Spiritual Bureaucrats

“[He sa]id [to me], “John, wh[y] are you doubting and [fearful]? For
you are not a stranger [to this like]ness. Do not be faint[hearted]! I
am the one who dwells with [you (pl.) always. I am the [Father.] I
am the Mother. [I] am [the Son. I am the one who exists for ever,
undefil[ed and un]mixed.
N[ow I have come] to instruct you [about what] exists and what
[has come] into being and what mu[st] come into being, so that you
will [understand] the things which are invisible a[nd those which] are
visible, and to t[each you] about the perfe[ct Human”
Apocryphon of John (The Berlin Codex, Nag Hammadi II)

“Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. “
Sigmund Freud ( letter to his fiancée, ‘Letters of Sigmund Freud’)

“We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten.”
Martin Prechtel (Secrets of the Talking Jaguar)

“Having” and “being” in children. Children like expressing an object-relation by an identification: “I am the object.” “Having” is the later of the two; after loss of the object it relapses into “being”. Example: the breast. “The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.” Only later: “I have it”—that is, “I am not it”.’”
Sigmund Freud ( Some elementary lessons in psycho-analysis)

“The way that I feel
is so heavenly, too good to be real.
When you’re next to me I’m so afraid
that I’m fast asleep so don’t wake me up,
let me dream if I’m dreaming.”
Neil Sedaka (I Must Be Dreaming)

Two things I wanted to return to, well, sort of ‘return to’. One is a remark made on the podcast about some in the media who reacted with exaggerated emotion to the Taylor Swift engagement announcement. And this idea of contemporary infantilism. The second, an unrelated topic, is about quantum theory again.

I still feel that when physicists create the math for various studies, everything is fine, in the sense that the math works (I take their word for that). But the problem is more to do with how these studies are then written about and talked about. It is clearly very difficult to talk about quantum theory. It is less paradoxical to just do the math. The paradox is the story applied to the math.

Take the word ‘possibility’. A word one hears a lot in the various lay science books on quantum theory. ‘Probability’ is another such word. One hears that and, at least I, wonder what it actually means. We are talking about ‘things’ that cannot be visualized. And that raises issues with the illustrations (often childlike, speaking of that subject) that accompany lay introductions to quantum physics. But probabilities means odds. We have odds or statistical percentages that the particle has an up spin or a down spin. Like betting in Vegas. Except not like betting in Vegas. There is a hubris to the language of physics (the non math).

Now the idea of anyone actually being excited by the announcement of Taylor Swifts engagement (to American football player Travis Kelce) is worth pausing for a moment to consider. Their joint instagram account had thirteen million ‘likes’. That’s most of Los Angeles if we think numbers.

It is interesting that the anti-Freud sentiments today, throughout western culture, are often based on Freud’s lack of scientific rigour. That these theories of the unconscious cannot be measured or weighed. Hence there is something ‘soft’ about psychoanalysis (maybe even lacking in masculinity). And yet, the ‘most scientific’ area today, the best funded (after computer sciences) is quantum theory, in which literally NOTHING can really be measured on weighed. (only, you know, implied….with probabilities). Why that’s downright squishy soft.

Back in 1988, in Quebec, a doctor and professor appeared before a commission on mental health. Hubert Wallot, who taught at the University of Quebec, said….

“During their childhood and adolescence, men are more likely [than women] to suffer from slow mental development, a short attention span due to “hyperactivity,” behavioral problems, “hyperanxiety,” schizoid difficulties, transient or chronic spasms, stuttering, functional enuresis and encopresis [involuntary urination and defecation], sleepwalking and nightmares, autism, as well as persistent and specific developmental problems such as dyslexia. As adults, men make up a significant percentage of those who present personality disorders related to paranoia and compulsive or antisocial behavior (as evidenced by the large number of them in prisons). Men also far outnumber women in the frequency of transexuality and sexual perversions.”
Hubert Wallot (“Mental Health: Men, the Forgotten Group, L’Actualité médicale, 11 May 1988)

As Auden said of Freud “To us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion”. Here we can say the climate of opinion — of society — has changed.

“It began slowly to dawn on me that my dream was a play or a small portion of a larger play, a narrative conceived by a cunning playwright, produced by a dramatic producer, directed by a director who had a sense of timing and of the uncanny and the dramatic moment, and staged by a scenic designer who could offset the narrative of the dream with a setting that highlighted it to the maximum intensity of feeling.1 The casting director also had a flair for the medieval and the romantic nature of theatricality.”
James S. Grotstein (Who is the Dreamer, Who Dreams the Dream?)

Dreams are therapy in play form. Dramatic narrative form.

“Dreams are dramatic narrations written, directed, and produced by a composite dreamer who is unknown to us, who employs narrative as the instrument of phantasy and myth and uses neurophysiological perception—namely, visualization—to organize the chaotic, fragmented accretions of mental pain left over as residues of yet one more day of existence. What we commonly call a dream is the visual transformation of a never-ending pageant of events in the internal world. { } There is a dream audience who anticipates the dream and requisitions it from the dream producer in order to recognize its own problems and resonate with its own hostaged self—a self experienced as having become lost, like Sleeping Beauty waiting to be awakened by the Prince Charming dream, which is forged in the smithy of dream work by the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream. Human beings are only pinpoints on the vast surface of cosmic existence and are blessed (or doomed) never to know their true dreamer. It is as if the boundaries of the body-self do not begin to describe, to circumscribe, or to contain the boundaries of the sense of the Ineffable Subject of Being, or, as I would now more properly like to designate it, the sense of I-ness, which seeks its reflection in its selfness. Ultimately, the dream issues from the ineffable and inscrutable O, Bion’s (1965, 1970) term for Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality; coheres into dream language; and vanishes once more back into O’s navel. In Plato’s cave, the subjects cannot look behind themselves where the fire illuminates the Eternal Forms.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

This is all in keeping with much that I have written on theatre. Most writers, good writers anyway, know that the author of their best work is a stranger to them. Often this fact is hard to talk about. Grotstein notes that all dreams are Passion Plays. And this is, I sense, correct. When we did outdoor plays at Padua Hills, in the San Gabrial foothills near L.A., we all sensed that all the plays were Passion Plays. That is what had been set in motion there.

Sticking with Grotstein a bit longer (and Bion in this case)…

“The Dreamer Who Understands the Dream is the audience that verifies the passion of the dreamer. In addition to being the requisitioner of the dream, it is also the barrier that contains the dream. It functions as a porous mirror to reflect the passions of the dreamer but also to be influenced by them, much like a mother’s relationship to a child. { } The audience is the background that compels the foreground hypothesis to remain in the foreground until it has become sufficiently defined, at which time authentication, correlation, and self-publication are established (Bion, 1970, 1992). The rituals and rites of passage in primitive societies, the requisite 10-man composition for a Jewish religious congregation, the role of a legislature with a president or monarch are everyday vestiges and derivatives of this powerful authenticating function. { } In other words the Dreamer who dreams the dream is the Ineffable Subject of being who, as the registrar of pain, discontent, or sense of endangerment, sends outcries as projected imagistic messages into the containing Dreamer Who Understands the Dream, whose “reverie,” like that of the mother of an infant, catches the torment and transforms it into meaning. The internalized mother container and her reverie become the Dreamer Who Understands the Dream.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

This is close to Gnosticism, and to quantum paradox. And Grotstein adds “It is my impression that Bion’s concept of maternal reverie includes the maternal capacity to dream or mythify her child’s projections, not just handle them realistically. The mother’s ability to put the projected pain to sleep is a testimony to her capacity to dream for the infant.” This is a profound insight, really. The question often arises as to why we cannot remember early childhood. Freud had no explanation for childhood amnesia. The Mother dreams FOR the infant. This is also how Mayan tribes and Amazonian rain forest tribes view motherhood.

“Typically a shaman would find an object, previously unknown to him, exactly like one seen in a dream. Maybe a song or prayer would come back to him from a forgotten dream upon cradling this object in his hands. These objects are said to speak, because it is through them that shamans retain the special mysterious language of their power in the dreams. Such found objects become the throne or client for one’s spirit. Ones power would then have an actual physical place to sit, as the Tzutujil say. Spirits are given a home, just like us, the people. The spirits must have a home, or they become sad orphans or renegades. A person whose spirit has no home becomes depressed or a criminal.”
Martin Prechtel (Ibid)

The Mayan shamanistic learning is panpsychism in essence. Most indigenous peoples believe some form of panpsychism. The problem for modern science is the need to apply ‘scientific method’ to such beliefs. To reproduce the experiment. But while such science has done wondrous things and accomplished much, it is not suited to all learning. And clearly quantum mechanics is exploring a form of shamanistic reality. Quantum theories, such as retroactive causality is magic of some form. But back to the Mother dreaming for the infant.

“I have suggested that the ineffable subject is the unconscious sensor (not censor) of the dreamer’s discontent. What is the role of the former’s more conscious colleague, the phenomenal subject? During sleep, the latter participates in sleep as well, whereas the ineffable subject never sleeps. It may be that the ineffable subject originates the dream to protect the phenomenal subject, the guardian of the day. This line of thought would be in accordance with Freud’s (1900) theory that the purpose of the dream is to protect sleep. During wakefulness, the phenomenal subject becomes the first-line sensor, who detects danger from outside and relays it to the ineffable subject. Ultimately, the Dreamer Who Understands the Dream can be seen as an arcane representation of the internalized maternal container, which “collects” the narrative urgency and modifies the story until dream solution and resolution are possible.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

Grostein, who died in 2015 in Los Angeles, where he practised, was deeply tied to the theatrical metaphor in exploring dreams. Its a very Freudian construct, finally, but it is premised on the idea of internal censors (working with sensors) who’s psychic existence must be accepted — that dreams are a complex dialectical process of censorship and repression, and what amounts to limited hang outs when the dreamer awakes.

But this idea of internal dream mediators, forms of semi-autonomous dreamworkers, is, if taken to its logical conclusion, reveals a strange reality. And one that echos Gnosticism and various shamanistic practices. But it also helps explain the disturbing cul de sacs of contemporary physics. In fact this becomes a referendum on the technologies of the unseen.

The following paragraph is almost a narrative of the 20th century, in addition to its other meanings. We could add (per last blog post) the sixties and Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the Beats, but also Kafka and psychoanalysis, the legatees of turn of the century Vienna. And Einstein. And Black Mask crime fiction, from Jim Thompson to David Goodis to Cornell Woolrich, to various other tributaries of American pulp fiction, from John Franklin Bardin to James Cain, to Charles Willeford. These were the cultural forces that shaped dreams. The voices that shaped dreams, too.

“The strange task that ensorcelled victims must perform involves an estranged and projected element of their life—on a return trajectory. In the meantime, these hapless victims believe themselves to be impaled on a strange, inexhaustible, and eerie drama. They feel compelled to play it out, though it has no personal meaning for them except for the unconscious guilt that compels them to undertake the journey. It is Kafkaesque. In analysis, as these victims seek to grow, they find themselves confronted, I believe, by a double, a separate personality with a separate agenda that the patients themselves created and gave life to every time they turned their back on their feelings. These doubles seem to be separate human entities who have to be murdered if the patients are to make progress. In classical literature this murder took the form of Orestes’ murder of Clytemnestra and Cain’s killing of Abel. Perhaps all plots involving parricide belong in part to this theme. It may demonstrate the “other side” of the Oedipus complex. Murder mysteries may also fall into this category.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

It is worth another aside, of sorts here, and that is that the profound influence of pulp crime fiction (and noir film) cannot be overstated. There is a great article by Keith Alan Deutsch, on the history of Black Mask, and editor Joseph Shaw talking with author Charles Brandon. “I remember him showing me a couple of lines in a manuscript of Raymond Chandler’s, something such as, ‘I looked into the fire and smoked a cigarette. Then I went to bed.’ This was the key line of the story, Shaw said. In those few minutes watching the fire the protagonist thought the problem through and reached his tough decision. You weren’t told that but you knew it. The line was clean, the effect was subtle but strong.”
(Keith Alan Deutsch “Black Mask Magazine, Steve Fisher, and The Noir Revolution”)

This is remarkably sharp analysis. Smoked a cigarette and went to bed. THAT is the dream voice of mid century America. In fact that was the dream voice that was carried on through Robert Stone and Kesey. And even Pynchon. And in the Nepo Baby infantilism of today’s Hollywood, it is a voice that is entirely gone. Extinct.

(footnote, Bruce ‘Lucky’ Humberstone was a client of my Mom when she was making book out of Bordner’s bar in Hollywood..but that’s another story for another time). { second aside here….Bordners is still there and used in countless Nepo Baby films and crime TV shows, including recently Bosch}.

And one of the failures of writers like Richard Ford, and Jim Harrison (both of whom wrote some excellent stuff) was they forgot what they were writing about. They forgot who they were. Including Cormac McCarthy, too. They tried to be Virginia Woolf at the end of their lives and that resulted in some very weak output. Surprising, since McCarthy was close to something deeply almost uncannily reverent about Nature; a voice of oneiric majesty.

The film noir of the late thirties and all through the forties (and a few inching into the fifties) was informed directly by German/Jewish emigre directors and writers. Mostly directors, who learned from UFA studios in Germany and the expressionistic nightmares from that era. Those nightmares in turn were unconscious (or some, conscious) expressions of the terror of the coming fascist revolution. And this is one of the mistakes most critics and film school professors make about Noir film, and that is to not recognize it is essentially communist sympathetic and anti capitalist. It is the narrative voice of anti-authoritarian and anti Puritan America. What changed by the 70s (after an interruption in the sixties) was to reverse that. Suddenly you had Eastwood and Jack Webb. And you end up with Tarantino, straight from Tel Aviv.

One thing Grotstein is perhaps wrong about is that its not just ‘all plots involving parracide’, its quite possibly ‘all plots’ period. Since plots themselves are little parracides. And this is the dark message of mimesis and of Freud. The quantum revolution did not come outside of history. It came from men in Europe, from Jews and Danes and Italians. It was the generation, largely, after Vienna. And it was part of the creation of mass weapons of destruction.

“I believe that we undergo a sequence of caesuras in which we experience a sense of separation from the object from whom we emerge, that is, from the “background presence, or subject, of primary identification.” Freud (1909) hinted at this entity in his paper on family romances, in which he called attention to the child’s distinction between the remote and romantic parent and the parent at hand, who is more like the caretaker in the gatehouse of the estate. I see human infants as experiencing themselves as incompletely separated from a mythical object behind them, their background presence, their object of tradition, which rears them and sends them forth.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

Everything in the dreamwork, however it is tweezed apart, suggests the Gnostics or Kabbalah, and some version of the ‘God within’. And this Kabbalistic or Gnostic belief in some kind of inner divinity is also what Shamanistic cultures suggest, albeit often indirectly. And it is close to the implications of Quantum theory, or some quantum theory, and it is sympathetic to panpsychism. Quantum theory keeps finding answers to unasked questions, but it also keeps creating math that, if correct, would insist on something not unlike Mayan or Amazonian or early Indian or Persian beliefs.

“In the sense that the Background Presence is unknowable, it constitutes the “Other,” our “alter ego” or “second self.” Steele (1979) stated, in effect, that our hermeneutic relationship to ourselves and to objects is basically dyadic insofar as it is both subjective and objective simultaneously. True empathy is the discovery that our object is also a subject.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

Kafka and Dostoyevski. The double. And here enters a discussion of aesthetics.

“The actual arena of transcendence in artworks is the nexus of their elements. By straining toward, as well as adapting to, this nexus, they go beyond the appearance that they are, though this transcendence may be unreal. Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual. Their transcendence is their eloquence, their script, but it is a script without meaning or, more precisely, a script with broken or veiled meaning. Although this transcendence is subjectively mediated, it is manifested objectively, yet all the more desultorily. Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality of being art. Equally, however, art betrays transcendence when it seeks to produce it as an effect. “
Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)

If what Grotstein calls ‘background presence’ is a version of ‘other’, then our dreamworkers are inextricably bound up with all our mimetic processes. One of the problems with the whole space/time new ageism associated with quantum reality is, as noted before,. ‘we never meet anyone getting younger’. And at the end of this is death. Our bodies get weak, old, withered and frail and then we die. Adorno is correct, of course, that one cannot try to create the effect of ‘spirituality’, or transcendence’. Art only gets there by forgetting about it. Hilma Af Klint was not really making art, she was ‘doing therapy’ of a sort. Aesthetic therapy, but still not classical art creation. She inadvertently developed an unsettling vision for a kind of Nature.

“…just as those paintings fail in which the geometrical patterns to which they are reducible remain factually what they are…”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

Well, yes, its why David Lynch sucked so bad. Creating ‘affects’ is not art. Af Klint makes geometrical patterns as part of a medical vision, or a kind of meditation. Much like certain Asian arts. Much like Kenneth Noland, who is actually the next step past Taoist prayer wheels. Or it is Buddhist. Here, says Noland, is my wheel that cannot turn. I repeat again that one of the great critical failings of contemporary arts criticism is to not see the deeper dimensions of much colour field or minimalist painting. It most certainly is not about the surface. The dream narrators for American lives also includes Wallace Stevens and Robert Bly, and Robert Lowell. And this raises another relevant sidebar: for many raised with screen tech, with TV and internet, the narration is AI, and before that the voice of your favorite advert. I often wonder at the role of important political personalities; Reagan for one, who was clearly inarticulate but yet dubbed ‘the great communicator’. For thirteen million people Taylor Swift is, on some level, narrating their dreams (a terrifying thought). But I suspect that on a deeper level, unconscious level (after all), the narration is still Homer or Nietzsche. Or Cotton Mather.

“Isakower (1938) and Lewin (1950) said the mother’s breast is the screen on which the dream is projected, and Spitz (1965) offered the notion that mother’s face forms the dream screen. These three noted that the dream is a narrative action that needs a surface for proper cinematographic projection and perception. If mother’s breast or face is the screen for the projected dream narrative, what is the theater? I suggest that the theater constituting the ultimate containment of the dream narrative, by night as well as by day, and the ultimate author of its framework, is the Background Presence of Primary Identification.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

And this takes us back to American infantilism. The paternal deficit. And the maternal deficit. As I never seem to tire of saying, all stories are crime stories, all stories are about homesickness, and all stories are about exile. The discovery of aesthetic expression in early man had to be intimately connected to dreams. How early and pre linguistic man dreamed is another entire topic. But that inner theatre screen on which is projected our private condensed story line was likely once a shadow puppet theatre of the mind. What Grotstein misses is the uncanny aspect of story — really of allegory. And the nature of performance. Stanislavski is mentioned but without the necessary questions. Why are some performances so riviting? I can remember seeing Brando on screen at the age of ten. I could not take my eyes off him. Why? I cannot articulate the reason but it was hypnotic. And this is for a film, (One Eyed Jacks) that I could not fully follow. (later I came to love that film). But I knew I should pay attention. One answer is that this kind of preternatural presence, attention, focus — as found in actors, like Brando, is not really communicating or performing per se. Brando was ‘being’. He was being ‘Brando’. This suggests the role of ritual altogether. In the beginning was the actor on a stage. The ritual cannot reproduce the profundity of the first stage appearance. It must be repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

In the contemporary world, firstly, that kind of attention is tantamount to nonexistent. But far worse than that is the trivial interloper. The bad actor (interesting how that term has evolved). The ‘bad actor’ is stealing from his culture. That is why he is far worse than no actor. The thief of authenticity. The thief of allegory. The voice of self deprecation. The voice of faux self criticism. It is very telling that attacks on social media, personal attacks, are often couched in accusations of elitism. This is one voice of the cultural and metaphysical thief. Accusing others of elitism is a way to admit one’s own inability to be elite.

A short digression.

The oldest recorded dream is that of King Dumuzi, from approximately 3100BC. Dumuzi was King of Mesopotamia.

“A dream! My sister, listen to my dream: Rushes are torn out for me; rushes keep growing for me. A single growing reed shakes its head for me. A twin reed, one is removed from me. Tall trees in the forest are uprooted by themselves for me. Water is poured over my pure hearth. The bottom of my pure churn drops away. My pure drinking cup is torn down from the peg where it hung. My shepherd’s crook has disappeared from me. An eagle seizes a lamb from the sheepfold. A falcon catches a sparrow on the reed fence. My goats drag their lapis lazuli beards in the dust for me. My male sheep scratch the earth with thick legs for me. The churn lies on its side, no milk is poured. The cup lies on its side; Dumuzi lives no more. The sheepfold is given to the winds.”
Bendt Alster (Mesopotamia: Copenhagen studies in Assyriology Vol. 1)

And more interestingly there is the first dream analysis of this dream (which was apparently well known as over sixty copies exist). The interpretation of the dream is by Dumuzi’s sister Geshtin-anna.

“The rushes which keep growing thick about you, are your demons, who will rise against you and ambush you. The single growing reed shaking its head for you is your mother who bore you; she will shake her head for you. The twin reed, from which one is removed from you, is I and you; one will be taken away from you. The tall trees in the forest being uprooted by themselves for you are the galla; they will descend on you in the sheepfold. When the water is poured in your pure hearth, the sheepfold will become a house of silence. When the bottom of your pure churn is removed from you, you will be held by the galla in his hand. When your drinking cup falls from its peg, you will fall down from the knees of the mother who bore you. When your shepherd’s crook disappears, the little galla will set fire to it. The eagle who seizes a lamb in the sheepfold is the galla who will smite your cheek. The falcon who catches a sparrow in the reed fence is the big galla who will climb the fence against you. That the churns are lying, no milk is poured; the drinking cup, Dumuzi is no more; that the sheepfold is given to the wind, means your hands will be bound in handcuffs, your arms will be bound in fetters. That your goats drag their lapis beards in the dust for you means, my hair will swirl around in heaven for you. That your male sheep scratch the earth with thick feet means, I will tear at my cheeks with my fingernails for you.”
Bendt Alster (Ibid)

Now allow me to past together a few more remarks from Grotstein here:

“The Assyrians apparently considered dreams to be a secret language between the gods. In the times of Assurbanipal and Tiglath Pileser III, for instance, Assyrian royal inscriptions were written in places inaccessible to the human eye. There was sculpturing in front, but behind the sculpturing were hidden, secret inscriptions. These inscriptions were on clay cylinders inside the walls of buildings. “They were made for the gods. Dreams were the messages of gods to gods”…{ } When we analyze a dream, we get the patient’s associations, day residues, and memories, and we use the latent and manifest dream associations to reconstruct a possibility of inner thinking, an approximation by analogy, if you will. The actual meaning of the dream is unknowable, because it contains, at the least, all the possible associations forever backward and forever forward in time. The dream is total language beyond comprehension. Comprehension itself is an embarrassment to the near-perfection of the dream. In addition, the perfection and mystery of the dream are penetrated in another way, in the very presentation of the dream itself. { } I have been using the dream as a specific instance of a consciousness or an awareness within us that is greater than what we have hitherto called consciousness of self. This awareness belongs to a preternatural self. The dream is a vent in the shield that separates our two worlds, the outer world of conscious, asymmetrical experience and the inner world of infinite symmetry and inner cosmic vastness.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

It is telling that dreams almost always (always!) demand interpretation. They are mysteries. This seems hugely significant. Passion plays but also mystery plays. I wrote last time how quantum theory was a kind of mystery (closed box mystery, which was only partly a joke).

Dreams exist in quantum reality.

“Matte-Blanco (1981) said of the narcissism myth that, when Narcissus looked into the River Styx, he saw his unconscious self, his symmetrical twin. Matte-Blanco (1975, 1988) believes that a conscious mind lives in the third dimension of asymmetry, asymmetry being the characteristic of development in real life; symmetry in the mathematical sense characterizes the unconscious and seems to occupy dimensions approaching the infinite. ”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

“The unconscious domain, which Freud formulated, is accessible through the world of our dreams and of childhood thinking. It is a world in which the ordinary concepts of cause and effect, time, and space, to mention but a few of its characteristics, are turned on their head. In our dreams, when being highly emotional, or as children, we think what is unthinkable or nonsensical in other waking or conscious life. Inconvenient as it may be, the relationship between the events and experiences of psychic reality and the material world is not that of ordinary science and logic. “
Eric Rayner and David Tuckett (Introduction to Matte-Blanco’s Thinking, Feeling, and Being)

Matte-Blanco was a psychoanalyst and a mathematician. He was Chilean. And he anticipated the links between the unconscious and quantum theory. Had he lived longer (he died in 1995 at the age of 86) this connection would probably have become more pronounced.

“In Matte-Blanco’s view neither psychoanalysts nor others that use it have really pursued Freud’s fundamental discovery about the unconscious and its logic. Instead, attention has been directed too exclusively to debating or modifying Freud’s ‘strange’ ideas about sexuality, the death instinct, or similar subjects. Or it has gone into formulating psychoanalysis in ways which tame the revolutionary characteristics of the Freudian unconscious. Many analysts have not taken seriously enough the idea that the mind works within a framework of timelessness and spacelessness. Nor have they investigated the fundamental properties which permit the processes of condensation, displacement, projection, introjection, and so on.”
Eric Rayner & David Tuckett (Ibid)

The Freudian unconscious allows of no contradiction, there is no negation, also. The Freudian unconscious is without absolute certainty. And this has been so disturbing that most psychoanalysts — especially in the U.S. — decided the focus should be on the conscious mind, not the unconscious, and by degree, over half a century, the focus shifted almost entirely to the conscious mind. The unconscious was too unruly and inherently anarchic. Much as quantum mechanics is too anarchic.

“The way in which dreams treat the category of the contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded…. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.”
Sigmund Freud (Interpretation of Dreams)

One can be both happy to be alive in a dream, while also feeling sadness at one’s death. One can do this at the same time, in the same dream moment. I think these paradoxes of dream logic (or non logic) are much like quantum reality. The particle is both there and here, or both there and not there. In some strangely Gnostic like sense the unconscious dream world is a pathway to understanding quantum theory.

“If he feels his chief to be a dangerous father it is because he considers both to have the same characteristic, dangerousness. If we express this in terms of symbolic logic we may say that in his unconscious he treats both as elements of a class; it may also happen that he treats one as an element of another class, but in this case both classes are always subclasses of a more general class. For example, a mother who feeds belongs, let us say, to the class of women who feed materially; a professor who teaches belongs to the class who feeds mentally. When, on account of a process of displacement, an individual feels the professor as a mother who feeds he is, first of all, treating both classes as subclasses of a more general class, that of those who feed, either materially or mentally.”
Ignacio Matte-Blanco ( The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-Logic)

In the Freudian unconscious displacement and condensation are the most radical concepts. They are intimately related, as well. They form the basis of all the most radical elements in dreams. Matte-Blanco has an exhaustive deconstruction of stratum (his term) in the unconscious. The point though is that the last, and deepest stratum (the fifth in his blueprint) one arrives at pure indivisibility. This is close (as is his fourth stratum) to how schizophrenics experience the world, but it is a realm where everything is experienced as everything else. Or rather, it CAN be experienced as everything else.

“An experiencing individual knows, say, a specific visible mother, Mrs Rosa Torres. Behind and inside her the individual also recognizes a number of other mothers, such as his own mother and many other mother-images which have played a role in his life; and there also is the general idea, motherhood. These perspectives on Mrs Torres—that is, the individual’s feelings about her—are possible while maintaining total respect for the rules of bivalent logic. In spite of the fact that she is seen from the perspective of both the second stratum (as other mothers) and the third stratum (as motherhood), there is no visible manifestation of bi-logic. In the midst of it the individual Mrs Torres remains consciously and socially perceived as an individual. Moreover, at deeper and deeper strata Mrs Rosa Torres, the individual, together with other mothers and motherhood, is also experienced as fatherhood, everyone, inanimate objects, and so on.”
Eric Rayner & David Tuckett (Ibid)

There is a place where mimesis overlaps with the unconscious in this scheme. And that has rather substantial implications. It is also, now, a place where early Gnostic thought, even early Islamic and Pre-Socratic thought overlap. But more importantly, perhaps, this is the seat of allegory. The unconscious is allegorical. It is an infinite allegorical dream. And every dream, as noted above, demands interpretation, is created to be interpreted, and is hence a mystery. And here I sense the topic of hierarchy, of an ‘elect’ or ‘chosen’ (Many are called but few are chosen, as Jesus said) and a sense in all of these spiritual practices that there is an inability to escape this idea of a priest, or those who with ‘insider’ information — this construct is an archetype of sorts. Mystery (and here we might well also discuss the uncanny) demands interpretation but that means an interpreter. The initiated, those invested in the secrets, are always somehow disciples, too. All of these disciplines foster practitioners of the unconscious — in the timeless theatre of mind lurks the spiritual bureaucrat. And this means the tendency toward systemization is the tendency of science, but it is also the tendency of authority. It is the breaking of a wild horse, the domestication of cattle and fowls, the creation of many things, too, that are hard to see negatively (irrigation systems, sanitation planning, etc). The domination of self is the default position for the priest class of any religion.

There is a lot more to say, hopefully next post. I want to conclude with just an addendum of sorts on the puer aeternus, and the corresponding Puella Aeterna. It is interesting that Maria Louise von Franz in her analysis of The Little Prince, says the Puer Aeteunus is often homosexual, fixed on his mother, but also “The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the singular human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it maybe impossible to slip out again…{ }At the same time, there is a highly symbolic fascination for dangerous sports—particularly flying and mountaineering—so as to get as high as possible, the symbolism being to get away from reality, from earth, from ordinary life. If this type of complex is very pronounced, many such men die young in airplane crashes and mountaineering accidents. “
(The Problem of Puer Aeternus)

Peter Pan is then a suitable stand in.

It is hard not to think of Peter Thiel and Sam Altman and Eliot Karp — (of course current commentaries back away from the homosexual aspect. Which is of course among the most interesting parts of this analysis, and not homophobic to say so). Not incidentally all three of the above are ardent Zionists. But I have noted before this fascination with fascism and uniforms in gay porn and iconography. For women, it is very complex and beyond the scope of this post to dig into fully, but much of what needs unpacking is the coerced role playing of ‘Kore’, Puella, the numinous anima-mundi, the eternal daughter. And by extension I think this is linked to the Taylor Swift cult. And it is linked with homesickness. Our society keeps destroying our homes. Grotstein has a chapter devoted to the myth of the Labyrinth. And I feel that this is particularly important today. (I will write more on this next post). But in this chapter Grotstein suggests that indeed, all narratives involve a search for ‘home’.

“Being “trapped in the labyrinth” is a potential danger for all of us, but it also seems to define a class of patients—”orphans of the Real” (Grotstein, 1995b, 1999a)—characterized by their lack of vitality or aliveness, preoccupation with safety over pleasure and adventure, withdrawal and alienation, preoccupation with inner reality, and a marked sense of “self-consciousness,” which, in turn, is characterized by a sense of disembodiment and depersonalization, if not outright derealization. These patients seem to have undergone a spiritual death, often unobserved and unmourned.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

Grotstein then relates a particular case study:

“This patient’s history was suggestive of the Asperger syndrome. He belongs to Alcoholics Anonymous but has never drunk alcohol. He has never had sex; he professed to be, if anything, homosexual, but had never committed himself in that regard. A developing but sexually unconsummated relationship with an attractive young actress precipitated a dream in which this woman provoked him into throwing her onto the bed. He began to have sex and hated her for provoking what he felt was his demonic side, of which he was terrified. He realized, however, that this aspect of himself was associated with his sexuality. In his associations, he spoke of his fear of my labyrinthine, demonic, aggressive, lying, mendacious self, the monster within me who deceives, cheats, steals, and imitates others.

‘My childhood was so awful. My mother and father hated each other, and both hated me. I could never be a self around them. I eventually learned that I didn’t have to be myself if I could be someone else. It was the only path through the maze. Perseus—with the three one-eyed women—pretended to be someone else, as did Jacob and Ulysses. Becoming another person, putting on someone else’s identity was the way to survive. If I had continued to be me, I’d have suicided, so I suicided partially so as to go on living. I guess I’m terrified of sex because it means entering the labyrinth and owning my demonic self’.

This patient’s dream demonstrated another feature of the mythic, voyeuristic journey into mother’s claustrum, that of the tropism to return to one’s “first home.” We may term this the “homing instinct,” and it may be a part-instinct within the epistemophilic instinct.”
James S. Grotstein (Ibid)

But it is more than that. The Labyrinth was created, somewhat mysteriously, by Daedelus, interestingly as a way to hide away the Minotaur. The monster was a shameful secret for the royal family (the ruling class). The Labyrinth is the unconscious, a endless and infinite maze at the end of which is the Minotaur, a chimeric half man/ half beast castrating machine (he feeds only on human flesh). The point is only that the Labyrinth must be ‘solved’. The myth of the Minotaur was the illicit offspring of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos. After Minos had prayed to Poseidon, asking for a magnificent white Bull (the white bull theme is part of the long history of Minos and his forebears). When Poseidon granted his prayer the King was so entranced with the beauty and magnificence of the White Bull he decided to keep it and not sacrifice it as was expected. Poseidon was not fooled and so caused Pasiphaë to become sexually intoxicated with this bull and she had Daedelus create a hollow wooden cow she could hide in and placed it out in the fields. The White Bull mounted it and 9 months later the Minotaur was born. Minos tasked Daedelus to create the maze, where the King could, he reasoned, safely hide the family secret. Pasiphaë crawling ‘inside’ the hollow cow is itself an interesting symbol. And the grotesque secret monster of the ‘royal’ family is a trope that is repeated throughout western literature.

I wrote a bit about the mythology of the bull back in 2020. https://john-steppling.com/2020/06/labyrinth/

Theseus (with help from the princess Ariadne) killed the Minotaur and ended the story. Still, the maze, in whose center there is a devouring monster (though half man) is the repository of unconscious instincts, which human reason ‘solves’ (in this case by using a ball of string to help Theseus find his way out). The symbol of the bull casts a very long and dark shadow on western civilization.

The death of Manolete, perhaps the most profound of matadors from the golden age, is itself a tragedy of some enormity. And perhaps a candidate moment marking the end of the tragic. Manolete’s death, in the working class mining town of Linares, in 1947, echoes with allegorical details. Manolete was the purest of pure bullfighters. The Zapata of the corrida, whose style was something approaching sublimity. No steps between passes. Never hurried. Never.

Paco Aguado wrote: “But the gaunt figure of Manolete, like that of a Quixote dressed in lights, transcended beyond bullfighting , perhaps because of the identification of a starving majority resigned to ration cards and who each morning faced with similar fortitude the prolonged shortages and needs of years of dark misery. Before the bull, in that direct and evident contact with death , the austere Caliph of bullfighting preached by example the formulas for overcoming a country in need of role models and dreams that, apart from other artists, found them on the hot platform of the bullrings, pawning their mattresses if necessary to enjoy his passion and his favourite bullfighter. That the fledgling dictatorship used the Manolete phenomenon to control the masses it attracted is not surprising, nor does it have to tarnish the historical image of a sublime bullfighter who, on his trips to Mexico, also met with the cream of the Republican exile, including the very bullfighting Indalecio Prieto, which cost him some covert reprisals from the Franco regime. But the fact is that, in that season of ’47, Manolete was already exhausted and fed up with being exemplary , after having two overwhelming campaigns in Mexico while in his homeland new and more powerful enemies continued to emerge, determined to topple him from his solid pedestal, accusing him of the cattle-breeding frauds of the years of lack and advantages in that bullfighting of majestic profile with which he left a permanent mark. Attacked in the press and in the stands by Hispanic Cainism, and discussed in the highest courts for his unblessed love affair with the actress Lupe Sino , the bullfighter arrived in Linares that early morning of August 28, the day of San Agustín, at the wheel of his sky blue Buick, to settle into the Cervantes Hotel in the mining city, where he slept, without resting, his last sad night. Luis Miguel Dominguín , the irreverent young man who longed to seize the throne, passed by his room before Manolete put on that pink and gold suit that would be soaked in blood red just a few hours later. And the maestro took the opportunity to warn him that, in addition to glory, the Madrid native would also have to assume the legacy of his bitter detractors. The rest is already known: Islero, the fifth Miura bull, split his femoral and saphenous veins when Manolete, as was customary, entered slowly, allowing himself to be seen, to kill him with his feet. As the exclusive photos of the diminutive Paco Cano show, the bullfighter was taken, limp and bleeding, to the poor infirmary of the bullring, where an overwhelmed Doctor Garrido did what he could.”
Paco Aguado (El Dia del Cordoba)

His final words were ‘I cannot see’.

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