
Linking is a particular kind of emotionally dynamic relationship between objects in which they are ‘affected by each other”. In the interactions between people we talk about a kind of reciprocity of the interchange. After some years Taylor once realized that the patient was noticing a painting in the consulting room. It eventually became clear that even with such small signs of relatedness the patient was quite aware of impending vacations and breaks in the treatment.
Precursors of passion such as noticing, attending, linking begin to appear in the later stages of an analysis and especially during termination. Patients begin to notice paintings and objects in the consulting room they had been oblivious off for sometimes a very long time. These movements of consciousness as Taylor calls them are indications of mental health and an improved capacity to relate to objects and to objects in the external world .
6. Fostering passion
Is it possible to engage with passion in an activity without a secure base to come back to? Studies on attachment show that the toddler will engage in exploratory activities and in play when the mother or the caretaker is close by and that the toddler will interrupt his play to go back to mother for some kind of emotional re-fueling. Others than caretakers may fulfill that role in the adult. The notion that there is somebody there in the background may allow an artist, for example, to engage in hours of art making. A colleague was telling me of a very productive 6 weeks of writing in an isolated place this summer. He was certain that if he didn’t have his wife across the country and that he would be joining her, he would have never been able to immerse himself in his work the way he did. Last Sunday I felt reluctant to work on this paper the whole afternoon without a prospect of seeing anyone the whole day. I made plans to have dinner with a friend for that evening and with that idea I could go to the computer and work steadily for 2 or 3 hours. I knew I would be getting my emotional re-fueling from her later on. And I remember the pleasure of many hours in my studio or at the computer when I knew that my husband was nearby reading, writing or watching TV. This is reminiscent of Winnicot’s statement regarding the capacity to be alone in the presence of another. We may want to see the capacity to be alone as a sign of maturity ignoring that perhaps no matter how old and mature we have become we still need the connection to a significant other.
I thought of working on a paper on passion because in the last 3 years I have noticed that my passion has diminished and wanted to somehow understand that. Of course I blame the 3 and a half years of mourning my husband and I thought that I would recover my passion some day when the mourning could be over. But I have come to think that I will still need the presence of another. I spoke for example with a gallery owner about my recent work which she didn’t particularly like. She thought my best work was my monoprints and suggested that I try to do that kind of work on canvas. Inspired by our meeting I went to the art store and purchased 2 stretched canvases to start experimenting. The following day, a lonely Sunday, I forced myself to my studio. With the help of one of Shostakovich pieces, a piano quintet that a dear friend gave me, I was able to work steadily for 3 hours. I believe I found my re-fueling in the love of my composer friend who gave me the Shostakovich CD and the music itself. We seem to find different ways to bolster our passion by having a background object to support us. My art teacher worked with the radio on and it had to be a station where there were interviews and talking. If the radio was not working he could not paint. A writer I know does his best work at Starbucks where the people around him become the background object. I have written my best papers during flights. I experience great comfort in being surrounded by the other passengers and in being catered to.
From a developmental point of view these strategies to find emotional refueling may be indicative of an immature ego where the internalization of a good parental couple has not taken hold in the internal world. This goes along with the notion that the capacity to be alone and to work alone are signs of mental health, a notion that tallies with the American culture where independence and self-reliance are highly valued. One could argue that the more internalized the parental couple the more the person is able to supply the background object needed for re-fueling. Fairbairn ( ) wrote about a mature dependency rather than independency. For him the idea of independence is fostered by a schizoid fantasy of not needing anyone. Along the same lines Sidney Blatt ( )has written about the necessity for a healthy integration between autonomy and self-definition and relatedness. Likewise, the feminists at The Stone Center have emphasized the necessity for balance between independence and reliance on others.
7. Neruda
I hope that by now we have come to an understanding about how difficult it is for the analyst to keep the patient’s passion alive and how much that demands of the analyst. It brings to mind a poem by poet Pablo Neruda entitled Who Dies, that applies well to passion. It concludes by saying: Let’s avoid the death in soft installments, remembering always that being alive requires an effort much greater than simply breathing.
posted by jorge israel at 8:39 AM
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