“Without reducing mysticism to pathology—let’s be more nuanced, shall we?—you know as well as I do that the ‘unifying’ impulse of the mystic toward the Object, an effect that feels ‘obvious’ or like a ‘revelation’ to him or her, is also present in psychosis.” (Nothing doing. My scientific tidbits have only encouraged him to labor his point.) “And every self-respecting psychiatrist knows that this feeling of ‘union’ marks the symptomatic moment that in schizophrenics can herald either a cure or—should the feeling repeat itself—an aggravation of psychosis. In the same way, these modified perceptions, searing instants of an ‘altered’ consciousness of mystical experience, remind us of temporal seizures in epileptics. Allow me, however, to contradict you: neurological ‘diagnoses’ of pathogeny are of limited usefulness, because such states can only become mystical on condition of a background theological culture, or at the very least a mythological infrastructure, to lend them meaning over and above the pathological. I remain the analyst, you understand. And only on that condition can marginality—fruitful or destructive—become culturally transmissible, and museums, libraries, or churches start replacing hospitals. Do you see what I mean?”
“You’re right. The arts do seem to belong with those experiences, pathology included. Perhaps the only ones of their kind to survive in the modern world, however shakily, I agree. There’s no doubt about music and poetry, at least…What are they but sublimated transpositions of orgasmic sex, mutual penetrations of the artist’s universe and the world of the senses, encouraging further interpenetrations with the audience? Al-Hallaj said the same thing: ‘The eye with which you see me is the eye with which I see you.’”
I can tell Jérôme suspects me of overestimating the positive role of sublimation in these “extreme” cases. Aren’t I also being slightly hasty with countertransference?
“If you ask me, oh dearest, in our culture it’s the Song of Songs that provides the secret dramaturgy of great aesthetic adventures and mystical raptures. That said, merely to acknowledge the amorous dynamic that underlies artistic achievement explains nothing about how a particular individual actually got there! That remains an unknown, you see. A gap that scientific reason may never succeed in filling, no matter whether we’re talking about Mozart’s music or the very different but no less mysterious works of your Teresa. Ah, the unknown! Therein resides the tremendous pull we feel toward artists and mystics…” Phew, my colleague hasn’t taken against me. He drifts, almost humbly, into reverie.
To announce a method is to announce its limits. Tristan is happy to leave it at that, but I’m not. His generalizations about the mystic continent are so unsatisfactory that I’ve no choice but to gird myself for the patient auscultation of a text, a body. I don’t insist, there’d be no point. My colleague has just admitted that psychoanalysis, albeit more enlightening than other commentaries on the amorous logic of “God’s lunatics,” is a long way from flushing out its secrets. It edges nearer to them, though. Getting warmer, burning! Is not the unconscious a dynamic that breaches classical rationality and operates through the contradictory or “apophatic” logics with which mystical experience is studded? Or am I going too far, too fast?
First Bruno, now Jérôme. “You’re a man-eater,” snarled my ex before he disappeared. Not really. An eater of ideas, more like. I listen, read, absorb, appropriate, I tend my patch. There’s no denying I enjoy it. But I don’t steal, I steal away, at my own risk. Both faithful and unfaithful, and rather the latter. I linger in the company of the charming, the knowledgeable Jérôme Tristan during Parisian Psychoanalytical Society meetings and other after-dinner events. We are always the last to leave, sometime after midnight. He reassures me that I’m not the only one who thinks psychoanalysis could be poised, today, to recapture Freud’s audacity, the daring of his take on Moses, on monotheism, on civilization and its discontents…
“Thanks, but I really don’t need a lift, place d’Italie is very close and I feel like a walk.”
I pick up the morning papers at the kiosk in boulevard Saint-Michel, the moon is full, thin mist blurs the bare horse chestnuts of the Luxembourg gardens and wets my face. I veer toward Les Gobelins, different neighborhood, different style, different world, Paris is an always possible journey. No, I won’t follow the trail blazed by my colleague, I shall travel in my own way. A more personal way? Not only that, as we will see.
Freud knew how indebted he was to German philosophy and psychiatry, to Hartmann and Goethe, as much as to his hysterical female patients. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.3 Wasn’t Freud the Dadaist of lovesickness? The analytical process that “perlaborates,” as he put it, the symptoms generated by the accidents of erotic and thanatic attachments, resembles the mystic “path”—or so said some caustic black book or other. It does? Only if you ignore the want of any transcendental consolation, as well as the elucidation of the sexual motive, both of which are pretty major differences. The analytic “path” remains amorous, that is, transferential. It involves silence and the verbalization of desire, certainly, but it does not “lead anywhere.” Except to the dissolution of the transferential bond itself, of that loving bond at last stripped bare, and to an understanding of the immemorial traditions of totem, taboo, and other disturbing oddities of a more or less devilish nature. Quite extraordinary, surely? Certain mystics got there too, in their fashion, when they confessed to being “free of God,” breaking with the religious community, or when they exposed themselves to Nothingness in all serenity.
And yet, if like David Bakan I can detect resonances between Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and Jewish mysticism, the founder of psychoanalysis refers more often to Judaism than to its mystical currents.4 In his rare allusions to mysticism at large, Freud is worse than suspicious: he is impervious. While identifying similarities between the logic of dreams and that of mystical discourse, he makes this abrupt confession to Romain Rolland: “To me mysticism is just as closed a book as music.”5 And at the very beginning of the twentieth century he writes to his friend Wilhelm Fliess,6 about Dionysiac lyricism in Nietzsche, “in whom I hope to find words for much that remains mute in me.”7
Could such reticence stem from the fact that the mystical outlook seeks to “restore unlimited narcissism,”8 which Freud compares to the “oceanic feeling” (ozeanische Gefühl) connected to the infantile need to depend, to be protected, indeed to be archaically alienated in the mother;9 a need he was careful to guard himself from, if not to cast off altogether? And might it also reflect his justified concern to shield the nascent science of psychoanalysis from the “black tide of mud of occultism”? His watchful rationality led him to classify mysticism as a branch of “falsehood,”10 to which he spontaneously opposed “logos and ananke, inflexible reason and necessary destiny.” He reiterated the point in 1932: “Mysticism, occultism—what is meant by these words? You must not expect me to make any attempt at embracing this ill-circumscribed region with definitions.”11 And again: “Our god λόγος may not be particularly omnipotent, not able to perform more than a fraction of what his predecessors promised,” but “what would be an illusion would be to think we might obtain elsewhere that [which science] cannot give us.”12
Be that as it may, Freud’s reaction reveals a denial of oceanity that goes hand in hand with the denial of sensorial, preverbal dependency on the mother. And the logical consequence of this avoidance will be the return to an archaic experience of the mother–child bond conducted by Freud’s dissident successors, from Groddeck to Winnicott via Melanie Klein, the matricidal Orestian: all of them except Lacan! Against the Freudian model of an unconscious solely governed by the Law of the Father, a varyingly anti-Freudian “antimodel” appears, haunted by motherly jouissance and mystical apeiron…
In the course of his dispute with Jung (the occasion of dizzy spells and passionate swoonings when relations were severed for good), Freud wrote Jung a long letter on April 16, 1909, in which, after a long riff on numbers and death, he
declared: “You will see in this another confirmation of the specifically Jewish nature of my mysticism.”13 We can read this to mean: I am not a mystic in the way you are, I have my own: my mysticism has to do with Judaism, which is “the temporal conception of life and the conquest of magic thought, the rejection of mysticism, both of which can be traced back to Moses himself.”14 Was Freud right or wrong about this? Notwithstanding his “resistance” to the “oceanic dream,” the ultimate developments of his theory of the unconscious betray some brilliant appropriations of mystical experience.
The founder of psychoanalysis, Aufklärer that he was, had nothing but contempt for the Schwärmer, the enthusiastic dreamer; but he did not reject “superstition” out of hand, as the French Enlightenment did, for he regarded mysticism as an intriguing intersection between knowledge, sense experience, and the suprasensible. He erected his own conception of psychic life as a rationalistic dualism, and his entire oeuvre opposes the “dark monsters” that abolish the difference between the spiritual and the corporeal. Freud was at once hostile to “conscientialist” rationalism, which refuses to deal with unconscious phenomena, and wary of the “elusive, intangible unconscious” of philosophers such as Eduard von Hartmann. After the turn his thinking took during the 1920s, however, the Viennese bequeathed to us an exploration of the psychic apparatus that, long after him and beyond his personal limitations, brings peerless insights to bear upon the mysteries of desire, including mystical desire.15
Without lowering their guard against the insanity of telepathy or occultism, the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis suggest that mysticism and psychoanalysis attack the “same point”: the “deep ego’s perception of the id”; and share the same goal: to expand the domain of the ego (and of language) by giving it access to the drives of the id, so that it may “translate” them and make them conscious, free of censorship by the superego, and thus able to be shared.
Are we therefore to understand that psychoanalysis is a “metapsychology of mysticism,” linking by means of transference the “unconscious representations of things” to the “representations of words,” or deeply buried unconscious desire (the mysterious id) to the deep ego?
There is no denying the affinities between mysticism and psychoanalysis. In both experiences, a reshuffle of schemas takes place, to borrow the language of the learned Jérôme Tristan; the psychic authorities id/ego/superego change places, and their functions are transformed. But these reshuffles differ radically. Freud takes great care to avoid any confusion, and remains watchful to the end. Thus, analytical perlaboration allows that “where id was, there ego shall be,” and reinforces the ego by elucidating the logics of the desire that is peculiar to the id. In a lengthy meditation upon the goals of psychoanalysis, Freud grants with reference to mysticism that “It is easy to imagine, too, that certain mystical practices may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in the depth of the ego and in the id which were otherwise inaccessible to it.” But he goes straight on to say: “It may safely be doubted, however, whether this road will lead us to the ultimate truths from which salvation is to be expected. Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.”16 It could not have been stated more clearly.
The mystical path, by contrast, plunges the ego into the id by a kind of sensorial autoeroticism (“obscure self-perception”) that confers a certain omnipotence upon the id, which lies “outside” the ego, and by the same token underwrites the collapse of the knowing ego, in thrall to the darkness of the realm of the id: revelation and absence, jouissance and Nothingness. The mystic, then, revels in the visual or aural representation of the Thing or Object of desire, and this unspeakable delight can turn into a perverse or psychotic impasse. The final apophthegm of 1938 runs as follows: “Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.”
The psychoanalytic cure, for its part, addresses the same pleasurable tryst between the ego and the id, but through uttering the transference allows them both to circulate, from id to ego and from ego to id. Even so, how many analytic cures have ever facilitated the full blooming of such states of grace? On the other hand, Teresa’s “reports” to her confessors, texts written in a situation of transference with their addressees, do allow a certain perlaboration of unspeakable delight: an elucidation of the “obscure self-perception of the id,” or, as she is fond of saying, a clarification of “imagination” by “understanding”?
Freud’s genius, marking the decomposition and recomposition of psychic personality, does not spare the mystical personality. Dream, music, ocean; neither cleaving to experience nor ignoring it, analytical listening gives meaning to its jouissance.
“Sylvia Leclercq, what a dynamo.” People notice a kind of optimism about me. Does that bother you?
Chapter 4
HOMO VIATOR
All the things of God made me happy; those of the world held me bound.
Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life
Some five hundred years stand between us, Teresa; your Catholic culture is foreign to me, and I have difficulty in reading your language, Castilian. But none of this is an obstacle. The two French editions of your works, by Marcelle Auclair and by the Carmelites of Clamart, are available to me, along with a wealth of scholarly works harking back to the Spanish source.1
Across the centuries and languages and cultures you “speak” to me, because I translate you in my own way. Your moments of illumination, Teresa, my love, your raptures, your hallucinations, your deliriums, your style, your “thinking” that claims not to be an “understanding,” that wants no truck with that—I receive them through my filters, I gather them into meditations of my own, I shelter them in my body, I penetrate them with my own desires. Transformation, journey. Homo viator, wandering in search of sense and sensations in the language of psychoanalysis and fiction. My telescope (a seeing from afar), which is my microscope (magnifying the infinitesimal), brings you to me as an anguished, laughing woman whose harshness is born of generosity, a woman morbid and yet cheerful, a crazed but surprisingly lucid nun, who imposed on all the world the metamorphoses of her amorous body on the pretext of its desire for “Christ’s humanity.”
And you accomplished this at the height of the Golden Age, when Spain was discovering Erasmus, fearing and fighting the Lutherans, and enriching itself by sending fleets to the antipodes. Humbly I take the liberty of addressing you: for I know what store you set by your girls’ “effacement” or “dominion” of self, you, the practitioner of “abandonment” (dejamiento), and I will try simply to abandon myself to your pages and let your word be heard.
I am the kind of unbeliever who won’t accept that your body remained uncorrupted by death, as the Spanish king’s confessor thought when, at Alba de Tormes, on January 1, 1586, he found your remains intact—for their preservation was the less than miraculous work of stone and lime. However, I am convinced that your texts can and indeed must be read today and, why not, for centuries to come. And because your body had already been wholly decanted into your writings and monastic foundations—as I shall attempt to show in what follows—and since this apparent exterior, those external objects, those tools of battle are the one and only testimony to your most secret interior, that which sometimes you called “my jewel,” sometimes “divine center,” sometimes “bruised heart”—well, all things considered, I can’t really disagree with those who hold you to be immortal.
Your work seems deathless to me in the here and now, because through your faith, circumscribed by a particular civilization at one historical mom
ent, you underwent an experience and developed a knowledge of human desire (male and female) that have a message for every speaking creature. Christianity made this knowledge and experience possible, no doubt, through the exorbitant hypostasis of loving passion that is its genius. After many a fantasy-infused wandering that encouraged, if not provoked, some grave pathologies, but without straying from the “illuminated” prayer inspired by the alumbrados, you finally clung fast to the plumb line of biblical, evangelical, and theological texts the better to deploy the freedom of your own desire, while elucidating its perils and joys.
Dare I appeal to your good cheer, your restless energy, your sparkling sense of mischief for the license to retrace your journey from the standpoint of my irreconcilable foreignness? Before anything else I have a major infidelity to confess, an impediment that may prove to be a handicap in your eyes: since God is unconscious and the unconscious shadows us, I contend that the Other dwells within, not in the Beyond, and that the transcendence you yearn for is an immanence. Indeed, I find evidence in your own writings to support this hypothesis, for that is where you get to in the end, isn’t it? God dwells inside you; you say so yourself.
Your path through the mansions of the interior castle is not a dead end, as in Kafka; this castle’s walls are permeable, and there is no closed door to bar access to the Master lodged in the innermost chamber of intimacy. You move through a maze of crossings, a stream of spaces, facets, and questions. The Other suffuses the opaque depths of body and soul, generating a real vaporization of the traveler, no less than of her Beloved. Your scandalous appropriation of the divine, the megalomania of your fantasy of being God’s spouse and moreover a polymorphous creature, indissociable from God Himself, whom you ingest and swallow with feigned humility while proclaiming to be “dying of not dying” in Him, when it is none other than He who faints into you in this unchaste embrace, well, is all this strictly Catholic on your part? It’s certainly baroque. It would be more exact to say that you both swoon at once, like two lovers possessed, who can only thus discard their proud identities. And that earthy, ardent Song of Songs that you push to its logical limit, what is it but a way, the only way, to end up…free of God? You don’t pray to God to leave you “free of God,” as Meister Eckhart does.2 Out of love for Christ’s humanity, you receive your freedom from Him continually. Continually, without solution, without end, infinitely free. What if that was the definition of humanism?
Teresa, My Love Page 8