Dancing  Maidens

Conservatory  Garden

Central Park, New York

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves.

Aristotle

Metaphysics

Every question, no matter how intellectual its content, reflects suffering. Let us try simply to be receptive to this suffering, and if possible to open our ears to meaning of another kind.

Julia Kristeva

In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith

Introduction

Winnicott, Bion, Kristeva and Green, in their conceptualizations on ‘therapeutic space’, share a common thread in their approaching of that space:

Bion’s idea of the container for O; Green’s discussion of the therapy setting and the work of the negative; Winnicott’s transitional phenomena/space. For Kristeva, it is the concepts of heterogeneity, choretic space, and her use of Freud’s concept of the imaginary father of individual pre-existence.

Winnicott, Kristeva and Green recognized the importance of Bion in their thinking. Winnicott and Green knew him personally.  Kristeva and Green were well known to each other, personally and in their work. Winnicott influenced Bion, Kristeva and Green through his explorations of play and transitional phenomena – particularly as presented in Playing and Reality. All three acknowledged Winnicott’s influence on their own conceptualizations of therapeutic work. Green’s exploration of psychoanalytic theory brings Bion’s +/- K into the existential triangle: Love, Hate, and Knowledge inherent to the understanding of drives.

Is the desire to know or not to know implicit to the drives? Is there a primary ‘drive’ K of which L and H are essentially directions??? And what about play? Is it more that just an attitude or disposition?

This essay will attempt to see a common thread in a concept of therapeutic space as anchored in the essence of human nature and the nature of existence itself. All four psychoanalysts cite the importance of a ‘third’ dimension in development and relating.  Pathology in these frames is linked to a disconnection within the inherently relational nature of existence – a disallowance of its paradoxes, heterogeneity, and contradictions necessary for a sense of a viable self in process.

They dance together, circling themes they share: an inherent objectless tendency towards mutuality in existence; a concept of death drive beyond the Manichean split; objectless love and a concept of ‘drive’ beyond object need; the importance of Bion’s +/- K; Kristeva’s use of Feud’s deus ex machina, – the father of individual pre existence; Green’s the third dimension in existence and the work of the negative; Kristeva’s Heterogeneity that resides in the Chora as the paradoxical key to language.

Transcending the dualism of being/non-being stands the indefinable reality of possibility. Transitional phenomena exist and do not exist: they are the gardens of possibility accessed via our capacity to play and imagine: the third dimension of existence.

Play, within our capacity to imagine, is the risk and delight of swimming in the ocean of existence.

To highlight shared concerns within these four diverse approaches, a definition of existence as possibility for relation will be a backdrop frame for this review. Existence, framed as possibility for relation, highlights the intrinsic and dynamic incompleteness between form and energy within all existent beings.

As possibility, existence in relation is, paradoxically, sustaining, unstable, and incomplete.

The four aspects of the therapeutic experience we will examine are: therapeutic space, drive, the third dimension and play.

I. Therapeutic Space

Winnicott, Bion, Kristeva, and Green reach into two of Freud’s formulations that accentuate their perspectives on therapeutic space:

First, is Freud’s concept of the death drive and secondly, the imaginary father of individual pre existence.

The death drive addresses the inherent paradox of our experience of life. The imaginary father of individual pre existence addresses the place of trust in the reliability of possibility for relation in lived experience within the wider human community.

These concepts of psychoanalytic theory touch upon the human condition and therapeutic engagement. Through this engagement the essential fluidity of understanding oneself and others can be experienced; experienced as an intuition of meaning between two human beings mutually allowing the vicissitudes of difference and speech within the transference.

All four psychoanalysts stress that therapeutic space provides the possibility of singularly personal meaning within the occurrence of genuine mutuality; an engagement that allows and supports the impact of being in question with another.

These psychoanalytic explorers, with slight variations, frame therapeutic space as an event – an event wherein a shared honesty in confronting existence is the core realization of living with a meaningful faith in life’s possibilities for relation.

Kristeva’s perspective on therapeutic space is anchored in her seminal conceptualizations regarding the heterogenetic essence of the Chora, a concept borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus. Heterogeneity is central to the dynamics between the semiotic/symbolic in speech; dynamics that reflect the actions of existence itself.

In Kristeva’s frame, language must reflect the intrinsically heterogenetic dynamics of existence in order to realize the possibility of meaning in relationships. Kristeva’s heterogenetic space between conscious and unconscious within the speaking being is a reflection of reality itself.

The structural dynamic of existence inhabits every living being. Its allowance is the essential element of therapeutic space. This is the genius of Freud’s recognition of heterogeneity in existence: his basic rule of psychoanalysis, free association.

Kristeva and Green share this understanding of the allowance of heterogenetic space that holds a paradoxical dialectic of differences as central to the psychoanalytic experience. To capture the dynamism of the therapeutic process, they insist upon the contradictory integrity of Eros and Thanatos. They maintain their fidelity to the central importance of Freud’s death drive concept. For them all life energy holds the contradictions of the dialectic inseparability of life and death.

Green and Kristeva assert that the death drive’s reality within the dialectic of allowance and disallowance operates in language and in any relational act.

Green, in his Work of the Negative, acknowledges with Kristeva the importance of emphasis on the death drive. The therapeutic setting is a space that holds the dialectical tension of that reality; a space generated by fidelity to the contradictory mandate of Freud’s rule of analytic association.

Therapeutic space is relationship that holds an allowance of the inherent contradictions in life.

Bion’s ideas of container, pre-conception and conception also relate to this understanding of the dynamism of therapeutic space. Also borrowing terms from Plato, form and energy are contained as dialectically inseparable within a space that dynamically holds that contradiction, and allows possibility as continuous ever-incomplete articulation.

Bion, in a dramatically different frame from Kristeva, Green and Winnicott, addresses the realities of existence within therapeutic space, as the container of that dialectic through his concept of O. O is the unrelenting presence and indefinable force of existence itself. In his conceptualizations of the bi-directionality of +/- Love, Hate, and Knowledge in our relationships, Bion emphasizes O’s instability.

Therapeutic space becomes unsaturated and open to O via efforts to surrender understanding, memory and desire: the creation of conditions to absorb and transform beta elements and return them as alpha elements.

Winnicott visualizes therapeutic space as the creation a holding environment. He addresses the paradoxical impact of existence in terms of the realities of human failure within the holding environment – a breakdown in mutuality in relationships. The space of intrinsic relation is wounded or shattered by abandonment through accident or neglect.

Winnicott, well aware of the caprice of life and evil in the world, does not ascribe these realities to an intrinsic quality of existence manifest in relationships as a death drive. In Playing and Reality, however, he does question his thinking and recognizes a necessity to reconsider this issue.

A shared confrontation by client and therapist with existence itself, active in the present moment shared by both, is at the center of all four psychoanalysts’ thinking. Therapeutic space holds that confrontation for both client and therapist.

II. Drive

The concept of drive, an expression of the energy of existence, rooted in biology and universal in all living beings, can be framed as the unrelenting reach for possibilities for relation. Eros and Thanatos are attempts to conceptualize the inherent bi-directionality as well as the acceptance and/or rejection of that reality.

Green addresses the concept of drive in terms of an inherent lack in existence. He describes the Janus face of the work of the negative as action to either deny or accept that reality of the negative.

The drive concept for Green is the intrinsic and inseparable link between mind and body, the somatic ground of psyche, operating within the energy field of existence.  He sees the phenomenon of drive as “a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic… a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body”.

Green’s definition of drive addresses mind/body’s demand and capacity to process, relate to and survive the actual realities of existence in relation.

Green’s drive is the complex psychosomatic energy of mutual connection within the corporeal realities and opportunities operating in the living web of the interpersonal and object world.

In Kristeva’s frame, the psychosomatic realities of drives are infused with a semiotic base from which language is created. Drives in Kristeva’s writing are very much related to her concepts about the Chora. Drives are the pre-articulate psychosomatic energies reaching to realize and articulate the relational nature of existence in any context. Drives hold within them the semiotic foundation for language as an expression of the inherently relational and unstable possibilities of existence.

Winnicott approaches the drive concept in terms of the spontaneous motility he observes in infants. For him, this motility is a primary energy; an energy that differentiates in direction through the vicissitudes of development and object relating.

Drive in Winnicott’s concept is an inherent biological vitality, aggressiveness and creativity. It is initially objectless and enables the infant to both discover and be found within the field of its relations. It is the biological motion of existence – energy for creation and discovery. Its invalidation as such in actual relationships is a denial of inherent mutuality and is crippling to a sense of zestful viability in relations.  The vicissitudes of drive relate directly to Winnicott’s concepts of true and false self in negotiating the risks of possibilities in relation.

Bion’s approach to the drive concept was radically reframed under the influence of his concept of O, the unremitting presence and indefinable force of existence itself. He reconfigured the action of existence as a movement towards the truth of O in relation. Bion’s frame for drive is the movement of the universe as emotional truth: living together within realization and acknowledgement of the constitutive, contradictory and unknowable reality of O.

In place of Freud’s instinctive energies, Bion describes this action as emotional communication between us within the creative and destructive action of O. The realization of O itself abides beyond any particular object of this energy. Bion conceptualizes our emotional ambivalence toward the truth of O through his concepts of +/- Love, +/- Hate and +/- Knowledge.

From my reading of Bion, the motion of +/- Knowledge is primary. The motions +/- Love/Hate are emotional directions towards or away from relating within the experiencing of O. The experience of O always remains beyond our capacity to fully comprehend. K, L and H are intrinsic to the motion of existence within and between us. They are inseparable.

Our ambivalent actions of Love, Hate and Knowledge are our emotional participation in the movement of existence itself.

Looking at drive within the perspectives of these psychoanalysts suggests that beyond the specifics of any object seeking action, the movement in drive is a force for or against inquiry into a yet to be found connection – an articulating existential uncovering of possibility; that is to say there is an epistemological dynamic to the actions of drive.

III. The third dimension

In various ways, all four theorists acknowledge the crucial element of a third dimension in psychoanalytic practice and theory. This is a dimension essential to understanding the power of transference and counter-transference. It is accessed in the allowance of our capacity to imagine; a capacity in Winnicott’s writing that is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the holding environment. Each theorist addresses this third dimension.

In Kristeva’s work, the primacy of heterogeneity between the semiotic and symbolic in language addresses this dimension. Her reframe of Freud’s father of individual pre existence and the death drive capture the part this ‘third dimension’ plays in development and therapy: Access to this dimension is to suffer tolerating risk and drive beyond a binding duality in order to allow moving into felt and desired unknown possibilities within oneself and between oneself and others

In Kristeva, the path to realization of the father of individual pre-existence is via a developmentally necessary allowance of abjection and matricide on the part of both infant and mother – thus the developmental necessities of allowing the experience of the heterogenic nature of existence: the death drive. Under the pressures of developmental biology, abjection and matricide access a yet to be defined reality within the infant’s self when held in a supportive and allowing parental environment.

Andre Green clearly identifies the reality of a third dimension. In his configurations of thirdness, he articulates the spaces of risk and allowance of unknown possibilities always present between us. He identifies the instability and possibilities of community built on the triangular nature of relation. It is the existential reality that all dual relationships abide within the reality of living participation in the wider human community. Green’s formulation of the death drive in terms of allowance and disallowance of this dimension address this paradox. The third dimension is a space of allowance of inherent instability of existence captured in the semiotic and beyond the reach of symbolic logic.

For Bion, his concept of O states the importance of this dimension in therapy and life. He portrays the dynamics of projective identification as the normal mode of relating between mother and child; a mode grounded in the mother’s and parental environment’s tolerance of this contradiction in existence. It is a tolerance central to their capacity to interact with their child’s existentially questioning, protesting difference and discomfort.

For Winnicott the dangers and ambiguities of existence in human development permeate his concepts of the in-between, transitional object and transitional phenomenon. The power and instability of the in-between spaces of relation is Winnicott’s third dimension. Failures in the parental environment of attentiveness, tolerance and capacity for ambiguity, imagination and play are critical here.

For Winnicott the devastating impact of failure in relational reliability and disallowance of the infant’s innate ruthlessness – prior to its capacity for concern and guilt in object aggression – wound access to realizing the objectless capacity for relation available in the human community.

Winnicott confronts the issue of the loss of meaning largely in the failures of the holding environment and the experiences of the child’s falling to pieces. The phenomenon captured in Freud’s death drive concept, in most of Winnicott’s writing, is a refusal of the validity of aggression in relationships, not in an intrinsic aspect of existence.

IV. Play

Play, release of energy climbing on the monkey bars of form, is the jouissance of inherent heterogeneity in existence. Play is the vital essence of the third dimension. Games are efforts to contain play but play itself is uncontainable. This distinction is critical in Bion’s understanding of the psychoanalytic experience.

Play is the sparkling and exciting disruption of not quite formed possibility. It reaches out to form by defying it – by treating it casually, as of no consequence.  This is amply commented upon in Winnicott’s treatment of transitional phenomena and Bion’s instability of O. Play, as an aspect of that instability, permeates Bion’s presentation, particularly in A Memoir of the Future and Transformations. If play is not allowed within the energy of superego dynamics – form, in terms of the self, is moribund. Kristeva, in Black Sun emphasizes the power of play in treatment and the essential power of the semiotic in therapeutic communication and self-in-process.

Possibility for relation does not exist without the instability of play between energy and form.

Winnicott’s creativity and our capacity to imagine aren’t simply pictures in our consciousness. It is the proto-form activity of our entire being-in-relation reaching for possibility. It is the foundation of play and the vehicle of drive, anticipatory and/or focused.

Bion places the dynamics of existence itself as the analytic object. Surrender to that play is the core of his psychoanalytic method.

Bion’s constructs of +&- Love, Hate, and Knowledge negotiate the multi directionality of drive in relationships. Love and Hate can be framed as the directional aspects of Knowledge – the primary motion of existence as possibility. Our capacity to play is the foundation of intelligence and our capacity to know and discover.

This placement of the multi-directionality of play only makes sense if drives are seen as modes of inquiry or reaching for new possibilities of form. Bion’s –K, similar to Green’s negative, is the active refusal of one’s capacity to imagine formless possibility: a refusal to play.

Kristeva addresses the consequences of corrupting the experience of meaning through the denial of the intrinsic play of heterogeneity. Refusing to acknowledge the reality of heterogeneity wounds living and meaning. Relevant also is Green’s theorizing on the death drive as a refusal of play and the instability of meaning as well as understanding drive as a mode of enquiry.

V. Further implications

Influenced by this overview of all four psychoanalytic thinkers, some basic concepts of relation and development can be reconsidered.

Relationships, within the reality of transference and countertransference, can be seen and experienced as the dynamic play of mutual efforts to define and redefine expectations. This inherently contextual reality of our being is captured in the concept of superego and the central importance of Thanatos as well as Eros in relating – the unresolvable instability and contradictions of existence in relation.

Superego, the psyche’s implanted mark of ontological relatedness, captures the intra and intersubjective dynamics of life within our communal field; a field of omnipresent mutuality, desire and expectation.

Winnicott suggests this through his concepts of projective perception/anticipation and our capacity to imagine – prior to any specific idea or form. Expecting and being expected are dynamically interacting in every relational context. It is an intrinsic aspect of the field of all human relations.

Consequently, the superego dynamic is inherent with the use of language, a phenomenon ontologically implying the innate reality of community. Language is humanity’s unstable tool for articulating inherently incomplete mutuality. This is at the center of Kristeva’s development of the dynamic heterogeneity of the semiotic and symbolic in language and relation in any context.

Our singularity coexists with awareness of both mutuality and the reality of spaces between us of yet to be defined differences in processes of differentiation. Superego phenomena manifest the active presence of participation in a world of intrinsic relation. This phenomenon is not simply limited to specific relations but is a dynamic of the living field of relations. Every relation carries the weight and history of all relations of which it is a part; including the dimensions of time: past, present and future.

Herein lies the power of personal historical inquiry within the experience of transference.

All four psychoanalysts imply a dynamic mutuality of undefined anticipations in biology itself – whatever the form. No form evolves in ipse, but only as a participant in an articulating field of relating.

The existential reality of play, clearly articulated by Winnicott, is at the core of the therapeutic experience addressing superego conflicts. Kristeva and Green acknowledge Winnicott’s influence upon their thinking about the existential imperative for play in life and therapy.

The risks of expectation are the inherent risks of existence as possibility for relation. The superego phenomenon can be seen as the struggle for steady state within a human community among the pre-articulate/articulate forms of possibility in relations.

Bion’s thinking about preconception, conception and container relate to this reality. Superego, as an aspect of our capacity to imagine, intuits the inherent risks of rearticulating and renegotiating forms within any context of active mutuality; the inherent risks of the death drive.

The active reality of the death drive inhabits the superego. It is an internalized structure of the communal psychological reality. Superego is an apparatus to stabilize form against the disruptive reality of possibility. The vitalizing/catastrophic play of Bion’s O in relationships is active here.

The over reaching attempt to freeze and hold form stable is the death drive. Play is the breath of life’s movement holding the intrinsic inseparability of life and death.

This is articulated by Green’s death drive concept as disallowance; by Kristeva’s disallowance of heterogeneity in language and relation; by Bion’s minus K, as well as Winnicott’s deficits in one’s capacity to play and form transitional objects.

For Winnicott, Kristeva and Green, the capacity for play is clearly crucial in the dynamics of a benign superego.

Possibility for relation does not exist without manifest forms; forms do not exist without the instability and play of possibility.

Our capacity to imagine isn’t limited to images in our consciousness. It is the proto-form activity of our entire being-in-relation reaching for possibility. It is the foundation of play and the magic carpet of drive.

Any conversation that is therapeutic abides within that space of acknowledgement of existence as the instability of yet to be discovered possibility for relation.

This is the powerful reality of radical therapeutic silence; silence succinctly stated in Bion’s maxim: surrender of understanding, memory and desire.

***

Faith

in tattered

shopping bags

of belief

torn

&

needing  patching

an inseparable couples’ dance

changing

from time to time

cycling

joy and disappointment

like any real relationship

it can deepen

but can’t be ‘fixed’.

***

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

_____________ (1977). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt.

Beardsworth, Sara. (2004). Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and modernity. Albany: State University Press of New York.

Bion, Wilfred R. (1962). Learning from Experience.  London: Heinermann. (Reprinted Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.)

______________ (1965). Transformations. London: Heinermann. (Reprinted London: Karnac, 1984)

______________ (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Travistock. (Reprinted Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.)

_______________ (1991). A Memoir of the Future. London: Karnac, 1991.

______________ (1998). Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. London: Karnac.

Buber, Martin. (1958). I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

_____________(1965). Between Man and Man. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Macmillan.

Donnelly, James. (2000). Love and knowledge: The quest for personal meaning. New York: South Garden Press.

_______________. (2016). Psychoanalytic insight and a philosophy of existence. www.southgardenpress.com.

_______________. (2017). Difference and dependence: The sustaining paradox of heterogeneity in our being together. Thoughts after Kristeva. www.southgardenpress.com.

Elkins, Jeremy, (2017). Revisiting destruction in “The Use of an Object”. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXXVI, Number 1.

Green, Andre, (1999). The Work of the Negative. London: Free Association Books.

____________, (2005). Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis. East Sussex: Routledge.

____________, (2005). Play and Reflection in Donald Winnicott’s Writings. London: Karnac Books.

_____________,  (2011). Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work. London: Karnac Books.

Grotstein, James S. (2007). A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy To Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books.

Hansen, Sarah K. (2013). Julia Kristeva and the Politics of Life. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol. XXI, No. 1. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

____________(1984). Revolution in Poetic Language.  Translated  by Margaret Waller with an Introduction by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

____________(1987). In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith.  Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press

____________(1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

___________ (1991). Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press.

_________ (2002). The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. New York: Columbia University Press.

_________ (2002). “Nous Deux” or A (Hi)Story of Intextuality. The Romantic Review; Jan-Mar. Volume 93.   Columbia University.

____________ (2009). This Incredible Need to Believe. Translated by Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press

____________ (2010). Hatred and Forgiveness: Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis III, trans. Janie Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia, Tardine, A and Blake, H. (1981). Women’s Time. Signs. Vol. 7. No. 1, Autumn, pp. 13-35. University of Chicago Press.

Oliver, K. ed. (1993).  Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing. New York: Rutledge.
_____________. (2002).  The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press.

_____________ . (2010) Julia Kristeva’s Maternal Passions. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol. XVIII, No. 1. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Oliver, Kelly and Keltner, S.K. ed. (2009). Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Kristeva. Albany: State University Press.

Sjoholm, C. (2005) Kristeva & the Political. New York: Rutledge.

Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International University Press.

____________ (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Travistock Publications

____________ (2000). Psychoanalytic Explorations. Ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, Madeleine Davis. Boston: Harvard University Press.

©  2019 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW

All rights reserved

South Garden Press, New York