Psychotherapy: Eros and magic.
Plato believed that Eros is the desire that can lead us to a Higher truth wrapped within mystery, and Jung agreed. Meanwhile Freud had grabbed the scissors snipping and was cruelly at Eros... until there was nothing but blood and feathers falling around him like rubies and snow.
So when ever Kit talked about fantasy 'with a PH'' I was trying to recall Ioan P Couliano's book: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.
The Spirit is body shaped, but it is made of such subtle stuff that it can represent the finer, more ethereal soul (the internal presence of the divine) to the perception of the body. This works the other way around too, spirit represents the body to the soul; thus allowing both some awareness of each other.
A vocation of suffering is chosen by a true believer to create the path to wisdom by a purposeful withdrawal from the beloved before any physical consummation, or satisfaction can occur - so it is too late if you have had sex, or if there is any real love and partnership! For then, it is said, desire may never be quenched...oh dear. But, fear not. There are other theories! This directs us to look East, towards Mircea Eliade (Couliano's mentor) and towards Tantra...
Of course I wanted our sessions to lead us both to 'higher truths', and encounters with deeper mystery. This is the promise of love after all! But Kit, though seeped in mediaeval lore, and with a comprehensive knowledge of Christianity regarded therapy as disconnected from eros - or he purposefully kept our conversations so.
I mentioned Couliano several times in our sessions, and Kit didn't seem to know of his work?
But then, I never knew what Kit honestly thought or believed!
Couliano, looking at the works of Bruno in particular, explains that Eros was understood in Platonic thought from circa 5 BC onwards at the very least, as the aspiration to transcendental and Divine Wisdom and Beauty.
Sex and violence may well have been conflated then as now; the failure to read and intuit the feelings, meanings and emotions of others is a product of ignorance. The alternative, to create flow and beauty in relationship, including sex, comes from knowledge and wisdom.
But without knowledge of Eros, and experience, how can ignorance transform into knowledge and wisdom?
In our time, post-Freud, Eros lives in the id, within the Freudian powerhouse of monsters. Eros is chthonic, wingless, primal desire (libido) demanding in an inarticulate way, that the outside world satisfies desire. The Freudian solution to harnessing the energy of Eros and 'other monsters' is to import - or rather to internalise - a set of behaviours based on our culture's behaviours, values and beliefs. Then the energy of Eros can be redirected by the numerous twists and turns of our internalized representation of our culture, our family, and moderated (repressed) or re-directed (sublimated).
This internal representation of our culture is 'held within' the Super-ego. The answer to the problem of emotion, is to abandon all hope of getting one's needs met and forget...until circumstances arise that allow a more culturally acceptable expression of the need.
So, if you are gay and your culture can't allow that?
If you fall in love with your therapist and his belief system doesn't allow genuine, heartfelt communication between client and therapist?
Viewed this way, Freud appears to see any expression of frustration arising from a (forbidden) un unmet need as regression. Freud's solution was to teach therapists that ignorant Eros must be continually tricked via school, and advertising fantasy representations of life, society and society's norms so that we all act in accord, create cooperation via a mechanistic set of rituals (as seen on TV) and never go off the path into authentic and honest communication!
So, frustration is important to therapists (not all of us!) because awareness of the theory of regression and denial inculcates a sense of shame which makes us stop the 'tantrum', and in theory enables us to undo future self-deceptions. My guess is, it could help reduce the force of a person's self abandoning and self-attack by giving them a feeling of being understood.
I see Freudian theory as ultimately about stopping people from making a fuss, and becoming good citizens. And OK, this is better than uncontrollable outbreaks of random violence! But a lot of alternative realities have gone missing, and Eros lies wingless and bleeding in the sewer...I mean, Freud made Eros into a workable theory - but Plato had placed Eros as the link between physical existence and spiritual essence; we fly with Eros!
With Freud we plod along from birth to death never looking over the edge of the ordinary and safe, never experiencing the divine.
And this is of course what made Jung so unable to tolerate Freudian theory!
Back to Plato.
[[QUOTE.
Born in 428 BCE, the philosopher (Plato) was among the first generations of young boys who were systematically taught to read. He was also destined to conjure up one of the top-selling metaphysical notions of all time, a notion that irrevocably marked the rationalism, religion, and mysticism of the Western world: the theory of the forms. Plato held that another world exists beyond the realm of temporal flux and gross matter that we perceive with our senses. This otherworld is a pure and timeless realm of perfect ideas; the sensual things we perceive around us are only faded Xeroxes of these ideal forms. Davis, Erik. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.]]
The Platonic view describes body and soul - much in the same way that we now describe brain and mind. In the contemporary understanding of biology we see millions of synapses conveying K and Na ions, transmitting information about body and world; a potassium and sodium cascade so that the brain can integrate information to create the imagined, the virtual symbolic representation of us, the world and it's systems - which we experience as both physical - real, and virtual, as the mind.
But the body is physical, and the mind is not, it is full of echoes and reflections understood now as an emergent property arising from complex systems. In Plato's time like now there was a division made between the physical elements of our corporality and that which animates us (life processes, energy transfer reactions) and God.
Curiously we now attribute our corporality to the stars, but in Plato's day according to Couliano, spirit as made of the same stuff as stars, pneuma. And it is shaped by the stars present in the sky at the time of your birth.
Without spirit, soul would be blind to the outside physical world and without soul there is only death - the body is simply physical elements that will disintegrate!
So, to recap: the sidereal pneuma, is spirit, this is the body made of stars. Its function is to translate the sensations, sounds and images from the body's senses into a format that soul can read, and vice versa.
For the soul cannot grasp anything that has not first been converted into phantasms. And the soul communicates to the body through pneuma.
Pneuma is the inner sense, translating between soul and body.
And to step sideways, back into therapy, Gendlin's focusing technique or the postmodern therapy strategy of working with accessing better versions of the self both honour Eros, pulling him out of the sewer and supporting his healing until he can regrow his wings!
Phantasm...
Aristotle viewed intellect as phantasm, much as we today regard thoughts.
And soul was regarded as the vital force that animates.
Now we find the parallels with Freudian concepts.
Freud regarded his talking cure as psychodynamic - he could have called it pneuma -dynamic, but the word pneuma is already taken by lungs and air.
In Freudian psychodynamic therapy Eros is usually, no! No, eros as sex is always the cause of the patient's problem!
In Freudian theory, energy (affect - sensation and outcomes of the emotion) is invested in an object of desire. The person longs for the other, thinks about them all the time! This process of shifting all one's life energy into another is called cathexis. If that energy is blocked because it is transgressive to want that particular person (such as one's therapist for instance!) or because the person has died or can no longer be contacted, Freud explains that the cathected (blocked) libido (life energy) will express itself as regression, aggression, or obsession, until other outlets are found.
In this view, people who can sublimate don't end up in therapy!
This way of thinking places grief as energy we have to get back, and therefore grief becomes something we have to get over. If we don't 'get over it' unbearable, catastrophic distress is viewed under the Freudian lens as a disorder.
Freud is thinking in terms of energy only, he was not seeing grief as an unbearable need to seek and find a lost loved one, he was not seeing relationship as integral to one's own identity, he certainly didn't entertain for one second that such a loss can shatter one's identity and in effect destroy one's self and one's world. The cure for loss - according to Freud - is to shift the energy, to fall in love with someone else, and move on.
I imagine Freud and Sinead O'Connor in the Underworld. Sinead is singing 'Nothing compares to you' Freud isn't moved. He pauses, feels obliged to dispense wisdom and then proclaims that her singing is an attempt to cathect her libido..
Anyway, Couliano goes on to explain that the Pythagoreans spoke of vital pneuma circulating in the blood. Students at the school of 5th Century Empedocles of Agrigentum believed spirit to be a subtle vapor moving in the arteries of the body. The heart was therefore the central reserve for pneuma, and phantasy, and this is why the heart is so affected by love.
There is still a belief that phantasy is more attractive than real life!
And this way of seeing underlies a view of addiction; that people become enraptured by phantasy. For we place our starry phantasm within the other. And as phantasy is star-stuff, far more beautiful than muddy, messy, chaotic real life, we are addicted to the radiance that is actually our own projection (I mean the language - projection being a psychotherapy term!).
This ancient way of understanding also predicts that the physical real body of the beloved can never be as beautiful as our projected starry-phantasm, that we believe is the beloved. So love can't be forever because what we love is us! The phantasm of the beloved is nothing but one's own pneuma!
In this explanation a real other person is evoking desire, creating phantasms made of our pneuma. As advertising tries to do, to capture our own energy, to sell us the phantasy. Or so runs the Platonic explanation now conflated with Freud!
Though it seems mostly harmless the theory leads to ideas such as if you wear the wrong clothes, the rapist can't be held responsible for the effect and his actions. He was enraptured by the effect on his pneuma. This bad explanation is usually, but not always, aimed at women who are then treated as dangerous and disruptive.
A more common psychological variation of this power of phantasm concept, imagines that there is a problem stopping a person seeing through their phantasy.
The phantasy becomes psychological diagnosis:
They only fell in love with me because...
- because of their script.
- because they projected onto me
- because of their transference....
- because they are a narcissist'.
- etc.
Meanwhile Plato's theories also lead to the concept of courtly love with its "vocation of suffering" . In this modification, the power of the phantasy is harnessed and used as the path to wisdom.
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