Visions: The 'other way round' of Love and Death E-Book

Günter von Hummel

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 209

Beschreibung

If for love hate and for death life are opposites, then in the 'other way round' of love and death the opposites cancel each other out. For this, the simple, only mirroring consciousness must be distinguished from the deeper awareness, which can only be experienced securely in a self-analytical practice (an-alytical psychocatharsis). The author also shows by means of contrasts in other areas that a new view, indeed a kind of vision, can expand conventional psychoanalysis by means of such a practice. It contains not only analytical but also meditative aspects and can thus be learned by everyone himself - as also described in the book.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

The ‚other way round‘ of Love and Death

Lacan's Triple Braid

Making a Feast

'Iconic' and Female Discourse of Love

Death, the absolute Master?

'Leave him out'

Visions 'the other way round’

Lacan's 'Thing' and the Awareness of Mechthild of Magdeburg

Appendix

Bibliography

1. The other way round of Love and Death

In the ZEIT of 27. 5. 2021 a young woman writes about the experiences and sufferings of her mental illness. "Taking mentally ill people seriously for once and presenting them authentically", is written in the preface of her text.1 And indeed, she describes her illness, including hospitalization and everyday situations, very meticulously, but also in a differentiated way. Above all, she deals with the way in which mental symptomatology comes across as superficial, misleading and unhelpful in Netflix series and other cinematic and verbal representations. She describes how in the series ‘13 Reasons Why’ the psychotherapist "says with a serious face and reassuring voice: Sometimes things get worse before they get better." Grandiose, typical pseudo-logic, which the author can only ever counter with the statement that the true superpower lies 'in enduring alone'.

But why does she say that she is mentally ill? Isn't this just an expression of the professionally established and the perfectly adapted, who follow the so-called 'university discourse', while the author herself argues in a much more empathetic, self-organized and fundamental way, so that one could call her a protagonist not only in her own cause? Is she not almost a psychoanalyst, one for herself and one for others concerned? She is neurotic, but the essence of neurosis is basically only that the neurotic not only imagines and loves his fantasies, but that he enjoys them intimately. He passionately enjoys what he fantasizes as floridly as if it were real. Neurosis is psychologically not okay, but is it also illness?

When St. Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207-1282) confessed to her head nurse: "God speaks to me"! the latter was not at all 'amused'. However, the nuns were designed to communicate with God. But suddenly one of them seems to dance out of the ranks and yet everyone gets confused. The colleagues are jealous, the superiors fear for the orthodoxy. "Those who love a lot are blissfully silent, those who do not love are the watchdogs [traitors] of love," she wrote herself.2 For years I cared for Catholic sisters in a home for the elderly that belonged to them, as a doctor. They were all modest, content and well to do. But it never occurred to them that God might one day directly alleviate their suffering. Why, actually? I would say, because today's time has become even more than before the watchdogs of love and therefore they did not know anything about this 'other way round’ of the 'Flowing Light' (Mechthild's main work), of which I want to report here later from a modern point of view.

It is well known that most psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, consider themselves atheists. But the French psychoanalyst J. Lacan scoffed at this and said that one could see well "that God intervenes daily in people's lives, for example in the form of a woman. The preachers and the women are the worst troublemakers," he stated. Well, one may not have to see it so blatantly, but the idea that it can be the most diverse things, the causation of which one does not know, allows for all sorts of speculations. Perhaps St. Mechthild took the causation as divine too seriously, too exaggerated, too maniform.

But in her case it is not a matter of fantasies, but of 'visions', which I write in quotation marks for the time being because of certain ambiguities. Having fantasies is not the problem either, but letting oneself be too strongly excited by them - often unconsciously - is not. The subtle artists, teachers, masters and 'visionaries' of mankind could always be accused of being a bit 'mentally ill', they just didn't do as much self-incrimination as the author above. To enjoy always belongs some insanity anyway and even the philosopher F. W. Hegel once said that he personally would have been close to mental illness for a short time, so much he enjoyed his thoughts. Among such neurotics one can also count the poet A. Strindberg, the composer R. Schuhmann, the painter E. Munch and many others from culture and science. But in the meantime things have changed, we have psychoanalysis!?

It is not unknown that philosophers are often hostile to psychoanalysis. One cannot blame such a populist thinker as D. Precht, he has simply not informed himself enough about what Sigmund Freud or the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan have said and written. But with the currently greatest philosopher in Central Europe, Jürgen Habermas, this is more than surprising. If laymen feel repelled by Freud's sexual theory, one can still understand that. They believe that it is about sexuality - in the first place at least - but this is only a side effect, the word 'sexual' only denotes a characteristic of the basic forces of human desire, which are already formed in earliest childhood and have just the character of drives, which inevitably, as if penetratingly, head for their goal in order to pacify themselves.

Habermas, however, thinks that Freud, and Lacan in particular, "darkened the light of the Enlightenment" with his psychoanalytic theory. But this negative statement must be reinterpreted positively: the light of the Enlightenment was not as bright as Habermas thinks; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with their horrific wars, have shown that the most terrible darkness prevailed, which the Enlightenment did nothing to change. And so it could only be good to dim the light of the Enlightenment a bit with an excursion into psychoanalysis. Freud's fundamental forces concern the eros-life and death drives, that is - if I may put it very simplistically and sweepingly - the power of love and death. But precisely because this is only expressed in a very simplistic way, I have written in the title of the book of the 'other way round' of these forces and also of psychoanalysis as a whole. Because 'visions' have no validity in it.

That they are not completely disregarded is mainly due to the French psychoanalyst J. Lacan, who reformulated these two forces into the power of a perceptual or viewing drive (close to love) and an expressive or speech drive (close to death). In any case, with this reformulation psychoanalysis can be better understood and more comprehensively used. It is not incomprehensible that speaking is close to death. People constantly talk past each other, they misunderstand each other, even they lie, they often contradict each other in a total, perfect way, so that one really has to ask oneself what they actually have from speaking, from communicating.

Not much, because they hardly ever tell each other the truth. Maybe they stick to the insights of Habermas, whose central theme is the 'communicative action', the 'communicatively socialized subjects' and the 'unlimited communicative community'. It was a great progress, in that people came from 'subject-philosophical (Kant) to language-pragmatic understanding (Pierce) of the use of reason', but in order to get through to the truth, Habermas has to introduce and clarify quite a few additional terms: there must be mutual approximations and obligations, moral learning processes and much more must take place in order to reach the great 'We', which can then have the consent of all. An immense philosophical conceptual apparatus frames the whole.3

That's true in a way, but can't it be simpler? Mechthild of Magdeburg has shown it, but her search for truth is for us today too much captured by the direct reference to God and an extreme self-sublimation. Lacan also conveys it directly when he says that language does not serve communication at all, but revelation, admission, selfdisclosure. The philosophers do not reveal themselves, they do not give away their anxiety, they do not give away their innermost. They remain in the good, enormously far-reaching, profound thoughts that they have made for themselves. For the psychoanalyst, Habermas's 'acts of speech acts' are mental defense mechanisms that seek to circumvent the reports of one's own unconscious desire. Despite this, philosophers are interesting to read, but they do not bring the decisive point.

Precisely, it is about desire, about a driving force that cannot be resisted so easily. And it is the same with the power of love and death that no one knows exactly what is right, true and characteristic in them, although one must follow them exactly, necessarily, imperatively. Thereby it has always been disturbing that the love has mostly lost to the death. Even if for millennia a god or several gods should be a guarantor that it also works 'the other way round', in that the life after death would continue in an otherworldly realm, the question remains about the complete ambiguity of this otherworldly life and its powers.

What is love about? Doesn't it always pass away in the same way, no matter how much it is sung about? "Love is as strong as death," says the Song of Songs, 4 and in many other places it is added that God loves more than human beings could ever do. But for this one must "prove faithful even unto death", and moreover it is monotonously asserted that anyway "love is the greatest", etc., etc.5 A continuous, meaningless talk. In other words, it is actually about a bet that is constantly made and that one always has to make again, in order to somehow successfully smuggle oneself over questionable issues of death and love. It is about the 'other way round' of love and death, because in normal use one always confuses these forces with negative consequences.

Because even if there is to find a grain of truth at all the normal around said, for the today's science culture these somewhat sweepingly exaggerated truths are not sufficient any more. One must convey that 'the other way round' in a new and provable form, so that one must no longer only believe, but can also have an authentic knowledge of it. More than hundred years ago psychoanalysis started with the 'other way round'. The main part of the soul is - 'other way round' than conscious - in the so-called unconscious, which is the reservoir of repressed or even completely split off emotions and meanings.

But with regard to love and death of all things, psychoanalysis has stumbled a bit, in my opinion precisely because of the lack of the 'visionary'. The literary critic E. Goebel thought that above all Freud's death drive hypothesis is to blame for the fact that the psychoanalytic overall concept ultimately turns out to be pessimistic.6 This is because the active eros-life drives have no chance in the face of death. Death is therefore described by the French psychoanalyst J. Lacan as the "absolute master" whom no way passes, and in love he sees - along with hate and ignorance - a form of nothingness.

Before I continue with the fact that the nothing is not logically conceivable without a something, the one only exists against the background of the zero and the existence can only be imagined against the background of a non-existence, and thus these statements cancel and balance each other out a bit, something personal: As a doctor I have always asked myself why people waste so much time and energy in order not to die of a disease. They take tons of medications, constantly consider one surgery or another, and seek so-called second and third opinions for everything, but with little progress. Wouldn't it be better 'the other way round' to use death as something instrumentally helpful, to acquire a 'diaita' (δίαιτα), a special way of life or art of living, as the ancient Greeks called it. Diaita' was theory and practice and went beyond philosophy.

I myself suffer from a somatoform pain disorder, which is bearable and fromwhich one can by no means die. It is a constant companion that disturbs, but which after years has developed more and more into a life compass. That is, I feel when something is not good for me, I have taken on, behaved wrongly or nourished myself. Through this I don't think about death anymore, on the contrary, I have developed exactly from these guidelines, from this reason, the method which I have announced in the subtitle and which can be learned exactly in the sense of this compass by everyone himself. A method of self-awareness and self-therapy, to adhere to a ‘diaita’, from which, of course, the word diet is derived, but also precisely other artful soul and body techniques, is in the final analysis nothing new. I will come back to it in detail by scientifically justifying the mentioned new procedure, which I have called Analytic Psychocatharsis.

Back to the nothing, to the zero, to the fundamental lack, which - following Lacan - has made the actual beginning, even if one has to think of the corresponding background of being to it. That one has spoken of the big bang as a beginning of the universe, is only correct in a subordinate sentence and has taken place only on a side stage. If one starts from a science from the subject, whose object is in each case oneself, the beginning lies much more in the relevance, which can be grasped only in each individual practically and not in a generalized theory. The philosopher G. Simmel spoke in this respect of the "individual law", in which the individual receives an object-relevance in himself.7 For when I write and narrate here, everything starts with an 'I speak, therefore I am'. It begins and ends with the "l'etre parlant" as Lacan named the human being in his basic function and then formulated this function almost up to a psychoanalysis completely 'the other way round', i.e. a self-analysis.8

And so to begin with nothing is to begin wrongly as usual. Kant, for example, began with the question of 'synthetic judgments a priori' by claiming that there are analytic judgments which are automatically true a priori, because they are already contained, so to speak, in the rules of language we use when we use, for example, the word use: Usefulness ist useful - an analytic judgment, a priori true. But it is also somehow nonsensical and banal. Kant admits this nonsense, but now grabs the synthetic judgments (which are therefore not already conditioned by the rules of language) and then starts to fill whole books with the truths which he now obtains by a syllogism of the analytic with the synthetic judgments.9

Thus, he can then easily begin with the word begin: actively the cause begins (in fit), he says, because passively beginning as causality becomes cause (fit).Now he does not need to ask why in the word causation he already prefigures the cause (makes it, so to speak, primordial). In short: in this way he comes to be the philosopher of his time, the professor, the university teacher, the knower.10 He says everything right, he knows everything exactly - and this is quite true also for today and for all other sciences - but Kant does not say it well enough! Not in such a way that one could experience it directly. Everything is rightly known, but not well communicated, not well conveyed, not well said! (It was already so in Kant's time that the readers groaned over his works).

After all, Kant would like it if, as Lacan suggests, one would start with the lack, the zero, and speak of the 'exsistent', in that something 'sists' (persists) 'ex' (outside). A God, for example, which then - as in the case of my catholic old people's home sisters - does not really exist anymore, because one finds him only in the 'ex', where he persists. The Catholic philosopher of religion R. Spaemann therefore said that God is an "immortal rumor". This was not meant negatively. A Someone who is and will always be spoken of is better than the image of an old man with a beard or even than constant cathechetic repetitions. So it is about someone who does not exist within the here and now, but who nevertheless can have body, but it is a body without shape, without form, just 'ex'.

The modern philosopher of consciousness T. Metzinger ascribes to man a 'phenomenal self-model', i.e. an independent ego, a conscious-feeling inner perspective, which Lacan also calls an 'imaginary object'.11 Metzinger starts from the horror of suffering, into which to look leads to the fact that it also looks into oneself, as Nietzsche said.12 But real suffering can only be felt and correctly assessed in oneself and then also in others, who fulfills further criteria than an 'imaginary object', than a firmly delineated ego-feeling in oneself. One needs a 'suffering metric', Metzinger thinks, in order to be able to really understand suffering in its quantity and quality, but the philosopher has to reach far out in order to be able to write about how suffering could now really be reduced and how one would then no longer have to speak only of consciousness, but of Awareness, of Compassion-Awareness.

Metzinger also sees the difference between the imaginary and the symbolic objects, that is, between the perspective, phenomenal order of the conscious living being oriented to appearance and image on the one hand. On the other hand the order oriented to the word , to the symbol, to the comprehensive world of language, which, for example, can also lead to the fact that one can suffer terribly from a loss of dignity. Even the whole mankind, he thinks, could suffer from lack of dignity and perish, if climate and environmental factors are not brought under control. For the expanded consciousness, which thus already pushes towards consciousness by including compassion and co-awareness, references to the complexity of language and speech are thus also necessary.

However, I do not start from a political or neuro-philosophical consideration, but from a psychological, psychoanalytical, unconsciously spiritual one. In their sense one must likewise distinguish consciousness from awareness. The latter can still be present in the half-dead state, as one could determine with so-called near-death experiences. The person lying in a kind of unconsciousness can see himself as if from the outside and also grasp this holistically, but is not awake-conscious. Something similar exists with the 'Déjà Vu', the convincingly strong sensation to have experienced something exactly like this before. There is no consciousness, but a naive consciousness, which can be clarified even further in a psychoanalysis, because behind the 'Déjà Vu' there is a 'Jamais Raconte', a never told, repressed, classical case of a completely 'other way round'.

But the mystical ecstatic is also far detached from consciousness in his rapture, he is often outwardly barely awake and yet is in a kind of awareness. Here the phenomenon of awareness without consciousness becomes perhaps even clearer. I remember the well-known Indian saint Ramakrishna, who sometimes had to be brought back from his rapture by force, so kataton, frozen, drifted off, he seemed in his meditations. Certainly, the closeness to mental illness can be felt here, but only with a reference to mental extremes one does not do justice to awareness.

In order not to suffocate in boring theory, I want to bring an example from my own application of the Analytic Psychocatharsis, which can bring clarity into the psychological and psychoanalytical from another side. I start from the Freudian unconscious, to which the same applies, namely one does not find it in one's own consciousness, because it is 'ex' of oneself and yet at the same time the most inner.In order to discover this and to keep it going permanently, just as the vestal virgins in ancient Rome were never allowed to let the fire go out, today an increasingly large team of neuroscientists, spiritual scientists and psychoanalysts is needed. I want to give this 'ex', back to each individual, because only the individual can achieve true awareness, which requires a practice of which an ounce is worth more than a ton of theories, as the old saying goes. Theorists, philosophers and consciousness researchers were sublime hysterics for Freud; they try to establish the truth about being, man, love, death, etc. only out of themselves by screwing up their own thougths.

When I once again practiced the procedure, which thus combines meditative and psychoanalytic methodology, I noticed after about an hour of such a concentration exercise not only a clear relaxation, but also a physically perceptible concentration in the center of the body, which developed upwards beyond the head as if into an ever higher 'mountain', which was also visually visible in an implied way. Apart from a certain mightiness (not power) of this image, this imaginary impression, I also found myself in an extremely pleasant state and at the same time in some kind of certainty of having reawakened an ancient symbol.

This 'mountain experience' seemed to have been very close to the body, 'bodily' as one used to say. Physically perceptible. So it was about a relation to the unconscious more on the level of unconscious bodily images, while in conventional psychoanalysis the level of unconscious phrases is more in the foreground, which is why Lacan says: "It speaks in the unconscious". But this projected inward, the somatoform of my experience, transmitted itself like an It Feels, It Radiates, It Chills.13 The body images are unconscious, but just 'bodily' aspects, which have the same importance as the mentioned unconscious phrases.

Thus, as a psychoanalyst, I know that this 'mountain' can also be interpreted as a phallic symbol, as the usual phrase, the word-acting of the 'phallus symbolique', as Lacan constantly called Id (this heraldic figure of Freud's Id) in his psychoanalytic seminars.14 My 'mountain' had, however, besides the heraldic symbolic also something imaginary-real (figuratively corporeal) about it. For it was not - or not essentially - a memory or a fantasy articulating a phallic desire, but something a bit more substantial, image-acting, 'vision'-like. With a reference to Freud's science I can distinguish this description fully from earlier representations in mysticism, religion, yoga or by today's esotericists. Because I will specify my 'mountain experience' in reference to picture-scientific and psychoanalytical procedures. Above all I will connect this Rays-phenomenon with that of Id Speaks, whereby a scientific consolidation is achieved.

Thus, I already depict down here such a formula-word, which is used in the first meditative exercise of the Analytic Psychocatharsis and which I have also used in the example with the 'mountain'. It contains several meanings in a single (here written in a circle) stroke.15 The meanings overlap, so that the writing as such does not say anything, there is an 'overdetermination' (multiple statement), as it is known from the psychoanalytic dream interpretation. But this is just advantageous, because in this way the unconscious, which is purely structurally built up in the same way as the formula-word, is irritated, provoked and awakened to give out its, and that means now also unconsciously my, me concerning, meaning (for which a second exercise will serve).

Because I attribute only a casual meaning to my 'mountain experience'. For me, this 'appearance', this imaginary-real, 'vision'-like, is only a small part of my process. The felt, 'chilling' 'mountain' only represents something cathartic, that is, a liberating, purifying, purely figurative-real, clarifying experience, which does not allow any precise statement. In Freud's theory, I would classify such an experience close to the place that Freud called introductoryrepresentation. There the driving force - here now that of the perceptual or visual drive - is directly psychically represented, which from there usually leads to an uncontrolled affect or to defense mechanisms (if the drive is not endured and is shifted into complex thinking or into symptoms).

Nevertheless, this part, which is more related to the imaginary-real, to the image-acting, is important. It even represents the main part of the book, because in classical psychoanalysis only or quite emphasized, the symbolicreal, the word-acting comes into play. Lacan clearly recognized this and tried to give shape to the pictorial, the imaginary significant (imaginary-real) with geometrical figures, topologies, knot formations and braid-like representations. But even with this he remained far behind the gravity of the word-acting. To experience the imageacting itself, to have a kind of 'vision', even almost to be able to communicate with it, has something great about it, which one cannot completely sweep under the table.

Also someone who has climbed several eight-thousanders or who has scaled spiritual and mathematical heights may have a quite comparable 'mountain experience', which just like mine is not the last word in wisdom. But leaning back after reaching the summit and having the feeling of floating above everything may correspond exactly to the imaginary-real. The simultaneously physical and spiritual, the mental climax, fulfills as an event the Freudian drive-structure-concept with its starting-, object-, and target-dynamics in a different and yet again the same way, mainly directed to the image-acting. One is seized by a 'vision', which almost corresponds to an act of love.