Psychotherapy: Eros and magic.
Plato believed that Eros is the desire that can lead us to a Higher truth, and Jung agreed. But Freud grabbed the scissors, and began snipping 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'' (seems to be most associated with Melanie Klein, and Freud) I was trying to recall Ioan P Couliano's book: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.
The Spirit (pneuma) in this view, 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 create awareness of the soul. This works the other way around too, spirit represents the body to the soul; thus allowing both knowledge of each other. In other words; without spirit, soul would be blind to the outside physical world and without soul there is life without knowledge of God or the sacred - this is I imagine, the rationale for zombies. And the body without spirit and soul is simply physical elements, that will disintegrate!
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!
Of course I wanted our sessions to lead us both to 'higher truths', and encounters with deeper mystery. This is the promise of Eros after all! But Kit, seemed to regarded therapy as disconnected from Eros - or he purposefully kept our conversations so. And of course I too did my best to avoid showing any presence, or the effect on me of Eros.
Couliano, on the other hand?
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 explains that Eros was understood in Platonic thought from circa 5 BC onwards, as the aspiration to transcendental and Divine Wisdom and Beauty. Sex and violence may well have been conflated then as now; other than heading off into polyvagal theory and how autonomic states create and reflect behaviour, the failure to read and intuit the feelings, meanings and emotions of others is both ignorance as a behaviour, and is perpetuated as a product of ignorance. The alternative, to create flow and beauty in relationship - including sex - comes from knowledge and wisdom.
In our time, post-Freud, Eros lives in the id, the Freudian powerhouse of monstrous desires. Eros in Freudian thought is chthonic, wingless, primal desire (libido) demanding in an inarticulate way, that the outside world satisfies desire. The Freudian solution is to build a cage, or a kind of machine constructed from our culture's behaviours, values and beliefs. Then the energy of Eros can be contained or redirected by the numerous twists and turns of our internalized representation of our culture, our family, and moderated (repressed) or re-directed (sublimated). And this internal representation of our culture is 'held within' the Freudian concept called 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? 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 leave the path.
I'm not a fan of Freudian theory.
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. With Freud we plod along from birth to death never looking over the edge of the ordinary and safe, never experiencing the divine. But before Freud - Plato placed Eros as the link between physical existence and spiritual essence; we fly, we sublimate - curiously a word that indicates going from material solid straight to ethereal/ spiritual 'air'. There is no messy wet stage in Plato's Eros!
Freud wanted this too, but in his system sublimate means to put the energy into something else, something socially acceptable, charity work, running to improve your mental health?
Back to Plato.
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 its systems - which we experience as both physical - real, and virtual - as the mind.
In Western thinking, or rather following Descartes, there is a belief, or habit of dividing 'spirit' from 'matter'. The body is seen as physical, and the mind as something else; an intangible ghost realm, full of echoes and reflections understood now as an emergent property arising from complex systems. It was the same in Plato's time, likewise a division was made between the physical elements of our corporality and that which animates us (life processes, energy transfer reactions) and beyond all that, God.
And though we now attribute our corporality to the stars, for the stars are furnaces where the elements that make up earth, and us were once forged; in Plato's time, the stars were made of spirit. And the name of this star stuff is pneuma. As our Soul descends through the layers of space into the matter of body, it is sheathed in star-stuff - pneuma.
This is the link between the stars present in the sky at the time of your birth, your personality and your fate.
So, to recap: the sidereal pneuma, is spirit, this is the (light)body made of star-stuff. 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, this is the function of spirit (pneuma). And the body, to hear the soul, must 'listen' to spirit...
So, put simply:
Pneuma is the inner sense..
And continuing, back into the world of psychotherapy, Gendlin's focusing technique in particular; working with the felt sense, with images, with impressions, with physical sensations, and of course the concept of contact in Gestalt therapy honour Eros, pulling him out of the sewer and support his healing until he can regrow his wings!
Phantasm...
Aristotle understood intellect as phantasm, much as we today regard thoughts as a rippling set of images on the surface of the deeper, almost unfathomable brain..
And soul was regarded as the vital force that animates.
Now we can see the parallels with Freudian concepts.
Freud regarded his talking cure as psychodynamic - if soul - psyche - is underneath Spirit, then a disturbed psyche is ultimately the origin of our disturbed behaviour. The inner, wordless realm of the Id, is the origin, the powerhouse. Therefore anything the patient thinks or believes or says that they have experienced, anything that the patient's body does, is created by the patient mistaking the disturbing phantasms for reality.
To stay on the surface, in Freudian terms, would empower the error.
It would be to work with delusion, chaos and nonsense.
In Freudian psychology, the soul is the true locus of pathology, and the soul is made of primal memories and sensations laid down in childhood - and like a child it is wordless and energetic. So Eros is usually, no I think Eros is always regarded as fundamental in creating the patient's problem!
Freud understood that if he listened to the soul's energy expressed by the patient in words; then the pressure on the Id could be somewhat released. As the patient speaks, he feels the impact of the shocking content of his dreams and phantasmic life. As Freud interprets the shocking content as unresolved fragments of childhood experiences, the patient understands. and his tension resolves.
Ah, if only it was that simple!
In Freudian theory, psychic energy (affect - sensation and outcomes of the emotion) is invested in an object of desire. The person longs for the other, thinks about them, or it, all the time! This process of shifting all one's life energy (soul's desire) into another is called cathexis. If that energy is blocked because it is transgressive; against social rules 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. Grief is imagined as an invested soul-energy that we need to get back, and therefore grief becomes something we have to 'do', it is work. Framed like this, the failure to do the work, if we persist in finding our loss unbearable, then catastrophic distress is viewed under the Freudian lens as a disorder. Freud was 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.
In Freudian terms, the cure for loss is to shift soul 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.
OK, so Freud believed that we have some control over where and how we invest our primal, soul energy, but phantasms may be both a symptom of a diseased soul and the cause. For soul's energy can be enticed and trapped by....by what?
The process of shifting all one's life energy (soul's desire) into another is called cathexis.
The outcome of this view is a concept of addiction that imagines people becoming enraptured by phantasy. We mistake (and this certainly isn't my view so I'm struggling as I write in first person!) our own starry phantasmic illusion, as a real, external other. Phantasy is made of star-stuff, so it is far more beautiful than muddy, messy, chaotic real life. Our addiction is our attraction to the radiance, to our own soul's reflection. But, please make a note of this, for the language gives us so many clues, the word here is projection. And the process is known as transference. So what is leaving the body, what is being projected and transferred?
I will get to that later.
This ancient way of understanding predicts that the physical real body of the beloved can never be as beautiful as our projected starry-phantasm. So love can't be forever because it will always be contradicted by glimpses of reality. Welcome to the world of advertising! In this interpretation, adverts aim to capture our energy, by giving us a phantasy we think is a reflection, not from the outside world, but from our own souls. Advertising works, but not necessarily in the way Plato and Freud may have understood. But the Platonic view of the power of images empowers ideas such as if you wear the wrong clothes, the rapist can't be held responsible for the effect and his actions, for was enraptured by the effect of the clothing 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, a block, that is 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.
ha, so much to say...
Meanwhile Plato's theories led to the concept of courtly love, originally Fin'Amore; a "vocation of suffering" . In this modification, the power of the phantasy is harnessed and used as the path to wisdom. In other terms (alchemical), this is sublimation (another fascinating concept that tells us so much about the history of psychotherapy)..
The mythos explains that if you don't have sex, and arguments over money, kids, in-laws; it is said that desire may never be quenched. Oh dear. This has been Kit's choice I think, or rather it is the sentence he has passed on me, for my crime of offering and wanting a real, earthly relationship, his crunchy socks and all!
How dare I!
But no, this blog is in Gestalt terms, a creative adjustment, it is not sublimation. To sublimate my feelings I would have to objectify him, put him on a pedestal, I'd have to desire perfection. I don't chose to do this because I can, because I know too much. I have lived within a system that required me to empower Eros to sublimate desire - three years a consort - possibly a story I will never tell? A subject that takes us East, towards Mircea Eliade (Couliano's mentor) towards Tantra, on a foundation of translations by Theos Bernard, and other purveyors of 'Eastern mysticism' into the West. Taking a turn towards psychotherapy with Jung and James Hillman. [+] and the occult via Crowley and Allan Bennett.
Enough!
I stop.
