Can’t Sleep, Can’t Wake Up

“Of course, for the person exercising bad faith, it is still a matter covering up an unpleasant truth, or of presenting some pleasant error as the truth. In appearance therefore, bad faith has the structure of a lie. But what changes everything is that in bad faith it is from myself that I am concealing the truth.”
Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness)

“The Oedipus myth, so fundamental to the psychoanalytic conception of the human dilemma , is an endlessly twisting labyrinth revolving around the question of whether it is better to know or not to know, better to be known or not to be known. If Oedipus had known that the man with whom he entered into battle on the road from Delphi was his own father, would he have done otherwise? The question, of course, is moot — – it could not have been otherwise.”
Thomas H. Ogden (The Primitive Edge of Knowledge)

“Funes could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw-he noticed the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world. Babylon, London, and New York dazzle mankind’s imagination with their fierce splendor; no one in the populous towers or urgent avenues of those cities has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Ireneo, day and night, in his poor South American hinterland. It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot, in the dimness of his room, could picture every crack in the wall, every molding of the precise houses that surrounded him. (I repeat that the most trivial of his memories was more detailed, more vivid than our own perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Off toward the east, in an area that had not yet been cut up into city blocks, there were new houses, unfamiliar to Ireneo. He pictured them to himself as black, compact, made of homogeneous shadow; he would turn his head in that direction to sleep.”
Jorge Luis Borges (Funes, the Memorious)

“…the idea of one’s own death is subjectively inconceivable.”
Otto Fenichel (Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, 1945)

I was in a discussion with several of the people involved in the Aesthetic Resistance podcasts, and the discussion centred around Glenn Greenwald and his extortion (attempted) by Israel. Or perhaps call it public shaming. And this in turn started me thinking about Sartre and his ideas on bad faith.

“It is best to choose and to examine one determined attitude which is essential to human reality and which is such that consciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself. This attitude, it seems to me, is bad faith (mauvaise foi).”
Jean Paul Sartre (Ibid)

First, the Greenwald revenge shaming backfired from almost any perspective one can find, and suggests an exhaustion in the Western public to the sordid tactics of Israeli intelligence. But a broader examination of this and other such phenomenon is, I think highly pertinent. I have written of the loss of a certain kind of organic ‘thinking’ in people today, and I linked last time Johan Eddebo’s post on the same topic. And how perhaps the latest phase of this cognitive loss coincided with the widespread use of AI on social media (and elsewhere). Just from my own experience there seems to be a significant uptick the small errors of daily life. The wrong medicine ordered, the wrong replacement parts, or things lost in the mail, and on and on. And this also reminded me of the recent lectures by poet Anne Carson (also linked in a previous blog post) which offer a wonderful reminder of what is now (or feels like) a lost culture. It is both erudite and literate, but also intuitive and somehow (for lack of a better word) organic.

But while this is easy enough to observe (difficult, actually, not to) it requires more rigour to extrapolate on the implications, and to trace back how and why this has happened.

As a sort of refresher here, I want to go over the Freudian idea of self deception, and Sartre’s corrective, which is his idea of ‘bad faith’.

“In Freud’s (1915, 1923) model of the mind the self is viewed as comprised of two or more distinct and warring systems, each with its own goals. One the one hand, we have our conscious mind where thoughts, beliefs, desires and aspirations are accessible and can be conceptually communicated. On the other hand, there is the unconscious mind comprised of drives and impulses which can compete with each other according to the laws of their ‘cathectic energy.’ The unconscious contains socially unacceptable ideas, desire, memories and motives, that are associated with conflict, emotional pain and anxiety. The unconscious is not accessible to our awareness and is composed of non-conceptual and symbolic elements that cannot be communicated through language. Our unconscious drives push for satisfaction, even at the expense of our conscious beliefs and wishes.”
Guy Du Plessis (A Philosophical Analysis of Sartre’s Critique of Freud’s Depth-psychological Account of Self-Deception)

Now, there are a significant number of philosophers who reject Freud. Interestingly most are highly reactionary, politically speaking (Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Heidegger, and Karl Popper — this a pretty partial list). But a couple, Wittgenstein and Sartre in particular, take Mulligans. Sartre wanted to be the French Heidegger, but then found out he, Heidegger, was a metaphysical nazi. So that was a problem. And I maintain Wittgenstein probably never even read Freud.

“In Sartre’s book, Being and Nothingness (1958), a section entitled ‘Bad Faith and Lies’ argues that Freud does not provide an adequate explanation of self-deception by making a distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes. Sartre claims that in the act of repression there is awareness of the drive that is being repressed as well as an awareness of the actions that aims to satisfy it – and simply put, these are both rational activities. According to Sartre the Freudian ‘censor’ must first register the drive or impulse before preventing it from becoming conscious.”
Guy Du Plessis (Ibid)

This last sentence is not quite right, though. The idea of the censor ‘registering’ the drive is just nonsense. It’s wrong in multiple ways. What does register mean here?

“…the dualism of the conscious and unconscious does not coincide with the dualism of the rational and mechanical: all rationally structured items in the mind are consciously accessible; some purely mechanical items are consciously accessible, but others are dynamically unconscious.”
Jonathan Webber (Bad Faith and the Unconscious)

This goes back to Kant and Descartes. Both of whom Freud rejected (well, in the same way Nietszche rejected Christianity — by becoming the greatest Christian ever). But the point is Sartre here (less so elsewhere) is denying the unconscious. All cognition is not conceptual. But even putting that aside, Sartre’s hostility to Freud here feels very odd, because later he is far less at odds with psychoanalysis (Search for a Method, which was 1957 and Being and Nothingness was 1943). But then Sartre is complicated. His best work is remarkable and admirable and his lesser work is often almost cringe inducing. He is also someone who’s followers do him no credit. I think his work appealed most to a certain strain of white maleness. At least in the US. Existentialism was not for sissies. Etc.

Now Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’ is more profound than his explanation of it, or his examples. The example of the woman agreeing to go on a date with a man she knows lusts for her, but tells herself this is ‘only’ a date and his flattery is just respect, etc etc. For Sartre this is ‘bad faith’. She deceives herself about his intentions and the likely consequences. Well, ok, but on another level this IS just a date. If she fucks him, and takes money from him, THAT is ‘bad faith’. But the self deception isn’t quite self deception. In fact, the problem is more the society that creates class tensions and gender antagonisms with those tensions, and allows for sexual commodification. Also, I am sure that in such situations there are multiple unconscious urges and several acts of absolute repressed emotions. But I don’t want to dwell on this particularly, because there are other more compelling aspects of this idea.

Sartre’s idea that you had to be aware of your motivations and have some kind of access to your thoughts, even unpleasant ones, to manifest ‘bad faith’ feels unnecessary. But there is no reason to reject Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’ just because some of our motivations (nearly all, actually) are repressed. Its still bad faith. One feels discomfort, and feels unease, Malaise is emotional, not intellectual. To go on this date knowing you don’t really like this person who lusts for you is bad faith, even if one is not fully aware of one’s dislike. And in fact I think this is where life under Capitalism is highly relevant. All relationships are reified, in some sense. We may or may not consciously ‘know’ this, or the extent to which our decisions are mediated by our alienation.

Teiresias’s words: Oedipus knew, but could not bear to know what he knew, to see what he saw.

Positivists (see Daniel Dennett) see humans as ‘intentional systems’. But even contemporary neuroscience lends credence to the Freudian view of the mind ( Du Pressis footnotes Antonio Damasio for one example). To circle back to Greenwald here, the Zionist penchant for various forms of blackmail (Epstein being the extreme example) functions on a broad societal canvas. The propaganda Israel produces is nearly always delivered with a shotgun (unless, of course, it is one of their many, I am sure, private extortion rackets). But since this is Greenwald and a genocide is going on, the manufacturing of these big picture narratives tends toward the generalized definitions of morality that the Imperialist West uses for most of its public communiques. The public does not believe this morality, at least not in its actionable version, and certainly Israelis don’t believe it.

Thomas H. Ogden is probably the most original and deep of contemporary psychoanalytic writers. And I find a lot of my thought, which was developed before I read Ogden, is reinforced and made clearer by him.

“The autistic-contiguous position is understood as a sensory-dominated, pre symbolic are a of experience in which the most primitive form of meaning is generated on the basis of the organization of sensory impressions, particularly at the skin surface_/A unique form of anxiety arises in this psychological realm: terror over the prospect that the boundedness of one’s sensory surface might be dissolved, with a resultant feeling of falling, leaking, dropping, into an endless and shapeless space.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

Ogden originated and introduced this idea of ‘austistic-contiguous’ space — psychological space. And it echoes a lot of what I wrote about many times, even in the just previous blog posting. This is the core of my attempt to, in a sense anyway, reverse engineer the path to that missed appointment, that absence. For there is where one finds the human.

“Strachey translated “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” as “Where Id was, there Ego shall be.” In doing so, Strachey ignored Freud’s explicit instruction to dispense with pompous Greek words when translating das Es and das Ich . In English, a better translation of Freud’s German would be: “Where it was, there I shall be (or come into being ).”
Thomas H. Ogden (Interview LeCarnet Psy, For a new analytical sensibility or ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ 2022)

The point is that everything is bad faith. It is just what Sartre was (I think) pointing toward, clumsily in his case, this time, was this ‘reality’ — hell is other people, he said. He wrote the play No Exit. His blather about ‘freedom’ is where the cringe comes (as Parenti once said, those who claim to be free have simply not reached the end of their leash). Sartre understood, too, from his relationship with Franz Fanon, and his writings on the Algerian war of independence, that anti-black racism was the inevitable self deception, the colonialists tether to the world. But he wanted to be Heidegger.

The autistic – contiguous position, then, falls between “strangulated internal object relations and the realm of tyrannizing a-symbolic patternings of sensation” (Ogden). In other words this is the basement for consciousness, a basement that mostly we have lost the key for.

“The autistic-contiguous mode of experiencing is a presymbolic, sensory mode and is therefore extremely difficult to capture in words. Rhythmicity and experiences of sensory contiguity contribute to the earliest psychological organization in this mode. Both rhythmicity and experiences of surface contiguity are fundamental to a person’s earliest relations with objects: the nursing experience and the experience of being held, rocked, spoken to and sung to in his mother’s arms. These experiences are “object-related” in a very specific and ‘very limited sense of the word.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

This description is borrowed, largely, from Francis Tustin and to a lesser degree Esther Bick. And though not mentioned, from Andre Green. The point for my purposes here is this non-reflective very rudimentary stage for the infant can often be pathologized. Life in the ‘Spectacle’ slips easily into pathology.

“The autistic-contiguous position is conceptualized { } not as a prepsychological (biological) phase of development in which the infant lives in a world cut off from dynamic relations with external objects; rather, it is conceived of as a^psychological organization in which sensory modes of generating experience are organized into defensive processes-in the-face’ of -perceived danger. Under circumstances of extreme, protracted anxiety, these defenses become hypertrophied and rigidified and come to constitute a pathologically autistic psychological structure. The development of a normal autistic contiguous organization can occur only within the unfolding relationship with the mother as environment and the mother as object (cf. Winnicott, 1963a).”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

A primary aspect to these ideas is the unconscious fear of not knowing. This is a core aspect of earliest experience. And one of the cornerstones (as Ogden puts it) of Freud’s entire theory: that one knows more than he or she thinks they know.

“The creation of psychological defenses can be understood as the organization of systematic misrecognitions (for example, it is not my anger that I fear, it is yours). Freud (1911), in his discussion of the Schreber case, explored the idea that psychosis involves the misrecognition of one’s internal state through its attribution to external objects.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

And here enters Lacan. For Lacan saw the ego as an *agency* of misrecognition. And this he theorized was situated in a highly complex unfolding of language, symbol, and the imaginary. Misrecognition is also something that relates to and helps elucidate art and culture and creativity. Lacan was building on Freud, but looking at what he felt Freud had neglected. The imaginary is, to be reductive, the direct lived experience of the individual. As language is learned the child learns that there is an interpretation — an interpreting tool, but language is not an invention of the child. It is inherited. It is history. It is society. It is civilization. But, paradoxically, as such it is inadequate to articulate lived experience. Language allows interpretation, and that opens a huge window on the world, but it also necessitates the losing of that key.

“We acquire human subjectivity at the cost of ‘Becoming profoundly alienated from our immediate sensory experience (which is now distorted an d misrepresented by the symbols we use to name it)’. In this way, we unwittingly engage in a form of self-deception, creating for ourselves the illusion that we express our experience in language , while we are in fact, according to Lacan, misnaming and becoming alienated from our experience.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

And here allow me a longer quote on a crucial part of this misrecognition process (sic):

“Joyce McDougall, an important contributor to the French psychoanalytic dialogue, has discussed her work with patients who seemed “totally unaware [and thus kept the analyst unaware ] of the nature of their affective reactions” (1984, p. 388). She understands this phenomenon as a dispersal of potential affect into a variety of addictive actions including drug abuse, compulsive sexuality, bulimia, “accidental” injuries, and interpersonal crises. Such addictive activities are understood as compulsive ways of defending against psychotic-level anxieties. As the defensive use of the affect-dispersing action becomes overtaxed, the individual engages in ‘psychosomatic-foreclosure and psychosomatic misinterpretation’ of events in the psychological sphere.Under such circumstances, what might have become a symbolically represented affective experience is relegated to the domain of the physiologic and becomes disconnected from the realm of conscious and unconscious mental representations.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

As the terror intensifies there is an attack on psychological processes connected to language, or to the creation of psychological space, and the rearrangement or modification of meanings, and eventually the destruction of meaning-giving ability in total. Ogden calls this ‘non-experience’. And here I think what I noted earlier about the cognitive losses in contemporary society, may well be overlapping with these acute further stage projections and displacement. So my question is, does AI and digital media, screens, et al; does this function as a form of non experience? Or rather, a milder version, a limited hangout version of ‘non experience’?

Winnicott introduced this idea of ‘potential space’ — a sort of state between reality and fantasy, a ‘false self’ that often can be carried throughout one’s life. And at the extreme end of this ‘potential space’ (and subjects can function quite reasonably as false selves) there is a ‘fear of breakdown’ (Winnicott): which “represents a form of failure to generate experience in which the patient is terrified of experiencing for the first time a catastrophe that has already occurred. “ (Ogden quoting Winnicott)

But how is it that language — that most profound invention of the human, that which separates us from Apes and snails and squirrels…..how is it that one of the essential truths of language is that it cannot describe or express human lived experience?

Now this sort of milder version of non-experience that I am suggesting, is cousin to a state Ogden discusses;

“In this psychological state, the individual has not foreclosed experience psychosomatically or failed to psychologically elaborate early experience, nor has he entered into a state of “nonexperience.” The patients discussed here have often attempted, but have not entirely succeeded in, warding off the anxiety of not knowing by means of addictive actions. The form of experience that I am interested in here is one in which the individual is sufficiently capable of generating a space in which to live such that he is capable of knowing that he does not know; he never entirely frees himself of this terror, much as he unconsciously attempts to lure himself and the analyst into mistaking his systematic misrecognitions for genuine self-experience.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

My experience (which was extensive) with opiates was that this was the perfect guardian of any encroaching form of non experience. The terror was always there. But the narcotic was a very — if always temporary — protector of the realm of ‘me’. And here there is a discussion to be had about repetition. And I think repetition is a highly misunderstood idea in psychoanalysis. For it is something that extends or bleeds into other psychic states, it is reproduced allegorically AND symbolically. We repeat repetition.

The mother/child relationship is a morass or swamp of misrecognition. The more germane truth here is that regardless of other variables, there is a structuralization of misrecognition that occurs. Hunger begins as a physiologic event, but is identified, or sometimes misidentified, by the mother and given a name, or a reliable response. The Mother responds, wanting (desiring) herself to be sensitive and attentive (or is just ignored as she texts to her friends).

“A mother-infant relationship is never directly observable in the analytic setting even when the patient is a mother describing current experience with her child. Instead, what we observe, and in part experience, in analysis is a reflection of internal object relations (our own and the patient’s, and the interplay between the two). Therefore, when I speak of the internal relationship between mother and infant, it must be borne in mind that the patient is both mother and infant. This is so because an internal object relationship consists of a relationship between two unconscious aspects of the patient, one identified with the self and the other identified with the object in the original relationship.”.
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

The internal mother and the internal infant-object often become confused, giving way to obsessive compulsive Mothering (rigid feeding schedules etc). The child learns, in a sense, to be confused. That ‘confused’ is normal and Mommy is a fucking nutter. This while still an infant.

“Such misnaming generates confusion- in the infant as well as a sense that hunger is an externally generated event. In the extreme this mode of defense against not knowing becomes a persecutory authoritarian substitution of the mother’s absolute knowledge for the infant’s potential to generate his own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. “
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

Ok, so now to fast forward to contemporary society, and the advent of AI, there is a programmed (by Mother) set of algorithms, that misidentify and misrecognize nearly everything. But are given identity in much the same way (what Ogden calls) ‘the psychologically minded’ mother does (who gives mis-readings of her child’s behavior). As Ogden notes “The effect of such interpretation is the creation in the child of a feeling that he has no idea how he *really feels*

This is, I would argue, very common today in the educated classes, where parents have a sort of basic acquaintance with ‘self help’ books or TED talks, or Oprah interviews. There is no real thinking involved in these ‘psychologically minded’ activities. All such things carry a tinge of ‘hobby’ about them. Which reminds of Adorno’s notes on ‘hobbies’.

“The question concerning free time, what people do with it and what opportunities could eventually evolve from it, must not be posed as an abstract generalisation. Incidentally the expression ‘free time’ or ‘spare time’ originated only recently – its precursor, the term ‘leisure’, denoted the privilege of an unconstrained, comfortable life-style, hence something qualitatively different and far more auspicious – and it indicates a specific difference, that of time which is neither free nor spare, which is occupied by work, and which moreover one could designate as heteronomous. Free time is shackled to its opposite.{ }. Neither in their work nor in their consciousness do people dispose of genuine freedom over themselves. Even those conciliatory sociologies which use the term ‘role’ as a key recognize this fact, in so far as the term itself, borrowed from the domain of the theatre, suggests that the existence foisted upon people by society is identical neither with people as they are in themselves nor with all that they could be. Of course one should not attempt to make a simple distinction between people as they are in themselves and their so-called social roles. These roles affect the innermost articulation of human characteristics, to such an extent that in the age of truly unparalleled social integration, it is hard to ascertain anything in human beings which is not functionally determined.”
Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia)

So the contemporary situation that I noted at the start of this post; the loss of deep thought, the loss of a certain kind of reflective contemplative organic reasoning is the result, obviously, of a whole litany of forces on a societal level. Today there is an unsettling return of fascist sensibility. But the entire globalist billionaire class, the whole transfer of wealth to the top one percent, and the various projects for control; from Covid lockdowns to the ‘Climate Crisis’, to the restructuring of Capital and the contraction of Capital (though its unclear exactly how this works)— all of this has running parallel to it the ascent of digital technology, the attention economy and habituation to screens, to smartphones and AI — this is reaching a state of acute madness. We see this madness in the EU leadership, and in how Western Imperialism (the only kind of imperialism) continues to manufacture wars for profit. And now the genocide in Gaza. The global surveillance state largely run through and mostly by Israel. And the reality that WW2 ended without the defeat of fascism. The Nazis went into a kind of hibernation, they were dispersed and given legitimate jobs in industry, academia, and the state. And now they have returned, barely disguised.

The question is just how enmeshed in the madness and loss of reason are that one percent fascist globalist billionaire class? And my answer is that they are near completely enmeshed. Its not as if Musk or Bezos or Bill Gates or Peter Thiel or whoever, is not as insane as anyone else. The sanest part of the planet is the Global South. Africa looms as the last frontier of sanity, in fact.

Now, Ogden notes that his patients who suffer from eating disorders are actually suffering from a disorder of recognition of desire. As he writes…“An important aspect of the experience of such a patient is his unconscious fear that he does not know what he desires.” I had a girlfriend once who said ‘I never really know if I am sick or not’. In a case study Ogden relates a patient who felt insubstantial and isolated.

“The patient’s sense of isolation in the relationship with me was gradually understood in terms of his internal relationship with a schizoid mother who “gave the appearance of being there until you realized that she was unable to think.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

Certainly part of the loss of thinking is connected to the loss of desire.

“Bion (1962) introduced the term “alpha-function” to refer to the as yet unknown set of mental functions which together transform raw “sense-impressions related to an emotional experience”, which he terms “beta-elements,” into “alpha-elements.” Beta-elements – unprocessed sense impressions – are unlinkable with one another and consequently cannot be utilized for thinking, dreaming or storage as memory. In contrast, alpha-elements are elements of experience that can be linked with one another in the process of conscious and unconscious thinking and dreaming (both while we are awake and asleep). For Bion: “Failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep. [Inasmuch as] alpha-function makes the sense impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious [thought] and dreamthought, the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up”. Hence the peculiar condition seen clinically when the psychotic patient behaves as if he were in precisely this state.”
Thomas Ogden (The Art of Psychoanalysis)

There is a phenomenon that occurs in children (one of my twins, who were very premature had such an experience). They are called ‘night terrors’ and are to be distinguished from nightmares. In the night terror the child wakes up, terrified, crying, shaking, and is unable to recognize the parent who has come to calm him (or her) and offer comfort. Eventually the child (usually not long) will return to sleep. Upon awakening the next morning the child has no memory of the event. Either conscious or unconscious.

“Both from a psychoanalytic point of view and from the point of view of brain wave activity, the person having a night terror does not wake up from the experience nor does he fall back to sleep after being calmed (Daws, 1989). A person having night terrors is unable to view them from the perspective of waking life.In Bion’s terms, night terrors are constituted of raw sense impressions related to emotional experience (beta-elements),which cannot be linked in the process of dreaming, thinking or storage as memory.The child having night terrors can only genuinely wake up when he is able to dream his undreamt dream.”
Thomas H. Ogden (The Art of Psychoanalysis)

Much of the pain associated with those seeking therapy or psychoanalytic help can be seen as metaphoric night-terrors. And the germane aspect of this is the idea of the ‘undreamt dream’. The dream is that which, in the traditional sense of these terms, maintains the structure of the mind; the conscious and the unconscious. One does wonder what those who deny the existence of an unconscious make of dreams. But for those who cannot dream either in sleep, or awake (in reveries) the result in short order is full blown psychosis. We all have to dream. And dreaming is creating links and associations of images and words and feelings. The dream work is there to allow some form of individuation. And it is here that the spectre of death appears. My friend the black doorway.

“The terror of death is ubiquitous and of such magnitude that a considerable portion of one’s life energy is consumed in the denial of death. Death transcendence is a major motif in human experience-from the most deeply personal internal phenomena, our defenses, our motivations, our dreams and nightmares, to the most public macro-societal structures, our monuments, theologies, ideologies, slumber ceremonies, embalmings, our stretch into space, indeed our entire way of life-our filling time, our addiction to diversions, our unfaltering belief in the myth of progress, our drive to “get ahead,” our yearning for lasting fame.”
Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)

Curating the lingering terrors of infancy and childhood means constructing ever more elaborate mental architecture. And lurking behind those early fears is death. Children have no fear of death, though. For the young child the fear is of loss, or abandonment, and of falling into some space (physical or mental, awake or asleep) that goes on forever. And, as noted above, it is the terror of deciphering the anxiety and uncertainty of caregivers, of touch and the learning to ‘know’ something about desire.

“The precategorical terror and struggle of infancy lurks beneath the organization of adult consciousness. It erupts when dread is evoked. It is a position to which individuals regress in times of overwhelming despair and threat. It is a matrix of experience carried into adulthood, which persists beneath defensive facades. Autistic-contiguous dread embodies the anomie despair of Kierkegaard’s crisis of faith, the fear and trembling, the sickness unto death. Autistic-contiguous anxiety is the foundation of the fear of unknowing…”
Jerry Piven (Death and Delusion)

There are two linger questions here; one is Capitalism, and its effects on mental health, and second the is how our inheritance of language, of culture, and symbol, have taken the paths they have taken. There is a third question but I feel its more part of the seecond, perhaps, and that is religion. The first, Capitalism, the evolution of class society, and in advanced capitalism the durability of exchange value, the sense of how propaganda shapes language and symbol, so our inheritance is also a political conscience building tool. Or conscience destroying tool, an instrument engaged in the over cathected myths of progress and science, narratives of authority and control. The slowly maturing child reaches the Oedipal phase but also is forced to leave school and work in the mines. Or in the shoe store, or the bakery. Like my parents. My mother left school at thirteen to work in her step father’s bakery in Detroit. This reads like a plot for Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. My mother could read and write, but barely. She was forever self conscious about this. But she was a beauty contest winner and staved off her terrors with alcohol. But then her entire family did the same. So the internal Mother (for my Mother) was both schizoid AND inherently absent. She was also a nasty little ferret faced drunk herself. She may have appeared present but was unable to think (see above). Cutting across all these case studies are the pressures of economic insecurity. Or race, or location. The sense of stigma due to location occurs very early in life. The role of ‘money’ has rarely been fully analysed beyond work like Norman O. Brown.

“ Dreams and neurotic symptoms show that the frustrations of reality cannot destroy the desires which are the essence of our being: the unconscious is the unsubdued and indestructible element in the human soul. The whole world may be against it, but still man holds fast to the deep-rooted, passionate striving for a positive fulfillment of happiness. The conscious self, on the other hand, which by refusing to admit a desire into consciousness institutes the process of repression, is, so to speak, the surface of ourselves mediating between our inner real being and external reality. The nucleus of the conscious self is that part of the mind or system in the mind which receives perceptions from the external world. This nucleus acquires a new dimension through the power of speech…”
Norman O. Brown (Life Against Death)

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
James Joyce (Ulysses)

Of course, if Capitalism is a significant force in distorting psychic development (or lack), it is important to remember that Capitalism didn’t fall out of the sky, God did not invent Capitalism. Man invented capitalism. Just as man invented language. And like language this exploitive system predicated on inequality is the inheritance of the child born into it. So this is not only a question of the deprivations of poverty, the poor nutrition and the, often, despair of the parents –this is also shaping desire and fine tuning the fear of the child.

“Psychoanalysis, in its sole survivors, is concerned with a different struggle, in the sole war without memoirs or memorials which humanity pretends never to have fought, the one it thinks it has always won in advance, quite simply because its very existence is a function of having survived it, of living and giving birth to itself as culture within human culture. This is a war that, at every instant, is waged in each of its offspring, who, projected, deformed, rejected, each for himself, in solitude and against death, have to undertake the long forced march that turns mammalian larvae into human children, that, subjects. That the biologist will not find his affair in that object is certain; this business is not biological, since it is completely dominated, from the outset, by the obligatory constraint of the human order that every mother, beneath her maternal “love” or hatred, starting with the rhythm of feeding and training, engraves in the little sexed human animal.That history, “sociology,” and anthropology will not find their affair in it is not at all astonishing, since they deal with society and thus with culture, that is, with what is no longer the little animal, who becomes human only for having traversed that infinite space that separates life from humanity, the biological from the historical, “nature” from “culture” That psychology should lose itself in that object is not at all strange, since it believes that it is dealing, in its “object,” with some human “nature” or “nonnature,” with the genesis of the being identified and registered under the very auspices of culture (of the human), the object of psychoanalysis is the absolute a priori question, whether to be born or not to be [le naitre on n’etre pas], the aleatory abyss of “the human itself in every child of man. { } It is enough to recognize that specificity, and thus the distinctness of the object underlying it, to recognize the radical right psychoanalysis has to the specificity of its concepts congruent with the specificity of its object: the unconscious its effects.”
Louis Althusser (Writings on Psychoanalysis)

And then Lacan. And Lacan saw “The discourse of the unconscious is structured like a language.”

And really, this was all (well not *all* but a large part of) what Wittgenstein was exploring. Its just there, like life.

“Thus the Oedipus complex is not a hidden “meaning,” which would be lacking only in consciousness or speech. The Oedipus complex is not a structure buried in the past that can always be restructured or transcended by “reactivating its meaning”; the Oedipus complex is the dramatic structure, the “theatrical machine,” imposed by the Law of Culture on every involuntary and constrained candidate to humanity, a structure containing in itself not only the possibility but the necessity of the concrete variations in which it exists, for every individual who manages to reach its threshold, live it, and survive it.”
Louis Althusser (Ibid)

The above paragraph is very good. Our unconscious is a theatre machine. Theatre is the laboratory for the unconscious. It features obsessive/compulsive acts, and it features repetitive acts, and there is a missed appointment of some sort. There is always an elsewhere (usually offstage)-. In another sense theatre *is* dreamwork. In ‘night terrors’ there is no dream. There are no symbols, no stories, and nothing changes before or after. The discourse of the unconscious is structured like language, but it means it is structured as theatre; a discourse is in some way a performance, a dialogue. Theatre precedes religion I believe. The priest class took the performance on stage and made it into a sermon. Later politicians and business leaders made it into a power point presentation. The priest or pastor stripped the trappings of terror, dried the wetness and female eros, and eschewed Dionysian excess with morality. Christianity promised a second season. Christianity said the show had been picked up. They cancelled the performance at Delphi. But never mind, year two is going to be great. The Super Ego was always a network executive in a sense.

“So while individuals experience the dread and compensate to different degrees, it is nevertheless a fundamental human experience and consequence of neoteny, of being born premature and helpless. It is a human achievement to imagine and fictionalize from panic and despair. When Bion writes of the dread of being stripped of meaning, he is asserting that bodily decay and integrity can become symbolized in acts of meaning. Human consciousness invents meanings and illusions as transitional objects which protect them from dying, and the loss of those meanings threatens with that same terror experienced in helpless infancy. As Freud wrote, religion protects human beings from helplessness and death. In this helplessness can be discerned the infant’s fear of injury and annihilation and the adult’s fear of being killed, of being insignificant, dying, and being food for worms. But the precategorical dread of leaking and rotting is yet a deeper stratum of anxiety, from which many defenses, illusions, and symptoms are constructed (Ogden, 1989). This is “the primitive dread of death that resides in the unconscious-a dread that is part of the fabric of being, that is formed early in life at a time before the development of precise conceptual formulation, a dread that is chilling, uncanny, and inchoate, a dread that exists prior to and outside of language and image (Yalom, 1980).”
Jerry Piven (Ibid)

William Barrett, in the rather forgotten Irrational Man, writes of this long transition from species infancy to adolescence. Piven quoted him …

“the whole impulse of philosophy for Plato arises from an ardent search for deliverance from the evils of the world and the curse of time …. We have to see Plato’s rationalism, not as a cool scientific project … but as a kind of passionately religious doctrine-a theory that promised man salvation from the things that he had feared from his earliest days, from death and time …. Plato believed in the eternal Ideas because he was afraid to die.”
William Barrett (Irrational Man)

The reason the fear of not knowing is so overwhelming is because it is really the fear of death. Maybe this is obvious. And if in the earliest stages of psychic development there comes a moment, or moments, of absence — this pre-linguistic position of the infant may absolutely need to feel ‘something’ — the Mother. And this helps stave off the sense of falling into ‘nothing’, into darkness, an abyss, and the experience, however simple and unarticulated, helps to create a stage, a space– a something outside of ourselves that is, of course, inside ourselves. Somewhere along this long path, this journey, there comes a deeper recognition of subjective and objective. And an awareness that all stages are inside. That our dreams, if we can remember them (and the amnesia of childhood is very significant here and maybe an entire post unto itself) are ‘doing’ something, the dreamwork is real work, and without it I wonder if we don’t intuit on some level that life would become one long Night Terror.

The fear of falling is always death. We do not climb into Death. We fall into it.

The idea of ‘dreams’ has come to be associated with idleness and louche character — oh he’s just a dreamer. Occasionally if the dream is about working hard and obediently, then the stigma is removed. But dreams are never idle, and dreams are factories for the labor of manufacturing our identity and society. Without dreams we are nobody. A final thought: when Althusser wrote that piece, in a sort of manic state himself, it was to argue to the French Communist Party that both Freud and Lacan were hugely important (they, or rather their discipline, had been officially denounced as *reactionary*). This continues through to today. There is a strange animosity to psychoanalysis on the left.

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