talkingcure

Go Play Outside

I have been thinking about the horribly high youth suicide rate in New Zealand and made a connection in my mind with the kindness of the environment here.

In New Zealand, children are commonly encouraged to "go and play outside" in a way that seems quite different to my experience in other parts of the world.

Here, "outside" is seen as a kind, friendly and nurturing place since we are blessed with wide open spaces, beautiful bush and beaches, almost no poisonous creatures, mainly quiet streets, and not many people about. There are of course lots of natural hazards, such as rivers, tidal rips, and precipices, but every 'kiwi kid' learns early on how to avoid falling and drowning!

The problem is that being told to 'go and play outside' often constitutes a subtle form of abandonment or neglect in a country that is by its nature riddled with attachment difficulties. Most people in New Zealand don't have to go very far back to connect to an ancestor who left home and family to travel to a new land.

In being sent to play outside, there is often an unconscious acceptance of 'out of sight, out of mind' - "the kids are alright, they are playing outside", that just is not true! Children need to know they are held in our minds so they can grow a sense of holding themselves as adults.

When the big "go and play outside" comes at the end of adolescence and our children leave home, some New Zealand kids experience this as traumatic, in the sense that all the little 'go and play outsides' they experienced growing up are suddenly unmanageable.

A colleague of mine often reminds me that suicide is always a case of mistaken identity; but it is not always easy to identify who they really wanted to kill. Perhaps as parents in New Zealand we need to think twice before sending our kids to play outside.

Doubt

I was reflecting after the group I conduct on Wednesday evenings how doubt is such an essential part of the human condition.

We can never really be sure of anything in this life, except we will die one day, however we put enormous amounts of time, money and energy into trying to convince ourselves otherwise.

When I hear someone saying "I was just absolutely sure it was the right thing to do" I find myself wondering what the doubt is that they are too scared to let themselves know about, and that they are having to defend themselves against. What makes them so anxious they have to know?

I believe the distortion of the fundamentalist religions is to polarise doubt and faith. I think of faith as allowing space for our doubts. I know I need to have faith to function in the world I live in: Faith in the technologies I participate in every day; faith in the loyalty of my friends and family; faith that I will be understood and respected. Yet I know these carry no guarantees: My hard drive crashes and I lose all my family photographs; my wife leaves me for someone else; or my neighbour drives recklessly and kills my dog as I walk him down my road.

When I am a baby, too much doubt can destroy me because it does not allow for faith to develop. Being so helpless is impossible without Winnicott's 'good-enough mother' modulating and containing my experience of doubt in ways that allow me to grow faith, and to extend this faith into the world through transitional experience. Then as an adult every time I engage with culture I re-enter this transitional space in ways that allow the freedom to play with doubt and faith, and renew my relationship with the space between them.

John Bowlby's famous drawing of the course of a toddler wandering away from its mother as she sits on a park bench, and returning to find her still there before wandering off again - tracing out the pattern of a flower - is a pattern of faith and doubt. The toddler has enough faith that mum will stay put to wander off, and doubt enough to return to check that she really has. Some of us repeat this pattern in our adult lives, forever trying to heal an injured relationship between doubt and faith.

Perhaps the doubt that cripples is the doubt that insists on the polarities of omnipotence and helplessness and denies our essential subjectivity.

Science sometimes loses track of itself in this dance of doubt and faith, allowing itself to be seduced into aspirations of certainty, as Heidegger writes in his little essay "The Age of the World View".

As soon as I lose sight of doubt in my work with patients I find myself in trouble. Paraphrasing something Bion is reported as having once said: "in every therapy there will be two rather anxious people in the room".

Three Blind Mice

Barbara Tholfsen on LinkedIn alerted me to this Ella Sharpe Quotation from 1930 about the necessity of reading "three blind mice" etc. if you want to be an analyst:.

"In any reading for analytical qualification I would make compulsory the following books:

Nursery Rhymes, the Alice books, Hunting of the Snark, Grimm, Andersen, the Brer Rabbit books, Water Babies, Struwelpeter, Undine, Rumpelstilzkin, Peter Ibbetson, Greek Myths and Tragedies, Shakespeare's Plays.

Were I an arbiter of training, I should set an examination on those books as a final test by which the would-be analyst should stand or fall. My final examination for qualification would run on these lines:—

1. Quote in full a verse in which 'London Bridge is falling down' occurs.

2. Give briefly the story of three blind mice.

3. If the mice were blind, how came they to run after the farmer's wife so purposely? Account for the cutting off of their tails.

Illustrate what unconscious drama is being staged when a patient thinks of himself as one of the blind mice.

What inference concerning the health of the ego do you draw from the fact that the tails were cut off instead of the mice being killed?

Somewhere in that list of immortal stories we shall all find an unconscious phantasy of our own. To understand even the tale of the three blind mice is to have a conception of what those crystallized terms id, ego and super-ego really mean in terms of the drama of life. Faced by a cross-examination on children's nursery rhymes in terms of psycho-analytical theory, with an application to the struggles going on in ourselves or in our patients, would any of us do more than scramble through it? To pass it creditably would mean that one had a good chance of being a creditable technician."

Ella Freeman Sharpe "The Technique of Psychoanalysis " 1930

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?viewMemberFeed=&gid=55622&memberID=46776851

No Such Thing As A Group

‘Just as Winnicott says,
“There’s no such thing as a baby”,
There is no such thing as a group’.

In this post I will discuss the proposition that 'Just as Winnicott says, "There's no such thing as a baby", there is no such thing as a group', in relation to the work of Bion.

The proposition implies a connection between Winnicott's remark and there being "no such thing as a group", so I will begin by exploring what Winnicott had in mind, in order to provide a context for thinking about Bion's observations in this regard.

From within this context I will then outline some aspects of Bion's thinking about groups, and develop and explore possible links with Winnicott's thinking about infants in ways that might suggest there are no such things.

No Such Thing As An Infant

Wiinnicott’s famous remark “there is no such thing as an infant” took place at a Scientific Meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, circa 1940. Winnicott refers to this remark in a footnote to his 1960 paper “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship”, and links it in turn to a footnote of Freud’s in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (Freud, 1911, p.220). In his footnote Freud suggests, when one includes the care an infant receives from its mother, the psychical system of mother-and-infant can be considered as subject only to the pleasure-principle and free of any reality-principle. Winnicott attached great importance to this idea indicating Freud was suggesting there is a stage at which infant and mother form a unit. Although Freud does not elaborate, Wiinnicott proposes at the beginnings of life the very meaning of ‘dependence’ comes into question as “the infant and the maternal care belong to each other and cannot be disentangled.” (Winnicott, 1960, p.40).

Winnicott develops the idea that mother and infant begin by being entangled in ways that change our ordinary understanding of what it means to depend on someone. In this earliest period of life, before speech has begun to develop, an infant¹ depends on maternal empathy rather than “on understanding what is or could be verbally expressed” (Ibid, p.40). The baby at this stage has no symbols and no ability to have one thing stand for another; it relies on a mother to make sense of the world, to ‘mentalize’ the raw data of internal and external experience and to transform it into symbols or signal affects (Mitrani, 1995, p.70).

Winnicott describes how in the "ordinary way" a mother provides a "holding environment" within which the infant can build up a “continuity of being” (Winnicott, 1960, p.47) by identifying with her baby and shifting some of her sense of self onto it. This early primitive relationship between mother and baby, which is not really a relationship between two things in the ordinary manner of things, or even something that happens between two things, but is rather a kind of agglomeration of bits attempting to obtain some sense of themselves:

On the one hand we have ‘baby’, a word we use to describe a physical entity observed from the outside as a something that is attended to. From the outside this something has projected onto it a fantasy of a psychological entity, which is really a bundle of raw sensory perceptions, sensations, unexperienced experiences, or "beta-elements" (Bion, 1962b, p.7). We can say as a physical entity the baby will not survive without a caregiver, but we can also say as a psychological entity the baby does not exist without a caregiver, in the ordinary course of things, a mother.

On the other hand we have ‘mother’, a word we use to describe a physical entity observed from the outside as a something that attends to the physical needs of something we call a baby. We tend to assume this mother has a psychological reality: However this cannot be taken for granted and only comes into being when she is able to allow herself, and is allowed, to participate in the undifferentiated bundle of psychological stuff that is mother-and-baby by entering a state of receptivity, or what Bion called "maternal reverie" (Bion, 1962a, p.309) where the mother contributes "alpha-function" (Bion, 1962b, p.2) to the mass of "beta-elements" (Ibid, p.7) that is mother-and-baby.

From the point of view of mother-and-baby, ‘mothering’ in this primitive psychological sense, cannot be thought of as something brought to the baby. If it is ‘brought to’, in a literal sense, something about the baby’s experience of going-on-being will be lost. The baby needs to believe it is bringing alpha-function as mother. For this to be true it must be able to take itself as mother-and-baby for granted.

This is why Winnicott suggests:

“The newly integrated infant is ... in the first group. Before this stage there is only a primitive pre-group formation, in which unintegrated elements are held together by an environment from which they are not yet differentiated. This environment is the holding mother.” (Winnicott, 1965, p.219, emphasis in original).

Before this integration “the individual is unorganised, a mere collection of sensory-motor phenomena, collected by the holding environment. After integration ... the infant human being has achieved unit status, can say I AM” (Ibid, p.217).

Winnicott uses the word “integration” for this moment in development where a baby becomes a person with an inside and an outside (Ibid, p.217).

No Such Thing As A Group

“... the basis of group psychology is the psychology of the individual, and especially of the individual’s personal integration” (Winnicott, 1965, p.215)

"The apparent difference between group psychology and individual psychology is an illusion produced by the fact that the group brings into prominence phenomena that appear alien to an observer unaccustomed to using the group." (Bion, 1961, p.169)

Focussing now on Bion's observations about groups, I will proceed by referencing three aspects of group psychology he articulated to the discussion above. The three aspects of group experience  are:

1) The work group;
2) Basic assumptions, and;
3) Proto-mental phenomena.

Work group

Bion observed activity in groups where the group seems "capable of establishing contact with reality and recognises the need to evolve, and to work together towards a common aim." (Lopez-Corvo, 2003, p.310) Bion called this a "work group" (Bion, 1961, p.98), but it is not really a group, rather it is a way of describing an aspect of mental states operating within a group. Learning, in these mental states, is by experience: There is a need for truth, and an awareness of the painful consequences of acting without an adequate grasp of reality. (Ibid, p.100)

Work group activity demonstrates a level of maturity such that the group undertakes mental work to achieve a task, containing and speaking about feelings rather than discharging them (Symington, 1996, p.126). I suggest this is linked to a 'capacity to be alone’ which Winnicott proposed was vital to development. (Winnicott, 1958, pp.416-420). The work group may be thought of as a psychological environment where "ego-relatedness" is primary and "id-relationships" within the group strengthen the work of the group rather than disrupt it. (Ibid, p.418). Individuals in work group mentality are able to experience being alone in the presence of others. (Ibid, p.417) Although there is no such thing as a "work group", there will be aspects of this mentality in any group that is orientated towards work.

Basic Assumptions

By altering his focus (Bion, 1961, p.48) Bion observed activity in groups which focussed on the group preserving itself, as if it had "a natural tendency to disintegrate" (Symington, 1996, p.128). The wellbeing of individuals becomes secondary to a basic assumption there is a need to maintain the group, even though there is no effort to make the group worthwhile; "adherence to the group is an end in itself." (Bion, 1961, p.63). Bion called the mental states associated with this activity "basic assumption" mentality, connecting it with "powerful emotional drives" (Ibid, p.146). This mental activity requires no training, experience, or mental development and makes use of "valency", or an individual's readiness to engage in this way. (Ibid, p.116) It is "instantaneous, inevitable, and instinctive" (Ibid, p.153).

Bion observed groups expressing basic assumption mentality through one of three mutually exclusive patterns: Dependency (baD), Pairing (baP), and Fight/Flight (baF). I suggest these patterns may be compared to three focusses a newly integrated infant might find refuge in², on the edge between integration and unintegration: baD - Orienting centre and reference point (breast, phallus etc.);  baP - Order, structure and hierarchy (sexual union, primal scene); baF - Boundary, edge and covering (skin, womb, container).

Like an infant held together by its mother's skin, a group experiences a sense of integration due to the unifying state of mind of the active basic assumption. However that this is “a dangerous achievement” since the “repudiated external world comes back at the new phenomenon and attacks from all quarters and in every conceivable way” (Winnicott, 1965, p.219). Perhaps this explains why a group becomes so preoccupied with its own survival as an end in itself. Although there is no such thing as a "basic assumption group", there will be aspects of this mentality in any group, an orientation towards survival of the group and avoiding learning by experience.

Proto-mental Phenomena

Bion was led to propose proto-mental phenomena through wondering what happens to the inactive basic assumptions. He visualised the the two inactive basic assumptions existing as a matrix of proto-mental states where "physical and psychological or mental are undifferentiated" (Bion, 1961, p.102), a system containing precursors for the emotions which are present in other aspects of the group. (Lopez-Corvo, 2003, p.222) Meltzer suggests "It is not intended to describe a cause and effect series", rather refer to a level "at which physical and psychological events are not differentiated, where the emotional components are fused because incipient as observable psychological phenomena." (Meltzer, 1998, p.279) 

I suggest we may compare the 'proto-mental' aspect of a group to an unintegrated infant, or “primitive pre-group formation”, of mother-and-infant (Winnicott, 1965, p.219), in a state of invisible oneness. Both refer to a state that is not physical or mental, rather the two are undifferentiated, what Bion refers to as beta-elements (Bion, 1962b, p.7) “which may manifest themselves as accident, illness, or vocal utterance.” (Symington, 1996, p.138) Just as there is no such thing as an unintegrated infant without a mother, there is no such thing as a "proto-mental group";  since these aspects only exist in relation to the mental states of 'work' and 'basic assumption' as a pre-symbolic and pre-psychological matrix of possibility.

Bion offers us these three "vertices" (Bion, 1970, p.21) from which to understand groups , and suggests it is useful to find ways that bring the basic assumption aspect (ba) and the work group aspect (W) into contact (Bion, 1961, p.126). I believe any group which is endeavouring to be creative needs to bring the ba-activity and the W-activity into relationship: Emotional states associated with the active basic assumption and mental states associated with the work group can then enter a dialectical relation where “each creates, informs, preserves, and negates the other” in the realm of transitional phenomena and potential space (Winnicott, 1971, p.107).

Employing the thinking of Ogden (1985) to develop this, I suggest in establishing contact between ba-group-activity and W-group-activity the exclusive unities of 'group' and 'individual' are transformed into a three-ness of individual, group, and individual-as-group as three distinct entities. ‘Oneness’ (the invisible group-individual existing as a proto-mental soup) becomes ‘three-ness’, since at the moment of differentiation within the group-individual unit, not only are the group and individuals created as objects; in addition, individuals are created as subjects. Individual as subject is an observer of group and individual as (symbolic) objects; each individual becomes the creator and interpreter of his symbols. (cf. Ogden, 1985, p.133)

There is no such thing as a group without these moments where the group is created as a symbolic object in the mind of participating subjects.

Conclusion

The proposition that "there is no such thing as a group" has been examined in the light of Bion's thinking about groups informed by Winnicott's thinking about early infant experience and later developments by other psychoanalytic thinkers. An attempt is made to develop a vertex from which contact between the mental states of basic-assumption and work-group can be understood as marking a threshold where a group can begin to exist.

Notes

*1* As Winnicott points out the meaning of ‘infant’ is derived from the Latin ‘infans’ meaning ‘not talking’ (Winnicott, 1960, p.40); similarly the lack of speech is inferred in the derivation of ‘baby’ which derives from ‘babble’, an imitation of a baby’s making of noise before it has words.

*2* I have discussed the idea of 'refuge' elsewhere in an unpublished undergraduate thesis "Going For Refuge" submitted in 1987 (Balfour, 1987).

References

Balfour, C. J. A. (1987). Going For Refuge. Bachelor of Architecture. Auckland University.

Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences In Groups and other papers. London: Tavistock Publications Limited.

Bion, W. R. (1962a). The Psycho-Analytic Study of Thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, 306-310.

Bion, W. R. (1962b). Learning From Experience. London: William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd.

Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications Ltd.

Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (Strachey, Trans. XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works).

Lopez-Corvo, R. E. (2003). The Dictionary of the Work of W.R. Bion. London: H. Karnac (Books) Ltd.

Meltzer, D. (1998). The Kleinian Development. London: Karnac Books.

Mitrani, J. L. (1995). Toward An Understanding Of Unmentalized Experience. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 64, 68-112.

Ogden, T. H. (1985). On Potential Space. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 66, 129-141.

Symington, J. & N. (1996). The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion. London: Routledge.

Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The Capacity To Be Alone. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39(5), 416-420.

Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 585-595.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Family and Individual Development. Tavistock Publications Limited.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Hove, E.Sussex: Brunner-Routledge.

Freud, Terrorism and Rhetoric: A preliminary discussion

Introduction

It has been proposed that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and ensuing attacks around the world including Bali, Madrid, Mumbai and London show just how right Freud was about our malaise.  I am interested in discussing this and using it to think about the ways psychoanalysis helps, or fails to help, us understand the dynamics of groups and organisations.

I believe that on close reading this proposition reveals terrorism's project of locating good and evil, binding us into regressive groups. I suggest Freud's analysis of groups, war and civilisation opens a way of understanding this project and the unconscious dynamics that underlie the events of the last ten years.

I will proceed by grounding my critical discussion in a close reading of the text of the proposition, referencing this to Freud and later developments in psychoanalytic thinking. I will endeavour to avoid the rhetoric of terrorism, approaching the text with a stoic attitude and a surgeons's detachment. (Kirsner, 2006)

Discussion

"Terrorist Attacks"

The phrase ‘terrorist attacks’ is problematic: ‘Terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ are slippery ideas. The Collins English Dictionary defines ‘terrorism’ as “systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal” (1986, p.1573): This covers a wide range of human activities including war. In popular culture ““terrorism” is generally associated with acts of political violence, carried out by non-state actors, often against non-military targets.” (Fitch, 2005, p.7). This association to terrorism is shaped by the response of the state, emphasis being placed on the 'wickedness of the perpetrators’ and the 'innocence of the victims’. Both sides employ the media to claim virtue and disown wickedness (Apfel & Simon, 2005). It can be argued that “terrorism” ‘is first and foremost discourse” (Fitch, 2005, p.7)

Terrorism’s discourse encourages us to polarise and identify with others. Freud wrote to Einstein in 1932 "conflicts of interest between human beings are in principle resolved by the use of violence" (Freud, 2005k (1932), p.222) However what sets terrorism apart from this 'ordinary' use of violence is the way it uses the media to demand we identify in a particular relation to it. If we succumb to this demand it creates a special bond between us which is the essential nature of a "mass" (Freud, 2004f (1921)).

The discourse of terrorism is compelling because it offers us relief from human helplessness in much the same manner as the discourse of religion (Freud, 2004h (1927)). The language of terrorism has much in common with the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism and terrorism has been adopted by religious fundamentalists of all persuasions. In exhorting us to “embrace Freud” Charlotte Frick gives us an example of how easy it is to join the terrorists:

In losing our fear and allowing our insights to keep us constructing and re-constructing civilization, we embrace Freud’s sense of Eros. Love loves on from generation to generation, and it is only that force of love and understanding which shall defeat the death mongers who hate so passionately creating evil from their psychological forms of despair. (Frick, 2003, p.6)

Frick passionately invokes Freud, but not in his characteristic spirit of inquiry, more in the manner of religious fervour. This is the rhetoric of them and us - the discourse of terrorism. Freud never suggested the way to civilisation was by ‘embracing Eros”, quite the opposite: Unbridled Eros is troubling to civilisation because it pursues the aim of “making one out of two” to the exclusion of others (Freud, 2002j (1930), p.45), the reality of living in community demands we restrict libido and inhibit its aims. (Ibid, p.46)

"Terrorist” is a redundant qualifier of "attacks" and is intended to position the reader. This positioning may be read as an unconscious ‘slip of the tongue’ (Freud, 1975b (1901)) which locates both reader and writer in the discourse of terrorism.

"Ensuing Attacks Around The World"

"Ensuing attacks around the world" invites the reader to consider the bombings in Bali, Madrid, Mumbai and London ‘ensued upon’ September 11, as though it was causative. This is hard to know about, because it is so overdetermined (Freud, 1975a (1900), p.283). However the attack on the World Trade Centre was totemic in a double sense and allowed people on both sides a sense of being part of their own global ‘mass’. Mass ideology inserted itself in the place of individual 'ego-deals' (‘I’-ideals) (Freud, 2004f (1921), p.69).  Freud remarks on the consequences of this:

... a weakening of intellectual performance, uninhibited affectivity, the inability to exercise moderation and postpone things, the tendency to overstep all bounds in the expression of emotion and ... the kind of regression of mental activity to an earlier level that we are not surprised to find among savages or children. (Ibid, p.71)

"Ensuing" also suggests a commonality which by implication excludes other events. This is a rhetorical device which invites us to adopt an unconscious position. We are invited to identify as ‘other’ in relation to the attackers in a mirror identification: Attackers and victims “must be hard and unloving towards those who do not belong ... (and) ... cruel and intolerant towards non-members.” (Ibid, p.50) The contrary identifications push both sides towards more primitive functioning by creating a substitute for the uncertainties of more ordinary relating (Ibid, p.60)

Like “terrorist”, the use of “ensuing” is redundant, a rhetorical device perversely positioning us as 'other than terrorist'.

"Just How Right Freud Was About Our Malaise"

To know anything about this phrase we need to know what Freud is supposed to be right about: The phrase ‘our malaise’ is confounding. It invites the reader to identify with “a feeling of unease, mild sickness, or depression” (Collins, 1986, p.931), and seems to imply something wrong with us, a communal sickness, something that could be put right. The malaise becomes a ‘thing’ and in doing so situates it outside psychoanalytic discourse which “mainly consists of a method of investigating unconscious psychic processes.” (Amado, 1995, p.351)

I have found three references to “malaise” in Freud’s writing. The first in ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (Standard Edition):

The sense of guilt of those days was very far from being any longer restricted to the Jewish people; it had caught hold of all the Mediterranean peoples as a dull malaise, a premonition of calamity for which no one could suggest a reason. (Freud, 1975n (1939), p.135)

The second reference is from the New Penguin Freud version of ‘Civilization and its Discontents’:

... there are some types of patient who are unaware of their sense of guilt, or who experience it only as a tormenting malaise, a kind of anxiety, when they are prevented from carrying out certain actions (Freud, 2002j (1930), p.72) (emphasis in original).

Lastly, again from Civilization and its Discontents, this time the Standard Edition:

Consequently it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations. (Freud, 1975i (1930), p.135-136)

Freud links ‘malaise’ in all three cases to the discomfort (Unbehagen) resulting from unconscious guilt. Although he is not yet able to understand the mechanism by which something unconscious causes feelings of discomfort, he likens it to anxiety and the way unconscious ‘anxiety’, or more correctly the ‘possibility of anxiety’, is “present in some way behind all the symptoms” of a neurotic (Freud, 2002j (1930), p.72)

If ‘our malaise’, understood in this way, is connected with the attacks of the past ten years, it suggests the attacks may have been an ‘acting out’ of the discomfort resulting from an unconscious sense of guilt, a repetition of earlier traumatic events that produced these feelings, a failure to ‘work through’ (ibid) the difficulties encountered (Freud, 1975d (1914), p.151). This line of thinking takes us further into Freud's work.

Freud, (2005c (1913)) suggested civilised society is founded on the original murder of the ‘primal father’ and his replacement by a symbolic father. This has two consequences: It makes living together possible because of the emergence of “moral precepts and restrictions”; and it imbues us with an underlying sense of guilt and remorse for the murder (Ibid, p.159). He writes: “Thou shalt not kill, makes us certain that we are descended from an endless series of generations of murderers who had the lust to kill, as we perhaps do ourselves” (Freud, 2005m (1933), p.190). Therefore the tendency to aggression is ambivalently at the centre of civilisation, both making it possible for us to live together through the establishment of a symbolic authority, and threatening to destroy society through a desire to return to individual omnipotence (Freud, 2002j (1930), p.58).

By understanding civilisation in this way, Freud maintains the story of Oedipus as central to his view human development for both individuals and civilisation as a whole. Individual growth from infant to adult requires us to give up our omnipotent striving for union with one parent and associated murder of the other. In negotiating this we install an agency of restraint within our psyche, an internal judge or superego (Freud, 1975l (1933)). Similarly civilisation requires we relinquish individual omnipotent striving and accept a symbolic order which restrains us.

According to Freud, underlying this story there are two principles at work: 'Eros', or the life drive, which seeks to bring things together, and 'Thanatos', or the death drive, which seeks to break things down (Freud, 1975e (1920)). In the context of civilisation, 'Eros' binds people together but also threatens to sunder people apart as each individual seeks omnipotent satisfaction for themselves only: This is most obvious in its expression as libido or the sexual instinct. 'Thanatos' sets one person against another and seeks to murder or render others inanimate, but also enables people to live together through the establishment of the symbolic order, guilt, and conscience: This is most obvious in its expression internally as the superego, and externally as a system of law and order.

In a fractal symmetry between parts and the whole, Freud's conflict between the instincts of life and death is therefore expressed by a conflict at the level of the agencies ego and super-ego. Similarly, the ambivalent love and hate directed towards the parental figure (primal father) in the Oedipus complex, at both an individual and cultural level, is itself "part of a larger ambivalence between the life and death instincts”  (Ricouer, 1970, p.308). This is what lends such complexity to the unconscious sense of guilt, the ‘malaise’, Freud locates at the heart of civilisation (Freud, 2002j (1930), p.71).

Returning to our proposition, its rhetoric may be understood as both an aggressive attack on, and a libidinal invitation to abandon, our ability to think for ourselves. As with any invitation to join a group, we are required to forgo some of our individuality in return for the comfort of belonging. If we were to attempt to strip it of the 'rhetoric of terrorism' it might then read something like this:

The attacks on September 11, 2001 and subsequent attacks over the last ten years including Bali, Madrid, Mumbai and London, may be understood in terms of the discomfort Freud locates at the heart of civilisation.

In the light of our discussion this revised proposition would seem to be true.

Through Freud, the attacks may be thought about as a reminder of the extraordinary difficulties we face as beings who have the capacity to contemplate our own death, and the many ways we manage our anxiety about this. Terrorism may then be understood as an “immortality project” taking its place alongside human cultural and religious striving (Tarantelli, 2010, p.2). Both victims and perpetrators attempt to survive their inevitable organic demise by exchanging this for an ongoing symbolic existence.

Freud’s life and death drives may then be reconsidered as two aspects of a striving for immortality: Eros variously directed towards continuing ourselves through family and similar projects; Thanatos directed towards any perceived threat to our continued existence.

Groups and organisations are both the context in which these immortality projects play out and also may be understood as unconscious immortality projects themselves, as we seek to exchange our limited individual existence for the security of an ongoing group identity.

Conclusion

The suggestion that "The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and ensuing attacks around the world including Bali, Madrid, Mumbai and London show just how right Freud was about our malaise"  has been shown to exist within a discourse that is terrorist and attempts to locate the reader in relation to goodness and badness through rhetoric. This attempt to locate the reader has been understood by reference to Freud as the unconscious operation of libido and aggression in ways that are familiar in all groups and organisations, and indeed the whole project of civilisation. Brief mention has been made of a conceptualisation of Freud's thinking  as a fractal structure and a further revision which suggests what makes us uniquely human is our engagement with life as an immortality project.

References

Amado, G. (1995). Why Psychoanalytical Knowledge Helps Us Understand Organizations; A Discussion with Elliott Jaques. Human Relations, 48(4), 351-357.

Apfel, R. J., & Simon, B. (2005). Trauma, violence and psychoanalysis: September 11: Trauma and human bonds Edited by Susan W. Coates, Jane L. Rosenthal and Daniel S. Schechter Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press (Relational Perspectives Book Series, Vol 23). 2003. 312 pp. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86, 191-202.

Collins Dictionary of the English Language (Second ed.). (1986). London & Glasgow: Collins.

Fitch, A. J. (2005). To what extent has the discourse of “terrorism” served to criminalise marginalised communities? The case of Turkish-Kurds in Britain. MSc (Econ) Terrorism and International Relations. University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Freud, S. (1975a (1900)). The Interpretation of Dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IV (1900): The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part) (pp. ix-627). London: Vintage.

Freud, S. (1975f (1901)). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (J. Strachey, Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VI (1901) (pp. vii-296). London: Vintage.

Freud, S. (2005a (1913)). Totem and Taboo (S. Whiteside, Trans.). In A. Phillips (Ed.), On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (pp. 3-166). London: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (1975b (1914)). Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II) (J. Strachey, Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 145-156). London: Vintage.

Freud, S. (1975c (1920)). Beyond the Pleasure Principle (J. Strachey, Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (pp. 1-64). London: Vintage.

Freud, S. (2004a (1921)). Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I’ (J. A. Underwood, Trans.). In A. Phillips (Ed.), Mass Psychology and Other Writings (pp. 15-106). London: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (1975 (1927)). The Future of an Illusion (J. Strachey, Trans.). In The Standard     Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI     (1927-1931) (pp. 1-56). London: Vintage.

Freud, S. (2004b (1927)). The Future of an Illusion. In A. Phillips (Ed.), Mass Psychology and Other Writings (pp. 109-164). London: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (1975g (1930)). Civilization and Its Discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927-1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, (pp. 57-146). London: Vintage.

Freud, S. (2002 (1930)). Civilization and Its Discontents (D. McLintock, Trans.). In A. Phillips (Ed.), Civilization and Its Discontents (pp. 1-82). London: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (2005b (1932)). Timely Reflections on War and Death (S. Whiteside, Trans.). In A. Phillips (Ed.), On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (pp. 169-194). London: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (1975d (1933)). Why War? In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932-1936): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, (pp. 195-216).

Freud, S. (2005c (1933)). Why War? (S. Whiteside, Trans.). In A. Phillips (Ed.), On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (pp. 221-232). London: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (1975e (1939)). Moses and Monotheism (J. Strachey, Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937-1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works (pp. 1-138). London: Vintage.

Frick, C. A. (2003). The Mythos of Terrorism through the Prism of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Proceedings from The 20th International Literature and Psychology Conference, University of Greenwich, London, England.

Kirsner, D. (2006). Freud, Civilization, Religion, and Stoicism. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 23, 354-366.

Ricouer, P. (1970). Freud & Philosophy: An Essay On Interpreataion (D. Savage, Trans.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Tarantelli, C. B. (2010). The Italian Red Brigades and the structure and dynamics of terrorist groups. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis,. Retrieved from http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123333649/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Evidence for the efficacy of psychotherapy

The following article is from American Psychologist, Vol. 65. No.2, and is a review of a paper by Jonathan K. Shedler “The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy,”. Jonathan K. Shedler PhD, University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Brings Lasting Benefits through Self-Knowledge

WASHINGTON—Psychodynamic psychotherapy is effective for a wide range of mental health symptoms, including depression, anxiety, panic and stress-related physical ailments, and the benefits of the therapy grow after treatment has ended, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

Psychodynamic therapy focuses on the psychological roots of emotional suffering. Its hallmarks are self-reflection and self-examination, and the use of the relationship between therapist and patient as a window into problematic relationship patterns in the patient’s life. Its goal is not only to alleviate the most obvious symptoms but to help people lead healthier lives.

“The American public has been told that only newer, symptom-focused treatments like cognitive behavior therapy or medication have scientific support,” said study author Jonathan Shedler, PhD, of the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. “The actual scientific evidence shows that psychodynamic therapy is highly effective. The benefits are at least as large as those of other psychotherapies, and they last.

To reach these conclusions, Shedler reviewed eight meta-analyses comprising 160 studies of psychodynamic therapy, plus nine meta-analyses of other psychological treatments and antidepressant medications. Shedler focused on effect size, which measures the amount of change produced by each treatment. An effect size of 0.80 is considered a large effect in psychological and medical research. One major meta-analysis of psychodynamic therapy included 1,431 patients with a range of mental health problems and found an effect size of 0.97 for overall symptom improvement (the therapy was typically once per week and lasted less than a year). The effect size increased by 50 percent, to 1.51, when patients were re-evaluated nine or more months after therapy ended. The effect size for the most widely used antidepressant medications is a more modest 0.31. The findings are published in the February issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association.

The eight meta-analyses, representing the best available scientific evidence on psychodynamic therapy, all showed substantial treatment benefits, according to Shedler. Effect sizes were impressive even for personality disorders—deeply ingrained maladaptive traits that are notoriously difficult to treat, he said. “The consistent trend toward larger effect sizes at follow-up suggests that psychodynamic psychotherapy sets in motion psychological processes that lead to ongoing change, even after therapy has ended,” Shedler said. “In contrast, the benefits of other ‘empirically supported’ therapies tend to diminish over time for the most common conditions, like depression and generalized anxiety.”

“Pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies have a financial incentive to promote the view that mental suffering can be reduced to lists of symptoms, and that treatment means managing those symptoms and little else. For some specific psychiatric conditions, this makes sense,” he added. “But more often, emotional suffering is woven into the fabric of the person’s life and rooted in relationship patterns, inner contradictions and emotional blind spots. This is what psychodynamic therapy is designed to address.”

Shedler acknowledged that there are many more studies of other psychological treatments (other than psychodynamic), and that the developers of other therapies took the lead in recognizing the importance of rigorous scientific evaluation. “Accountability is crucial,” said Shedler. “But now that research is putting psychodynamic therapy to the test, we are not seeing evidence that the newer therapies are more effective.”

Shedler also noted that existing research does not adequately capture the benefits that psychodynamic therapy aims to achieve. “It is easy to measure change in acute symptoms, harder to measure deeper personality changes. But it can be done.”

The research also suggests that when other psychotherapies are effective, it may be because they include unacknowledged psychodynamic elements. “When you look past therapy ‘brand names’ and look at what the effective therapists are actually doing, it turns out they are doing what psychodynamic therapists have always done—facilitating self-exploration, examining emotional blind spots, understanding relationship patterns.” Four studies of therapy for depression used actual recordings of therapy sessions to study what therapists said and did that was effective or ineffective. The more the therapists acted like psychodynamic therapists, the better the outcome, Shedler said. “This was true regardless of the kind of therapy the therapists believed they were providing.”

Contact Jonathan Shedler, PhD, by e-mail or by phone at (303) 715-9099 and by cell at (970) 948-4576.

Download Shedler on Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

As Seen On TV!

As I drive back from analysis several times a week I pass a billboard advertising plastic surgery. "The Six-Pack Redefined" it proclaims, and shows a 'before' and 'after' picture of a man who has been given a sexy "six-pack body". Even at the darkest moments of my analysis I have not been tempted. I think the 'before' picture looks more like my cup of tea so to speak, apart from not being able to afford what I imagine is expensive surgery. But I am very curious about the red slash across one corner of the billboard which says "As seen on TV".

The red slash 'As seen on TV' seems to be some sort of recommendation or validation of the procedure. I don't have a television myself and willingly miss out on this important aspect of popular culture. I prefer to listen to the radio (the pictures are better I find) and I am an avid collector of podcasts. So I have no idea how this procedure can be seen on tv, but I imagine perhaps as a commercial, or docuvert I think they are called. What interests me is how it seems to imply if something is 'seen on TV' it is more credible, or somehow more 'real'.

Many years ago I read a book I remember as "The Private Future". I have not been able to find this book since, but I recall a chapter on television and culture. The author suggested one of the difficulties with television is it brings the most public of arenas into our most private realm. Where once families would gather around the hearth or its equivalent, increasingly we sit around a television. This turns the private inside out, blurring the distinction between public and private in ways that reality tv shows have further exploited. In addition the distinction between what is 'significant' and what is less 'significant' is further blurred: Thus we watch a news item about a human disaster somewhere in the world in the same breath as we watch an advertisement for underarm deodorant or the latest washing powder. Even worse to my mind news has become 'entertainment' and the newsreaders have become celebrities.

This reminds me of Donald Meltzer's paper on Adhesive Identification (1975) where he writes of research he participated in with autistic children. They noticed there was no inside or outside in these childrens' minds, no interior and exterior. They would draw a picture of a house and turn it over and draw another house on the other side of the page but the two doors lined up exactly, as if stepping into the house meant stepping out at one and the same time. I wonder if we are encountering a form of cultural autism where there is no distinction between inside and outside, public and private, friends on Facebook and actual intimacy.

But I digress, I was wanting to think about neuroscience. This 'As seen on TV' slash on the six-pack plastic surgery advertisement reminds me of the impact of contemporary neuroscience on psychoanalysis. I think 'As seen on functional MRI' has become somewhat equivalent in the field of the mind to 'As seen on TV' in the field of cosmetic surgery. Whilst increasingly the discoveries of modern technology confirm much that Freud observed, started us thinking about, and we now observe ourselves in our practice, 'As seen on MRI' seems to make these observations and thoughts more credible, as if we could never quite believe ourselves. At times neuroscience's almost obsessive attempts to explain who we are through functional MRI scanning and the anatomy of the brain is reminiscent of the craze for phrenology that occupied the 18th century where it was thought we could tell something useful about a person by mapping the bumps on their head.

I am not suggesting that we should reject the technology to help us understand ourselves or that we ought to dismiss the findings of technology - that would be silly - but I do think there is something disturbing in the way something is not quite 'real' until a machine tells us so! Perhaps we are more willing to believe in Higgs Boson than the the existence of an unconscious because the former is mathematical, and because it does not seem to shape our lives in the same way! We may only 'know' the Higgs boson directly through a very big machine, the Large Hadron Collider, currently looking for it. I wonder if the best device for detecting the traces of the unconscious is a mind that is attuned, or a machine.

The unconscious is more awkward than the Higgs boson in an everyday kind of way for most of us and that has always made it unpopular. I believe Freud who began as a neurologist would have been delighted with the abilities of neuroscience to further investigate the mind, but I don't think he would have stopped observing how people behaved, what they said and dreamed! He was anxious to ensure psychoanalysis was accepted as a scientific endeavour because science gave it some measure of acceptability. As Heidegger has suggested, science has become the arbiter of what is real and has replaced religion as the arbiter of 'human-beingness'.

There is some connection (I am not sure what yet) to a conversation I listened to as a podcast on "All In The Mind' (Australian Broadcasting Corporation with Natasha Mitchell) where the topic under discussion was the amount of culpability that can be attached to criminal acts committed by someone subject to an addictive substance. This had me thinking about the chain of events leading to the act committed under the influence. Assuming the addiction usually starts with a decision to try the addictive substance, could one work back up the line from the offence to the decision to become addicted and make an inference of responsibility?

However that in turn had me thinking about 'community' and how some people seem doomed to become addicts by virtue of the environment they grow up in. Are we all ultimately responsible for a criminal act committed by someone? When we lived in villages perhaps this link would have been easier to make. Now we are faced with global warming we are having to revisit the interconnectedness of things in a way that may force us to rethink everything.

Ethics

I hugely enjoyed listening to Neville Symington last night speaking on ‘Ethiics: From Socrates to Psychoanalysis’. His thinking as always ranges across the gamut of civilisation and thought. However he located his argument by referring to an intellectual act originating with the pre-socratic philosopher Parmenides that grasps the universe as a singularity, being everything that is. He suggests that since it is ‘everything that is’, it must be ‘good’ since the very notion of ‘bad’ inherently implies something ‘other’.

I woke up this morning thinking there is an element of rhetoric in this that disturbs me. I connected it with the way the psychoanalyst and mathematician Matte Blanco demonstrated one feature of infinite sets, and therefore the unconscious, is that differences between partial sets breaks down - the set of all even numbers is identical to the set of all odd numbers. The world behaves very differently at infinity.

Symington also suggested it has to be a mistake to speak of more than one universe, as the universe is everything and therefore is one. However singularity becomes peculiar at infinity as there ceases to be a distinction between one-ness and two-ness, so there could be more than one universe.

At this level (and the need to be clear about the levels is crucial here) the distinction between good and bad breaks down - the universe is neither good nor bad, and both good and bad, at one and the same moment.

This brought to mind some lines I have remembered since my early teenage years from Archibald McLeish’s brilliant play ‘JB’ based on the life of Job (I may be misquoting this as I remembered it from watching the play and it has perhaps incorporated a certain dimension of nachtraglikeit or afterwardsness):

“I heard upon my dry dungheap,
That man cry out who cannot sleep,
If God is good he is not God,
If God is God he is not good,
Take the even, take the odd.
I would not sleep here if I could
But for the little green leaves on the trees
And the wind on the water.”

This seems to be saying something similar, God, or Being-In-Itself, or the Universe, can be neither good nor bad and is both at the one and the same time ... However there is something about life itself (the leaves on the trees and the wind on the water) that is compelling, but perhaps I am back to rhetoric again.

Conducting Groups

I was having a conversation with a colleague today and they were asking me about the group I conduct. Their questions helped me to articulate some thoughts.

I am unusual here in New Zealand in that I choose to conduct psychotherapy groups on my own rather than with a co-facilitator. I have had experience of both and whilst I can see advantages and disadvantages to each, I believe I am better off in a psychotherapy group conducting on my own (as distinct perhaps from a teaching group).

My thinking revolves around how two people facilitating interferes with the unconscious group dynamics in ways that close down possibilities: As a single facilitator I form a couple with the group as a "third" which means I remain available to the individuals in the group as a "symbolic other". If I were to have a colleague with me, we become the couple and the "group" might be left out in the cold. Put another way, having an actual couple moves the group towards the concrete and away from the symbolic. I believe psychotherapy works when it makes use of our remarkably human ability to have one thing stand for another, not when it becomes trapped in misguided attempts to fix something.

Another question my colleague asked me was whether I required participants in the group to be in individual therapy with me. I misunderstood his question to begin with as I consider these as mutually exclusive. I suppose I can just about imagine a group where everyone was seeing me individually, but why would I do this? To my mind group psychotherapy is an alternative to individual psychotherapy and sometimes is the treatment of choice, not an adjunct to working individually.

I am hoping to start a twice a week group in the near future. About half the participants in the once a week group I have been conducting for nearly three years would like to change to twice a week, but this is not possible without a consensus.

Freedom and Icebergs

I have been thinking about a 'tweet' I received recently:

"caffeine_addict@psychotherapynz See U are interested in how people can be free 2 b themselves - except if they want to smack kids! On yr own terms perhaps"

Caffeine_addict challenged me to think about the apparent paradox that I am interested in how people can be free to be themselves and yet I support the movement here in New Zealand to maintain hitting children as a criminal offense.

I have been listening this week to a free podcast from Oxford University of an Introduction to Philosophy and somehow Caffeine_addict's challenge and my listening have linked up in my mind.

To clarify my position, when I think about peoples' freedom to be themselves I am referring to my sense that we human beings are like icebergs!

We are like icebergs because it seems most of who we are is unconscious or repressed (beneath the surface), and just as the course of an iceberg is primarily determined by the tides and currents rather than the winds, I think the course of our lives is primarily determined by the things we don't know about ourselves rather than what we do know.

We like to think we are the masters of our destiny because to think otherwise is difficult, and we adopt all manner of defences to avoid having to acknowledge the truth.

Freedom is not about having the right to hit people.

Gregory David Roberts writes eloquently of his take on freedom in the opening paragraph of his book "Shantaram" (2003):

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know, but in the flinch of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life."

I believe that ability to choose to love or to hate only comes with hard work and we can not have one without the other - that is we only have the freedom to choose to love when we can also choose to hate. I am not talking about acting something out, rather the knowing of these experiences in our inner world.

I believe it is worth protecting the right of children not to be hit as it opens up a space in them where they have more chance of being able to make free choices in the future. The law is in place to protect our freedoms, and children especially need its protection.