Psychotherapy: Eros and magic.

Plato believed that Eros would take us into a Higher truth and mystery, and Jung agreed. But Freud grabbed the scissors snipping cruelly at Eros until there was nothing but blood and feathers falling around him like rubies and snow. 

I am certain that many of psychotherapy's best theories and explanations are a continuation of much older concepts and ideas - repackaged so as to appear new. So when Kit talked about fantasy 'with a PH'' I was trying to recall Ioan P Couliano's book: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. 

Couliano, looking at the works of Bruno in particular, explains that Eros was understood as the aspiration to transcendental Beauty.  But in our time,  Freud describes Eros as chthonic, wingless, primal desire (libido) demanding in an inarticulate way, that the outside world satisfies our desire; the energy of Eros (id) is blocked and redirected by the numerous twists and turns of our internalized representation of our culture, our family, and moderated (repressed) or re-directed (sublimated) by the Super-ego. 

Viewed this way, Freud appears to see Eros as the unsocialized, inner child we become when we - to use another of his reifications - regress. Freud's ignorant Eros is continually tricked via advertising's fantasy representations of life, society and society's norms. In psychodynamic therapy, awareness of the regression and denial allows us to know what Eros is up to, which helps to stop the tantrum, and undo future self-deceptions. Then we  - the ego - can allow the Eros child to walk hand in hand with reality and stop making a fuss, be a good citizen. 

But Plato had placed Eros as the link between physical existence and spiritual essence; we fly with Eros. 

[[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 real and as the mind. 

So, what is spirit? 

Couliano translates spirit as made of the same stuff as stars, pneuma. The Spirit is body shaped, but it is made of such subtle stuff that it can represent the finer, more ethereal soul 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. Without spirit, soul would be blind to the outside physical world and without soul the body would simply be earth, air, fire and water set to disintegrate! 

So, to recap: the sidereal pneuma, spirit, the body made of stars translates 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. 

Aristotle viewed intellect as phantasm, much as we today regard thoughts. And soul is energetic, it is the vital force that animates. Now we find the parallels with Freudian concepts. 

Freud regarded his talking cure as psychodynamic - he should have called it pneuma -dynamic, but pneuma is already taken by lungs and air. In Freudian psychodynamic therapy Eros is usually, no 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 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. 

This diagnoses grief as something we have to get over; and unbearable, catastrophic distress as a disorder. Freud is thinking in terms of energy only, not about relationship and identity and the shattering of 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.

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...