Unbearable Ecstasy, Reverence and Awe, and the Perpetuation of an Aesthetic Conflict Essays

Unbearable Ecstasy, Reverence and Awe, and the Perpetuation of an Aesthetic Conflict Essays Unbearable Ecstasy, Reverence and Awe, and the Perpetuation of an Aesthetic Conflict Essay Unbearable Ecstasy, Reverence and Awe, and the Perpetuation of an Aesthetic Conflict Essay In this paper, I will attempt to explicate and discuss some aspects of Frances Tustins concept of the unbearable ecstasy of at-one-ment emphasizing her attentiveness to the importance of the containing function of the mother with regard to this elemental experience; Meltzers notion of the aesthetic conflict; and Bions important and original distinction between reverence and awe and defensive idealization as each of these specific themes separately and in combination have some essential bearing upon the provocation or mitigation of envy, the process of introjection, the development of both healthy and pathological internal object relations, and the resultant nature of the super-ego and individual self-esteem. I hope to be able to demonstrate how these concepts overlap, intersect, and modify one another perhaps reflecting the personal and professional intersection between these three clinicians and their profound impact on my thinking. Toward this end, I will offer clinical case material, both as a background for and an illustration of the phenomena described, as well as certain conclusions, which may have some impact upon our attitude and technique in psychoanalysis. To begin with, I would like to present a clinical vignette from the analysis of a patient, whom I will call Jessica, as an introduction to and background for the theoretical discussion which follows. Jessica (Clinical Material Omitted Here) The Aesthetic Conflict I was re-minded of Jessicas experience while reading Donald Meltzers paper (Meltzer Williams, 1988) on what he terms the aesthetic conflict. In that paper, Meltzer states: It has probably escaped no-ones attention that the percentage of beautiful mothers recorded in the course of psycho-analysis far exceeds the national average and that this appellation clearly refers back to childhood impressions often completely out of keeping with later more objective judgments by the patients of their middle-aged parent (p.8-9). Here Meltzer prompts our consideration of the possibility that the view of the beautiful mother, often presented by patients in analysis, harkens back to some early proto-aesthetic experience; one that is however not without conflict. Rocked in the cradle of the deep of his mothers graceful walk; lulled by the music of her voice set against the syncopation of his own heart-beat and hers; responding in dance like a little seal, playful as a puppy. But moments of anxiety, short of fetal distress, may also transmit itself through heart-beat, rigidity, trembling, jarring movements; perhaps a coital activity may be disturbing rather than enjoyable, perhaps again dependent on the quality of maternal emotion; maternal fatigue may transmit itself by loss of postural tone and graceless movement (p.17). In this passage Meltzer indicates that the baby knows its mother inside and out as both the bad and the beautiful and is impacted on a sensual level by each of her physical, mental, and emotional qualities even before its birth. This notion reverberates with findings from current fetal observation (Mancia 1981; Piontelli 1985, 1987, 1988, 1992a, 1992b), psychoanalytic/clinical inference (Bion 1976/1987,1977a; Freud 1926; Hansen 1994; Maiello 1995; Mitrani 1996; Osterweil 1990; Paul 1981, 1989, 1990; Share 1994), and imaginative conjecture (Bion 1979). Indeed Meltzer purports that . . . every baby knows from experience that his mother has an inside world, a world where he has dwelled and from whence he has been expelled or escaped, depending on his point of view (p.21), and he goes on to posit that, after birth: The ordinary devoted mother presents to her ordinary beautiful baby a complex object of overwhelming interest, both sensual and infra-sensual. Her outward beauty . . . bombards him with an emotional experience of a passionate quality, the result of his being able to see [her] as beautiful. But the meaning of his mothers behavior, of the appearance and disappearance of the breast and of the light in her eyes, of a face over which emotions pass like the shadows of clouds over the landscape, are unknown to him (p.22). Meltzer seems to suggest here that mother is an enigma to her baby. The baby may have known her, and yet perhaps shaken by the impressive caesura of the act of birth (Freud 1926) it has suddenly become uncertain of what it knows. Is she a beauty or the beast? When Meltzer proposes that This is the aesthetic conflict, which can be most precisely stated in terms of the aesthetic impact of the outside of the beautiful mother available to the senses, and the enigmatic inside which must be construed by creative imagination (p.22, italic mine). it seems that he is implying that the babys sensory experience of the beautiful (good) mother must be confirmed by what the baby finds inside the mother, and that the babys experience of the mothers inner world her mood, her emotional and mental life, her attitudes about herself and her baby is colored by creative imagination, i.e., by its own phantasies via the process of projective identification. However further along, Meltzer appends the above conclusion, submitting that the baby must wait like Kafkas K for decisions from the castle of his mothers inner world (p.22). With this addition, it would seem he is suggesting and, I believe, is correct in doing so that it is not just the babys creative imagination that imbues the inside of the mother and the babys pre- and postnatal experience of her with meaning, since, as he so astutely observes, the baby must derive its cues from the mothers conscious and unconscious communications; that is, the baby must wait for its mother to confirm its greatest hopes or its gravest fears. To put it another way, the baby asks: how does mother view/experience herself? and it must anxiously await the answer from its mother. I believe that the babys question and the mothers answer together constitute one aspect of the type of reality testing that Melanie Klein (1975) referred to as the means by which the baby finds validation for the enduring existence of the good breast, the good internal object, and the good experience it represents. An example of this type of reality testing, and the consequences of a distorted message being received from the castle of the mothers inner world, may be seen in the following material from the four times per week analysis of another patient whom I will refer to as Carla. Carla (Clinical Material Omitted Here) Lara (Clinical Material Omitted Here) Reverence and Awe versus Idealization In a paper read at a scientific meeting of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society in 1967, Bion (1992) described an encounter with one patient who came to him after a previous analysis from which he had benefited, but with which he was nonetheless dissatisfied. At first Bion expected to find greed at the bottom of this patients distress, but it soon became clear to him that there was something else going on. Bion described his patients outpourings, which were so fragmented that they would have required an omniscient analyst to sort out and make sense of (p.289). Bions interpretations were either labeled brilliant or they were met with extreme disappointment and hostility to the point of depression. He finally concluded that: There is a great difference between idealization of a parent because the child is in despair, and idealization because the child is in search of an outlet for feelings of reverence and awe. In the latter instance the problem centers on frustration and the inability to tolerate frustration of a fundamental part of a particular patients make-up. This is likely to happen if the patient is capable of love and admiration to an outstanding degree; in the former instance the patient may have no particular capacity for affection but a great greed to be its recipient. The answer to the question which is it ? will not be found in any textbook but only in the process of psycho-analysis itself (p.292). In his customary style, Bion avoids saturating his concepts, leaving them somewhat ambiguous, and thus allowing us the freedom to use our own capacity for imaginative conjecture to fill in the blanks, so to speak. I will yield to the temptation to do so with the understanding that the reader may draw his or her own conclusions, which may very well differ from my own. I think Bion seems to be saying that, in this instance, he had met with a patient for whom Kleins theory of envy did not apply. Indeed he seems to be making it clear that he did not see his patients disappointment and hostility as constituting an attack on the good breast or the analysts good interpretations. Neither did he seem to see the patients fragmented presentation as the result of an envious attack on thinking or on the links that might have rendered his communications meaningful and relevant (Bion 1959). Instead, Bion appears to conclude that his patient was attempting to have an experience of an object who might be able to understand and transform the inchoate experiences of the as-yet-unintegrated-baby-he and was therefore seeking the realization of his preconception of an object who can contain these experiences as well as his innate capacity for love, reverence, and awe. I would put forward here that the containing capacity, initially found and felt to be located in this type of external object when introjected leads to the development of an internal object capable of sustaining and bearing feelings of ecstasy and love; an object that might form the basis of the patients own self-esteem. This aim certainly calls for an analyst who truly thinks well enough of himself and his own goodness that he is not dependent upon the goodness and cooperativeness of the patient in order for such a positive self-perception to be confirmed, and in order for him to continue to function analytically. Discussion with Frances Tustin During one of my final conversations with Frances Tustin (1994), with whom I enjoyed a close personal and professional relationship for over a decade, we had the opportunity to discuss this distinction, which Bion makes between the manic defense of idealization and the healthy striving to be in contact with an object deserving of reverence and awe. Prior to this time, Tustin had never read nor had she been aware of the existence of this paper of Bions, which I chanced to bring to her attention in the following way. When we were together in England, just one month before her death, I knew that Frances had little time to live and I wanted to express to her in most explicit terms how much her work had affected me. I wished to do this partly out of my own need to show my gratitude toward her this one last time. However, I also felt the need to reassure her, since she seemed to be plagued by a fear that she had not contributed enough, that what she had contributed would soon be lost or forgotten, or that it would have no effect on anyone after her death. When I told Frances how profoundly she had helped and inspired me in my thinking and practice as an analyst, she demurred, as if she felt I was in danger of idealizing her. She said that I gave her much too much credit for [my] good work and hard-won success, and she heaped upon me many other compliments that, although sincere, left me feeling somewhat rejected. Suddenly I felt a headache coming on, and my good spirits faded. When Frances noticed my mood had changed, she asked what the trouble was. I was quite candid with her about what I had felt and about what had followed, and said that I hoped she would be more mindful of the way she handled peoples gratitude for and admiration of her. After recounting my experience and those of the patients discussed in this paper, we talked over how she herself had stressed the idea that the ecstasy of at-one-ment (Tustin 1981) could only be borne if it were adequately contained by the mother herself (p.224-6). In the most primitive states of mind, beauty is associated with moments of bodily completeness in which there is an experience of ecstatic fusion with the earth-mother (Tustin, 1981/1992). If left uncontained, such ecstasy might be experienced as a dangerous overflow of bodily excitement equated with a devastating sense of two-ness (p.106), too much to be borne in mind, perhaps disintegrating into a painful if not unbearable somatic agony. When the beautiful experience of at-one-ment is unable to be kept in mind, not only does it leak out and dissolve in its antithesis the ugly tantrum of two-ness but the baby is now doomed to an eternal despairing search for that ever-present auto-sensual bit needed to flesh out its exp erience of being. We went on to talk at length about the relationship of the experience of ecstasy to that of the beautiful mother refered to both by Meltzer (1988) and by Winnicott (1945), as well as about Bions ideas regarding reverence and awe. We both knew that I was having difficulty facing the impending loss of her friendship and support, and that I was chafing at the prospect of her death. However it seemed to us in that moment that even more salient was my need to secure in our last contact her aid in containing all of my love and gratitude for her. Some Conclusions In part, as a result of that last conversation with Tustin, I have arrived at the conclusion that the resolution of what Meltzer called the aesthetic conflict might be predicated, at least in part, upon the capacity of the mother to contain the babys reverence and awe of her, along with her own capacity for tolerating her babys hatred, envy, and terror of loss. This may prove clinically crucial when we consider the process of internalization or introjection by the patient of the analyst and his/her functioning which is essential to insure a successful treatment. It might be said that the apprehension of beauty (Meltzer 1988) is linked to the existence at the core of the inner sphere of the personality of a container, not just for our painful experiences, but for those joyful ones as well; a containing object with the capacity to endure not just our feelings of hatred toward the object (and therefore toward the self), but one that is enduring of and resonating with those loving feelings felt toward the perceived external object, one in which the capacity for realistic self-love and esteem are rooted. As Kahlil Gibran wisely wrote in The Prophet : And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty. And he answered: Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide? And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech? (1923/1976, p. 74) It must not escape our awareness that our capacity to love and therefore to forgive ourselves depends largely upon the way in which our loving feelings have been dealt with, accepted, and validated by an other. It seems when all is said and done that we are limited in part in our capacity for self-esteem by the limitations of our parents capacity (and later our analysts) to contain and therefore confirm our feelings of reverence and awe. I believe that herein lie several technical implications of enormous import. For example, we must consider that if we interpret the patients genuine reverence and awe of us (when we are felt as truly good objects) as a defensive idealization (as if we were instead being experienced as bad objects) perhaps out of some rigidly inappropriate adherence to our theories we will fail in our function as a container (Bion, 1977b) for experiences of true goodness, and consequently this essential internal function will fail to develop in the patient. Instead, the Super ego (Bion 1962, p.97) will be augmented and its devastating effects intensified, where forgiveness and the striving for life might otherwise healthfully prevail. Additionally, the development of an enduring faith in the existence of goodness and beauty, with increasing hope for their apprehension, will be stultified. When hopefulness perishes, nagging doubts about the goodness of the object and therefore about the worthiness of the self perpetuate in spite of repeated proofs of such goodness and worthiness. Moreover, increased envy and defensive idealization will proliferate hyperbolically (Mitrani 1993). As analysts we need to realize that the degree of our awareness of our strengths and limitations, and the extent of our willingness and ability to consider, to accurately evaluate, and to acknowledge to ourselves the impact of the messages we send to the baby-in-the-analysand from the castle of our inner world are crucial factors in providing an emotional experience for the patient that serves to mend old wounds and facilitate new growth.