Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Passion, Defences against Passion and Aliveness






This Wednesday we will explore Passion and Aliveness. I’ll begin by asking us to reflect on desire and our relationship with desire. We will look at Freud’s model of Id, Superego and Ego and think about his concept of the battle between our instincts and drives on the one hand and the internalised voices of parental and societal authority on the other hand. We will look at the role of defences, splitting and projection in repressing and or redirecting libido and the consequences for our sense of self and our sense of aliveness.

Freud saw human beings as wolves to other men, a thin veneer of civilisation held in place by taboos against violent sexual competitiveness and rapaciousness being the corner stone of a fragile civilisation. All of life being a constant struggle conducted in the fraught space between erotic and destructive instincts. For instance although there may be a conscious lament about a unrewarding life or disappointing relationships there may also be a fierce unconscious attachment to seemingly “bad objects” and secret gratification in withholding joy and love to others, or stirring up guilty and shameful feelings in oneself as a kind of punishment which might provide relief from guilty feelings and also confirm fantasies of omnipotent control. Roy Schafer in Bad Feelings investigates defences against bad feelings, psychological structures designed to block all feelings totally, and the need for the therapist to hold an empathic respectful attitude towards the need for defense and to work through the defense as much as possible.

Relational Psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell is eloquent on the persistance of vulnerability into adult life and the twin nature of desire and aggression.

In Can Love Last?: “Dependency is not a holdover from childhood; it s constitutive of desire for a real other person. And the vulnerability of dependency makes us feel endangered. In desire we are endangered. And being endangered makes us angry. We want to control, to have the power to hurt, perhaps to eliminate the other whose charms have disrupted our equanimity, who has undermined our sense of self and self-worth. Aggression is a response to threat, and sustaining desire over time produces a perpetually regenerated threat. ….Desire endangers us, and the aggressive response to that endangerment can destroy both the object of desire and ourselves.

I’ll be talking more about aggression in September. Winnicott the great object relations analyst of the independent school believed it had a vital role in healthy human relating and particularly in mature sexual relating. Winnicott thought a lack of passion and vitality came about because of false self functioning. In healthy development the mothering one is exquisitely sensitive to the child’s wishes and actualises them, in mothering which generates a false self, the caretaker misses the child’s wishes more or less completely and sees only her own image of the child, her own agenda.

In such circumstances Winnicott argues that the child cannot maintain genuine wishes and needs in an unreceptive environment –it is too painful. The true self is unattended to, either kept secret or repressed. Further the caretaker’s agenda must be dealt with; relatedness is essential to physical and emotional survival. So the child learns to shape himself or herself according to the contours of the mother’s vision, becoming mummy’s son or mummy’s daughter, a false self on a compliant basis.

In the Shadow of the Object Christopher Bollas, describes people who are abnormally normal. “They are usually rooted in being objective, both in their thinking and in their desire. They achieve a state ofabnormal normality by eradicating the self of subjective life, as they strive to become an object in their own being. In his cultivation of material phenomena the normotic has become an object, both for himself and for his others: an object with no subject, an object alive and happy in a material world.”

He also describes the way that moods can conserve a disowned internal self state that has been preserved intact during childhood. “When a person goes into a mood, he becomes that child self who was refused expression in relation to his parents for one reason or another.” He sees moods as “registers of the moment of a breakdown between a child and his parents, and they partly indicate the parents’ own developmental arrest, in that the paret was unable to deal appropriately with the child’s particular maturational needs.” What had been a self experience in the child, one that could have been integrated into the child’s continuing development, was rejected by the parents so became frozen by the child and is contacted again through the mood.

It is these states that therapists of the Winnicott, Kohut, Balint schools believe can be transformed in therapy when the therapist is able to attune to the emotional state, and wait for the client to put words to their experience. And if the client is able to make use of the therapist, to feel seen, heard and felt and to find that the therapist is able to accept the expression of difficult feelings as communication. Feelings can lose their associations of shame and or fear, do not need to be repressed and that this creates a more dynamic experience of life and love.

Before ending I wish to also briefly visit the work of Jung and Ken Wilbur and talk more about splitting of persona and shadow, life and death, and body and mind and the task of the centaur to open to and integrate the passionate animal and sentient mind in one body.



Sunday, August 8, 2010

Happiness- is it found, made or an inner creation?




This Wednesday’s dialogue is about happiness and I will be outlining some thinking from the Buddhist realm about happiness as well as some thoughts from Psychoanalysis and from Psychosynthesis.

A lot of money is spent in the pursuit of happiness through materialism –the advertising industry happily cultivates our sense of inferiority, of envy, of something missing in order to encourage us to spend our way to personal fulfillment. The personal growth industry which includes therapy, books, retreats etc also encourages us to spend in the name of self-improvement as if happiness could be a spiritual goal. Yet how realistic can it be to be happy all of the time or even most of the time? I suppose it depends on how we define happiness and also how we look at suffering.

Barry Magid a zen Buddhist and psychoanalyst, in his book Ending the Pursuit of Happiness invites us to consider that our "pursuit of happiness" may actually be a source of our suffering. He takes an unusual look at our "secret practices"—what we're really doing when we say we're meditating-like trying to feel calmer, or more compassionate, or even "enlightened" (whatever we imagine that means!). He also uncovers our "curative fantasies" about spiritual practice-those ideas that we can somehow fix all the messy human things about ourselves that we imagine are bad or wrong or unacceptable.

Freud said, "Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness: money is not an infantile wish." Throughout life we are driven by the desires and fears established in early childhood. I suspect he would agree that happiness is a transitory state, that it signals to us that a need we experience is fulfilled.

In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud says “What we call happiness in the strict sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as a periodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

Although at first glance this presents a rather pessimistic picture I am coming to an understanding that the flux of emotion, that the pitching of fortune, is in fact what gives happiness it’s bounty. In a blog, Cold house Journal one American citizen writes of his year trying to live without air-conditioning and his appreciation of warmth when it comes, of the seasons change, because of this. Is happiness then found through embracing our experience as it is rather than fighting to change or overcome it? This is the path of immanence and I think there is some truth in this. Of course a culture dominated by this worldview would not be good at striving for material improvement. Our dissatisfactions with the way things are having lead to some pretty nifty inventions. However perhaps as a civilization we are getting towards the end of the satisfaction that ipod, iphone, dishwasher, flat screen can offer. Technology offers individual comfort but often undermines the simple pleasure that comes connection with others and with the environment which also give us great happiness.

Other spiritual paths suggest that the way to happiness or spiritual fulfillment is through transcendence, put crudely getting over us. A therapist in Auckland Anna Cowan says she thinks about this as inviting a client to step up out of their experience (transcendence) in contrast to stepping down further into their experience (immanence). I like her model, it suggest two ways to shift our consciousness and to open to deeper or wider experiences of self.

Many psychological frames and spiritual ones encourage us to, in the words of Ram Dass “Be here, now.” Anxiety in an attempt to defend us from suffering represses or displaces suffering but this suffering continues as physical symptoms, inexplicable moods, repetition compulsion. If we can step down into the feelings and or memories isolated from consciousness by anxiety we become more resilient, more whole and more capable of enjoying the ordinary happiness of a good conversation, a walk in the park and a meal with friends.

We might also become less self obsessed and more open to others and to the joy that is found in opening to generosity to others and care for the environment.

Two quotes on happiness from the Dali Lama, someone who faces suffering but chooses happiness:

“I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our

being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that

the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of

well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically

puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may

have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is

the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures,

it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development

alone. The key is to develop inner peace.”

“We can live without religion and meditation but we can’t live without human affection.”



Tuesday, July 13, 2010


Let's talk about happiness

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Lynne Holdem presents another series of winter lunchtime dialogues that aim to enhance our understanding about being human. Drawing from psycho-analytic and psycho-spiritual thinkers Lynne will talk in everyday language and then invite participants to contribute their own thinking. Interested community members and professionals are all welcome.
• August 11: happiness: is it found, made or an inner creation
• August 18: passion, defences against passion and aliveness
• August 25: awareness of hope: conscious and unconscious
• Sept 1: the healing heart –the role of compassion and acceptance
• Sept 8: aggression, shadow and wholeness
• Sept 15: sympathy and empathy: helping or hindering
• Sept 22: freedom - fear and courage in being oneself
• Sept 29: generativity, from consumer to active citizen

Entry is by donation to Supporting Families in Mental Illness in Taranaki. Your donation can be by cash or to SF Taranaki via Give A Little. Coffee and tea provided. Bring your lunch if you wish. Dialogues take place at Lynne’s rooms on the third floor of BNZ building, 50 Devon St on Wednesdays at 12.30 -1.30pm.
http:www.psychematters-lynneholdem@blogspot.com for more information or phone Lynne on 06 769-6050.