EIGEN IN SEOUL:

VOLUME TWO,
FAITH AND TRANSFORMATION
 EIGEN IN SEOUL:
VOLUME TWO,
FAITH AND
TRANSFORMATION

Michael Eigen
First published in 2011 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT

Copyright © 2011 by Michael Eigen

The right of Michael Eigen to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents
Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
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permission of the publisher.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE vii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ix

CHAPTER ONE
Day 1 1

CHAPTER TWO
Day 2 37

CHAPTER THREE
Day 3 77

REFERENCES 113

v
PREFACE

This book is a transcription of a three day, eighteen-hour seminar I gave

in Seoul in 2009. It takes forward and complements the Seoul seminar in
2007 (Eigen in Seoul vol. 1: Madness and Murder). I wish to thank Jaehoon
Lee, founder of the Object Relations Institute in Seoul, for sponsoring
these seminars and helping to make my wife’s and my trip a good one.
Special thanks to Joonho Lee for his job as translator at the seminar and
for transcribing the tapes afterward. He helped set a good tone for the
seminar. My wife, Betty Eigen, helped smooth and patch the transcrip-
tion, preparing it for final edit.
Faith plays an important role in transformational processes in psy-
chotherapy. I don’t mean “belief”. Belief may be a necessary part of the
human condition but it tends to prematurely organize processes that
remain unknown. For me, faith supports experimental exploration,
imaginative conjecture, experiential probes. The more we explore ther-
apy, the more we appreciate how much our response capacity can grow.
We are responsive beings, for good and ill. Too often, our responses
hem us in. We short-circuit growth of responsiveness. Yet it is possible
to become aware of the rich world our responsive nature opens, places
it takes us, feelings with as yet no name, hints of contact that may never
be exhausted.
vii
viii P R E FA C E

I use parts of W. R. Bion’s and D. W. Winnicott’s texts as points of

departure for some of the explorations in the seminar and draw from
my own work as well. The seminar weaves clinical and cultural con-
cerns, the state of our persons and nations, how we feel, get along with
ourselves, and obstacles that dog us but are widely undefined or defined
wrongly. It is as if something pains us, as if life, the human condition
pains us, and we try to excise the pain without knowing what it is. We
grab at this problem or difficulty and attack it thinking, at last, the pain
will be solved. If psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it is that we
are persecuted by our own nature, which finds voice and resonance in
structures of the outside world. In part, social structures, from family to
state, are ways we try to organize pain, hoping to diminish, even solve
it. I suspect we do not know what is bothering us. Beliefs hide this fact.
Faith opens it.

Michael Eigen
New York City, January 2011
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Eigen has been practising in the mental health field for over
fifty years, first with disturbed children in schools and treatment
centres, then as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, psychoanalyst,
and psychologist in clinic and individual practice. He has taught at
several universities, including the New York University Postdoctoral
Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He has also taught at
many psychoanalytic institutes, including directing a programme for
creative individuals in psychoanalysis. He was Director of Training at
the Institute for Expressive Analysis and is currently on the faculty as
a control/training analyst of the National Psychological Association for
Psychoanalysis, where he was on the Board of Directors for eight years.
He has published over one hundred papers and nineteen books.

ix
CHAPTER ONE

Day 1

Morning session: Bion’s nakedness, the emotional core

of the dream, on-off thinking
This morning we’re doing a little bit of Bion. I asked Jae [Jaehoon Lee,
founder of the Seoul Object Relations Institute] to let you know I was
going to work on excerpts from some pages (226–241) of Bion’s book,
Cogitations. How many people read that? Not too many. How many
people did not read it?
Okay, so not too many people read it. I will have to be the cow that
chews her cud, digest it for you like a mother bird, that digests the
worm for the baby bird. We’ll try to do that.
Bion is of course very difficult to read. He’s also very naked; he’s
a very naked soul. One reason he’s so hard to read is because he’s
so naked. The pain is so excruciating. And he doesn’t flinch from it.
He goes into it and into it. It’s very hard to stay with it. But he finds
some beautiful things along the way. There can be a very close connec-
tion between pain and beauty. He said some very beautiful things and
I would like to share some of them with you today, both the beautiful
and painful aspects of things he said on these pages. (For more on pain

1
2 EIGEN IN SEOUL

and beauty, see “Tears of Pain and Beauty: Mixed Voices” in Contact
With the Depths, 2011).
Does anyone want to try to tell me what Bion thinks is the core of
a dream? What is the core of a dream for Bion? Anyone have any ideas?
[A woman answered, but her voice was not picked up. She answered
that for Bion the core of the dream is the emotional experience. She also
spoke of the importance of reading a text like Bion’s a little at a time,
even fragments and phrases. Focusing on little bits at a time opens
vistas.]
Yes. Exactly right. That’s the core of a dream for Bion. You hit the
bull’s eye. One of many ways of reading, a very important way, is to
read as this woman suggests, a little bit, even a phrase. D. H. Lawrence
felt you could get the DNA of an author just by reading a paragraph.
On page 233 of Cogitations, in the middle of the page, Bion writes
that the core of the dream is the emotional experience. We often don’t
know what that is. What is the core of the dream? Dream emotion can
be elusive. If you live with a dream, one day the emotional experience
feels one way, another day it changes somewhat. How do you step into
the same dream twice? The emotional experience evolves, transforms
over time. And perhaps you will have transformed a little too, by living
with the experience. The sentence says, “The core of the dream is not
the manifest content but the emotional experience.”
When I say we don’t know what the emotional experience is, it could
mean many things. We could be speaking about what our emotional
experience of the dream is, what kind of emotions the dream makes
us have. Or we could be speaking of the emotional experience that
the dream is expressing. An emotional experience that we’re not sure
about, unknown emotional experience. An unknown experience that
challenges us, or intrigues us, or haunts, or invites us. The Talmud says
every dream is an unopened letter from God. We don’t open or are una-
ble to open too many of these letters. But sometimes a letter haunts us.
Dreams have a wide range of experience—some are beautiful and
fulfilling, many are scary or hurtful or don’t end very well. Most dreams
are aborted. Aborted experience. Something happens to frustrate the
dream. An arc of experience falls short, is broken off before completion.
Perhaps the dream is attempting to portray something broken, inter-
rupted, incomplete, fragmented. Perhaps the very experience of incom-
pletion and interruption is being dramatized and fed to us. As if the
feeling of something being aborted is part of our insides. An intimation
 DAY 1 3

of aborted lives or aborted feelings. Something happens that doesn’t go

all the way, doesn’t reach absolute fulfillment. A dream breaks off and
we have a sense of aborted experiencing. Broken dreams, expressing
broken aspects of our beings.
Most dreams come to us in the form of narrative. Bion says this nar-
rative gives “an appearance of coherence” (p. 228). More strongly, the
narrative is “a method of imposing an appearance of coherence and
integration” on dream elements, aspects of emotional states and their
sensations. The raw emotional state expressed by the dream comes to
us through a dream narrative, often a fragmented or broken narrative,
which imposes sequence and meaning on unknown emotion. We “see”
the emotion through a glass darkly, through the dream filter.
Emotional currents come together in a dream. Bits of experience come
together in a dream and we are uncertain what those bits of experience
are and what kind of narrative to impose on them. The dream is a kind
of magnet for emotions, an attempt to express and digest them. It helps
in the formation of emotions, slants the way they are born.
We communicate through narratives. We impose an appearance
of coherence and integration. But what is it that we are imposing this
coherence and integration on? What are the broad emotional experi-
ences that we’re filtering through narratives, creating through narra-
tives? We try to give ourselves messages from the deep. And we try to
do it through narratives that skew these messages, distort them, hide
them. Freud was also interested in how the dream hides emotional
messages. Bion feels we can’t escape this. With the imposition of nar-
rative coherence and integration, something is lost, missed, possibly
deformed. But something to work with is created. Bits of emotional
experience can be fed into unconscious waking thought and common
sense. We can build—well or badly—with the emotional sense distilled
by dreams. Art, myth, politics reflect ways emotions are organized, re-
created. But it is good to realize that something unknown about emo-
tional reality remains. Something unborn, embryonic. We mid-wife
emotional life partially, at our best creative partners, but often what we
contact involves emotional damage or incapacity.
I’d like to introduce a term Bion uses, taken from David Hume:
“constant conjunction.” It simply means things that go together, appear
together. When this comes, that comes. David Hume noted that events
that go together, associated happenings, recurrent patterns, often stim-
ulate ideas of causation. We think this caused that when we see this
4 EIGEN IN SEOUL

and that appear together. Hume noted that people attribute causation
to things that are associated—constantly conjoined—with each other.
We see the sun rise and cross the heavens daily and think Apollo is
drawing it along in his chariot. We make up reasons, myths of causa-
tion. We make up reasons to explain why things appear together, why
this goes with that.
Very often we don’t know why this goes with that. We just notice when
this happens, that happens. The cause might be something, somewhere
else entirely. What we notice might be the middle of a story. We may
not know the beginning or end of the story. X goes with Y. We make
up myths and stories and scientific explanations as to why these things
appear together. Sometimes we’re right, but usually we’re not.
A particular constant conjunction that Bion is interested in is the
following: something like a good feeling appears and then a bad feel-
ing happens. Something good happens, something bad happens. You
think you’re doing something good and helpful, then a calamity arises.
Like in old silent movies. When a character says in the beginning of the
movie, “What a beautiful day”, you know something awful is going to
happen. Maybe you’re sailing along with good feelings, but walking
on thin ice without knowing it, disaster not far away. Bion notes this
conjunction, this coming together, this pattern, this repetition, this con-
nection, this link: something good happening, something bad happen-
ing, good feeling—bad feeling.
An example of constant conjunction in the external world is the
recent economic mania and then meltdown. I don’t know if it hit this
country, but in the United States there was a decade or so of economic
escalation, then catastrophe hit. This wasn’t a surprise from Bion’s
point of view. Up-down, good-bad are facets of a constant conjunction,
recurrent happenings in the field of experience.
It goes on all the time, ubiquitous. A rhythm, back and forth between
pleasure-pain, joy-suffering, something good one moment, then some-
thing seems to take it away. This inner sequence in normal living in
inescapable.
Our job with our patients and with ourselves, is to help make room
for this sequence, for this inner rhythm, for different transformations
of this constant conjunction. Not to get rid of it. We cannot get rid of it.
We’d be getting rid of ourselves. Even in nirvana, you will not get rid
of it. One has to learn to live with it, have a larger frame of reference,
open the playing field, make more room.
 DAY 1 5

An example Bion likes is the Tower of Babel (p. 241). The story
begins with people cooperating, working together, with good will.
People speaking a common language engaged in the common task of
reaching heaven. What could be wrong with reaching heaven? What
could be better? And then disaster strikes. We attribute it to God. God
didn’t like this cooperative activity. He attacks the link. You silly peo-
ple, you shouldn’t do this, you can’t reach heaven yet. You’re going too
far, too fast. God strikes the people down. He attacks the link. He cre-
ates a situation in which people can’t understand each other. They no
longer speak the same language or the same emotional language; there
is a babble of tongues.
As psychoanalytic people, we know that this angry God is our-
selves. It’s us. We’re the angry god. From my particular theistic point of
view, God is unknown. An unknown God. He may not be unknown for
you in your particular theism, but in Judaism, God is an unknown god.
We’re not even allowed to say his Name. He’s mysterious. What can we
say about him? We can feel him. We can feel it. We feel this presence. We
feel a deep presence, which we’ll speak more about this afternoon when
we talk about Winnicott. An implicit, mysterious presence deep in our
loneliness, in our insides. What is it? We don’t know.
Much about what we say about God describes aspects of ourselves
and our experience of life. In Rage, I have a chapter describing God’s
personality. And it is clear in describing attributes of God we describe
aspects of ourselves and wishes about ourselves. The angry god in the
myth of Babel—that’s us. We are that. We are the angry god, a very
angry god. In psychoanalytic talk, the god that destroys links between
people is in us, a part of us.
So what does this god do? In the myth of the Tower of Babel, he stops
us from reaching heaven. As we get a taste of heaven, he pulls the cord,
puts the brakes on and destroys our reaching out or attempts to destroy
it. When we’re cooperative with each other and want to make earth like
heaven, make a heaven on earth, something goes wrong. Something
stops it. And the force that stops it is in ourselves.
This has a very important implication for getting along together,
how we get along together. In order to get along together, we have to
make room for not getting along together. If you’re in a relationship,
if you have a partner, you don’t get along together all the time. If you
get along together 5 percent of the time, it’s a good relationship. We
have to make room for not getting along. Or not being there. Or being
6 EIGEN IN SEOUL

irritable, or whatever it is. But in order for us human beings to get along
together, we have to learn how not to get along in a better way.
So again, the God of Babel, a force within us that attacks cooperative
links is something inside us. Something inside us that attacks ourselves,
attacks our own link with ourselves. Something of us that’s unable to
get along with our own selves. Our own self can’t get along with itself
and keeps attacking itself. It’s like a wounded rat I once saw. One of its
legs was wounded, and I watched it chew it off. We feel emotional pain
inside and we may try to solve the pain by tearing at it, by making the
wound bleed more. We do it instinctively because we don’t have the
evolutionary tools to stand back and figure out a better way of doing it.
That’s one of the forefronts psychoanalytic therapeutic work is experi-
menting with. Can we develop tools to work with emotional life, to
work with our wounds in a better way, in a way that doesn’t make it
worse?
We’re lucky, in a way, because heaven doesn’t give up on us very
easily. And good feelings return in periods of recovery. So there are peri-
ods of attack, attacking each other, attacking ourselves and periods of
recovery from attack. The good doesn’t give up, it isn’t ended, it comes
back. We’re resilient up to a point, we’re testing what that point is right
now, we’re testing how resilient the earth can be, how resilient we can
be in the face of toxins we’re pouring into ourselves and into the world.
But so far, up to now, we managed to survive our own toxins in some
form or another. So far the earth has managed to survive us. Whether it
will continue so, we don’t know. But we’re hoping that something in us
will come to our rescue. The challenge of a negative force doesn’t stop.
I’d like to give another example that Bion gives of a constant conjunc-
tion between something good and something bad, a patient’s dream.
Bion’s patient dreams that he’s on a train and thinks there’s a potential
disaster ahead. He sees cars near the tracks and tries to signal the train
to stop or signal the cars away. He signals as if he were in a car, stick-
ing his hand out the window to make a stop signal. And his hand falls
off. It causes trouble, perhaps annoys other passengers, creates a delay.
Perhaps now the focus will be on his dismembered arm and dealing
with the damage. His attempt to help makes matters worse. The very
mechanism through which he tries to help causes difficulty. In this case
Bion sketches a constant conjunction between trying to do something
good and results opposite to a helpful intention.
 DAY 1 7

Again, the aim of therapy would not be to get rid of any of these
tendencies but to develop, to evolve with them, to make a bigger play-
ing field, stretch to encompass them better, make more room for them.
That’s the message I’m trying to communicate. To make more room for
the rhythm of these tendencies so that they have room to play. I just
came from Kyoto and one of the many amazing art works I saw was
a Buddha, I don’t know the Japanese pronunciation, I know only the
Chinese, Kwan Yin [In Korean, Kwan Yin is Kwan Eum (bo sal)]. Kwan
Yin is that aspect of Buddha that only knows compassion. In this par-
ticular representation, there were 13 heads on top of the head of the
Buddha. The heads were demons, monsters, mis-shaped and deformed
creatures. And on top of all of them was another self, another centered,
undeformed Buddha. This is about as good an outcome as you can get
for what I’m talking about.
All tendencies are given expression. All tendencies have room in a
larger frame of reference. Here you have the Buddha coming through
all persecutory forces, all the demons, all hell. What happens to the
deformations? They’re still there, but now they become helpers. They
channel energy. The energy becomes usable for a better end. It’s not
denied. The distortions are there. The demons are there. They don’t go
away. But a larger frame of reference is able to make use of them.
If you turn the kaleidoscope a little, a variation in another key is
Jesus going through the suffering of death on the cross and resurrect-
ing. Dying and resurrecting, going through all the suffering in the
world and resurrecting. Here is the constant conjunction we are talk-
ing about in reverse. An extreme condensation of total agony and joy
or bliss.
American evangelicals say Jesus was crucified for us, conquered
sin for us. From my analytic viewpoint, Jesus’ journey expresses going
through this basic rhythm or constant conjunction in an absolute way,
totally, thoroughly, fully. That doesn’t free us from finding ways to
make room for ourselves to go through it in a relative way. Either we
go through the sequence or deny it, and if we deny it, we make a big-
ger mess. So little by little we have to teach ourselves to dose it out, to
increase the dosage to what we can stand. We go through our deaths,
many deaths, bigger and smaller deaths and rebirths. It doesn’t stop,
crises do not stop. But we begin to approach them with a better quality
of approach.
8 EIGEN IN SEOUL

In a way, the Kwan Yin representation I described seems more static

than crucifixion-resurrection, but it portrays, in a single view, contrary
forces at work encompassed by a giving heart. A kind of Buddha-demon
sandwich. Demons on top of Buddha, Buddha on top of demons.
The Buddha here is Kwan Yin, expressive of infinite compassion.
This brings me to the next part I wanted to talk about. I think we
should take a little break before I try to do the second part, but I’ll give
you a glimpse of what I want to do. It’s something I call on-off think-
ing. Bion talks about three kinds of alpha function. Why does he use
the term alpha function? Alpha function is a term he made up referring
to how we store and process emotional experience. He uses the term
alpha function to let us know we don’t know very much about how we
process emotional experience. How do we begin to digest, work with,
amplify and evolve with our emotional life? He uses an “unknown”,
a term like alpha function, to slow us down, stay open, and not make
believe we know more about emotional life and what to do with it than
we do. We have cognitive and brain studies, we know this and we know
that. But Bion likes to remind us that what we know is not even a stripe
upon the tiger, let alone all the stripes or the tiger itself. He coins the
term alpha function for unknown processes of psycho-emotional diges-
tion, psychic digestion.
How do emotional impacts get digested? He tells us about three
kinds of processing. One is through narratives. Narratives in dreams,
narratives in stories, stories we tell each other about ourselves and our
lives, stories we like to believe or want to believe. Some stories espe-
cially move us because they reach a deeper truth.
Freud pointed out that dream narratives show and hide truth at the
same time. Bion adds, with Freud, that we do this while awake as well.
We both show and hide ourselves in what we say. We have to learn
to live with and read double languages in the way we communicate.
Another way of saying this is that we have to build a capacity to feel
and work with hiding and sharing at the same time. We show through
our hiding and hide through our showing. Hide and show. A double-
ness that characterizes narrative communication. This is an inescapable
situation. We are programmed to be narrative beings, double beings.
We have art forms that try to get below the narratives, get under the
narrative to the thing itself. There is an urge to escape our narratives,
be free of them, get out of them, as if we feel hemmed in by our own
stories.
 DAY 1 9

A second form of processing is analysis. Not psychoanalysis

specifically, but analytic thinking, logical thinking, like Euclidean
Geometry. Bion sees in Euclidean Geometry a mode of processing emo-
tional as well as spatial experience, an approach to emotional space.
In general, Bion points out ways various scientific, mathematical, as
well as mythical formulations express and explore aspects of emotional
experience, in addition to other uses that are made of them. I think of
Owen Barfield’s book, Poetic Diction, in which he shows that modern
poetry is both analytic and intuitive and that both processes interweave
in opening and communicating emotional reality.
I’ve touched two forms of alpha function: narrative and analytic
thinking. But it’s the third form that Bion brings up that I most want to
talk about, most want to communicate. I call it on-off thinking. Some-
thing appears, disappears. Appears, disappears. Like a dream appears
and then disappears (Bion, op cit., pp. 223–234). You have it, you don’t
have it. It comes, it goes. You come, you go. Self, no self. God, no god.
Attachment, not attachment. On, off.
Another way he tries to describe this is in terms of reversible think-
ing. He likens it to reversible figures in perception. You look at a picture
and see a witch, keep staring and you see a beautiful woman. Now a
witch, now a beautiful woman. Back and forth. I’m calling that on-off
processing. We see things one way, then another. First love, then hate.
Reversible affect. Reversible thinking. I’d like to say a little more about
reversible processing and on-off processing when we come back.

* * *
On-off thinking can be applied to lots of things. Before the break
I applied it to god/no god, self/no self, attachment/no attachment.
This kind of thinking makes room for all our tendencies, our binary,
complementary tendencies and their gradations and mixtures. “Now
you see it, now you don’t, now it’s x, now it’s y” is an important way
our mind works. We tend to persecute ourselves because we can’t think
just one thing. We think of something and its opposite. That’s part of our
power, that we think X and not X, we think Y and we think Z. We have
the kind of mind that turns things around, reverses things. It’s impor-
tant to see how precious it is to have the kind of consciousness that can
null itself. An amazing capacity that works myriad ways. Rather than
straighten it out and make it behave, it’s best we learn to work with it,
develop it.
10 EIGEN IN SEOUL

To be able to see things one way and see things another way, is not
just being obsessive or indecisive or vacillating. It’s learning to chew
things, turn things around, see things from multiple perspectives. And
the more we let ourselves do that, the less nasty we may be with each
other. If I could see things from your perspective, and you could see
things from my perspective, instead of assuming that you’re wrong or
I’m wrong, if we begin to turn it around, looking at it this way and
looking at it that way, we may able to develop a deeper appreciation for
ourselves and for each other, an appreciation that instantaneous reac-
tions that see things only one way can’t develop.
We have so many languages and see things from so many perspec-
tives. Scientific languages, faith languages, psychoanalytical languages,
common sense languages, everyday languages. All of us have many
languages and we’re not sure how to reconcile them. Well, I’d like to say
right now that we don’t need to reconcile them. We need to use them.
If there weren’t faith languages, most of the art in the world wouldn’t
have happened. If there weren’t science languages, we wouldn’t be sit-
ting in this building talking to each other this way right now. My feeling
is that the human race needs to learn to stop the wars between different
capacities, all the different languages, and begin to develop them, begin
to develop each capacity as fully as possible. Last night, Jae brought me
to see traditional Korean dance. The people playing instruments and
dancing are specialists. Profound specialists. And what they specialize
in is a very developed art form, a stylized art form. They embodied
particular ways of expressing cries from the heart. We have so many
languages for cries from the heart and we need them all. Each adds a
variation, a nuance, a particular soul window. We need to develop all
of them.
I’d like to give a bit of a case from Bion. In all of the cases scattered
throughout his work—there are a lot of them—cries from the heart are
stifled, frozen, broken. Something went wrong with the cry. It wasn’t
given or allowed to be given or couldn’t reach full expression. It’s as if
the person who’s crying isn’t able to cry. The cry becomes something
of a stifled scream, frozen. The personality becomes something like a
stifled scream, the personality a kind of scream in spasm.
We’ll only be able to do a little bit in the time we have, but at least it
will be a little bit. It’s a particular case in Cogitations (1992) in a section
called “The Analyst’s Odyssey”, pages 218–221. To divert for a minute,
I want to say that one of the things Bion recommends in order for the
 DAY 1 11

therapist to keep psychic processing warmed up and in good repair,

is to use myths. He feels that myths and dreams work with emotional
experience in overlapping ways. Part of the analyst’s homework is to
use myths to illuminate emotional realities of sessions. The analyst
might write his or her associations to various parts of a congenial myth.
Perhaps the myth is meaningful to you at this moment with this patient
or perhaps it is meaningful to you because it touches an emotional knot
of your own that needs care. This is a kind of psychic exercise for the
analyst to help keep psychic processing ability lubricated, perhaps even
to help it come alive or come alive in new ways. He suggests the ana-
lyst find a myth that is personally meaningful. The emphasis is not the
patient’s associations or the analyst’s associations to the patient, but the
analyst’s association to a myth related to the session or to his own emo-
tional problems. For Bion, the myth functions as a kind of “algebraic
calculus” through which fields related to emotional realities at stake
develop. You get into the field of a myth and see what happens, what
you undergo.
Now, I want to get started with one of Bion’s patients. We’ll be using
his case as an example of constant conjunction and on/off thinking.
A particular kind of on/off thinking and constant conjunction involv-
ing the way a patient starts something and stops it. Starts, stops, goes
toward, goes away, begins and ends abruptly, starts again, cuts off. Bion
writes about psychotic patients, the psychotic dimension of mind, psy-
chotic operations, psychotic dynamisms. We’re going to enter a particu-
lar domain of madness and maybe you’ll recognize some of it.
We’re starting with the case on pp. 218–219. I’m going to try to go
very slowly on some of this. Slow motion. Have you seen movies of
infant studies begun some four decades ago by Daniel Stern and carried
forward by Beatrice Beebe and others? These movies show slow motion
frames of moment to moment interaction between mother and baby.
Baby does something, mother does something, mother does something,
baby does something. You see immediate shifts of expression, action.
You see frame to frame changes in feeling expression depending on
what each does from moment to moment. Slowing things down can be
consciousness raising.
Bion begins his portrayal saying the patient comes to the door and
looks away. So right there you have a constant conjunction and on/off
mechanism working. A conjunction of going towards, looking away.
The two tendencies together function as a unit: towards-away.
12 EIGEN IN SEOUL

The patient comes to the door. That’s already a big thing for
a psychotic patient. The patient comes to see you. So that’s a plus. Not
everyone does that. Not every patient can come to the door. Not every-
one who needs therapy will seek therapy. For someone who’s psychotic
to be coming to the office by himself seeking help, is immense. I think
of a patient a Brazilian colleague referred to me some years ago. This
patient would call and leave a message on my answering machine and
I never could understand the message. I never could get the number
right. Whatever combinations of numbers I tried, I couldn’t reach him.
The message never came through. This went on for three or four months
and I started to close up. I began to feel I didn’t want to see this person.
I want to give up. I contacted the analyst in Brazil who made the referral
and told him this patient and I were having communication problems.
We couldn’t make contact. My Brazilian colleague chuckled earnestly
and said, “He wouldn’t be trying to see you if he didn’t have commu-
nication problems.” As soon as he said that, something in me softened.
The next time this person called I understood the message, called his
number and we saw each other for two years. We worked well together
before he went back to Brazil, his home. How do these things happen?
One moment, it’s like this, the next moment, it’s like that.
So, Bion’s patient comes to the door and looks away. Toward, away,
start, stop. Perhaps he looks away to avoid Bion’s eyes, physical or
mental eyes, perhaps even imaginary eyes within himself. In some
of Beatrice Beebe’s films, there are moments when the mother seeks
the baby and the baby looks away. Sometimes a mother won’t tolerate
that and goes in search of the baby’s gaze, goes after the baby’s gaze.
At such a moment, the mother seeks the baby even when the baby is
trying to tone down interaction and isn’t playing anymore. In this case,
eyes refuse eyes; eyes are unable to bear eyes. The baby wants to tone
down or stop the stimulation, take a rest, get away for a moment, shut it
out. If a mother misreads this signal or can’t take the baby turning off, if
she needs the baby to turn on and keeps going after the baby, forcing it,
the interplay can turn into a tragic happening rather than a game. The
baby can’t control the stimulus and the mother won’t give up trying,
won’t let the baby have its space, won’t let it turn off for awhile.
Winnicott (1953) speaks of a patient who, as a child, had to be her
mother’s transitional object. She had to be there in order to keep her
mother in life. The mother couldn’t allow the connection to wax and
wane or die out. The child had to always stay on to keep her mother
 DAY 1 13

alive. The natural rhythm of being on and being off got wounded.
One of the things that Winnicott tried to do with this woman was give
her room to be alive and to be dead, to come back and to go away, to find
or enable the development of her natural rhythm of coming and going,
coming alive and dying out. Bion’s patient can’t fully die out and can’t
fully come alive. The flow, the rhythm, the back and forth movement
has been wounded, traumatized. Both tendencies have been trauma-
tized. He lives in a semi-aborted version of each tendency.
Bion writes, “The patient comes to the door and looks away so as to
avoid my eyes. He is dirty and unkempt; he wears gloves, but they are
not a pair.” (p. 218) So again, he wears gloves but they don’t match. It’s
yes/no, yes/no. He holds out his hand to shake but it’s limp, a shake
but not quite a shake. He goes towards and stops. He seems almost to
dissociate himself from what he does physically as well as mentally. As
if he does it but is not in it. If that’s the best he can do, at least he does it.
He came to the session. He held out his hand. He was dissociated, not
fully in it. But he wasn’t fully out of it either or he wouldn’t be there
at all.
Bion continues: “He lies down on the couch. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I don’t
seem to have much to say.’ There is a pause of two or three minutes.
‘Funny, I seem to be feeling anxious.’ He is tense and lies so still in a
position that might, except for his tension, be described as limp.” Here
you have opposites again. He is tense. He is anxious, but limp, dis-
sociated from his feeling. It’s as if he feels it from far away, five times
removed. As if having an inkling of what he might be feeling if he felt it.
Yet he’s communicating. He is saying I feel anxious—maybe. But then
goes limp in face of it. To be tense and limp at the same time. That is
an achievement. It allows a glimpse of how we are so often composed
of opposites at the same time in our body and minds. We are never just
one thing. In the particular state Bion is describing, one is tense and
limp or slack at the same time and both tendencies are simultaneously
real.
“He examines his hand with detachment as if he were witnessing
a hallucination or some event from which he wishes to detach him-
self because he is so frightened by it.” Again, the duality. I look at my
hand as if I’m detached from it because I’m so frightened by nameless
fright. Maybe I’m frightened because I have a hand and because I can
do things with my hand, at least theoretically. I have a body and can
actually walk with my body if I let myself walk with it. I have a hand
14 EIGEN IN SEOUL

and could do useful things with my hand if I could occupy my hand.

But my hand scares me. I’m afraid to have my hand. I’m afraid of my
body and I’m afraid to be in my body and to use myself.
“He turns his head slowly to follow the movements of his hand. He
folds his hand on his chest. The operation is complete; he composes
himself for slumber.”
Then Bion has a paragraph about his feelings while this is going on
and speaks of his patient’s actual or conjectured fears of committing
murder. He also describes his patient’s sensitivity. If Bion adjusts his
chair, it appears that the patient experiences it as a violent impact. Bion
writes, “I may adjust my position in the chair, or even make some sound
or movement much less obtrusive. At once the patient starts violently,
as if I had frightened him beyond endurance, or maybe even struck
him.” The patient is in a quasi-slumbering state, maybe a semi-relaxed
state, maybe a catatonic state and Bion moves, and the patient violently
starts, a shock. We begin to get a picture of something going on deep in
the patient, whether the patient is aware of it or not. Affective attitudes
reverberate throughout what we call body and mind, as if bodymind or
mindbody express emotional states we can only guess at and remain, in
an important sense, unknown. Fright, startle, pain. The patient acts as
if a painful thing tore through him when the analyst moved. We get a
sense of a frozen and traumatized state, yet high susceptibility to shock.
Little things become a potentially traumatizing shock. A movement of
the analyst becomes a violent tear.
I’m tempted to say that the patient lives in a semi-murdered state,
a kind of frozen murder, semi-alive and capable of movement, even,
at times, violent words or actions. Although, in Bion’s vignette, we get
a sense of tension rising and fizzing out. If there is a volcano, it did
not erupt, although the tension and fizzing through the patient’s being,
chronic stiffness-slackness, has stories to tell.
Whatever the stories may be, Bion notes, “His attitude expresses
intense pain. Slowly, reproachfully, he subsides. The session has
begun.” Here you have intense pain expressed in a way most people
wouldn’t notice or would push away. Here we have a micro-glimpse
into a life of intense pain that an “average” person (or therapist?) might
brush off or be baffled by. How can a change of position or movement
of a chair be akin to catastrophe? A catastrophe that begins to rise, then
falls, but never is far away. A catastrophic state that often wouldn’t be
seen, or would be dismissed.
 DAY 1 15

“It’s nothing” are two words often used to make pain go away.
The other day a patient told me about a remark his mother made that
stabbed his heart. Later she apologized. He brushed it off saying, “It’s
nothing.” It was beyond conception to say, “Thank you for apologizing,
for noticing. You stabbed my heart and it means a lot to me that you feel
bad about it.” Nevertheless, the acknowledgment of pain and apology
was quite a step.
The state Bion describes is at once a showing and dismissing of
pain, as if the patient is caught between two semi-frozen tendencies.
A constant conjunction: intense pain rises-subsides. Stiff-limp, tension/
no tension, both at once. The session begins/peters out. This conjunc-
tion is a beginning. In a state like this, beginning/ending is a kind of
beginning—if the patient and analyst keep coming. Bion picks up on
the patient’s sensitive pain receptor, then immediately after the patient
transmits this pain, he downplays it. The patient says, “I forget what
I said,” after saying he thinks he has something important to say and
later says, “There’s something I meant to say.” It’s a little like a Beckett
play, waiting for feeling, meaning, something important to show up. It
shows up and vanishes at the same time, or almost shows up, almost
vanishes. It may be that “traces” of what might be or was are being
communicated.
The petering out of the session is at one with its rising and its rising is
one with petering out. Living in almost land. The dual tendencies work
together, semi-showing/nulling. A lot is going on. Is it verbal, non-ver-
bal? Does this distinction fade? How would you describe this domain
that Bion is trying to tune us into? A domain of twitches, spasms, ges-
tures of the feel of tension and dying out, a sense of too much and noth-
ing. Every little bit is too much to take and being too much to take is
nulling.
Since there is so little time, I’m going to jump to some of the phrases
that the patient uses in another session that show hints of the under-
lying pain. It’s as if the patient is in a state of spasm, in a spasm that
comes and goes. Spasm state, limp. Spasm state, limp. And it comes
out in his words and his gestures and some of his phrases. Here are
a couple of phrases from another session. Patient starts talking to
Bion softly, confidentially says, “They’re cutting the grass. Of course.”
“I could hardly protest.” “The tea was awful. Really awful. Well,
there it is. No home. Tea all over the place. I simply will not stand it.”
Does that make sense? They’re cutting the grass. So cutting. A broken
16 EIGEN IN SEOUL

narrative expressing brokenness. We care about the emotion that the

narrative expresses. We care about cutting. The tea was awful. We don’t
care about the tea. We care about the awful. What was awful? Life is
awful. He is awful. Mother is awful. I don’t know what’s awful. Bion
is awful. Feelings are awful. Something’s awful. Cutting is awful. Really
awful. I believe you. I believe it is awful. It is really awful to be alive,
not to be alive, to have feelings, not to have feelings. To be limp, to be
in pain. I believe it is awful. There it is. No home. Tea all over the place.
A mess. A total mess. I’m a total mess. Life is a total mess. We are mak-
ing a mess of things. This therapy is making a mess of things. I sim-
ply will not stand it! The whole body gets in this tension state. Rejects.
The mouth spits out. Hands and feet kick away. Eyes and ears shut out
sight and sound. I will not stand it. I cannot stand it. Life is too much.
The feeling of life is too much. I cannot stand it, I will not stand it, he
says as if he can do anything about it except blunt the feelings of his life
some more, dissociate himself some more. What can he do to get out
of this? Blank it out? Tense up so he can’t feel it? Leave messages that
I can’t understand?
He’s telling us an emotional experience. He’s giving us an emotional
experience he can’t make use of. He gives us a taste of his life. A feel
of his life that he can’t make use of. And the only real question at that
point is can we make use of it? Can we make use of his communication?
He’s transmitting a lot that a normal person cannot see and if the latter
saw it he/she would dismiss it. There is a lot here that’s being commu-
nicated moment to moment. Can we make use of it is the question? If
we can make use of it, something happens. A therapist from Brazil tells
me of course there’s a communication problem. That’s who we are. We
have enormous communication problems. And that softens me. And
then I hear the message. Perhaps my softening somehow sent a vibra-
tion to the patient across New York City. And he felt “now I can tell him
my number. Now I can leave the number. He can hear it.” Who knows
how these things work.
Bion adds, and I am paraphrasing and elaborating: I could write
thousands of words but I cannot represent what’s happening. I cannot
in theoretical, representational, narrative language really say what’s
happening. I can only write in such a way that I can make you feel
what I felt. I can make you feel what’s at stake. But I don’t know how
to represent it. I know how to communicate it in a way that if you slow
down, tune in you’ll get it. But it won’t be up in your head. It will be
 DAY 1 17

direct and immediate. And if something happens in you, then there is

a chance, just a chance that something more will happen in the work
itself.
Any questions? Or thoughts? Response? Anything anyone wants to
say? As the spirit moves you?

Question 1
[A comment was made that the tape did not pick up having to do with
analytical and intuitive thought].

Response 1
Yes. I think what you’re asking about is the tension between analytical
and intuitive thinking, and what value would analytical thinking have
in this situation. All thinking is valuable. Very little of it occurs. Einstein
said he thought once in his life. If Einstein thought once in his life, what
about the rest of us? But yes, you’re absolutely right. Bion’s emphasis
is on intuitive thinking. When he gives the exercise to free associate to
myths—all the different parts of a myth—he means this as a tool to help
build intuition. Bion’s emphasis is on intuition, not on analytic think-
ing in the session. He feels if you want to use upper story thinking you
might miss the session. You might miss the patient and you might miss
the response that the patient needs in that session in order for something
more to happen. When I saw him speak in New York in 1978, someone
asked him about the grid. In most of his books, Bion has a grid that por-
trays the growth of thought from more primordial to advanced stages.
It can be used to locate aspects of session processes. He responded to
the question by saying the grid is fun to play with between sessions,
but in sessions you’re maybe at the level of dream and myth or more
immediate transmission. In my language, impact and response. Impact
and response and imaginative elaboration, intuitive elaboration. In ses-
sions, it’s not the grid, it’s you. You don’t advance the work by playing
with upper stories of the grid in sessions, although you never know
where impact and response may lead.

Question 2
[Someone asked a question not picked up by the tape.]
18 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Response 2
Yes. My trip has been worth it. Thank you. That makes my whole trip
worth it to hear that. I read Jung before I read Freud in college. I love
Jung. I certainly have been influenced by Jung in a deep way. So was
Bion. So was Winnicott. So was Marion Milnor, all influenced by Jung.
But one thing clinically about Jung was that he had a certain contempt
for the weakness of his neurotic patients, particularly men patients,
mama’s boys. He felt he pulled himself up from neurosis, why can’t
they? He had the strength to live his own life, why didn’t they? He had
a certain contempt for dependency and weakness.
That was one of the great contributions of Winnicott, and Bion also
in his own way. Winnicott explicitly and Bion implicitly. There’s no con-
tempt for dependency by these two British analysts. The bible tells us
to care for the weak, the dependent, the left out, the disadvantaged, the
crushed, to become like a child. There’s no contempt in Winnicott for
weakness.
You give people support wherever they are whatever way you can,
given your limitation as a human being. Or to amplify Bion, support
the psyche. These authors touch a profoundly supportive attitude that
the human race keeps suppressing. An attitude that comes up and often
gets smashed. Another constant conjunction: caring for each other, sup-
port for dependency, respect for weakness, then smashing it. These are
raw materials we are working with.
Earlier, we noted that for Bion the core of a dream is an emotional
experience. The session as primitive, truncated, cut off as it is, is an
expression of an emotional experience. The whole session is like a dream
insofar as it expresses an emotional experience someway, if we can find
it. Many decades ago I experienced a therapist, Fritz Perls, who would
suggest saying before relating a dream, “This dream is my existence.”
We would say this and mean it. At the time, he worked mainly with
groups. He might have us give voice to different parts of a dream, enact
whatever appears in a dream. Anything that appears in a dream has
life. We would experience and portray the life of parts of the dream.

* * *

Afternoon session: Winnicott’s paradoxical aloneness

Sorry for being a little late. I just want to make sure you know that two
books of mine translated into Korean are available at the table. I hope
 DAY 1 19

you take a look at them, take them home, and find some meaning in
them. One book that Joonho translated is a transcription of the sem-
inars we had together in 2007. The other, that Jae translated, is Toxic
Nourishment, a deep book about moment-to-moment crises in sessions.
I describe how many people learn to survive on emotional toxins in
order to stay alive and make use of them whatever way they can. They
have to nourish themselves with toxic elements. The book gives many
clinical portrayals.
This afternoon I’ll be focusing on a chapter in another book called
Flames from the Unconscious: Trauma, Madness and Faith that will come
out in English in May this year. There are two chapters that focus on
Winnicott’s work on aloneness and this is one of them, Chapter Two:
“Primary Aloneness”. I believe you received this chapter translated into
Korean by Joonho.
At the beginning of the chapter, I quote something from Chuang
Tzu, “When the great bird rises very high, he must have the wind under
him.” I use this quote because Winnicott, in his work on aloneness, talks
about an aloneness that has support that it doesn’t know it has. Our
sense of deep aloneness has support, has to be supported. And initially
one doesn’t even know that it has to be supported, doesn’t know that it
is supported. But if it weren’t supported it would be traumatized.
We were talking about dependency this morning. And here is a
dependency that the baby doesn’t know it has. Dependency we may
not know we have. But if there’s not support for this dependency, our
whole existence is threatened. Our whole existence may be damaged.
Winnicott (1988) writes of essential aloneness. Now that’s a strong
term. Essential aloneness. He feels that we are essentially alone. It may
be strange to hear that Winnicott says this since he’s so involved with
relationship. Yet he says at the most intimate moment of relationship we
are essentially alone. He says the baby is supported in an alone state by
a not quite cognized presence. That is, we are supported. When we are
supported well we are supported in an alone state without quite real-
izing we are getting support. That’s why if therapy goes well, patients
may feel they’ve done it all by themselves and the therapist did very
little. The patient didn’t know it was the therapist who helped. Well,
that’s a very good kind of help.
The aloneness we are touching precedes clear self-other cognition.
The mother is there helping the baby but the baby may not take in the
fact that another being distinct from him is keeping him in life. Among
the passages in which Winnicott feels pressed to convey this paradox
20 EIGEN IN SEOUL

is the following. “At the start is an essential aloneness. At the same

time this aloneness can only take place under maximum conditions of
dependence.” (1988, p. 132) That’s a paradox for Winnicott. An essential
paradox. The essential aloneness we feel inside ourselves, the quality
of our aloneness depends on the quality of support we’ve gotten. This
plays a role in the quality of support we now can give ourselves. The
quality of aloneness depends, in part, on the quality of support we give
it. This carries over to the present moment. Our quality of aloneness
depends on the support we give each other, on support you now can
give to yourself, and that I can give myself.
Winnicott points to a very important experience. A great psychic
reality is at stake, a precious part of our beings we must make time
for, take the time to live and to sense: aloneness supported by another
one doesn’t know is there. A primary aloneness supported by what
I call unknown boundless other. A sense of unknown, boundless sup-
port. Aloneness has in its very core a sense of unknown infinite other.
No wonder Winnicott says so much depends on the quality of envi-
ronmental response. The very quality of our aloneness depends on it.
A primary aloneness supported by an unknown boundless other. If you
penetrate to the core of your aloneness you will not only find yourself,
there will also be this unknown boundless presence. Is it you? Is it other
than you? What is it? An unknown, boundless presence at the very core
of your aloneness. No matter how deep you go, you’ll find it there.
In Human Nature (1988, p. 157), Winnicott says “it is mad to hold this
view.” It is mad to hold this view, yet this view must be maintained. He
talks about how closely linked the baby and the mother are before the
baby is born. When the baby is inside the mother’s womb, the mix-up
of placenta, intrauterine connections support a separation. The very life
of the embryo depends upon support that it doesn’t know it has. The
fetus’s very alone life depends upon support by the surrounding life it
doesn’t know exists.
Again in Human Nature (p. 157), Winnicott says, “in the most inti-
mate contact, there is a lack of contact.” So that essentially, each indi-
vidual retains absolute isolation always and forever. This is Winnicott
speaking. The spokesperson for interconnection. But it’s an intercon-
nection so deep and so complete that we may not even be aware that
it’s there. If a meteor hits the earth we’re all affected by it. And if a psy-
chological meteor hits the support for our psychological life it has quite
a consequence. In the most intimate contact, there is a lack of contact.
 DAY 1 21

Essentially each individual retains absolute isolation always and

forever. That’s a strong claim by a writer like Winnicott who so often
seems to be so gentle. It’s very often missed how strong a writer he is
and how strong his claims are.
So this is another kind of constant conjunction. We are absolutely
interwoven and connected and we are absolutely distinct and sepa-
rate. We are totally interconnected and interwoven and totally separate
and distinct. A double capacity perhaps. A kind of DNA/RNA of the
psyche, to be distinct and united. In The Psychotic Core (Chapter Four),
I posited what I call a distinction-union structure. Both distinction and
union as one structure or parts of a structure. As with many constant
conjunctions, now you see it more this way, now more that way. Now
more distinction, now more union. Yet they both feed our existence,
double tendencies part of a basic structure (with sets of substructures),
a way we are constituted. A paradoxical capacity that helps our plastic-
ity. We are beings who can live almost anywhere in any conditions. We
find ways to make a go of it, whether in desert or arctic. Wherever we
land, we find ways to make a life of some kind because of our plastic-
ity. And a distinction/union capacity, being able to be at once separate
from and connected with, is part of this plasticity (See Chapter One:
“Distinction-Union Structure,” in Contact With the Depths, 2011).
At the end of this passage, Winnicott says again for the second time
on the same page (p. 157), “It is mad to say this.” But the truth is it
would be madder not to say it. We have to get used to—Winnicott is a
vehicle for it, Bion is a vehicle for it—we have to get used to thinking
paradoxically. We have to get used to not having so many cultural wars:
I’m for separation, I’m relational. They grow from the same source. They
are us, different branches of the same organism. When I was in a gar-
den in Kyoto, suddenly I found my spot. The writer Castaneda says in
every space there is one and only one spot that is your spot. And in a
Kyoto garden I found my spot. From my spot everything looked differ-
ent. Trees suddenly seemed to have roots on top reaching for the sun
and roots on the bottom reflected in the water. All different parts of the
trees were reaching for different kinds of nourishments. And the tree
needed all the kinds of nourishment. The roots on the top and the roots
at the bottom. Both were needed to draw from the soil, to draw from
the pond, to draw from the sun. The tree didn’t feel a contradiction. The
roots on top (called branches) say “We’re reality.” The roots at the bot-
tom deep in the soil say, “You wouldn’t stand without us, we’re reality.”
22 EIGEN IN SEOUL

So we have psychologists who emphasize separateness and those who

emphasize interrelation. Winnicott says we have to start thinking para-
doxically, encompassing multiple capacities. Otherwise, our capacities
are going to keep being at war with themselves. We’re going to keep on
taking sides and hitting each other over the head saying this is the right
one and that’s the right one, when both are right if used well.
I personally experience something sacred in our alone core and its
infinite unknown support. I think Winnicott also did. Our lives tap
into a sense of holiness connected with the background aura of infinite
unknown support. That such an implicit sense is there offers no guaran-
tees about how we use it. It’s a capacity we have. When the support that
basic aloneness needs cracks (and there are cracks in this support)—
when it cracks, vanishes or is threatened, emergent self feeling moves
towards cataclysm. Winnicott is telling us that when there are cracks or
damage to this support the sense of self also gravitates toward disaster.
We’re so connected and so sensitive that damage to the support, dam-
ages the self.
When you grow up with parents who are attacking each other,
you’re growing up with parents who are attacking the ground that sup-
ports you. In face of the ground shaking, we begin to harden. Chronic
self-hardening may be an important part of individuation. We harden
ourselves to grow up. We’re traumatized and we harden in the face of
trauma in order to survive. We have to do that or we’re even worse.
So chronic self-hardening may be an important part of individuation.
But a price is paid. Basic aloneness mutates. We mutate. In order to grow
up and survive and thrive and lead a decent life we mutate. We deform.
We transform. Basic aloneness mutates, splinters and the cataclysm
one hoped to dissolve or avoid or contain is embedded in character.
That’s one reason Freud said character is fate: our trauma history is
embedded in our character. How we act, how we think, our habits, our
response tendencies, our trauma history and how we respond to it, how
we try to master it, get through it, survive it, is embedded in our second
nature, our third nature, our fourth nature, in our personality, in our
character.
We see massive traumas in the political world, as well as in lives of
individuals. Links between character and cataclysm spread through the
social body, families, individuals, culture. Massive traumas are created
in all parts of the world that mimic, reflect, look like the kinds of trauma
inflicted on the basic support of an individual. The traumas inflicted
 DAY 1 23

on the support to individuals have a cumulative impact on the kind of

traumas that societies suffer. One mirrors the other.
Nevertheless, in spite of all the tragedy in Winnicott’s psychology, he
notes a thread of peace that runs through the cataclysm of our natures,
a thread of peace that needs support. I’d like to focus more on this peace
element in Winnicott. Winnicott was fairly unique in psychoanalysis in
emphasizing restful states, quiet states as opposed to exciting states.
Infant and child research is catching up with him. But for many years,
psychoanalysts emphasized exciting states, libidinal states, heightened
states. Winnicott was pretty much alone in emphasizing the importance
of quiet, silence, what I sometimes like to call the Sabbath point of the
soul, Sabbath states.
Winnicott values excitement also. It’s not that he doesn’t value
excitement. Excitement is very, very important. Excitement, sex-
ual excitement, rage excitement, intellectual excitement, artistic
excitement. Excitements are very important. But again there is the para-
doxical constant conjunction. Excitement, rest. Excitement, rest. Which
comes first? Maybe it depends on the baby. I know with one of my sons,
rest came first. With another one of my sons, I’m not so sure. I think
trauma came first and rest came after. I think they were different from
the moment I saw them. Whatever the ordering, whichever is first, I
wouldn’t argue. I’m not going to fight this is first, this is second. Winni-
cott said they are both important. And the rest state, the quiet state has
gotten a raw deal in psychoanalysis. It has been a second class citizen
and Winnicott tries to make it a first class citizen. He and Bion are simi-
lar this way. All states are first class citizens.
Of course meditation and prayer are quieter states than many other
activities that are emphasized in psychoanalysis, like sex and aggres-
sion. Winnicott came from a Wesleyan background. While he wasn’t
overly strictly religious, the quietism of his Wesleyan background pen-
etrated his psychology and had a value for him that he had known since
childhood.
Here are some quotes: “there was an unexcited state that was dis-
turbed by an excited one. And it deserves study in its own right.”
So whichever one was first, there were moments when you were peace-
ful and then an excited state disturbed it. Maybe sometimes you would
say I’d rather not have this excited state come. I feel so good with-
out it. Let me just enjoy this good peaceful feeling a little longer. In that
moment you have a certain privacy of rest and the peaceful state gets
24 EIGEN IN SEOUL

broken into by a little bit of excitement, whatever the disturbance is.

There are moments when rest is the valued state and excitement is the
disturber. Here is another quote; “these excited experiences take place
against the background of quiet in which there is another kind of rela-
tionship between the baby and the mother. We’re concerned with an
infant in a highly dependent state and totally unaware of this depend-
ence.” Here he’s speaking of the peaceful moment, this rest moment
in which the baby is being totally dependent on the mother without
knowing it, and the mother is accepting of this dependence. The mother
rests in it with the baby so that they are in this peace together.
There are people who don’t know how to rest, who don’t know what
rest is, even that it exists. They’re mostly on the go. Some of these people
contribute a lot to society and some of them wreck the peace of others.
Sometimes I hear people apologizing for resting in our world today.
If someone needs to take a rest they might say apologetically, “I’m
sorry but I need to rest” like it’s something to apologize for. “I can’t go
tonight, I have to rest.” And they feel there is something wrong with
them because they need time off, they need time to themselves.
There’s something tricky in psychoanalysis. The theory of psy-
choanalysis didn’t really include much about rest. Freud talked about
passivity, but he didn’t give it its due. His theory was mostly about
activity. Libido for Freud was active. Even if it’s passive, it’s active.
Psychoanalysis is a hyperactive theory. It’s a theory about hyperactivity
of the personality. Yet in his therapy the division of labor is one person
remains quiet and listens, the other does most of the talking. One per-
son is supposed to be quieter than the other. One person listens and
waits and creates a quiet atmosphere. The background support Win-
nicott talks about, the background quiet, waiting, is built into psychoa-
nalysis, built into the clinical method. Quiet is part of the division of
labor, an atmospheric condition, but not given its full theoretical due.
Winnicott brings it out of the closet, emphasizing its critical importance,
a kind of invisible dimension.
It’s not only the prerogative of the analyst to be quiet, restful and
listening. Traditionally, the patient’s quiet in session, especially if pro-
longed, would be seen as resistance. The patient was supposed to be
talking, putting feelings into words, saying what came to mind, what he
thought and felt. When I was in training, the patient’s silence was usu-
ally interpreted as resistance. This attitude towards the patient’s silence
could be traumatizing. It’s not just the prerogative of the therapist to be
 DAY 1 25

quiet. The patient needs quiet too, his or her own quiet space. Affective
processing needs quiet time, quiet time for feelings to be processed.
Perhaps the connection between patience and patient implies the
play of rhythms between patience and pressure. Winnicott depicts a
kind of alternation or dual reality of quiet and excitement, a “double-
ness” that can be hard to sustain as one grows. Dissociations occur, con-
flicts occur, traumas occur. It is challenging to be able to give value, to
validate different sides of our nature. In a way, Winnicott feels health is
more challenging than illness and more painful, as one sustains more
tension between capacities in health than in illness. In the latter, abil-
ity to sustain tensions between capacities tends to collapse, freeze.
Here’s a quote. “Probably the greatest suffering in the human world is
the suffering of a normal or healthy or mature person.” Another quote.
“Tremendous forces are at work within the person when as in health
they have full vitality.” (1988, p. 77) As one grows, one begins to take
a little more of oneself, take a little more of life. And that exerts more
pressure on the personality. As one remains less developed, more col-
lapsed, one endures less pressure and tension from the various stimuli
that impact on one because one shuts them out more.
If rest was traumatized, it’s hard to rest. The last time I was here,
in 2007, I spoke of an incident in a treatment center for schizophrenic
children I worked in as a young man. There was a lovely young girl
who was very active in an autistic kind of way. I’m thinking of a par-
ticular moment when she climbed into a baby carriage and just lay there
on her back very peacefully, very quietly with her hands up and back,
extended on either side of her head, open and peaceful. Very rare for her.
She was always very tensely going on. Within a few minutes her worker,
her therapist came by. A likeable active young woman who was very
playful. She sees her young patient in a baby carriage lying there. And
instead of instinctively and intuitively feeling the peace of the moment,
she felt it was an opportunity to make excitement, to have play. She
starts tapping the girl’s chest, going, “Poop! Poop!” Perhaps she was
trying to animate the girl, bring her back to activity and play with her.
Instead, the little girl had a startle response, a shock. I could see or imag-
ine something of the girl’s trauma history. A restful state intruded on by
a well-meaning person. Her therapist was benevolent, wasn’t toxic. The
timing was all wrong. She didn’t get it. Her intuition didn’t include rest.
It didn’t include peace. She was more of an excitement person who likes
to play, likes activity. You could see the shock waves go through the
26 EIGEN IN SEOUL

girl’s body. From my current point of view, the girl in the baby carriage
miraculously dipped into a moment of peaceful aloneness where she
felt unconscious support that quickly got violated.
There’s an unconscious background that makes it possible to relax
into oneself. It’s an unconscious background that makes it possible for
the patient eventually, not today, not tomorrow, maybe not for 10 years,
but makes it possible for the patient to relax more and more into herself
over time, and to find herself more and more over time. To some degree,
the therapist is the unconscious background support, the unconscious
background atmosphere. We have holes in our personality. We’re trau-
matized. Our damaged being is inevitably going to affect the patient.
That’s the way it is. But we may also have a taste of this peaceful part,
this peaceful dimension, this heaven within, at least a little bit. It gets
communicated even when we talk. It’s an atmospheric thing. And once
we find it, once we locate it, once it becomes part of our body, part of
our skin, part of our tone, part of our texture, it comes out even when
we’re talking. You don’t have to be silent for silence to happen. But it’s
also good to be quiet enough to let the patient be able to hear herself
and for you to be able to hear yourself as well.
I’m going to be reading a little bit from the bottom of page 158 and
top of 159 in Human Nature. I want to bring out the idea that a person
whose support for rest has been traumatized, tries to find that support,
tries to create or recreate it, but often manages to recreate the trau-
matized support once more. We seek a better state while gravitating
towards a traumatized state.
When rest happens spontaneously for someone in early life, when
the mother can rest with the baby, not always have to be doing some-
thing, when they can both rest well together or alone or have their
alone rest supported even from a distance, have a background sup-
port, it’s not painful. It’s a relief. It’s a blessing. But if you grow up
with traumatized rest and get near a rest state, it’s painful. It’s pain-
ful to have to be vulnerable and expose yourself to a background that
will fail you, a background support that isn’t supportive but violating.
In therapy, Winnicott points out that return to dependence, trying to
open the dependence state, can be more painful than it was for a baby.
One has a trauma history embedded in one’s being that one is in dread
of contacting.
“When we watch the emotional development of an infant at these
very early stages we feel how precarious it all is. Fortunately most
 DAY 1 27

of the environmental care is in physical terms; at the beginning it is

instinctual and the mother’s specialised orientation makes it likely that
the important things happen apart altogether from understanding and
knowledge, unless the mother is ill. It is to be noted, however, that a
return to an earlier stage of dependence means pain and a sense of precari-
ousness that belongs to dependence. Presumably, this is not a feature of
the original development that proceeds normally.” (1988, 158–159)
Winnicott feels if the mother is okay enough, things happen spon-
taneously, instinctively. The mother does what she does and what she
does is okay enough. She senses. It’s not a matter of reading books and
knowing how to, not intellectual understanding. It’s not a mentalized
thing. It’s a psychical thing. Sensing. One senses and responds. In early
mother-infant interacting, it’s likely that important things happen by
themselves more or less. Unless she is ill, Winnicott adds. If the mother
is ill, she may have to compensate with intellectual know-how to make
up for her lack of sensing responses.
Going through infancy is difficult enough. Winnicott does not ide-
alize dependence. Pain is an inevitable part of the process. Yet babies
go through it. When Winnicott writes of regressing to dependence,
he does not mean a pain free state, an idealized state. One has a long
unconscious history of dependence, ways of avoiding it, reacting to
it, coping with it, organizing it, working with it. Once you’re grown
and in therapy, to open dependency wounds is painful and precarious,
even dangerous. All the ways that have organized to help escape pain
begin to shake a little. It is one of the practical rules of therapy that one
opens pain to help pain. The precariousness Winnicott notes in infancy
is touched on and defenses built up to handle it are struggled with and,
to some degree, reworked.
To be an infant going through infancy has its own set of difficulties.
To be an adult dipping into “solutions” achieved opens one to wound
structures and levels of pain one spent years trying to play down. If
dipping in doesn’t come out right, things may be worse than before.
As common sense says, better to leave things alone. But if a person
has to go there, has to go through this and re-experience deep levels of
dependency with you, then you have to recognize that this person is
going to undergo pain that you have to make room for. You have to be
ready for what one goes through. Perhaps you have to have a certain
taste for unbearable pain. You can’t expect someone dipping into hell
to say, “I’m so glad doctor; I’m so glad you’re letting me go through my
28 EIGEN IN SEOUL

deep dependency. It feels so good.” Parts of this process are agonizing.

It’s painful to undergo vulnerability that got violated and is liable to get
traumatized again. Because we therapists are traumatizers. I suspect
there are points in most sessions we have traumatizing impacts. If a
person is putting herself/himself at risk and letting a deeper depend-
ency come out, you can be sure a lot of pain is going to happen because
you’re going to fail this person in some way or another. Wounded trust
is an inevitable moment in human interaction.
The person is going to go through hell. And you’re going to go
through hell together. You go through hell together and you come
through as human beings together. You don’t go through dependency
perfectly, you get hurt, but you go through it in a better way than you
did before. You’re in it together and you come through it together and
it was worth it. But don’t expect someone to say, “Oh, I can’t wait to do
it again. It’s so wonderful.” No, it’s precarious and painful, unsteady,
fraught with hardships.
Winnicott says the pain of regression to dependence is presumably
not a feature of the original development that proceeds normally. The
infant goes through lots of states—painful states, agony states, fearful,
angry, joyful states. He seems to have the plasticity to go through lots
of states. By the time we develop more organized defenses typical of
our character and personality structure, we start hardening and don’t
have the flexibility of an infant to go through so many states so fully.
The pliancy of infancy enables one to go through upheavals that could
threaten the balance of adult rigidity.
There is a wisdom teaching something like: If a drunken person falls
out of a carriage, he’ll probably be OK. If a sober person falls out, he’ll
probably be too stiff and break bones. The baby goes through all kinds
of things we couldn’t go through as raw and totally now. There are
ways that the pains of adulthood can be worse than the pains of infancy.
We lose the plasticity of being able to flexibly move through changing
states because we harden and resist and push against them, creating
another set of painful states.
Winnicott summarizes the situation: “In illness or in the course of
psychotherapy, regression may occur and regression to infancy states
can have a healing quality provided that the very intense suffering
associated with dependence experienced regressively can be toler-
ated.” That is, provided that the analyst can tolerate the suffering the
patient is going through. The analyst, the therapist, very often tends to
 DAY 1 29

short-circuit the suffering. It may feel cruel to let a person go through

it, but crueler not to. A lot depends on your intuition. If you don’t have
faith in the background support you’re giving, you can short-circuit
your own background support. When will rushing in to lend a hand
violate a potential healing moment, when will remaining quiet be vio-
lating? It’s a matter of therapeutic sensing. To a degree, like a mother
sensing a baby. A sensing quality that develops all life long.
What if I by accident or mis-attuned design stick my finger in the
patient’s psyche the wrong way at the wrong time? We can recover.
Hopefully, I’ll see the mistake or the patient will let me know and
we will go through the sequence together, a rhythm of recovery. The
implicit supporting background being will give us a chance to recover
spontaneously from this particular disruption. If it goes wrong one time,
we’ll have other chances, other sessions. If it helps for me to be a little
less active or a little more, we’ll have another try. Time is important, and
another time, until the patient realizes, “I can go through this.”
“The clumsiness of the psychotherapist as compared with the mother
makes it inconceivable that regression to dependence even in a care-
fully controlled treatment is pleasurable.” (Winnicott, 1988, p. 159) The
therapist automatically and spontaneously, simply by being who he
is, traumatizes the patient. If all goes well in the session, the patient
recovers from the trauma. A repeated practice of spontaneous recovery.
Spontaneous traumatization and spontaneous recovery. The therapist
as traumatizer—I don’t want to traumatize anyone but I do. I know I do.
I’m a hurtful person one moment and in another moment a provider of
background support. The person who goes through it well enough gets
the feeling, “I can survive you.” Perhaps, “I can even survive therapy.”
And I, too, may feel, “We are surviving each other, surviving therapy
together.” The patient may feel for the first time in his or her life a sense
of surviving oneself and another human being. A sense that we can be
together. It’s an important experience, repeated over and over in differ-
ent ways. We survive each other with growing respect for the intricacies
of our nature.
In the therapy situation—as life in general—both parties are trau-
matized and traumatizing. No one’s exempt. The quality of how we
survive each other is what’s at stake. Winnicott writes that “the idea of
a wonderful time in the womb is a complex organization of denial of
dependence.” (p. 159) It’s possible to take a manic attitude towards our
state of affairs, a moment of imagining everything’s great that denies
30 EIGEN IN SEOUL

just how dangerous, how precarious and how painful dependence

can be. To think everything is wonderful in the womb is an imaginary
idea. To project this imaginary state on to everyday life can be disas-
trous. If you picture all the growing the embryo/fetus does for nine
months, you begin to feel the necessary upheaval of a growing being.
Some of it is pleasurable but some is god knows what. Who knows what
it is like to go through such rapid growth processes! What goes on in the
womb can’t be simply having an easy time. Does the physical residue of
such condensed growth create a background model for rapid psychical
growth? We feel we ought to be growing more than we are? Upheavals
without end? One story about Buddha is that he achieved enlighten-
ment in 4 or 5 years once he got on track. He experienced all that can be
experienced, got to the bottom of what is possible. In another teaching
Buddha says that it took him millions of years with millions of teachers
to achieve the freedom he seeks to share. The womb becomes a model
of growth rather than endless, effortless succor.
Winnicott doesn’t want us to idealize dependence for the embryo/
fetus or baby or ourselves. Wherever we find ourselves, we go through
things. Sometimes—often?—what we go through contains implicit
dangers. Part of the feeling of going through involves going through
dangers. This sense of danger in what we go through—something
can always go wrong—contributes to a tendency towards paranoia
in human life. Because of the danger of dependence, we’re paranoid.
We’re paranoid creatures. We have an eye out for getting hurt again
and we are going to get hurt again, and again. Our dependence will
get wounded again. So we’re careful. We carefully monitor each other,
look for cues. We sense what kind of danger may be here. How should
I protect myself?
Winnicott wants us to acknowledge our situation, not idealize or
deny it. In this context, he sees idealizing dependency a kind of denial
of dependence. Part of acknowledging our situation is to take in the
fact that we are idealizers and deniers. We have to acknowledge our
dependency and everything that goes with it, all the potential vulner-
abilities we go through. The fact that we’re going through all this is
the main thing. Going through things together is the main thing. Much
depends on how we go through what we go through, the quality of going
through.
The last sentence that Winnicott writes in this section is: “Any
pleasure that comes with regression belongs to the idea of a perfect
environment, and against this has to be weighed the idea, just as real
 DAY 1 31

for the regressed child or adult, of an environment so bad that there can
be no hope of personal existence.” (p. 159)
We do have an idea of a perfect environment. We have the idea of
heaven within, or heaven outside. The gospel of Thomas talks about
how heaven is outside us as well as inside us. We have the idea of a per-
fect self, a perfect god, a perfect X, nirvana. We have the idea of perfect
states, have hints of these states, beatific moments. That’s also real. We
have to give our heavenly sense its due as part of a constant conjunc-
tion. But against this, in addition to this, coupled with this part of the
conjunction has to be weighed the idea, just as real, “of an environ-
ment so bad that there can be no hope of a personal existence.” Heaven
and hopelessness conjoined. That’s how Winnicott ends this chapter.
He wants us to know this deep within, find in ourselves heaven and
hopelessness—if finding this is necessary for our journey. Not everyone
may need to go there.
To make room for heaven and hell. An environment can be so bad
that there is no hope of personal existence. One’s inner environment
can become so bad that hope of personal existence remains out of reach,
a consequence of “toxic nourishment”. (Eigen, 1999) There are individu-
als who have heavenly moments in hell. There are such mixtures in our
lives. Tastes of goodness that support hope of personal existence. Tastes
of goodness that persecute hope. Siamese twins, hope and hopeless-
ness. I can exist and I can’t exist. I will never exist. I am existing now.
Any questions or thoughts? Anything your spirit moves you to say
would be welcomed. We have only a short time this afternoon, but
please remember that no interruption is irrelevant.

Question 1
Earlier on we compared the dependency and plasticity of the infant to
the rigidity of the adult and talked about how sometimes the pain is
greater for the adult. For adults, trauma such as rape or war or cancer,
how that impacts adults compared to children and how do adults live
through it?

Response 1
I don’t know how it impacts adults compared to children. It impacts
both terribly. It has a terrible effect on any human being. I think one
thing in our age that’s growing more and more prevalent is what
32 EIGEN IN SEOUL

used to be called psychopathy. A kind of hardening of personality to

survive, to win where only winning or triumph matters, where survival
matters and where integrity or quality of survival matters very little.
Psychopathy used to be defined as a defect of conscience, someone who
didn’t feel another person’s pain, or if aware of another’s pain, would
be interested mainly in how to use it for one’s own benefit. It’s possible
to terrorize a whole population into being afraid of another population.
For example, the Bush group managed to make some portion of the
American population afraid that Saddam Hussein was going to destroy
or badly damage America with weapons of mass destruction. It sounds
insane. The United States had been bombing Iraq for ten years. Iraq had
no weapons of mass destruction. (Eigen, Age of Psychopathy, 2006.)
Skilled “psychopathic” manipulation of mis-information stimulated
and drew on psychotic anxieties, annihilation anxieties. Fear of get-
ting killed, fear of murder is a basic part of human nature. Dreams
involving fear of getting killed are common. Governments go mad
and manipulate madness. The United States is a powerful country and
has a momentous impact on the world when it goes mad. And it does
go mad.
For eight years the Bush group manipulated psychotic anxieties of
the population. They played on catastrophic fears. They manipulated
the country to go war in Iraq and kill defenseless people. For what
reason? I can’t tell you for what reason, but one can’t help thinking
of power, position, oil, money. Some people got very rich doing this.
The munitions and construction and oil industries lit up. Aspects of the
financial world went through the roof. Things like this can’t go on for-
ever. A price is going to be paid. The air’s going to go out of the balloon.
It’s going to happen and may already be happening. Meanwhile, mind-
boggling wealth is at stake. The last statistic I heard on this was that
one percent of the population controls approximately 25 percent of the
nation’s wealth. We have governments, in effect, engaged in manipulat-
ing catastrophic fear to increase private gain.
This attitude carries over, stains the social fabric, big and small. The
model of those at the “top” seeps “down”. A psychopathic attitude trick-
les down. A model of being insensitive to the pain of others, manipulat-
ing the suffering of others for one’s own purposes. I consider it a disease
of the human condition. I don’t think that it’s unusual. I think people
always had that streak. People always had that particular tendency. But
 DAY 1 33

often we try to balance it with other tendencies. Winnicott talks about

early ruthlessness, the baby’s early ruthlessness with the mother, where
the baby doesn’t feel guilt for what it wants. It wants what it wants and
tries to get what it wants. And at some point it does begin to feel guilty
because it begins to realize that the mother is a human being too. There
is mutual adjustment that has to be made. Mutual give-and-take has to
be made. The baby grows a capacity for concern. The psychopath has
a defective capacity for concern. Ruthlessness is more dominant than it
should be. In a more balanced personality the two tendencies, ruthless-
ness and concern balance each other. There is a Jewish saying by Hillel:
“If I’m not for myself who else will be? If I’m only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?” So our big job as a society, and as a psychotherapist,
is that we must learn how to work with psychopaths. We have learned,
to a great extent, how to work with psychosis. We have learned, to a
great extent, how to work with borderline personalities. And yet we
have not learned how to work with psychopaths as a society and as
individual therapists.

Question 2
If there was a patient who required a regression to the state of depend-
ency and he/she had the experience in which the therapist or the ana-
lyst was not able to sustain it and kind of had a double trauma and if
this kind of patient came to you to seek treatment, how would you deal
with it.

Response 2
I would deal with it day by day, moment by moment. I would deal
with it as closely as I could, as Bion advises without expectation, desire
or understanding and try to create open support and space as best as
possible and see what happens and take it a step at a time, try to be
helpful.
If I’m lucky, very, very lucky, at some moments in some days, a good
spirit, if an evil spirit isn’t too strong for a few moments, a good spirit
will prevail. In Chinese, this good spirit is personified by a Buddha
called Kwan Yin. I am told that in Korean she is Kwan Eum (bo sal). I am
mainly familiar with Kwan Yin in writings about Chinese Buddhism.
34 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Last time I was here (2007) a woman gave me a good luck charm with
Kwan Eum on it and a Korean inscription, which I carry with me. So if
I have a good day and the Kwan Yin element is active, then I hope good
will towards the patient is part of the atmosphere, without imposing
more than that.
Also, what you do depends on your personality. I’ve heard stories
about the failure of dependency in analysis. In the beginning of my
book Psychic Deadness (1996), I write of an anorexic patient whose thera-
pist, very highly respected, fostered dependency in his patient. As she
got more and more dependent on him, she became more and more ano-
rexic. When he realized that she was sicker than he thought (these were
the words she used), he got rid of her as a patient. I’m one of the people
she found her way to until she was able to reestablish herself again. The
failure of trust, the failure of dependence by the therapist who induces
and then withdraws from it, is devastating. It’s better to remain in a
more balanced state and not do that to a person. I’ve seen something
like this happen many times. Winnicott reports suicides in his practice
as a result of traumatized dependence. It’s dangerous business, not to
be taken lightly. At the same time, it’s important to recognize and vali-
date these tendencies when they come up. I wouldn’t try to foster them
and I wouldn’t try to make them go away. I try to stick with what comes
up as best as I can and work with the response the person has and the
response that I have. Often this takes the form of mutual traumatization
and mutual recovery from the traumatization, over and over.
I wrote about something similar in a chapter called ‘Smiles and
Screams’ in Emotional Storm (2005). Again, a case where dependency
was induced, then crushed. You can find this book in the institute
library, if you want to take a look.
The question you are asking is bottomless because there are so many
ways to traumatize a patient. Our job is not to create a trauma-free envi-
ronment, which is impossible. That’s not going to happen. Our job is
to make space for these traumas in a way that helps recovery along.
You create a better outcome through interactions over a long period
of time.
I’m going to jump back to Winnicott (1988; Eigen, 2009,
Chapters One and Two) on aloneness and dependence. Earlier I spoke of
the baby’s sense of unknown boundlessness. An experience of unknown
boundless support without “knowing” it, without cognizing it. A sense
of unknown boundlessness implicitly present. Winnicott writes that the
 DAY 1 35

dependence he is bringing out does not sense its dependence. A sense

or perception of dependence has not yet arisen. A dependence without
sensing it. Yet if this dependence is not supported, foundational dam-
age may occur.
To be dependent without acknowledging it can take many forms as
development proceeds. For example, a psychopath does not acknowl-
edge the full extent of his dependence on victims. He does not integrate
the compulsive imperative, “I must have a victim. I must have blood.
I must …” A dependency but not a sensed dependency, an unacknowl-
edged dependency. A manic illusion of independence, the will to be top
dog, to win, to best the other. The victim is experienced as dependent on
the dominant trickster. This makes psychopathic dependence danger-
ous. Unacknowledged dependence wreaks havoc as life goes on. The
disowned boundless unknown becomes fuel for the never enough of
compulsive striving. In this case, you have a pathological, cruel version
of being dependent without knowing it.
On the positive side, dependence on unknown support can be very
beautiful. As a meditation exercise, let yourself begin to sense support
by a boundless unknown presence. There is an area of experience that is
exquisitely, thrillingly beautiful. A piece of the peace that passes under-
standing, reaching towards and from aloneness of an incommunicado
core. A happening that supports your incommunicado core from its
own incommunicado being. God as a kind of incommunicado core.
We don’t know if there is a God. We don’t know what God is really.
We have our productions and gestures, faith or belief. But we don’t
know. An incommunicado core that sends us messages, an implicit alone
core we seem to commune with. It supports our own core with incom-
municado being, a background for the history of aloneness through
a person’s life. Aloneness, too, has a biography. Threads of aloneness
reach forward, branch out. Some become the oneness of awareness,
some awareness of diversity. Awareness of diversity shares a common
thread.
We are all here sitting in some form of awareness, some form of
enlightenment. At this moment, we’re participating in our own ways
with an amazing consciousness. I see you. You see me. Separate-and-
together. Amazing consciousness.
In a way, we’re duplicates, like a machine turned us out. My con-
sciousness. Your consciousness. You’re aware. I’m aware. Stamped
with awareness. Iteration of being aware, implicit awareness of being
36 EIGEN IN SEOUL

in every spec of consciousness. We all share this. A kind of oneness,

sameness. The pronoun I is the same for all of us. Whether your I may
be different from my I, I don’t know. I can’t tell that. We sort of sense or
know what we mean when we say I. It’s generic, a generic I. It iterates.
Every human being that’s turned out has it in one form or another. Isaac
Bashevis Singer somewhere said that every human being, even if he’s
an idiot, is a millionaire in emotions. In part, we’re rich in I-ness, even a
sliver, a glimpse, a shadow of I.
We love our hate, our differences. We fight over differences,
perceived differences. But one mind runs through them. It’s the same
generic mind perceiving difference. When we fight over differences, the
same mind fights on both sides. One mind does all these things.
“One” is already a limit. At certain moments, “one” seems too high
to count. To number is already to limit something unknown. All one, all
alone, all one and alone. We grow into shared aloneness. Shared alone-
ness as a precious state of being. We’re sharing aloneness today, if we’re
lucky. A taste of a privileged moment where sharing is the aloneness
and aloneness is the sharing. The two constitute each other, parts of
the same constant conjunction, parts of the on/off, a kind of psychic
DNA/RNA.
In dipping into alone sharing, some of us discover new qualities of
being.
For some, dipping in is more than enough. You know the saying,
“You can’t step into the same river twice.” Our saying is, “It’s enough
if you can step into it once. Once is already more than enough.” If one
finds a way to begin dipping in, it’s more than enough.
CHAPTER TWO

Day 2

Morning session: no impact—high impact

[Dr. Eigen played the piano as people filed in and got seated early,
waiting for seminar time. A soft, harmonic jazz, mostly reverent blues.
Applause followed him to the center stage table when it was time
to begin.]
Here is a different form of jazz.
This morning I’m going to do a chapter from Feeling Matters (2007)
called “Words.” One of the major things I talk about is the feeling of
not being able to have an impact. A sense of not having an effect on
the other person or on anything. It’s easy to feel a sense of helplessness
in political situations. The government goes its own way and people
don’t seem to be able to affect it. A sense of helplessness on a grand
scale. On a smaller scale it happens in a family, in a couple, or with a
little child. Sometimes when you’re a little child, no matter how you
try to communicate with your parents, whether you scream, kick, act
badly or good, there are times you feel no effect no matter what you do.
Your parents continue on their way and you are left with a sense that
you don’t count. You’re helpless against the system—the family system,
health system, larger public systems.

37
38 EIGEN IN SEOUL

In the case I present here, the man I call Harry feels that he kills
people when he speaks, yet nothing seems to change. People don’t die.
People don’t even seem to notice. Harry and the feeling of not having
an impact will be our starting point: words don’t matter, feelings don’t
matter.
First, a little digression. One of my favorite piano players is Erroll
Garner. He could play any song in any key. He didn’t take lessons.
Rather, he started taking lessons as a child but his teacher discontin-
ued them when she discovered he wasn’t reading the music but played
what she gave him by ear. He listened to her play the piece, then he
played it. He never learned to read music and played by ear all his life.
An inner ear. A music soul ear. He would drive bass players crazy by
changing keys without notice when the spirit moved him. It was a chal-
lenge to keep up with him, almost a game. The bass would have to hear
it, find it. So I’m hoping I don’t drive Joonho [the Korean translator] too
crazy today or make him feel hopeless about my change of keys as we
go along.
We’ll begin with Harry speaking. He says, “When I speak I am con-
scious of words taking aim. I’m aiming at an enemy. I can’t tell you how
much this hurts. When I was a child, I stuttered and I knew why. I knew
my words were pellets to sink into others and explode or poison. Once
inside the other, they knew what to do. A wounding intent was buried
in their essence.” (p. 35)
Harry’s intention to wound others was buried in words. Words car-
ried a wounding intention. When I was a child, there was a saying,
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
As you know, that is a lie. A big lie, because words do hurt. Words hurt
most of all. Freud recognized this. In his first book, Studies on Hysteria
(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895) he noted that neurotic language, eve-
ryday speech and poetic language have something in common. Meta-
phor—poetic metaphor or everyday metaphor or neurotic metaphor—is
more than metaphor. It carries reality. It is real. Freud was intrigued by
phrases for psychic wounds. A word or look can be felt as “a stab in the
heart” or “a blow to the face.” These are common expressions in English:
“a blow to the face”, “a stab to the heart.” They express real states, pain-
ful realities. In these cases, metaphors express the way life feels.
How frustrating it was for Harry who actually wanted to wound peo-
ple with his words but couldn’t see the results of his actions. Yet his wish
underlines an important truth: words do hurt. Words wound. Words
 DAY 2 39

kill. There are instances of someone having a heart attack in reaction to

wounding words. A hurtful look or word can do more than cause pain;
it can lead to physical damage. Usually it’s less dramatic—a momentary
psychic wound or psychic death. The power of words. In Jewish folklore,
it is said that our words create angels or devils. Perhaps part of Harry’s
frustration was that he could not wound others as he was wounded.
Nothing he could inflict matched the pain of his own wounds.
After Harry tells me about how his words wound or fail to
wound, I write: “This is the third time Harry said this to me in the past
two weeks. I do not feel his words exploding, poisoning. Perhaps I will.
Maybe they will sneak up on me and go off without warning when
I step on one, a mine going off when a thought or feeling brushes it.”
(2007, p. 15) But so far it hasn’t happened. He’s telling me he’s killing
me with his words but I don’t feel it. Harry is affable and pleasant. I’m
attentive. I believe word mines are ready to go off. I believe he is tor-
tured by a hostile mind. Freud wrote that if a patient says all the time
that he’s guilty of this or that or just guilty, Freud believed that he is
guilty in some way, if only guilty for having a hostile mind, a murder-
ous mind. Are we guilty for having a murderous mind? Freud under-
stood this as being an unconscious murderous mind. The patient may
not know he has a murderous mind. Harry knows he has a murderous
mind yet is frustrated that no one feels it.
I believe Harry is tortured by his hostile mind. Murderous inten-
tions are real. I understand what he says but do not feel it. I understand
his words but I don’t feel the emotion he’s describing. We have been
together half a year and are still getting the feel of what it is like to be
together. For me, the feel of a person, the feel of a session is important.
How does the session feel? To get the feel of a session, not the mean-
ing of it. To get a sense of it, not what it means. If you want to give
an interpretation, no harm done. That’s a competent way to proceed.
You’ll likely get good results. People are flexible and adapt to therapy.
But my emphasis here is on the feel of a session. How does it feel to be
in the room together?
He talks about words carrying hostile feelings. At some point I asked,
“Do other words carry other feelings?” I am thinking of words of joy or
beauty. Maybe there are other moments, other moods. If there are, he
doesn’t mention them. I’m curious to see if there’s more feeling in his
life that he doesn’t need to talk about. Maybe words of joy, words of
beauty in addition to hostile words.
40 EIGEN IN SEOUL

“I’m not talking about that,” he says. Donald Meltzer somewhere

wrote that there’s no need to talk about what’s going well in the patient’s
life. If there’s an area of joy or beauty, leave it alone. You want to talk
about what the patient brings in, the problem. So I failed as a Meltzer
student. I was interested in what wasn’t being said. Harry is a good
Meltzer patient because he doesn’t want to talk about what’s right in
his life, just about the problem. He wants me to keep the focus, not
wander off with my own interests. I don’t know if you read Donald
Meltzer. If you are not a Meltzer reader, my suggestion is to start off with
Sexual States of Mind (2008), a great work. He has a world of wonderful
books.
“I’m not talking about that,” Harry says. “That is not what I’m trying
to get across to you. I must make you know that I’m a killer. Words kill.
I must tell you this because I must kill you.” (p. 15)
The last time I was here in 2007 I talked about our need to kill each
other and to survive being killed by each other. Winnicott talks about
destroying the other and the other surviving the destruction. Bion talks
about getting killed by the other and surviving destruction. We have
to survive each other’s and our own murderousness in psychological
terms. I’m not talking about actually killing someone physically. Literal
murder stops the process I’m trying to bring out. Actual murder acts as
a kind of premature closure, not letting experience build, cuts off expe-
rience. What’s at stake here is psychological reality, emotional murder
and survival, quality of survival.
One of my analysts once asked me to imagine murdering the person
I most hated in the most gratifying (to me) way possible. That set off a
fantasy train that was very helpful. To murder and come through, qual-
ity of murder, quality of coming through. You and the other have to stay
alive to experience this, to gain from this.
In Coming through the Whirlwind (1992) I wrote about a therapist who
was a psychological axe murderer. His axe was truth. He would use
his version of psychological truth to find flaws in others. He would see
some fault in the other and be compelled to shoot truth like an arrow
into the other’s psychic body. He regarded himself as a truth teller and
proud of it. He felt his truth telling was a healing act. He said what
he saw. He thought the other would be enlightened, even apprecia-
tive, and work on the flaw. That he wounded the other did not seem
to phase him. He thought he was doing a service. He had a hard time
taking in that this behavior played some role in the ruin of his various
 DAY 2 41

love relationships and now threatened his marriage. Perhaps he was

repeating this behavior obsessively in hope of creating a situation
in which aggression is survived, in which he is survived. As therapy
unfolded, this drama included the question of whether and how I would
survive as well.
Harry’s predicament was different from the patient in Coming
Through the Whirlwind. He wanted his words to wound, to kill, but
they failed. People in his life survived. Whether he would survive was
another question. When he said he would have to kill me, I wondered
what went wrong with his murderous impulse in his history. I never
got the sense that Harry meant he would literally murder me. It was a
feeling he was talking about. A felt need. A felt reality. A reality of feel-
ings. Something was aborted in his emotional reality, possibly a need to
kill and be killed and a need to survive these states and to survive well.
Perhaps, in part, failure to go through this or failure to have a partner
who goes through this resulted in a sense of lost impact.
Growth of capacity to come through the impact of each other’s
states and feelings is a crucial part of our development. A mutual going
through with many variations. Harry’s saying, “I must kill you,” may
express a need to go through the cycle of felt destruction, having the
impact of the destructive urge met with felt acknowledgment, and both
parties surviving the felt destructive force. Winnicott (1969; Eigen, 1981)
writes that the other surviving the subject’s destructive force adds to
the realness of reality. Reality is all the more real for surviving the back-
drop of boundless destructive fantasy.
Insofar as this cycle is chronically aborted or damaged, one’s sense of
reality becomes compromised. If the destructive urge does not find the
other and meets with no response or damaging responses, personality
suffers deformation. Therapy functions, in part, as a holding ground
for destructive urges, giving a person a chance to go through this cycle
with better outcomes.
Part of my job as therapist, in this context, is to survive destruction.
When I get destroyed, my job is to survive getting destroyed. Since I’m
just a person, I’m not immune from destructive impacts. A difference is,
I’m practiced coming through them. I might get derailed, done in, but
given enough time I come back, either this session, next session, next
week or next month. However long it takes, I come back, reconstituted,
ready for work. I can be destroyed pretty easily. But I learned over time
that I come back. I go under, come back, a cycle the patient needs to
42 EIGEN IN SEOUL

practice too. A cycle Harry and I eventually began to undergo together,

practice in building resiliency.
One practices a sequence of undergoing damage and death and
coming through. Bringing this sequence to life and letting it develop
more fully is part of what therapy is about. One can translate this as
going through our lives more fully, surviving our own destructive-
ness, our own destruction. The sequence is what counts, to catch on to
this rhythm, work with it. I call it a rhythm of faith. A faith of return,
you and the other will survive each other, one way or another. We’ll be
reconstituted. We’ll go through it. And if we go through it enough, it
gets better. Perhaps the sequence becomes shorter, easier. But there will
always be new destructive challenges in which we are thrown back to
square one or zero, and the work begins anew.
For Harry this sequence was stillborn. It’s voided because needed
affect is missing. Affect that needs to be in the room isn’t in the room.
The words are in the room. He may be feeling the feeling that he tries
to communicate, but the feeling does not come through, it does not
penetrate my being. The words are there, so he must have his eye on
something. But the feelings are not coming through.
“I know this is talk therapy,” Harry continues. “We put feelings into
words. But that is an odd locution. We put feelings into words like gas
in a car? Like cream in a cake? We put murder into words but don’t
actually kill each other?” (Feeling Matters, pp. 35–36)
I agree with Harry. What we do is called talk therapy, but what is talk
therapy? I’ve always felt the locution, putting feelings into words, to be
funny, strange. I was told in therapy school years ago that our job was to
put feelings into words and it struck me as “whoa, how do you do that?”
You take the feeling out with a scoop or spoon and put it into words like
ice cream in a cup? It’s a strange way of looking at people, I thought.
One problem with that view that struck me was you don’t just have
these odd feelings that you put into words. Words create feelings.
A poet creates feelings with words, makes new feelings when talking in
the present. When you’re speaking, when you’re really speaking, you
create feelings. Sometimes it’s seamless. Words create feelings, feelings
create words. The process includes and goes beyond both. It may be a
deeper synchrony in our beings leads to both feelings and words, word
feelings, feeling words.
Harry continues. “I must be sure you know that we do kill each other.
Speaking is murderous. Words kill. Words kill in worse ways than
 DAY 2 43

knives. I kill, therefore I am. I kill, therefore I’m not. It’s obvious but
people don’t see it. If they see it, they gloss over it and pretend it’s not
happening. They go on as if they are not killing each other. But murder
is the medium of words and, deep inside, murder makes life real. Pain
is a kind of compass. I locate myself via pain. I am where pain is. When
I kill you, I am where you are. It is a hidden form of travel, from pain to
pain, psyche to psyche. You can locate yourself in anyone anywhere via
pain travel. Murder is a kind of universal vehicle”.
“There is a devil in words. Evil slips into words, drives words.
A devil of persuasive force frames the way words work on belief. There
are words that lead to physical murder, words that maim, deform, stifle.
Murder is proof of existence. If we can be murdered, that means we are
here. If we were murdered, we are here. If we were murdered, we were
here.” (Feeling Matters, p. 36.)
Harry here links words to the devil. There is “a devil of persuasive
force”, the persuasive force of words, the persuasive quality of
words. Words aren’t just used to convey information. They’re used to
propagandize, to persuade, to convince the other of my view. Words are
used to get you to believe me, to believe in me, to have belief. Words
are used to get you to want me or my belief. Words are used as a motive
force for personal and social persuasion. Believe what I say. Believe in
me. Words are associated with belief systems. And so words are asso-
ciated with war. My belief and your belief often end up being differ-
ent. A lot of people believe the same thing and a lot of other people
believe a different same thing. Our belief systems are molded by words
often linked to disaster. Words and disaster, an ancient link. I think of
two people who are able to get along with each other as long as they
don’t talk to each other. As soon as they start talking to each other, they
can’t get along. In such a case, they can do things together, enjoy things
together as long as they don’t talk.
“Harry’s words shot through me but do not lodge. I see and feel
what he is saying but do not find him. He communicates an agony of
truth, a truth I know. His face hides torment. He tries to show what is
gnarled and narrow as words. But they do not pass through his face.
They do not gather up a lot of body. The words come from truth but hit
the air and dissolve. I reach for their impact but am left straining. His
words carry a most intense communication, murder itself, but I am left
wondering, where did their feeling go? I hear intensity, taste it, wait
for it.” (Feeling Matters, p. 36.)
44 EIGEN IN SEOUL

I believe Harry. I believe his words. I know them, feel they are
real. I know them from my own experience. I’m a word killer too.
So I know what he’s talking about. His words carry the most intense
communication, murder itself. But I’m left wondering “Where did the
feeling go?” Now that’s a feeling too. That’s a feeling I’m having. Where
did the feeling go? That’s an important part of the session. The fact is
that I don’t feel the feeling. That’s real. To not feel the feeling is a real
feeling. I feel the truth of what Harry is saying but not the feeling of
it—and that is a real state, a feeling state. Where’s the feeling? At the
moment the feeling is “in” its absence, the expectant taste of intensity,
waiting.
“Harry pulls the string on his speech.” Is that translatable? In America
there’s a toy called a yoyo, kind of two circular pieces of wood or metal
joined in the middle, with a string wound around the little center link.
By varying the tension in the string, you let the circular piece down,
then pull it up, down and up repeatedly. Harry pulls the string on his
speech. He puts himself, everything into words, then stops in mid-air,
undoes the impact. A string is pulled on the feeling of impact. Another
kind of constant conjunction. Something starts, something stops, starts,
stops. Stops in mid-air and undoes itself. Doing, undoing, reverse
systems.
In the Schreber case, Freud writes of subject-object and affect reversal.
Yesterday we spoke about reversible figures, reversible states: God—no
god, self—no self, attachment—no attachment. In the Schreber case,
Freud talks about reversible affect. Love reverses into hate. Hate reverses
into love. He talked about substitution: one affect stands for its oppo-
site. Love substitutes for hate, hate for love. Love signifies hate, hate
signifies love. He also talked about reversal of pronouns, e.g., “I” and
“you”. I love you. You hate me. I hate you. You love me. That is, I may
experience my love for you as you hating me. The affect forms a link and
pronouns keep reversing. This is significant in terms of history. There
are basic affects throughout history but players keep changing. Now
x country slaughters y country, this group slaughters that group. The
affect is constant: murder, hate, whatever variant. Players keep chang-
ing. Links are the same. The same hate or love links. But the “I” and
“you”, who does what to whom changes. It’s as if history doesn’t care
who does what to whom as long as it keeps getting done. As long as
players keep doing it, it doesn’t matter which mops up the other, as long
as the mopping continues. Links remain constant, pronouns reverse,
 DAY 2 45

change. Now I’m doing this to you, now you are doing the same thing
or a reversal to me.
Harry’s words do not lodge in me or even get to me because they
reverse in mid air and return to him. A turning back to the self. You throw
your affect out and it comes back to you, turning against yourself. Your
own potential feeling turns against you. Reversal and turning against
the self. I wonder if this kind of inner working isn’t reflected in movies
in which one’s creations turn into monsters that attack one. Another
conjecture: an etymological link between symbols and throwing, usu-
ally to throw meanings together. But when you throw something affec-
tive winds can take over. Affective underpinnings of meaning bounce
back, lash around. The wind of your feelings gets blown in your face.
Harry learned to protect others from his killer words but that didn’t
stop him from trying to reach the other. One of my fantasies was
Harry had a mother who couldn’t take his murderous feelings. She
couldn’t bear them and they kept bouncing off her, returning back to
him. A partial failure of projective identification. We project into others.
We try to put into others states we can’t handle and hope the other person
handles them better. The baby puts destructive feelings into the mother
(as well as the reverse). Feelings that might destroy or damage one’s
psychic being are transmitted to the other. In a Bion scenario, these feel-
ings enter the mother’s reverie. She intuitively mulls them over, instinc-
tively works them over, modifies them, and feeds back a better feeling
to the baby. Feeling states that are too much for the baby are modulated
by the mother. She takes the edge off destructive feelings.
This is a ground of empathy all life long—to experience feelings met
and modulated, fed back in better, more usable, less destructive form.
Bion asks what happens if this projection is refused and the full brunt
of destructive fears are sent back in raw form to the baby, perhaps com-
pounded with the mother’s fears and aggression. To throw back the
other’s feelings may be an index of incapacity. Perhaps the mother can’t
take it or doesn’t know what to do with it, compounded by her own
basic problems with destructive urges. The baby, then, is stuck with his
annihilation anxieties un-assuaged.
This is a problem for all of us, insofar as humanity is walled off,
defensive in terms of its own feeling states. If we can’t let each other’s
feelings in, the latter won’t be processed or processed well. It may be
that humanity as a whole suffers from psychic indigestion, affective
indigestion. The capacity to work well with feelings that besiege us
46 EIGEN IN SEOUL

requires further development. It is, if we are lucky, a work in progress.

The alternative is deadly. Picture a world in which projections have
nowhere to go, feelings are refused, bells we ring are unanswered or,
worse, met with emotional violence.
Your feelings bounce back to you like letters returned unanswered.
You don’t know what to do with them either. How can capacity to work
with destructive states grow without support? Bombs go off inside and
you freeze around them.
Therapy creates a space for feeling to be met, modulated, reworked,
grow. An atmosphere of supportive awareness, interactive fields, feel-
ing sustained and absorbed to the extent possible, enough for life to go
on, change suffered and enjoyed.
With Harry, I suspected I was getting a taste of developmental failure
that may have begun in infancy. I was the mother who couldn’t feel the
infant’s feelings and respond well enough. On the other hand, I was
experiencing the result of this failure, a non-feeling state, lack of impact,
something gone wrong in the emotional circuit. In that regard, I was
feeling something important to Harry’s being, a felt lack, impotence,
frustration. We sat together around an affective hole.
Harry told me what it was we couldn’t feel. We couldn’t feel the baby’s
destructive feeling and, more particularly, the effect or result of this feel-
ing. We couldn’t feel the result of his destructive feelings. In that sense,
we couldn’t feel him. But we did feel his frustration in not being felt. We
felt the missing effects of his destructive sense. We felt the lack of effect.
Let me dramatize this predicament. I will make believe I am a kind
of fantasy mother. I can’t feel the baby’s destructive feeling. It’s not a
matter of not wanting to, more a matter of can’t, inability, lack of equip-
ment for this part of mothering. We get through life OK having defec-
tive parents. All parents can’t do parts of parenting. In Harry’s case, in
my fantasy, he had a parent who could not let in his destructive feeling
and now I become that parent. I feel like that parent insofar as I am not
affected by his destructive urges. Perhaps I don’t have the equipment to
deal with them, or to deal with my not being able to deal with them.
Now he’s going through, still going through, always going through,
a sense that murder has nowhere to go. He sends a message with no
effect. The affect comes back unaltered, perhaps worse. He’s learned
over time that his mother has this weakness, so he’ll protect her. He’ll
protect her from himself. Something like: “She can’t take me, at least
part of me. She can’t take me in my full destructive gore. So I hold back.
 DAY 2 47

I learn to protect her. I learn to protect myself from lack of impact of

my feeling states. I learn to get what I can from what she can do. I’ve
become a master at making certain aspects of myself ineffective.”
In Toxic Nourishment there are many descriptions of a parent not bear-
ing the affect of a child. Emotional toxins often take the place of or over-
whelm processing ability. The other makes toxic what it can’t process
and what one’s own system can’t digest becomes more poisonous.
There are other possibilities as well. Undigested affect can wait for
years, centuries, millennia for evolution of digestive ability. Our focus
here is when things go wrong, something bad happens as a result of
affective failure. In Harry’s case, my sense was that Harry’s destruc-
tive feelings were not met and processed and psychic space filled with
toxic affect.
To some degree, processing detoxifies destructive affect. Unprocessed—
unprocessable—destructive affect can become malignant. In Bion’s
scenario mentioned above, the mother, to whatever degree possible,
detoxifies the baby’s destructive feelings and feeds back something
more tolerable. Insofar as this fails, toxins build. Absence of detoxifica-
tion capacity enables emotional life to poison itself. One response to
malignant processes is to not feel their effect or to sense what is happen-
ing but feel helpless to stop it.
Harry learned how to protect others from his killer words but that
did not stop him from needing to communicate their intent. It’s as if
he’s driven to keep saying I’m a murderer, even if he mostly murders
himself. My feeling is that this comes from a very early state that he
much later found a word for: murder, I’m a murderer, murder is going
on. To what extent did he find a word to express an existential state,
to what extent did thinking of himself as a murderer divert him from
something further? Does feeling himself a murderer express truth at the
same time it freezes?
I think of Jean Genet, who felt himself a thief. He was a sensitive
boy who had a foster father who didn’t really “get” him. A boy
destined to be a gay artist, a wonderful writer and fighter for human
rights seemed to live on another planet from the one his adoptive
father roamed—difference too great to negotiate. One day at a picnic
he took something from the table without asking, perhaps before
guests came. And his adoptive father calls out, “Thief!” A word Genet
felt as both a brand and revelation. “That’s it! That’s who I am! I’m
a thief!”
48 EIGEN IN SEOUL

He became a thief, ended up in jail for a time. He outgrew actual

thievery eventually, but the label reverberated. Many artists feel a thief
or impostor aspect. In his case the notion became a definition of who
he was. It “solved” an existential problem without solving it. In a way,
we don’t know who we are. We’re enigmatic, mysteries to ourselves.
We learn to define our enigma: we’re this, we’re that. Ah, so that’s
who I am. “I’m a thief!” That does it. That organizes it. That gets me out
of the enigma. Now I now. “I’m a thief, therefore I am.” The mystery of
the am is defined.
At some point Harry had this kind of revelation, an epiphany in his
own self. As if he had a kind of inside “father” like Genet’s external
father. An inside quality, presence, “voice”: You’re a murderer, a failed
murderer. You can’t even be successful as a killer, even a word killer.
Yesterday morning I tried to communicate something about a forbid-
ding force, a force that won’t let you get to heaven, a force that breaks
your towers, brings you down (the Tower of Babel story). You person-
ally and all humanity—your attempts to make heaven on earth will fail.
The jealous god won’t let you, will stop this process. Your attempts to
cooperate, whether in the family or across the globe, will break down,
mess up. Frustration is your eternal state. This angry god is in us. The
god that breaks links we try to build is in us. In Harry’s case, the angry
link breaking activity came up with the idea: “You’re a murderer.” And
that became an organizing narrative, giving an appearance of coherence
to the dream of his life.
Narrative dresses up affect. We try to pull out the affect from
a dream. What affect is being dressed up by this narrative? What affects
are being dressed up with a narrative: “I’m a murderer!”? We don’t
necessarily know what the affect is, that remains a matter of specula-
tion, exploration, formulation.
We know or guess or sense Harry is narrating an affect from the form
the narration is taking. Something failed, an aborted birth of affect or
certain affects. In psychic abortion, unlike literal abortion, the fetus
lives on. Psychic fetuses don’t simply die, although sometimes they
do. Aborted psychic life lives on as aborted life, aborted affect. It has
consequences we see in the session.

* * *
Any thoughts, questions, responses you’d like to start off with?
 DAY 2 49

Question 1
Yesterday you talked about myths and how we can train ourselves to
find the myth that suits this patient or suits this session. I’d like to know
more about what you mean by myth.

Response 1
Stories like the Tower of Babel, the Garden of Eden, or any of the
ancient Egyptian or Hindu myths and legends, any of the sequences
of mythology in which gods and people interact and do things
together. I mean myths in a traditional sense. The way Carl Jung or
Joseph Campbell might mean myth. Both of these workers felt that
myths guide and organize aspects of social and personal experience and
that it’s worthwhile to try to get a sense of what sorts of myth express
and structure existence. Do you have any idea of what myths might
apply to this chapter and to me or to Harry? Or is it too early to tell?

Question 2
We spoke about putting feelings into words, a discussion that was
very helpful to me. A middle-aged patient of mine recently called
some of her feelings lions and spoke of the queen rather than king of
beasts. She found a way of representing anger and angst, not easy for
a Korean woman of her time. So yes, feelings can be put into words.
But I also want to say that when I was listening to you speak, before
Joonho interpreted in Korean, I could feel the feeling your were under-
lining from the tone of your voice. I felt the affect although I didn’t
understand the words.

Response 2
Thank you. Yes, we respond on so many levels. It’s good to begin to
think inclusively with a sense of how all our capacities contribute. What
a beautiful instrument we’ve been given. So much can go wrong, still
there is beauty. Lions of anger and angst, beauty and power. To be a
queen is to contact and express one’s feeling life. You, your patient gives
new meaning to being a queen.
50 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Question 3
First, I was thinking about the “persuasive devil” and that the thera-
pist can become a persuasive devil. Second, I wonder if becoming very
drowsy in a session can be a signal of toxic nourishment.

Response 3
It can be. It can be a sign of almost anything. Any state can mean many
things. So it could definitely be a sign of toxic nourishment. It could be
a form of self-protection. At certain moments, too, you might be doing
something a patient can’t do. Yesterday I spoke about being quiet and
relaxed, the importance of quiet time. Some people can’t sleep or sleep
well. There’s a Russian joke about a communist meeting. The word
is out that a spy is at the meeting. One speaker talks on and on, then
another goes on and on. One after another speaker goes on and on.
All of a sudden, the Russian secret police swoop down on one man in
the big audience. The man asks, “How did you know it was me?” And
a Russian secret policeman says, “The enemy never sleeps.” Everyone
in the audience was drowsing. Sometimes sleeping is a benevolent thing
too. It’s hard to know how to evaluate your drowsing. If you drowse,
maybe a reverie or image or vision might come. Don’t be too quick to
jump to conclusions. Wait on it, taste it, treat it with respect. I once had
a class with a teacher, Phyllis Meadow, who talked about falling asleep
with a patient. She talked about getting drowsy during sessions and
felt it a sign of intimacy in the case she was discussing. She spoke of
patients who, after working years in therapy, were able to sleep during
sessions with her. She and her patient were able to sleep together for
a period. In this case, it could be emergence of an important capacity.
They could let go of consciousness together, an act of trust. So much
of our consciousness is built on a sense of vigilance. One is vigilant
of others, what are they going to do to me? Letting your guard down
can be an act of trust. I learned from Dr. Meadow not to prematurely
conclude that your sleep is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes your
drowsiness gives the other person room. To be too awake in a session
might not leave enough room for the other person. Sometimes drow-
siness expresses benevolence. I understood what Dr. Meadow meant
because she’s a very talkative, vital, vibrant person. She could take up
too much room very easily. So if the only way she could find to give the
other room is to sleep, it was, at least partly, a benevolent gesture.
 DAY 2 51

But yes—I think your point is important. Getting drowsy can signal
toxic nourishment in the air. You and the patient can get a lot from how
you both respond to drowsiness. Does the patient throw cold water on
you? “Don’t you dare drowse in sessions!” Does she—and this does
happen—feel relief, less pressure, more accepting of states? You respond
to the situation as it happens.
I’m thinking of certain moments I start to doze because the patient’s
tone of voice is soothing, like a mommy. They become the lullaby mommy
and I the baby. There are others who scare me so much I don’t dare doze.
I have to “watch out” all the time. You have to see how it unfolds.

Question 4
In Korea, there’s also a joke that when one dozes off and wakes up one
had a meeting with Confucius. I wanted to respond to your question
about what kind of myth fits this case, Harry. I thought of Cain and
Abel. And how God responded to one and didn’t respond to the other
and how Cain must have felt helpless and how that was acted out in an
act of murder.

Response 4
That is a good association, a beautiful instance of what Bion meant by
finding a myth that is real for you in this moment and in this case. There
could be five different people with five different myths that are real for
them. And what I hear you say feels real. A real myth for Harry and
real for you. Bion’s suggestion was to sit down with the myth and write
your own associations to it, every part of the myth, so that through the
myth you feel the impact of your own life, the realness of your own life.
Sensitizing yourself to your own life sensitizes you to sessions, to your
patient’s life. Cain and Abel. Can that mean the patient and therapist
are brothers, one favored by the Powers, one not? Who kills who? Is it
a drama going on inside of each of us, patient and therapist? Does who
kills who keep changing?

Question 5
I’m curious about the reason why you asked Harry, “Aren’t there other
feelings, joy and beauty?” When you questioned Harry it seemed that
52 EIGEN IN SEOUL

he got very angry and upset. It’s almost as if he re-experienced another

trauma of feelings not being communicated to the other person. I’m
wondering what caused you to say that. Was it because you weren’t
able to tolerate the state he was producing or was it that you wanted to
rescue him, had some kind of rescue fantasy?

Response 5
Those two probably played a role. It’s a weakness in my nature, perhaps
a frivolous thing in my nature. Also, it’s part of my nature to wonder
what his world was like. Was there warmth? What was outside the pre-
sented frame of reference? What wasn’t being said? Perhaps I did it for
my own curiosity, my own interest. I do a lot of inappropriate things.
If the patient is angry or wounded, hopefully we somehow keep work-
ing together, give each other another chance and another. It really is a
struggle to learn to tolerate one another and states we produce in being
together. Thanks for pointing to a difficulty I was having.

Question 6
You also expressed that you are a murderer, a word murderer, a word
killer. I wanted to know if that similarity helped you understand the
patient better.

Response 6
I think so. That’s an important point. You may empathically experi-
ence the life of the other even if the other person can’t fully experience
it. A person comes in feeling the pain of his/her life but to a certain
degree isn’t able to link up with it. To really get in contact with the full
tragic dimension of one’s existence is quite a step. And I do think that
feeling in contact with the tragic dimension of one’s own existence is
helpful.
I think of a supervision I wrote about in Psychic Deadness, the chapter
on “Being Too Good.” The supervisee was a lovely woman, unlike me,
beautifully dressed, elegant. Perfect clothes, perfect makeup. She was a
creative woman, a good therapist. She consulted me about a patient who
was becoming more and more suicidal. The patient felt horrible about
herself. She felt ugly, a mess. She couldn’t do anything right with her
life, wrecked by self-hate. The contrast with the perfection of the therapist
 DAY 2 53

and the horribleness of the patient was striking, alarming. I couldn’t

help wondering if this contrast was making the patient worse. The
therapist couldn’t sympathize with this patient’s plight. She could
empathize with patients who were a little more together or appealing.
But this patient’s state was foreign to her. She didn’t understand this
level of self-denigration, abjection (see Julia Kristeva (1982) Powers of
Horror, for descriptions of abjection). She found no flaws in her per-
sonality that matched her patient’s. By contrast, she molded her life’s
narrative around an image of perfection, betterness. In a billion years,
she couldn’t look like a homeless lady like her patient. I suspect her
patient’s demeanor frightened her, repulsed her. Perhaps, also, she had
a secret, unacknowledged contempt for this woman’s weakness.
I recall Jung’s work with a neurotic man and his impatience: why
couldn’t this mother’s boy pick himself up and do better? Why did he
give in to his debility? Why couldn’t he be like Jung and grab the bull
by the horns and make something of himself? I suspect contempt for
weakness is not unusual. Another kind of Cain and Abel? A contrast
between favored and disfavored states? How could a person let her-
self go this far and not pick herself up and do something? Her patient
wasn’t without resources, she had abilities. Why didn’t she use them or
use them better? The therapist was impatient with the lack of progress
and now scared that her patient was getting worse.
It occurred to me while sitting with this therapist that her patient
was going to kill herself unless the therapist could begin, even a lit-
tle, to get in touch with the abject part of herself that was totally shut
out. There must be some abject nucleus, some bit of abjection. I felt that
unless she began to let down a little, things were heading for disaster.
How could she reach a place where she was not always the better one,
but got under the patient? How can I explain that, a difference between
being over the patient and under the patient?
The first time I met Bion for a session, I walked in and felt immedi-
ately that he was under me. In some way, he looked like an abject, scared
bug. A big, thoughtful, kindly man—yet lower, not higher. I felt like cry-
ing on the spot because of course he was higher. It’s like a revelation of
the human spirit. My supervisee couldn’t do this. I’m not asking that
she be Bion, but perhaps begin by shedding a few layers of “rightness”.
Find areas of humility, below rather than above. She’s always going to
look good and take care of herself. That’s not the point. It’s something
else, a feeling tone, a dimension of being higher. It felt to me like not
being able to get lower was pushing the patient further down.
54 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Maybe part of the mix is Bion knew dread and her patient knew dread
and that she, my supervisee, managed to immunize herself to dread, at
least partly, too well for this patient. I think my supervisee hoped that
she could push her patient into health, that the latter would naturally
move into health. I tried to help my supervisee give the patient a little
more room to express how bad things were for her without trying to
make her more healthy. And tried to somehow let my supervisee know
she didn’t have to be so “right”. She’s not always right. Listen to the
patient’s hardships. Try to tolerate them a little more. My supervisee
recoiled from this at first. She could not find commonalities between
herself and her patient. She was not that bad, never was, never could
be. Yet she could begin to sense that her relatively “flawless” stance
was aggravating things. She began to sense that letting down even
a little might take some of the edge off the situation. And that’s what
happened.

Afternoon session: when you’re not looking

Faith and transformation: F in O and T in O
We left off with some good questions and comments. Anyone have any
thoughts or comments?

Question 1
I want to thank you because I’m also a killer, a murderer. And I want to
thank you for surviving these feelings. I feel that I am weak and I’m not
so good at surviving them. I had negative thoughts and feelings about
that but now I don’t feel so bad about it.

Response 1
Thank you. We’re all sensitive, very sensitive. We are sensitive creatures
and we are hardened, thick skinned and insensitive creatures. We’re
very soft, we’re very cruel. That’s part of why we’re here today. That’s
part of why the human race has survived. It has both sides. And we
don’t know what to do with these capacities. We really don’t know what
to do with ourselves. Conditions keep changing. And we have to see if
our capacities can get the feel of the new conditions and work with them
 DAY 2 55

constructively. It remains to be seen. Life is changing, and our capacities,

including a mixture of cruelty and kindness, have to strike new bal-
ances, new tones and textures. We are always trying to find our way.

Question 2
You mentioned that words create feelings and I wonder what that
means. Does it mean that it is creating something from nothing? I have
the feeling that originally there is something and it is like discovering
a feeling through the words, not making something that was not there.
Words are like vehicles, tools that we can use to discover these things.
Can you give a little bit more clarification about what you mean when
you say words create feelings?

Response 2
I think that words do many things and feelings also. The model that you
propose is valid but not exclusive. You’re trying to describe a real proc-
ess when you say that words help discover what’s there. But it’s also
true that words can create feelings. For example, passages in Rainer
Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. You will see a whole new sensibility getting
created as the poet speaks, an evolution of sensibility happening right
before your eyes. And it will take you with it and open you to a world
of sensibility that wasn’t there before the poet spoke.
On another level of evolution, there’s Winnicott’s concept of the use
of object. Winnicott talks about the importance of the object surviving
our destruction of it or our fantasy of destruction. To put it another way,
Winnicott touches the radical importance for development of the other
surviving our feelings. Surviving our feelings well enough, with a mod-
icum of integrity. He touches a pre-verbal world when a new feeling or
possibility of feeling swims into being. He asks whether a baby feels he
creates the feeling or discovers it? And suggests such a question should
not be asked. It’s unanswerable and to press for premature “solution”
violates its paradoxical nature. Creation of something new or discover-
ing what’s there? It’s somehow both, like a Moebius strip, in ways that
we don’t have words for or don’t understand. Winnicott raises the issue
and leaves it as a question. Can we sustain that question? If we can
sustain that question and live in paradox, a new sensibility begins to
evolve—a new way of approaching feelings.
56 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Turning the kaleidoscope in another direction, looking at another

level another way, Herbert Read wrote a book in the 1950’s called Icon
and Idea. He traces ways in which image precedes idea by about two
hundred years. First image, then concepts come after—image as soil
for ideas, image stimulates new kinds of thinking. According to Read,
nonverbal capacity leads the way in the development of culture, open-
ing new experiences in culture. Spengler (1918) writes of the rise and
fall of different cultural souls, each expressing something different in
human experience. In the model Read brings out, art was ahead of con-
ceptual thinking. Now I wonder. It’s hard to say what’s ahead of what.
At times, conceptual thinking seems to be ahead of image making, even
stimulates the latter. In our time, the interplay has become complex,
perhaps too complex to assign primacy. Interplay of capacities may be
a better model for much creativity in our time.
We are not finished products. We are still being created by unknown
processes. Perhaps the best we can do is to try to be partners with our
capacities. We can’t master them. But we can try to be partners with
them. If you have a mate, you don’t try to master and control the mate.
That’s not the way you are with a mate. If you are, you go to therapy
and try to get help or it’s going to be a problem. It’s not a mastery or
control model and it’s not a finished product model. It’s not like there’s
something there waiting for expression. That certainly can happen. But
we are in the process of evolving and changing and we don’t know
what we are changing into or at what rate. We do know that growth is
uneven, that it can come very fast or very slowly and that some capaci-
ties grow faster than others. It’s an adventure and we’re taking part in
a little piece of it. We’re a little piece of a big adventure, seeing what we
can do with it and what it can do with us.
Now, to turn the kaleidoscope another time, Keats wrote about some-
thing he called negative capability—capacity to live with ambiguities
“without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Because he was a
western poet, a British poet, he felt Shakespeare most exemplified this
capacity. He felt Shakespeare was a powerful example of living with
ambiguity, a strong expression of this new sensibility. A sensibility
that expressed itself in Hamlet and King Lear, personalities that didn’t
exist in Western culture before Shakespeare created them. New char-
acters, new sensibilities, new psychic nervous systems. New ways of
perceiving and experiencing the world. Harold Bloom, a great literary
critic who founded the humanities department in Yale University, made
 DAY 2 57

the outrageous claim that Shakespeare created human personality. For

Bloom, Shakespeare created the idea of human personality, the individ-
ual seeker with nothing to hold on to. You might challenge that and say
Buddha is a seeker holding on to nothing. But Harold Bloom sees some-
thing in Shakespeare that did not exist before in just that way. A sen-
sibility, a new raw nervous system without salvation of any kind, no
nirvana, no heaven. Just raw sensibility, raw sensitivity facing a tragic
dimension of life. A nervous system in which everything registers, eve-
rything impacts, and one tries to speak it as it is happening, create it as
it is happening. What comes first, words or experience? The distinc-
tion dissolves. They fade, meld into each other. Sometimes experience
comes first. Sometimes words come first. Sometimes words create the
experience. One of the thrilling things in Shakespeare is you actually
see experience created before your eyes. Is he raising a structure that
already was present, creating structure, creating or discovering a sensi-
bility of sensitivity?
In Shakespeare you have characters who simply are raw sensitivity
alone in the universe, registering everything that happens. Nothing left
but the alone individual with his naked sensitivity, feeling everything.
This is the last turn of the kaleidoscope, I promise—just one more
turn. I’m looking at the Lankavatara Sutra in which the writer writes
about wordless Buddha lands where transformations go on at a rapid
pace. One doesn’t even know what these transformations are. If I stop
and try to spell them out, it would take lifetimes. In an instant, less than
an instant, infinite transformations in wordless Buddha lands. What role
do words play? One can surmise words play a role because of the length
of the Lankavatara Sutra. At some point in its history, tales of Buddha’s
teaching became a form of literature, the written word. Not centralized
like Catholicism. Many writings, many sutras giving life to aspects of
experience, playing a role in creation of experiencing. In the Lankavatara
Sutra, wordless Buddha lands where transformations go on and on.
Something to think about, better yet—something to experience.
Winnicott and Bion are two great psychoanalytic writers who
emphasize nonverbal experience. Here’s a passage by Winnicott:

“Some babies specialise in thinking, and reach out for words; others
specialise in auditory, visual, or other sensuous experience, and in
memories and creative imagination of a hallucinatory kind, and
these latter may not reach out for words. There is no question of
58 EIGEN IN SEOUL

the one being normal and the other abnormal. Misunderstandings

may occur in debate through the fact that one person talking
belongs to the thinking and verbalising kind, while another belongs
to the kind that hallucinates in the visual and auditory field instead
of expressing the self in words. Somehow the word people tend
to claim sanity, and those who see visions do not know how to
defend their positions when accused of insanity. Logical argument
really belongs to the verbalisers. Feeling or a feeling of certainty or
truth or “real” belong to the others.” (1992, p. 155)

Winnicott was a great verbalizer who used words to convey and

valorize wordless realms. He appreciated sensing, feeling, envisioning,
together with wording. His colleague Marion Milner (1957), a painter
as well as psychoanalyst, wrote of perception as a form of imagination.
Bion, too, painted, and Winnicott drew. In his writing, he opened
paths towards nonverbal realms of experiencing crucial for human
development. In the quotation above, he noted the advantage word
people have in public discourse, but there are less visible situations
in which feeling, sensing, envisioning people can thrive, and therapy
may be one of them. Art, music, dance, and poetry therapy provide
avenues for non-discursive experience. But much goes on in ordinary
therapy beyond the reach of words. For example, creative silences open
hard to define doors. Tones, textures, qualities of being that one can
almost touch work in elusive whispers.
What I want to say about Bion is harder for me. I want to convey
something through two of Bion’s notations, plant them as seeds for
reflection. In both of these “formulae”, Bion refers to O.
Often Bion uses O as a sign for unknown emotional reality of a session
or unknown ultimate reality. Sometimes I think of O as an exclamation,
Ohhhh! Sometimes I think of O as origin or orgasm or open or zero
or unknown infinite reality. You can follow O into Buddhism, into
Kabbalah, or echoes in Sufi, Hindu, Christian mystics. Unknown,
infinite, ultimate reality, O. In a session, unknown emotional reality.
If O is a marker for unknown emotional reality of a session, you find
yourself in a humble position. Whatever you come up with in a session
may or may not be “right”. Unknowable O makes everything you say
questionable and, at the same time necessary, for whatever you say or
do or are has impact. To the degree we can, we are students of impacts.
Impacts on each other and on ourselves.
 DAY 2 59

If you know you don’t know, humility grows, and doors open to
use yourself in exploratory ways. If you give an interpretation and the
patient says, “You’re talking about yourself.”, maybe you’ll say, “Well,
I don’t know. I’ll take that into account. I’ll wonder if I’m talking about
myself. And maybe you, also, can wonder whether there’s anything in
what I said that connects with anything for you too or whether I missed
the mark completely.” If we know we don’t know what the ultimate
reality of the session is, we are freer to use imagination, to hallucinate,
feel, sense and share without putting out what we share as gospel.
Instead of feeling this is the truth you must believe in, take what I say as
something that came to me. To me it looks like it may have some value.
Check it out? How does it feel to you? The “inaccessibility” of O in itself
opens different levels of give and take about O-impacts.
The two Bion expressions I have in mind are T in O and F in O.
By T in O, Bion (1984; 1972) suggests that transformations (T) go on in
O although we are unaware of them. As in the Lankavatara Sutra, word-
less transformations go on in reality—our reality, transformations that
affect us, create, recreate us, possibly deform us. We may have intima-
tions, develop convictions and beliefs, but do not know what is happen-
ing or how. I think of a physicist’s remark, perhaps Eddington about the
universe: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” A remark
very compatible with Bion’s sense of unknown O-work, O-impacts.
Transformations go on and we don’t know what they are. We may have
hints, inklings, intuitions, but we can’t be sure. In meditation, for exam-
ple, there can be states we sense but they work with speed and subtlety
we can’t keep up with. They affect us but we do not know exactly how
they work or what they are. We just let them do their work.
We didn’t always know about electromagnetic fields in the universe.
But now we know they exist and likely impact us, although we don’t
necessarily know how. In a loosely similar fashion, we may not be able
to say what O is and what O-transformations are happening at a given
time. Can we say what O-transformations are going on right now? But
we can be pretty sure something is going on and we are affected, we are
undergoing elusive, intangible processes. O-work is changing us as we
speak and listen. Transformations in O are working right now, affecting
us in unknown ways.
If I were psychotic—I mean, more fully than I am—I would think
I knew what those transformations were. I would know the truth
about them. There would be little room for questioning, appraisal,
60 EIGEN IN SEOUL

self-correction. Psychotic truth may sound tempting, at times tantalizing.

But when you think about it, examine it, walk around it, look at it from
various angles, you begin to wonder. Truth can’t be so simple, one-
sided, certain. Psychotic individuals may seem to say, “I know what
O is, you don’t. I can’t live in a world where people don’t know O. I can
only live with O-people.” When you examine the dreads and certainties
brought up in psychotic states, doubt comes to your aid. You keep a cer-
tain distance, empathic doubt. You do not let psychotic truth snow you,
although you may appreciate its appeal. You wonder what more there
is, what is going on? In fact, most psychotic individuals, beneath their
delusions and hallucinations, are in an unrelieved quandary, obsessive
self-doubt. Is what’s really happening, happening? Can I stop it? Can it
be stopped?
If a psychotic individual can only live in an O-world with other
O-people, that’s no world at all. The psychotic is stuck. He knows
something or thinks he knows something that makes it impossible to
live in this world, because there isn’t a community of people who know
what O is. If you get two psychotic people together, you get two differ-
ent versions of O. They can’t talk to each other. They live in different
uncompromising O-states. Part of the work is building communicative
links in spite of living in different worlds.
We may be quite mad. But we’re not only mad. We are developing
ways to talk to each other, perhaps across or through or with our mad-
ness. Perhaps we are trying to share our madness. Madness to madness,
psychosis to psychosis. Now and then, we find ways to get through. We
talk to each other, feel each other and get through to each other.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Obama says he wants to talk to
people. What a revolution if that should happen! Actually talk to peo-
ple? Can that happen in this world? That would be an experiment of
sorts. A new experiment, to talk truth on an international level and
mean it. The history of international talk is partly a history of lies. Eve-
ryone betrays one another other. Everyone’s out for power. Everyone’s
maneuvering. Is Obama naïve? Crazy? Does he mean it? Can it happen?
Can a good spirit come into the world and enable talking to happen?
Oh my God!
So transformation in O is going on in reality, sometimes at a rapid
rate sometimes at a slow rate, sometimes both at the same time.
Transformations in reality. We don’t know what they are. We only have
our guesses, our intuitions, our hints. Sometimes it seems that a study of
changing fads on many levels might reveal something about forces that
 DAY 2 61

are working on a society. Every generation comes up with new phrases

they say to each other. In the U.S. one of the phrases that is faddish
among young people today is, “How sweet! That’s sweet!” It seems to
have popped out of the blue. When I was young and sometimes saw
“The Honeymooners” on TV, Jackie Gleason would say, “How sweet it
is!” All kinds of trials and hardships—“How sweet it is!”
There is a history of fads. We go through one fad after another, each
gripping us for a time, then letting go. Studying fads—how we shape
and organize intuitions, convictions, beliefs—may be one little inroad
into unknown forces at work. Still, the final analysis is we don’t know.
We may put our finger on this or that lever, this or that switch, call this
a force or that a force and say this is how they work together. Then two
hundred years from now find another lever that changes our idea or
vision. What we thought was a lever that did x, now looks like a tiny
part of something else that was working. We may not be sure what is
happening, but we do know something is happening. And that something
makes us up and we attempt to contact it, find a way of communicating
with it, enter into dialogue with our makeup, with processes that make
us up. Whatever this something is, it is important to us. It creates us,
impacts us, builds us, and we impact it.
Maybe in two hundred years we’ll have some idea of what some of
these forces are. We’ll put them into a knowledge bank, a knowledge
system. By the time we do that, other transformational waves will be
on their way. Our knowledge banks will apply to what happened two
hundred or two thousand years before, but no longer be up to what
is happening now or the unknown horizon. It may be our knowledge
base is a couple of hundred years behind us, behind our current life
movements. We talk about light from a distant star reaching us from
the star’s distant past. We may be in a similar situation with our own
knowledge about ourselves.
The philosophical notion that only God has the whole picture
touches our condition, acknowledging that whatever our perspective,
it must be partial. God may have the whole picture, but we have at
best bits and pieces. The meaning of this formulation doesn’t depend
on whether or not you believe in God. It’s a way of saying, if there is a
whole picture, no human being will ever have it. Bion points out over
and over, that wherever we find ourselves, whatever we think or feel, it
is a selection from a far greater pool. A little saying of his expresses this:
“Psychoanalysis itself is just a stripe on the coat of the tiger. Ultimately
it may meet the Tiger—The Thing Itself—O.” (Bion, 1991) If we apply
62 EIGEN IN SEOUL

the idea of selected thought rigorously, we have to say that God or O is

a selection from a larger God-field or O-field.
The second Bion expression or notation I want to bring out is F in
O. Faith in O. Bion writes it with a capital F. It’s a radical expression.
How can we have faith in a reality we don’t know? And why should
we? It (O, reality, ultimate reality) is going to destroy us. It created us
and it’s going to destroy us. Processes that give life die out. I suspect for
Bion the question is not whether I’m going to die but am I going to live?
Do I know I’m here? Am I here now and with what quality? When I’m
walking down the street, am I walking down the street? Who is walking,
how much of me is walking? Where am I when I’m walking? Right now
I’m giving this talk. Am I wholly here? Am I here with my whole being?
Am I giving what I can? Am I alive? Is this talk alive? Does it quicken
your aliveness? So the question isn’t “Am I doing to die?” I am going to
die and not too long from now. The question is “Am I alive now?”—and
what would that mean, to be alive now? That’s the real question.
The idea of faith for Bion has something to do with being alive now.
Am I alive now no matter what the reality is? Am I living my reality,
whatever it is, whatever it does? No matter what reality does to you, no
matter what it brings? The kind of faith Bion points to is a way of living
reality. To live in Faith in O. Is this mad, to live in faith in unknown real-
ity in which transformations are going on that we have no inkling of?
I am being transformed by processes I don’t know about and I am asked
by Bion to have faith in them, to live in this faith, a living faith, when
I know they will someday kill me. What is the basis for this?
There are phrases in religion I have lived with for many years; impor-
tant for the way I experience life. They fit well with Bion’s F in O. One
is in the book of Job, where everything is taken away. Job is naked on a
dunghill and ends up having a mystical vision of God. At some point
in his journey he cries, “Lord, though You slay me, yet will I trust you.”
That’s F in O.
Bion (1972) calls F in O the psychoanalytic attitude. He describes F as
a state of being without memory, expectation, desire or understanding.
A state of radical openness. Holding onto nothing. Nothing to hold on
to. Naked. And then impact and response. Bion understands that no
one achieves this kind of openness except in a relative way. It’s a path,
a direction. For him, a psychoanalytic path. Bion’s psychoanalysis is
an antidote to being a “know it all.” Neither Winnicott nor Bion are
know-it-alls.
 DAY 2 63

There are points in infancy when the mother may act like
a know-it-all and the baby sees through her (Elkin, 1972). The mother
thinks she knows what the baby is feeling but the baby knows she is
wrong. If a mother knows everything or thinks she knows everything
about the baby and makes a big mistake, the baby can feel the big mis-
take. It could be something little. The mother thinks the baby is wet, but
the baby is cold. Normally, a mother would correct herself, try some-
thing different, discover the trouble if she can. But there are mothers
or states of mothering in which a know-it-all attitude makes search-
ing for what is wrong difficult. Mother is always right. This has spe-
cial importance when it comes to interpreting feelings. If the mother is
always right about what the baby feels, the baby’s feelings have little
room for expression and recognition.
The baby can see the mother isn’t always right, even if it’s something
little like, “Oh-oh, she thinks I’m wet when I’m cold or hungry when
I’m irritated. She acts like she knows, but she doesn’t know what I’m
feeling.” If the situation is lasting and intensity builds, the baby is in
a quandary. A gap grows between the baby’s perception of reality—
physical or psychic—and the mother’s, e.g., she wants me to be happy,
but I’m angry; or she wants me to be confident, but I’m afraid.
“I know what you’re feeling or what you should be feeling,” is a com-
mon attitude. Some analysts are like that. When I was growing up in the
analytic world, analysts were fighting about the right interpretation. The
idea of a right interpretation was something of a fad, an ideal, perhaps
an idealization of psychoanalysis. “There is a right interpretation—and
this is what it is! Look at the patient’s associations and you will see it.”
This went on for years. I think it held back the development of psycho-
analysis for decades. The omniscient analyst. A bit of psychoanalytic
megalomania.
Likewise the omniscient mother, a bit of maternal madness, perhaps
even normal maternal madness. If omniscience is too unyielding
and persistent, it puts the baby in a quandary—it puts the baby’s
own reality into question. Here I am the baby. If I stay with my own
perception, I have no contact with the mother. I see she’s wrong about
my feeling. She doesn’t get it. She’s not in contact with me. I’m the baby.
She’s supposed to be taking care of me. How can I take care of her?
Yet I have to take care of her, humor her, make her feel she’s right about
me. Well, I can scream. I’ll scream and maybe she’ll get the idea that
something’s wrong.
64 EIGEN IN SEOUL

The baby will try different things. But what’s at stake is the baby’s
own sense of reality. If the mother keeps coming on as a know-it-all
mother, the baby is going to harden. It’s hard to forgive a know-it-all.
The omniscient mother who stonewalls, has to be right about every-
thing, leads to self-hardening. It’s harder to forgive a know-it-all than
someone who admits fault and is willing to interact on a more personal
level.
It’s important to have a mother you can forgive. Someone who tries,
does her best without overly hardening around a pretense of omnis-
cience. A mother who makes mistakes and knows it, lets in human
fallibility, yet has a basic good feeling, a mixture of confidence and
humility, fallible responsiveness that cares, open to editing. A give and
take mother a baby can forgive, part of an affective background that
enables mutuality to grow.
F in O is a psychoanalytic attitude, being without memory, expecta-
tion, desire or understanding. A radical openness in face of the ulti-
mate reality of the patient even if one doesn’t have certainty about what
the ultimate reality of a session may be. Yet caring for the reality of
the session and respect for the truth of it, staying open to impact and
response, trying to digest the process—creates and is part of a faithful
atmosphere, fidelity to the reality at hand. An attempt to do justice to
the reality at hand.
I gave an example of a smallish but consequential failure of faith
yesterday when I spoke of the Brazilian patient who kept calling and
I couldn’t reach him because I was unable to understand his message.
The Brazilian therapist who referred him refreshed my faith, brought
faith back to life, woke me, and then communication occurred. Faith in
a particular moment depends on a lot of factors and we can help each
other. We can support each other. The importance of a real psychotherapy
community is to support each other in face of the difficult process in
which we are engaged, a process which necessarily involves crises of
faith.
Another biblical phrase that has been with me many decades is from
Psalm 23, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil for You are with me.” You are with me through the
shadow of death.
Another moment of F in O. You can find examples of F in O through-
out the spectrum of spiritual experience, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim,
Hindu, Jewish and outside of the organized disciplines as well, in
 DAY 2 65

everyday life, in psychoanalysis. It’s a wonderfully open and fertile

expression.
The last thing I want to do before the break is to bring these two
expressions together. F in O and T in O. In the time left, we can only
begin to penetrate this link. There is so much one can do with it. Some
of you here will someday write about this conjunction, open more of its
windows. For now, let me suggest: F in O is the background, the sup-
port for T in O. With F in O working, the psyche gets support to let T in
O do its work. We sense impacts without necessarily knowing what
these impacts are. We let them play on us or shut them out, usually a
combination of both. One of our jobs is to try to partner these unknow-
able impacts, become a partner with our psyche. Partners with psychic
reality. A new attitude or way of being human or another way of say-
ing something that has always been with us? Psychic partners, open to
unknowable impacts. A new “commandment”? Don’t close off. Keep
O-ing. Keep open.
F in O makes for openness to T in O. F in O keeps us in the ballpark.
Yes, we also need to hide from reality, like Jonah. We need to modulate
impacts, dose it out. The Bible tells us rest is important. We need to rest
from ourselves. In the Bible, even God rests. Living is hard work. T in
O wears us out. We can’t take too much impact and response, or much
transformational work. We need time off, vacations from ourselves.
Withdrawal time is important. But that’s temporary. We come back.
We come back and need F in O to sustain T in O.

* * *
Anything you’d like me to try to respond to?

Question 1
I was a little bit nervous to ask the question but the question is about
faith in something unknowable, something that cannot be known. And
it reminds me of swimming in the river, in the flowing water when
you first learn how to swim. You don’t really know this water. You
don’t know it well. The reason why I’m studying this field is because
I want to know a little bit more about this unknowable thing and take
more responsibility. And when Bion says have faith in this unknow-
able thing it gave some relief and it kind of lessened this responsibil-
ity. I know that in this flowing water if I just surrender myself, I won’t
66 EIGEN IN SEOUL

drown. But I don’t know how to swim. So I want to ask you once again,
is it okay to have faith in this unknowable thing?

Response 1
Yes. What choice is there? Become cynical? Become hardened? Become
nasty? Become brutish? Become too sensitive? Become what? So, yes,
one has to develop a relationship with it. One has to develop one’s own
relationship with it. For Buddha, it took many, many lifetimes. Buddha
said it took millions of lifetimes with millions of teachers to become
what we call Buddha. We only have this tiny little lifetime but we can
begin to develop our own relationship to “this unknowable thing”. Our
own approach. It wants us to approach it in our own way. And little
by little dose it out. Don’t go too far, too quick. Give yourself time. Let
yourself wait. Things happen. They happen all by themselves. If you
are an active learner and not much of a “waiter”, that’s fine too. All
paths are real. All paths lead somewhere.
When I was young, I read everything. As I got older, I read less
and concentrated more on the little I read. I used to tell my students,
“Don’t try to read everything about psychoanalysis. Find something
you like and stick with that.” I get something from Winnicott and I get
something from Bion. Maybe you’ll get something from Kernberg.
I don’t know. Find what speaks to you, not your neighbor, not your
teacher, but you. Find what has meaning for you. After you finish your
institute program, you can pretty much do what you want. When you
are in a program, you may have to learn stuff that doesn’t fit you. But
you need to learn it to finish the program. You learn it and it’ll come in
handy at some point. But the real work comes after you finish, when
you go your own way, find your own way. You don’t have to read
what doesn’t work for you. Read what you love, what most gives you
something.

Question 2
During the break, I experienced a kind of shock, a surprise that is
a recurring event. As I was coming out of the toilet, I ran into you.
And you were also coming out of it. I felt a kind of disbelief that you
used the toilet. I mean, everyone does—but there you were actu-
ally. This happened before. There was a teacher I greatly respected,
 DAY 2 67

looked up to, and ran into her in the women’s room, and was also
surprised.

Response 2
My whole lifetime work is devoted to doing things from the bottom
up, rather than the top down. I spend a lot of time in the bathroom and
basement.

Question 3
In the morning session we talked about reality, words, different ways
of expressing ourselves, like poems and drawings. I felt like an astro-
naut floating among these different elements. We could be walking along
yet be an astronaut in psychic space. As I was thinking these things, my
mind went blank. I got into some kind wondering how do we know that
we are walking when we walk, how do we know that we don’t know.
I just had lunch and am afraid these thoughts will spin me into sleep …

Response 3
Well, Buddha recommended not eating anything after noon. He went
begging with his bowl in the morning, took his breakfast/lunch, then
began to meditate or speak. For many years, Buddhist monasteries
tried to emulate his teaching and not eat after lunch. For many monks
this has not proven practical. Perhaps some meditators found the
best Samadhi would occur if you haven’t eaten after lunch, and oth-
ers found otherwise. Every group has its particular rules and findings.
My best meditation time usually is in the morning after I wake up.
That’s my particular quirk.
This question “how do I know I’m here?” or “how do I know I’m
walking?” or “how do I know I’m awake?” has exercised some of the
greatest minds in human culture. Lao Tzu: last night I dreamt I was
a bird flying in the sky; how do I know that now I’m not a bird dreaming
it is a man sitting and walking? Or Descartes: what evidence can I give
myself that I don’t doubt my existence? So many paths, so many
manifestations of this question.
This morning I was walking down a street and thinking about
something. All of a sudden I sees the hills around the city—oh my God,
68 EIGEN IN SEOUL

look at the hills. Or another time, a leaf or a branch—look at the leaf,

look at the branch. Oh, this branch looks like a luminous being. It is
a luminous being. A being from nowhere. It’s like a psychic branch.
It suddenly looks like a psychic branch. Or another time, look at the
forsythia blooming. Then all of a sudden I do a double take. “Oh my
God, I’m here! I’m here!” Not lost in thought. Before I was walking and
thinking about this and that. All of a sudden a perception wakes me up.
“Oh my God, the forsythia is real.” And I feel real. My psyche and the
world are real. “Oh my God, I’m here!”
But I spend a lot of my time in my life not being here. I spend a
lot of time unable to be here. I just don’t have the capacity to take
too much of me, or reality. That’s why I know how little of reality so
many of us are able to take in and process. Now Bion wrote the job
of the analyst is to introduce the patient to herself. Well that assumes
that the patient needs to be introduced to herself in some way. Why?
What is happening in this person’s life that he/she needs an intro-
duction? Don’t you know that you’re here? You are here. In a way, so
much of Bion’s emphasis is like Buddha’s. How to wake up? So much
of Bion’s emphasis is on taking in the fact, taking in the reality of your
own life.
Bion is concerned with psychic digestion. Taking something in and
beginning to digest it. And a primary fact that needs digestion is the
fact of your own life, the feel of being alive, the feel that you’re here,
to really realize that “Oh my God, I am really here.” It’s kind of an
awakening. Maybe that seldom happens. Maybe it grows over time and
happens over and over in different ways. Maybe over time you start
getting the hang of it, the feel of being here a little more. My own feeling
is we’re never wholly here or rarely wholly here. We’re partly here and
not here. Bion remarks that a thing can only be if it both is and is not at
the same time. So we are and are not at the same time. Bion also feels
we are eternally embryonic. We are never fully born. There is always
more. Life is not only a lifelong birth process but also a lifelong gesta-
tion. No matter how born we are, we are still embryos.
We’re tiger stripes, partial tiger stripes, maybe not even a whole
stripe. Remember Bion writing that psychoanalysis is a stripe on the
tiger and someday maybe we’ll meet the tiger, the thing itself—O.
I suspect there are many ways of meeting the tiger itself. And that many
such O-moments occur in a lifetime. When I was in Kyoto, the national
museum had an exhibition on early Zen paintings. A good number of
 DAY 2 69

these paintings had tigers in them. I can make up things about what
these tigers are or represent. Tigers are lots of things for human beings
and for themselves. The part that I want to make up now, following
Bion, is that the tiger is O. And we are O. We are bits of O. Everyone
of us is O-ing in his or her own way. So if we’re all tigers, we have to be
very, very careful.

Question 4
I had a dream in which I was an embryo, yet the embryo was kind of
like an infant. And in the dream, you gave me a hug. After the dream
I thought of a yin-yang image, but in the middle part was a certain
darkness so the two sides weren’t fully connected. I sensed this had
something to do with a trauma and had a lot of different complicated
feelings about it. Yet I also felt some relief because the two sides were
not fully connected and the dark space between.
Yesterday when we were talking about trauma, I was very moved
and surprised to realize that maybe it is not somebody’s fault. But today
when we talked about the mother who couldn’t be forgiven, I was sud-
denly devastated and hit a wall. I thought maybe now I’m ready to for-
give. I feel frustrated. I just finished one book in front of me and there
are a million more books. I feel a kind of frustration and am wondering
if this is what the patient feels in therapy. No matter what comes up,
there’s more to come up.

Response 4
A very full sequence—we could spend months on it if we were in ther-
apy together. There is no ending. The real question in therapy is will
there be a beginning?
You made some possible speculations about the darkness in the mid-
dle. It disconnects. Bion posits a contact barrier between conscious-
unconscious. The barrier is necessary for different systems to do their
work. If there were no barrier at all, they wouldn’t be able to do the
work they need to do. The dark between, too, might be a place of safety,
of rest, a place to get ready for the next step. Sometimes scary but here
more a relief.
What I meant by the mother who can’t be forgiven applies to the
therapist who can’t be forgiven. It’s the ‘know it all’ attitude that can’t
70 EIGEN IN SEOUL

be forgiven. And whoever carries the “know it all” attitude creates

hardening, if not comic laughter. If the “know it all” is serious and has
power in your life and especially if you are dependent on this person
in a life and death way, you might feel helpless to counteract feelings
that get aroused and how they are organized—withdrawal, closing and
hardening your heart and body, rage, muteness, fury and docility, stu-
por and vigilance, paralysis, revenge.
Maybe the mother can be a know it all part of the time and humble
part of the time. All states are partial. We tend to talk in absolute terms,
as if this were absolute or that were absolute. But the fact is all reality
is mixed. Heaven, hell, purgatory—all mixed up. So mixed that often
you can’t distinguish one from the other, they are so part of each other,
the same pot of life. So the unforgivable and forgivable mothers may
be indistinguishable in some deep sense. And our forgiveness is partial
and our unforgiving is partial. Our hardening is partial. I don’t think
we can ask ourselves to totally forgive anyone for anything. But that
doesn’t mean we don’t forgive them in some way. So the give and take
continues. Getting along together continues. Enough forgiveness can
happen between two people who are together. Enough so that they can
get along in some way.
Enough forgiveness can happen so that they can let each other not
get along with each other also. We talked about that a little yesterday,
making room for not getting along together as part of getting along.
If we’re looking for an absolute state, an absolute solution, we’re going
to persecute ourselves because it doesn’t exists. It exists only in our
mind as ideal reality. But when we look at it closely, it’s not so ideal.
It’s not very human. It’s not a flesh and blood option. We have to scale
back and settle for a little bit of this and a little bit of that. A little bit of
forgiveness goes a long way and a little bit of hardening goes a long
way. The trick is to forgive when forgiveness is possible, not when it’s
impossible and harden when hardening pays off, not when it doesn’t
pay off. So it’s a mixture and mixtures can change.
In the bible, Jesus provides a kind of example. A disciple makes a
remark one moment and Jesus said; “Now you’re with God.” The next
moment the disciple makes another remark and Jesus said; “Now you’re
with Satan.” The change in mood, attitude or temper can be very fast.
Spirit doesn’t stay one way. If it does, maybe we should be suspicious.
A patient many years in therapy with Bion says, “I’ve been with you all
these years and I’m not changed at all.” Bion replies, “My God! Can you
 DAY 2 71

tell me how you managed that?” In his seminar in New York in 1978 he
added that it would be a real service to the scientific community to be
able to learn how a person manages not to change, given the changing
nature of things.
I may be getting a little off the point now but I’m thinking of an old
term, popular when I was younger—“making the oedipal”. The term
referred to the notion that it was our job to make the oedipal, get to the
oedipal, reach and work with oedipal problems. As my professional
life went on, I began hearing another term from the Kleinians, “making
the depressive position.” The Freudians tell us to make the oedipal, the
Kleinians, in parallel fashion, to make the depressive position. If you
don’t make the oedipal, you’re not fully developed. You’re immature,
anal, oral. If you don’t make the depressive position, you’re paranoid,
schizoid. You split and project and are likely morally inferior. If you
make the depressive, you see others as whole people and take respon-
sibility for your aggressive tendencies. To be a moral being, at least
potentially, you’ve got to reach oedipal and depressive phases.
Bion was adamant about not making paranoid-schizoid operations
second class citizens. They’re co-equal to depressive operations. Tear-
ing apart, putting together are both important, work together. You can’t
have one without the other. Bion didn’t support the depressive position
as a place to land on. There are hints in his work he felt suffocated by
a depressive position that went on too long or saturated psychic space.
Depressive “wholeness” can tend towards false integrity and needs cut-
ting through. You think you’re more whole than you really are, more of
a person than you are and foist off your image on others, demand oth-
ers see you as more whole too. You need paranoid-schizoid aspects of
yourself to tear down false wholes, domains of pseudo witness.
Bion favors starting from scratch, breaking down narratives, observ-
ing how narrative integrity is a kind of belief, an attempt to provide
coherent organization in face of messy psychic realities. Is it possible to
start from scratch, be naked without our wholeness, without narrative
crutches, a radical naked openness?
Bion was not simply valorizing the depressive position. The lat-
ter can function as a noose strangling personality. We need to split it,
break it into pieces to see fresh possibilities. Depressive organization
can lead to phoniness the paranoid psychotic sees through. Not that
it’s good to simply be psychotic or paranoid-schizoid, but the latter
has its functions in psychic growth. For one thing, to tear down false
72 EIGEN IN SEOUL

unities. If you want your hair to stand on end, read the last paragraph
of Memoir of the Future, a good starting point for Bion. Over and over,
back to square one or zero, Job-like sitting with nothing to hold on to as
a point of departure. In a way, a state in which the starting point is the
whole journey.
Here is a quote from the end of Bion’s (1991) A Memoir of the Future:

“All my life I have been imprisoned, frustrated, dogged by

common-sense, reason, memories, desires and—greatest bug-bear
of all—understanding and being understood. This is an attempt to
express my rebellion, to say ‘Good-by’ to all that. It is my wish,
I now realize doomed to failure, to write a book unspoiled by the
tincture of common-sense, reason, etc. (see above). So although
I would write, ‘Abandon Hope all ye who expect to find any
facts—scientific, aesthetic or religious—in this book’, I cannot claim
to have succeeded. All these will, I fear, be seen to have left their
traces, vestiges, ghosts hidden within these words; even sanity, like
‘cheerfulness’, will creep in. However successful my attempt,
there will always be the risk that the book ‘became’ acceptable,
respectable, honoured and unread. ‘Why write then?’ you may ask.
To prevent someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space—
but I fear I am being ‘reasonable’, that great Ape. Wishing you all
a Happy Lunacy and a Relativistic Fission … .” (p. 578)

From my zero to your zero, my psychosis to your psychosis, from my

starting point to your starting point and yours to mine—Bion’s clinical
method. For Bion this represents a kind of wisdom path. “There are no
labels attached to most options; there is no substitute for growth of wis-
dom. Wisdom or oblivion—take your choice. From that warfare there is
no release.” (ibid., p. 576)
When I think of how Bion and Winnicott—a thread in psychoanaly-
sis in general—address and minister to excluded, needy aspects of the
psyche, I think of the way Jesus is portrayed, ministering to the needy,
the weak, those who are left out and not doing well, the wounded. Jesus
criticizes those who act whole or like good people, better than they are
and supports those wounded by the rat race and injustices of life, those
for whom the world has been too cruel. He resonates with the humble,
poor in spirit, the weak, injured and hurt. This theme is a very deep
part of psychoanalysis, applying to one’s own self, helping the needy,
 DAY 2 73

weak, poor, injured, left out part of oneself. Psychoanalysis is interested

in what’s left out. In part, what’s left out of the “official” or executive or
missionary personality. Realities that don’t fit the program, that don’t fit
the psychosocial Establishment. Winncott’s and Bion’s and Freud’s ways
are all different, but they all support the needy, the left out. They ask you
to look at what doesn’t fit the psychic mainstream, marginal aspects you
don’t want to or can’t see, the bombed out, abandoned, neglected.
In Buddhism you’re asked to cross over to the other side and “make”
nirvana. In one branch of Buddhism you make nirvana for yourself. The
heaven within opens for you. The heaven within is always there. Sup-
pose you find it and make it part of your life, a foundation. The great
light of the universe everywhere at all times, the great life that uplifts,
sustains, frees. Suppose you discover that as part of your foundation.
Disturbance continues as long as you are a sentient life form. Distur-
bance does not end. Nirvana does not end the problem of pain. Pain
and difficulty and disturbance continue as long as you’re a person. But
your attitude towards disturbance, pain, difficulty can undergo change.
It is not impossible to develop a more embracing, over-arching, fuller
attitude to what one must undergo.
An enlightenment journey involves immense struggle. The goal of
enlightenment can be persecutory. Someone says, I’m meditating over
twenty years and still not awakened. I’m in analysis over twenty years
and still not cured. Ideal goals persecute you. Such measurements add
to the difficulty. You become a mental centipede unable to walk your
consciousness is so glued to your feet. When will I become a Buddha?
When cured?
The Lotus Sutra tells us that we’re Buddha now at various levels and
dimensions. There’s always more to go. But that is not a basis for per-
secution. If you’re overly focused on what you’re not, you don’t get
to savor what you are. Bion implicitly applies this principle to caring
for the terminally ill. In a “You-tube” clip of a part of one of his semi-
nars, Bion speaks of working with the terminally ill person and empha-
sizes doing what one can do, rather than all that one can’t. He evoked
a sense that there is something, whatever it is, however little it may
seem, that may be supported, something that the patient can experi-
ence, do, be (http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/bion77d.html).
You do what you can. You support what the person can do, can feel, can
be, not what they can’t. Perhaps it’s the same with anyone in treatment.
You don’t rub their nose in who they’re not or what they can’t do or be.
74 EIGEN IN SEOUL

You build on what they can do. You don’t shame them if it seems little.
A little goes a long way at deep levels of work.
There are many branches on the tree of growth. One branch says “go
from strength to strength.” Another says “go from strength to strength
but don’t leave out the weakness.” Don’t leave out the needy parts of
the psyche, of society. Winnicott’s psychology places an emphasis on
need. Sometimes he uses the word “need” in fairly unique ways. There
are needs one doesn’t know one has. Emmanuel Ghent, a New York
analyst, gives an example. His patient was lying on the couch and
Dr. Ghent put a blanket on her. And she started crying. All of a sud-
den she realized she had been cold and didn’t know it, that she had a
need for warmth and didn’t know it until the warming moment. At that
moment awareness of a need she didn’t know she had was created by
the actual fulfillment of it. Fulfillment of a need she didn’t know she
had until it happened quickened realization that she needed warmth.
Everyone in this room is strong. Every single person in this room has
strength or you wouldn’t be here. And every single person in this room
is weak, is needy or you wouldn’t be interested in this field because
we’re all here to help ourselves. We’re here to help our patients. Our
patients are our proxies, our doubles. And by helping our patients, we
help ourselves. We’re working with our own hurt selves. And we’re
working with the patient’s hurt self. But that doesn’t mean we’re not
strong. We are strong. We need to make room for this sometimes baffling
mixture of strength and weakness and resourcefulness to work with
both. We need to make room for our own hurt selves. We will always be
hurt. We’ll always need more inner support for our own beings.
Back to nirvana. Buddha discovered that nirvana doesn’t solve the
problems of birth. It’s wonderful to reach nirvana but a later Buddhist
movement taught that there is no break between nirvana and every-
day suffering. The enlightenment seeker attempts to help all sentient
beings. We feel the pain of others as our own and seek to do what we
can. We are all partners on the path.
The sentient being you spend most time with is you. So you are your
first charge. You are your first patient because you will be your patient
all your life long. You’ll be in your own care all your life long, your
primary patient. Your job is to become compassionate to this primary
patient, the closest one in your care. See what support and wisdom you
can manifest for this being who needs your help.
 DAY 2 75

We have just a minute or two. Any thoughts, feelings, questions,

wishes?

Question 1
I’d like to return a moment to myths and dreams. We said the core of
the dream is an emotional experience. But I’m wondering if the affect
is always real? Is it always true? Does affect in the dream also get dis-
torted? Does it also get reversed? Does it also get hidden?

Response 1
It’s always hidden. It’s always distorted. There are always “disinforma-
tion” processes going on. That’s part of what a narrative is. The dream
is a narrative. And it distorts and deforms. So the emotional experience
is ultimately unknown. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel something.
We do feel something. I hope the core of this seminar is an emotional
experience too. But it is important to wait and see how that transforms,
evolves, changes. The exercise that Bion suggests makes use of change:
find your myth and write associations to it and see how it changes.
In some way you know what the affect is, at least the affect tone of
the dream that’s available in your experience, but you also know if
you pay attention to it, sit with it, feel your way into it, let it work on
you—further things happen. The known affect you grab hold of or
that’s apparent in your dream leads you to more affective possibilities.
You are worked on by obvious, known, and less known, and even ulti-
mately unknown emotional processes. They all impact on you and add
to experiencing. Bion seems to suggest, cut away the narrative and see
what’s left, get to the emotional nucleus of the narrative. That doesn’t
mean you’ve gotten “truth.” But let’s see what you did get and where
you find yourself.
Freud spoke about a dream navel. Maybe what we’re touching
is some kind of journey towards the dream navel, through it. That’s
a funny image—dream navel. Freud says you can’t find it. In a way
Bion is saying, find the unfindable. We’re looking for what can’t be
found. You might find lots of truths—but the big fish here is what isn’t
known. If you find it it’s not the truth you’re looking for, but maybe
a sub-truth. Sub-truths can be very helpful. But it’s the fish that gets
76 EIGEN IN SEOUL

away or has not yet been found that is the emotional nucleus Bion
touches. We may as yet lack equipment to find and process such
unknown emotional impacts. We see where we go with our sensing
process.
If the patient says, “Hey, this is all in your mind. This has nothing to
do with me,” you at least found out where you landed at the moment.
I think to a large extent that therapy is for the therapist. We should be
grateful to our patients. They give us something to do, keep us off the
streets. They give us a more constructive life. They help us organize our
lives, give us meaning, help us make a living. They give us a chance to
mine ourselves, to go into the mine of our psyche and keep mining it.
We owe a lot to our patients. When Bion was asked questions about the
practice of psychotherapy—how do you know this? how do you know
that?—he said, keep on doing it. It grows with you and you with it as
you do it.
When I first started doing therapy some fifty years ago, I told the
head of the clinic, “I don’t know who’s getting more, the patients or
me. I can’t speak for them, but I’m getting something from this. Don’t
know if it’s helping the patients, but it’s helping me.” He looked at me,
this experienced, older man, gave a slight smile and said, “At least it’s
helping someone.”
I sometimes told my early patients “You know, I don’t know if you’re
getting anything out of this but it’s been damn good for me.” Recently
I got a phone call from a woman I treated at the clinic nearly fifty years
ago. I remember her so well and her husband too. I was young and
didn’t understand marriage and thought they would break up, things
could get so trying. Apparently they both grew, the marriage endured.
My former patient said, “I wanted you to know in case you needed to
hear this, I want to tell you. Thank you. You helped me find myself.”
She told me about her life, her children, the career she followed, paths
she took. It was wonderful to hear from her, the joy in her voice, the
pleasure she took in the difficulties of her life and what she did with
them. We both shed tears. You never know. Sometimes you do harm,
maybe a lot of harm. But sometimes, when you’re not looking, you do
some good too.
CHAPTER THREE

Day 3

Morning session: “I Don’t Know”

I wanted to mention again movies Beatrice Beebe made of mother-
infant interaction. You can see affect flows right before your eyes. She
studied micro-moment interactions, back and forth movement of mood
and affective attitudes. I saw some of these films when she was still an
assistant of Daniel Stern, many decades ago, and her work has grown
through the years. Another movie I’d like to recommend is a documen-
tary made in a French monastery, the Grand Chartreuse, in Switzerland,
“Into Great Silence.” The German film maker, Philip Groning, was first
denied permission to live in the monastery and make the film. The
monks wanted to think it over. Sixteen years later, they contacted him
and said they were ready. I was especially moved by close-ups of men in
prayer, nakedness of profound feeling. Deep, spontaneous flow of feel-
ing in the men shares something with the flow of feeling in the mother-
infant movies. It opens a realm of emotion we’re too often ashamed of.
For me, it was freeing to see their faces in prayer. You can find a review
I wrote of the movie expressing what I felt in Tikkun Magazine, July/
August 2009, or access it online at:
http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/jul_09_eigen

77
78 EIGEN IN SEOUL

I’d like to add a few words about Bion’s A Memoir of the Future and
the lines I quoted yesterday. He says that he inevitably failed to write
without expectation, memory, desire and understanding. Especially
understanding. There’s something about being understood that Bion
mistrusts. He seems to feel that most ways of understanding some-
one are wrong ways. He doesn’t want to be pinned down by under-
standing, pinned by meaning. He tried to write—it’s a contradiction
in terms—from a place of openness, zero, naked, as if one could write
without understanding, a kind of O-writing. If the book is a failure, it’s
a wonderful failure. So many passages open reality, open you. Skin is
shed, torn, skin grows back. Transformations—as in Ovid—only here
more obviously psychical—go on and on. Try the book. If it takes, it will
open pathways.
During breakfast with Joonho, we remarked that the theme for this
morning, “I don’t know”, wouldn’t got over well with Lacanians who
do know. In psychoanalysis there has been a history of knowing and
that knowing is very important. When I was younger, classical analysts
knew and contributions of many of them were important. They opened
doors of psychic perception. Yet they tyrannized the feel of psychoanal-
ysis in the United States and it was hard for new life to be born. When I
was growing into psychoanalysis in the U.S., much of it seemed dead to
me. Psychoanalysts knew so much there was little room for not knowing
and the new. The lack of fresh experience was compounded by politics.
When I was younger, the field was dominated by medical practitioners.
There was little room for practitioners with backgrounds in the human-
ities. So much so that when Theodore Reik came to the United States
and tried to join the New York Psychoanalytic Society he was rejected.
Freud personally recommended Reik, and it was Reik’s rejection that
prompted Freud to write his essay on lay analysis, in which he said
the humanities provide a better background for psychoanalysis than
medicine. Art, poetry, drama, history were closer to psychic reality and
more important in feeding psychoanalytic intuition. When Bion spoke
in New York in 1978, the only analyst who worked in the U.S. that he
mentioned was Reik, particularly his essay on surprise.
Students with background in the humanities grew up around Reik.
He gave a seminar that eventually grew into the first non-medical
psychoanalytic institute in New York City, the National Psycho-
logical Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP). I wonder if it took
its name, partly, from Freud writing that psychoanalysis was a part
of psychology—not medicine, not neurology. It accepted students
 DAY 3 79

from humanistic disciplines, with backgrounds in art, acting, writing,

philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, music. As might be
expected, over time disagreements arose and groups splintered off and
more non-medical institutes were formed. The medical monopoly on
psychoanalysis and the United States did not last. Perhaps one reason
it didn’t was that medical institutes needed new life and humanities
played a nourishing role. Fresh experience grew outside the establish-
ment, and with struggle and time, began to enrich the latter. It was not
an easy struggle.
When Winnicott gave his “Use of Object” (1969) paper at the New
York Psychoanalytic Society in 1968, it met with a poor reception.
Several analysts ripped into it without “getting” it. Winnicott did not
defend himself, had a heart attack in his hotel room, died three years
later. Now fifty years later we all read Winnicott. His “use of object”
paper is a breakthrough, opens significant areas of experiencing. Clare
Winnicott remained bitter about this event and when my article on ‘use
of object’ came out in the 1980’s, she wrote me, thanking me, saying
Winnicott felt about the use of object paper as I did, and so did she—it
gave expression to something important about how they lived. How
glad she was that it was at last getting recognition—and from New York!
Winnicott’s New York reception was a particularly dramatic instance of
what can happen when you come up against Those Who Know, but it
is not unfamiliar.
A second main wave of knowing, after classical psychoanalysis,
was the Kleinian, a school still contributing today in very profound
ways. They contributed important insights into psychic life (see “Boxes
of Madness” in Feeling Matters and the chapter on Klein in Psychic
Deadness). They, too, became tyrannical. I felt they had a moralistic
view of what the patient should be like and how therapy worked and
should go. Workers like Winnicott and Milner made use of Kleinian
insights—Klein was, in part, a springboard for Winnicott. Nevertheless,
the non-allied had to find openings for buds they were cultivating and
buck the tide. I don’t know who were the bigger tyrants, Freudians or
Kleinians. Lacanians, a third wave of psychoanalytic knowing, may be
the most tyrannical of all. They seem to have an inability to take criti-
cism. Yet their writing contributes to our feel of psychic life, if we get
under the dogma and narcissism. Knowledge contributes and knowing
suffocates. Knowledge has a politics of dominance, who knows best,
the king of the mountain. Perhaps shared kings, shared mountains, dif-
ferent groups on their own mountains, with some travelers.
80 EIGEN IN SEOUL

We have a big inheritance that continues to contribute, at the same

time we need to make room for ourselves, our work today. We need to
make room for positive findings of all schools and use them in a way
that works for us. You may be a psychological alchemist combining and
recombining the vast heritage of psychoanalysis, finding combinations
that work for you. Let us find what works for us today without embar-
rassment, shame or apology. See what speaks to you and stick with that,
let it grow and deepen. There are so many threads in psychoanalysis,
there’s no reason why you should apologize for trying to create your
own recipe. As I wrote in The Psychotic Core (1986), it’s a time of cross-
fertilization. Cross fertilization of cultures, cross-fertilization of schools,
cross-fertilization of fields. Your version of psychoanalysis might not be
anyone else’s version. As long as it’s working for you, you’re fine.
I’m not against knowing. How could anyone be? We wouldn’t be
here joined in this search without knowledge and the need to know. But
I also want to make room for not knowing, for un-dogmatic psychoa-
nalysis, un-dogmatic psychotherapy. Since not knowing gets neglected,
I want to focus on it today and, if not celebrate it, at least legitimize it as
part of clinical “technique”. I’ll read and talk a little about unknowing
this morning. I’ll be reading from the chapter, “I Don’t Know” in Con-
tact With the Depths (2011) which was distributed ahead of time. We’ll
talk about cases this afternoon and leave open time to bring out what-
ever you want.
I’m going to start near the end of the chapter because I know we’re
not going to get there. We’ll probably only do a few pages of this thirty-
one page chapter. Yesterday’s chapter was fourteen pages and we man-
aged to do two of them. So let me start with the end first. Near the end
of this chapter I write, “Perhaps we need to practice feeling and saying,
“I don’t know,” like a musician practices scales, as part of an exercise
in living.”
I suggest saying and feeling I don’t know as a practice. Not your
only practice. We need analytic thinking and intuitive thinking, left and
right brain. But make I don’t know part of your practice, an important
part. Try it as an exercise. Who am I? I don’t know. Who are you? I don’t
know. Practice I don’t knowing.
Perhaps we should begin as children. Over time, we may get used
to it. Not knowing as part of our education, part of school, part of what
we are taught. When I was a kid in school, the teacher would say, it’s
not a shame not to know. She would encourage us to ask—if you don’t
 DAY 3 81

know, ask. But if you asked often, you caused trouble. The teacher
wouldn’t like it and want you to shut up. You would get shamed. You
would feel ashamed of not knowing and eventually shut up or at least
not ask so many questions, not all the questions you want. If you’re
lucky, you preserve an area of not knowing in your own self. You don’t
lose contact with not knowing, but you learn to suppress it. This in itself
can be bewildering, but you learn how to do it.
My high school in Passaic, New Jersey, was pretty decent. Many of
its graduates went to good colleges. I was lucky to get through high
school and go to a good college without knowing what was going on at
all. Inside my mind throbbed, “What’s going on? What’s school for?”
I didn’t get it and wondered is it this way for others or was something
wrong with me?
It wasn’t until I went to college that suddenly I got the feeling, Ah!
This is what school is for. It was a new sensation, not present until
then. Teachers at last talked about things that made sense. Literature
I read, art I saw was meaningful to me. The reality of meaning came
alive. Later I got the idea that most of my teachers in grade school
didn’t know what was going on either. They just acted like they did.
They were playing their teacher roles. Many were dogmatic—this is
the way things are or should be. Did they know? More than anything,
James Joyce and Socrates turned my lights on in college. Imagine a con-
versation between Socrates and one of my teachers in Passaic. “Do you
really think you know what you know?” The unmasking would be like
peeling off skin. “Well you know, it’s not so obvious.”
Do you remember as children feeling that way about the whole
universe? Who knows what’s going on here? Does anyone know
what’s going on in this universe? In any universe? I don’t think anyone
knows. No one ever knew. We have ideas and opinions and know this
and that.
Finally as a grown man, an older man, I finally get to say what my
child self wanted to say. But my child self had to sit on it, stifle it. When
I got to be an analyst and entered the psychoanalytic world, I realized
so many analysts pretended to know something they didn’t know. They
knew this and they knew that. They knew Oedipus, a big knowing in
itself. They knew a lot in a real way. But with patients, they pretended
to know what they didn’t know. They pretended to know Something,
but were making it up. They made it up as they went along and pre-
tended to know.
82 EIGEN IN SEOUL

It’s a grace to be able to finally say out loud, “I don’t know” and
write about it, talk about it, a place for I don’t know. To validate I don’t
knowing as an important state, activity, ability in psychoanalysis or
therapy. I’m thankful that the child self who has been befuddled by my
life so many years finally gets the chance to breathe freely and openly
and honestly and fully say, “What’s going on here? I don’t know.” It’s a
relief not to have to pretend you know.
I think there was a period in my life many years ago when I was
afraid to let patients know that I didn’t know. Many patients had been
exposed to Freudian analysis and likely had an analyst who knew.
Many analysts would be quiet and take notes and give interpretations
that seemed to know what was going on.
Years ago, Alan Roland, a New York analyst, held seminars and one
year invited French analysts to speak. One evening Rene Major gave
an interesting talk on hysteria, calling attention to a painting, photo or
mirror on the wall of the clinic in which a woman having an hysterical
fit was being interviewed by Charcot. At the same time she was being
interviewed, she was in the picture within the picture watching herself
being interviewed, taking in her effect on the audience. A kind of dou-
bling or triple mirroring of consciousness. Major was talking about split
consciousness, intricacies of launching and seeing yourself through the
eyes of the other, watching how the other sees you, trying to capture the
desire of the other.
An analyst who was present said, “I’m not sure I understand what
you mean. You need to define your terms.” Rene waited, a bit puzzled.
He had given what seemed to be a pretty good talk and most of us got
something from it. The man continued, “When I use a term, I define it to
mean only one thing.” Rene Major looks at him and says, “Do you mind
telling us how you do that?” It was a helpful moment. Meaning doesn’t
work in a one thing way. Meaning never means one thing. It wouldn’t
mean anything if it meant only one thing, if that were possible. Meaning
is alive with meaning, with pluralistic levels and counter levels of
meaning.
I doubt Rene Major could have given his talk if he had to try to define
terms in a way that met stringent claims of clarity. A certain kind of
“unknowing” supports speech. There’s a taboo against not knowing in
the culture. On the one hand you’re told it’s OK not to know—you can
learn. On the other, there’s shame attached to not knowing. You have to
pretend to know. There’s a lot of make believe knowing. All groups are
 DAY 3 83

built on make believe knowing. It’s scary not to know but make believe
knowing is scarier. There’s a lot of delusional clarity floating around.
You might precipitate destructive events from a pretense of know-
ing something you don’t, a pretense of omniscience. Over time, our
“I don’t know” in us can become friends. Your ‘I don’t know’ and you
can become friends. From deep not knowing, no one is excluded. We
are partners in not knowing. Letting in deep unknowing has a chance
of fostering ability to wait, care and share, patience needed to live well
together and be intimate with ourselves. Deep not knowing fosters new
kinds of intimacy.
If you are deep in prayer or meditation, there are unknown intima-
cies, intimacies you’ve never felt before. You don’t have to say what it
is, define it. You just have to be in it, with it. Unknown intimacies do
something. To enter fields of unknown intimacies opens places of exist-
ence where nothing is required other than to marvel and say thank you.
More work comes later. When you are in it, this place of unknown inti-
macies, the only words that come are, thank you. Sometimes the words,
“I love you.” When you come out of it, there’s more work to be done.
Now that we’ve touched part of the end of the chapter, I feel that
starting from the beginning will be more understandable. I also feel that
I don’t have to rush because I said what I want to say. The essence of
what I wanted to say has been mediated. So we’ll start.
“My purpose in writing this chapter is to dignify and celebrate the
phrase, I don’t know. It has a long rich cultural heritage. Yet in political
practice and in everyday life, it often is denigrated as if those who seek
or hold power, whether in family, work or politics are phobic about
not knowing. They fear that appearing not to know would compromise
their position and precipitate the slide down the ladder of self-esteem.
We are urged from grammar school on not to be ashamed of not
knowing. We are told that not knowing makes learning possible, part of
the process of getting to know. Yet few of us escaped childhood without
being shamed for not knowing. I doubt many go through school with-
out many kinds of humiliation not least involving fear of not knowing.
We learn early to cover up deficits. An illiterate delinquent may hide
his incapacity with increased bravado and destructive acts. It is a funny
kind of learning, making believe we know more or are better, stronger
or more able than we know we are. I remember volunteering to tie
someone’s shoelace in kindergarten although I didn’t know how. The
teacher treated me rather well but the event stuck like glue in my mind.
84 EIGEN IN SEOUL

I wondered over many years why I had the need to do that. I knew I
could not tie the shoe. Yet I needed to seem as if I did, even though the
result must be failure. I was caught between fantasy and reality, hung
by my own mind.”
I was beginning to say earlier that when I was younger I was afraid
of letting patients know that I didn’t know. They were used to a milieu
in which analysts knew. If I didn’t know something they would say,
“What am I paying you for? I’m paying you to know.” It took awhile
to be able to have a response to that. I had to grow into more relaxed
wondering, “What was I doing? What am I doing with this patient?”
Little by little, I learned to say something like “No, you’re not paying
me to know. You’re paying me to try to be with you in a helpful way.”
Over time patients got used to me not knowing. It was a relief for them
too because then they didn’t have to know. And we could begin to sim-
ply let feelings come and talk about them, talk with them like welcome
or unwelcome visitors. Maybe understanding them, maybe not. People
like to find something that’s there and talk about it. And the capacity to
make contact and communicate grows.
“When I see world leaders making destructive decisions in a shell
of power, I wonder what gaps, deficits, ignorance they push away.
Do they imagine they know more or are more capable than they are?
Do they overestimate ability to gain a hope for outcome? Sometimes
it appears that the fear of showing weakness and ignorance becomes
more important than constructive action and going through processes
the latter entails. Hallucinated strength, hallucinated right and might
becomes more important than what reality can bear.”
“What a relief when someone says, ‘I don’t know, wait. There’s more
to learn. Let’s make opening for learning.’ I don’t remember a single
public declaration of uncertainty and need for deliberation in high
government decisions in the last eight years.” I was writing in October
2008 after eight years of the Bush government and there wasn’t a single
public declaration of not knowing. There was hallucinated knowing
for manipulative purposes. “I don’t remember a single public decla-
ration of uncertainty and need for deliberation in high government
decisions in the last eight years—momentous decisions affecting
lives, bodies, souls.” Momentous decisions were made on the basis of
pretense of knowing. I wrote this in October 2008 on the threshold of a
crucial presidential election. Many of us didn’t think Obama would get
elected. We knew he had the votes but feared the voting machines were
rigged and only a big majority turnout could ensure a win. It felt like
 DAY 3 85

the “right” had a stranglehold on the nation. A brutal eight years.

But people came out, enough to throw them out of office. It felt like a
miracle. I don’t know if things are going to get any better but they may
not get as bad as they could have. We’ll see.
We’ll take a little break.

* * *
Any questions, thoughts, responses, anything anyone wants to say or
ask me to talk about?

Question 1
At the beginning of “Primary Aloneness,” you quoted Chuang Tzu:
“When the Great Bird rises very high, he must have the wind under
him.” I’m not able to be a great bird or fly high. What kind of wind will
support me?

Response 1
Well, there’s a wind for every bird. Find the unknown wind that is
meant for you. I don’t know that the proverb means there’s no wind for
small birds, it just means that even a great bird needs the wind.

Question 2
I remember a story, I think by Dogen, about a snake. The tail of the
snake was upset because it was always the head that led the way. The
tail wanted to lead the way and was given a chance. But it kept bump-
ing into everything and getting hurt. Not seeing, not knowing was
hurtful. I’m a teacher. I teach children. We talked earlier about how we
let patients know that we don’t know. But as a teacher, as someone in
charge, someone who has to lead and teach, if I were to say I don’t
know, there’s going to be a lot of fear and anxiety on the children’s part.
How do I deal with this?

Response 2
It’s a cultural problem, a problem that all cultures face. The taboo
against not knowing—being phobic about not knowing—is universal.
If one has to know or feel one has to know with children, at least one
86 EIGEN IN SEOUL

can do that with some humility and not turn it into a power struggle.
The problem is that the way cultures are, it is very easy for power
struggles to fill the gap if one starts letting down pretences. This is one
reason why psychotherapy is such a momentous experiment, such an
important experiment because it’s an experiment in not having to keep
up all our pretences. Little by little we can reduce our pretences and
when we do that, we go through things. We go through the very things
that we are phobic about going through, all the things we’re afraid will
happen if we let down controls of omniscience and omnipotence. We go
through them and find relief in going through them. At least to some
extent, we discover we don’t have to be so controlling, so omniscient.
We get along a little better with a little less omniscience. We become a
little more flexible, caring, open. It’s another way of life. Cultures work
against this. The cultural establishment, the mainstream is afraid of this
other way of life. We’re sort of experiments in nature experimenting
with culture. Is it possible to exist as a group if we don’t display power
and control and pretense of knowledge? Is it possible to survive if we
simply interact as partners, partners in a big journey? It’s not an easy
question. It’s an evolutionary question. I feel the boss model, being on
top model, reached a point where it can destroy the civilization it grew
up to preserve. The boss, top dog, king or power model that one time
was useful in small groups, and grew to organize larger societies, had
a long run in history. It reflects human tendencies that were relatively
helpful in organizing cultures to an extent, but failed to solve many
basic problems and now contributes to the latter.
It failed to solve problems of war. As long as you have a boss culture,
you have war. As long as you have a boss or boss group, chances are
those with power get greedy and want more power. There’s going to be
fighting and a lot of people without much power pay for the bosses and
their machinations, often with their lives.
It’s marvelous to have cultural products and technological know-how
but we reached a new phase in evolution where the boss model can be
very destructive. Advances in technological communication and media
control evolved to a point where groups in power can sway the minds
of millions. There is ability to channel millions of people for causes few
might benefit from. We are at a persistent crossroads as to whether it is
easier to develop destructive weapons and political-economic scenarios,
than find ways to get along peacefully and well. Many feel a new model
has to be tried but are at a loss how to accomplish this. A partnership
 DAY 3 87

rather than boss model, a stress on mutual nourishment needs, little by

little, to infiltrate and mollify the dominance model. It may take thou-
sands of years and, even so, we do not know if we are the kind of beings
that can support a nourishment model. Human nature may not be up to
it. There’s no rush but if it does not happen, we’re going to keep killing
ourselves. And with amazing technology, the stakes increase.
A partnership model is not easy. To become partners with our capaci-
ties, with the universe. When I was a young man, I taught school for
several years. The first day of class, other teachers told me, “You have
to establish authority. You have to let them know who’s boss. After that
you can let down and do other things. First they have to know who’s
running the class, otherwise they’ll run over you.”
They ran over me. One kid set off a fire-cracker. I persevered. Several
months later, the fire-cracker boy wrote a beautiful paper about a horse
he loved. A paper he had no inclination he could write. He was happy,
proud, amazed he could communicate something he loved.
The communication I tried to get across was that we were all in this
together. Every human being is a learner. We’re all learners. I know more
about some things than you do. You know more about some things than
I do. Maybe that’s hard to digest, hard to take. But we all know more
than other people and we all know less than other people. And if I don’t
know something, I’ll try to learn about it. If there’s something we need
to learn together, I’ll do my homework and I hope you do your home-
work too. I don’t expect miracles. But little by little the balance begins
to shift. There’s only so much you can do because the culture is pro-
grammed in another direction.
One year I wrote a lot of plays for a fifth grade class. As I got to know
the children, I began to see them in different roles and made up plays
to fit them. I got permission from the principal to use the auditorium to
work on the plays. Some of them we put on for the whole school. About
five or six years ago, at a local hardware store, a grown man comes up
to me and says, “Mr. Eigen! Mr. Eigen! Do you remember me?” A man
in his 40’s, perhaps more. “I loved playing in the plays you gave us.
It made such a difference for me.” He went on to tell me more about the
uplifting impact of our contact so many years ago.
I don’t know what would have happened if I stayed a teacher.
It was rough going. I remember the fifth grade class he was in and
they weren’t so well behaved. But we worked together and something
happened for some of the students, something that stayed with them.
88 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Once the principal, Dr Bernstein, called me to his office and said,

“Mr. Eigen, you have to put the fear of God into these children.” And
I said, “You mean the fear of Bernstein, don’t you?” Overall, he felt
I was doing a good job and tried to get me to stay when the time came
for me to leave. But there was something about the way I worked that
didn’t fit his model, but to his credit he let me be most of the time.
I once wrote a book called Reshaping the Self (1995). It’s about two
patients, a schoolteacher and a businessman. One of the things the
schoolteacher talked about involved problems with the administration.
There was a tug of war, a struggle between her attempts to be creative
with her students and administrative demands. There’s a lot in this book
about the difficulty you raise, the conflict between the administration
and the creativity of teachers. It’s a very real problem and one needs to
find ways of persevering without getting fired. You don’t want to get
fired. So you have to do what you need to do to stay in the job. But you
want somehow to open up a little space for something more too.
I think of one of the questions raised yesterday, about how far one
should or can go in the kind of process I’m inviting you into. My feeling
is go as far as you can without hurting yourself. Dose it out. It’s a matter
of dosage. Jesus says to his disciples, “Be smart as snakes and innocent
as doves.” Don’t hurt yourself. Take care of yourself and open up a little
at a time in a way that isn’t going to do you harm, but in the long run
will make your life much more full.
If you are Beethoven, if you’re a great bird, you try to go all the way
and you don’t care what happens to you. But the rest of us have to do it
by degrees, with careful doses, keeping survival in mind. A paradoxical
dialectic between survival and opening, until it gets to the point where
you need to open in order to survive in a better way.

Question 3
I’m very impressed and even jealous of your ability to shed tears at
an event, a formal seminar like this. It was very touching. It’s true we
dose this thing we call psychoanalysis out too. We can only understand
as much as we can, depending on how mature we are, how much we
can let in or seek. Psychoanalysis is very difficult to understand. How
does it work, what is happening? I am glad you are raising questions
about it, about our ability to understand. I want to ask something
about Bion, about reality, being real, realization. Don’t shield me now.
 DAY 3 89

Make sure you tell me the truth. Tell me more about the process of
digestion and how it goes along with preconception and conception,
and moves on to other levels of transformation. I’m wondering, what is
ultimate reality and to what degree are we alive? How alive are we? I’d
like to know what all this looks like?

Response 3
Well, it’s taking place here. This is ultimate reality. Right here. We are
doing it. Bion says he can’t represent it. I’m thinking of a Bion passage
about a patient that frustrated him, one we spoke about the other day,
starting, stopping, starting, stopping, a sense of not going anywhere,
a feeling that nothing’s happening. Something was going on in that
session—perhaps a frustrating sense of going nowhere—but Bion
can’t represent it. He can make you feel what’s going on, the frustra-
tion, the somewhere-nowhere. But you might interpret it differently
than he. You may find different strands of meaning in events and feel-
ings he describes. He said he could write thousands of words and
still not represent it. Yet he can make you feel what’s going on even if
understanding this “what” differs. There’s an X you’re both buzzing
around, whatever that X is. And that X is somehow an outgrowth of
ultimate reality. We are ultimate reality. To be an outgrowth of ulti-
mate reality is to be part of ultimate reality (and therefore, ultimate
reality itself).
Bion once wrote something like, ‘one can’t sing a potato, only be a
potato.’ How does one sing a potato? A potato simply is. We are what
we are. When asked his name, God said “I am” or “I am what I am” or
“I will be there.” That’s sort of a model we share. Here we are—we’re
all here. We can doubt that. We can make believe it’s not happening,
that we’re not all here. We can raise radical doubt. Are we here? How?
To what extent? Am I anywhere? Well, yes we are here this moment,
in one form or another. Jeffrey Eaton, an analyst in Seattle likes to say,
“Nowhere/now-here”. This is real. What’s going on in this room is real.
How we talk about it, how we represent it, how we understand and
interpret it is going to vary among people. But something’s going on
here that’s real. And different people may feel it in different ways. But
this is ultimate reality. Right now. There isn’t anything more ultimate.
This is it. Sometimes I get a picture of the whole human race being
one organism with billions of heads. So I guess it applies to this room,
90 EIGEN IN SEOUL

whoever or how many people are here. One body with eighty heads.
One reality, with hundreds of interpretations.
You asked about realization, so maybe part of reality in this case will
be realizing we are here. Realizing we are ultimate reality.
I’m going to try to go on a little bit. Not knowing does not sit well
in high places. Whether it’s in a school or a family or a country, or in
psychoanalysis. There’s pressure to know and if you don’t know, to fill
in the empty space, saturate the space where not knowing would be.
There’s a famous story of Bodhidharma, allegedly introducing Zen Bud-
dhism in China. The story may be a fable, as so many narratives in reli-
gions are. Fables express states. Socrates felt this and said when you get
to a certain point in inquiry, you need to use myths. There are fabulous
dimensions in religions because it’s so hard to say what needs saying,
perhaps can’t be said. In this fable, Bodhidharma crosses the Yangtze
River and meets Emperor Wu. Emperor Wu asks Bodhidharma, “What
is the essence of the holy teachings?” “Emptiness—without holiness,”
Bodhidharma replies. Emperor Wu is taken aback, perplexed, uncer-
tain, perhaps insulted and challenged, perhaps assaulted. The inner
twinge felt when internal ground shakes during personal exchange,
when you have an exchange that shakes you up and you try to act as if
you didn’t feel a quake. The emperor fronted, covered the inner quiver.
Emptiness—not holiness. What do you mean emptiness without holi-
ness? I have merits. I’m trying to be holy. I do good deeds. I study the
teachings. I teach the teachings. I’m a good person, striving for holi-
ness. Empty, not holy? In an instant, Bodhidharma takes away part of
the emperor’s identity and the emperor is speechless. Ground shakes
but the emperor being the emperor tries not to show it. He doesn’t start
to cry and ask for instruction. He keeps his cool. Maybe he is reeling.
Maybe his dharma appetite is stimulated.
“Who are you?” asks the Emperor. “I don’t know,” replied Bodhid-
harma. Again the emperor pauses, a deer caught in the headlights,
afraid of losing face, unsettled and unsure, needing time to regroup
and sort things out. The moment passes and the emperor fails to reach
out for help. He went on being the emperor, shook inside but emperor
outside. He didn’t say, “What’s going on here? I’m quaking, paralyzed.
Teach me.” And Bodhidharma goes his way.
Later, Emperor Wu spoke with his teacher about the event. “Do you
know who that man is?” asked the teacher. “I don’t know” replies the
emperor. “He’s the bearer of the Buddha Heart-Mind Seal,” the teacher
 DAY 3 91

says and adds “Don’t bother sending after him. The whole kingdom
couldn’t bring him back.” So here’s another “I don’t know”, a differ-
ent “I don’t know”. Bodhidharma’s “I don’t know” and the emperor’s
“I don’t know.”
When the emperor has time to let down and reflect a little bit, he
starts to get interested. Who is this man? He begins to think, “Maybe
I’ve missed something. Maybe we should send after him. Maybe there’s
something more here than I realized.” But the teacher says “Too late,
too late. The moment’s over. The moment has passed. You missed it.
A moment gone forever.” Yet the moment leaves waves. Emperor Wu
is not immune. In one of my fantasies, I imagine the emperor opening
a little. A little crack, a little more. The emperor in me becomes a little
more curious, lets down a bit more. My emperor’s sense of wonder
grows, realizes he has more to go. He does not open in time for the
missed encounter, but the missed encounter leaves residues. We often
need time. (See the chapter, “I Don’t Know” in Contact With the Depths
for more about the Bodhidharma “Empty—not holy” story and much
more about I don’t know).
You’re in an argument with your partner and the partner stabs you
in the heart with truth about yourself, truth you don’t want to acknowl-
edge. She sees you better than you see yourself in some way. She may
not see the whole story but she sees part of the story better than you
want to see part of the story and it stabs you. But you go on with your
fight. Then two days later or a day later or five hours later, you think
“You know she was right about me. She was right and I couldn’t admit
it. I couldn’t admit it at the time but what she said was the truth. It’s
not the whole picture but she was right.” It takes time to acknowledge
truths that upset you. And it’s the same with patients too. There may by
a negative reaction to something you say that has value but over time
it may start sinking in. So, two different ‘I don’t knows’ with different
functions, levels, possibilities. The emperor’s “I don’t know” is both a
seed and a barrier, a fence around himself. But it’s not only defensive;
it’s also a seed. So often defenses and seeds are indistinguishable. One
reaction can serve multiple functions. Something happened to him,
seeds of not knowing to cultivate. A seed planted in the emperor, need-
ing time.
It is not impossible for the emperor’s “I don’t know” to shed selves
and become the radically open not knowing Bodhidharma mediates.
In my fantasy, the emperor keeps growing. The seed keeps growing.
92 EIGEN IN SEOUL

And eventually his “I don’t know” matures into a more radical

openness. Legend tells us that after leaving the emperor, Bodhidharma
went to another part of China and meditated in front of a wall for
nine years. I suspect the wall is a wall Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu
shared. A wall we all share. A wall that the human race shares. A wall
Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu shared and that you and I share with
them. A wall of self, a wall surrounding self, and a wall that keeps us
walled off. There are moments when the wall gives away and we taste
existence. Such naked moments make us more ready to work with
walls.
Jesus associates not knowing who we are with forgiveness. Forgive
them, they don’t know what they do. He’s on a cross facing death when
he gives expression to a more devastating aloneness: “Father, Father,
why have you forsaken me?” Is there a connection between undergo-
ing depths of forsakenness, radical aloneness, all one alone, and for-
giveness? An agony of radical abandonment coupled with a surge of
compassion. Buddha mediates parallel streams, letting go everything
one holds onto and everything that holds one, attachments to life and
death—opening to a saving void, transcending identity, a liberation
paradoxically expressed in compassion for all beings. Jesus says for-
give them, forgiveness partly grounded in not knowing or, in Buddha’s
terms, ignorance. There are differences between forgiveness and
compassion worth investigating, but here I wish to emphasize their link.
Forgiveness as part of compassion and compassion as part of forgiving.
In English, forgiving is giving for. Forgiving, to give. To give to others
what one finds most deeply in oneself. Giving is a deep kind of shar-
ing. Forgiving compassion, compassionate forgiveness, spontaneously
arises just because it’s there.
Note Jesus’ locution—they don’t know. Forgive them, Father, they
don’t know—they don’t know what they’re doing. Jesus models
compassion with a kind of distancing—they, over there, not me. This
often is the form forgiveness takes. The other person is the one who
needs to be forgiven, but do I? Yes I do, on multiple planes by other
people, by God, by myself. I need forgiveness, not just them. We need
forgiveness.
Another turn attaches to not knowing as grounds for forgive-
ness. Is my not knowing adequate grounds for forgiveness? If so, the
worst me, the evil me, malignant me may be getting off the hook.
Am I only ignorant when I do the bad things I do? What about my
 DAY 3 93

cruelty, my meanness? One can turn this and say, “If I can be forgiven
just because of my ignorance, if that’s all it takes, wouldn’t the evil in
me warrant compassion even more? If ignorance warrants compas-
sion, oh my God, then the evil I do that I don’t want to do but I can’t
help doing, that I don’t even know I’m doing, that warrants even more
compassion.” All the hidden nooks and crannies, all the secret places
need compassion and forgiveness. If God’s mercy seeped into all the
hidden spots, all the traumatized, deformed, monster places, places
I can’t even sense or even know how to begin to find or go to—would
this be a beginning?
One of the biggest challenges is to go from “they” to “I” or “we”.
Forgive us for we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know who
we are. The move from “they” to “I” and “we” involves profound inner
reordering. You’re with a partner, forgiving them. That means you’re
blaming them. If you’re forgiving them, you’re blaming them. It’s not
enough. The depths inside all of us need compassion, need forgiveness.
Your deepest depths—places you don’t know exist, intimate places
without a name, without a map. New nuances of freedom, quest and
caring. Not they don’t know. I don’t know. We don’t know.

Afternoon session: clinical work today

Any thoughts, questions, reactions from this morning or any other
time?

Question 1
Recently in a session I told the patient, “I don’t know.” And this made
the patient very angry. The patient said “I don’t want to hear that you
don’t know.” I feel that sometimes I’m forced to become this object that
the patient needs, that the patient cannot tolerate the therapist’s not
knowing, that sometimes the patient needs the omniscient object and
cannot stay in the treatment and even has to leave the treatment if the
analyst does not know. So what can we do in this case?

Response 1
Well, I don’t know what the case is. We’d have to talk about it and see
what he was angry about, where the anger is coming from. It’s possible
94 EIGEN IN SEOUL

to not know and yet not say you don’t know. Not knowing doesn’t
mean you have to say it. Just keep it to yourself. As long as you
know you don’t know. That’s the most important thing. Flexibility is
important. So if someone needs you to say something, then you say it.
You can say it as a supportive thing, a challenging thing, a stimulating
thing, an interpretation, whatever is needed. You do what you need
to do to play for time so that links can be formed over time in the
therapy. There’s no one rule. It’s not one-size-fits-all. I’m talking about
something deeper. I’m talking about not what you do or don’t do. I’m
talking about a very deep, underlying attitude, whether you have an
omniscient attitude. If you have a “know it all” attitude, your patient
will leave you or get worse. He won’t get better. But if you give them a
confident view, a confident interpretation from your own strength and
caring, that’s fine as long as you know you’re not omniscient. If you’re
really a “know it all,” you’re going to have a very rough time with
your patients. There’s going to be a power struggle because the patient
is a “know it all” too. The patient sees things about you that you don’t
know. The patient will see your defects, and you won’t be able to stand
them. The patient has his area of omniscience too, things he knows
that you can’t bear. If you start playing the game of internal omnis-
cience, that you think you know inside in your own inner core, then
you’re going to be in a power struggle with the patient. If you have a
more flexible inside and you know you don’t know and you’re try-
ing this and trying that, then you won’t have many power struggles.
You can say anything you want. But everything depends on your inner
attitude. I think Winnicott said at one point that as he got older he
became more and more silent with his patients. He was giving them
more and more room. And now and then he would say something just
to let them know that he was there or that he was alive and that they
haven’t killed him off in the session. Someone would still be with them
if they felt they needed it. He wasn’t speaking from the point of view
of omniscience. Even when he made some pretty wild interpretations,
he was speaking from the point of view of imagination, his own imagi-
native feel of the patient. He would come up with very inspiring ideas
that would intrigue the patient or make the patient interested. If you’re
really with the person, eventually you’re going to say things that make
the patient feel cared for or stimulated or say, “Well, I never thought of
that.” But it doesn’t mean that you’re clinging to these ideas or advanc-
ing them as the dogmatic truth. It’s an inspiration that comes to you
 DAY 3 95

and you share it. Maybe it’ll turn the patient on in some way. A lot of
times things just come out of the blue. Ideas just come out of the blue.
And if they seem like good ideas to you, why not try them out and see
what happens?
If you were in supervision with me, I might ask, as a kind of explo-
ration, why you said anything at that point. What was going on inside
you? If we were working together, I might ask what was the pressure
you felt? What were the kinds of processes that got released, stimu-
lated by this pressure from the patient who could not bear your not
knowing. I could only make some good guesses. I would wonder about
some basic things like, if I’m not the omnipotent, omniscient authority,
why do you (the patient) feel so lost? Where does this need come from?
Is it that everyone was weak in your family? You didn’t have enough
strength from the parents? Is it that someone was overly bossy, overly
intrusive and now you can’t bear to be without this filling? I might try
to imagine what led to the anger and what needs for omnipotence or
omniscience may be involved. Perhaps I’d wonder how the person felt
when the omnipotence/omniscience was there and not there. How do
you feel when I act like I know, how do you feel when I express not
knowing? How do you feel if I’m the omnipotent/omniscient object
and how do you feel if I’m not? One begins exploring ins and outs of
psychic possibilities. So I wish you were in supervision with me and
I wish I was in Seoul and we could work together for several months
and see what would come up.
I’d like to share a couple of moments in my practice and see how
it goes. I call the first one “Heart and Pain” or “Heartless Heart” or
“Heart of Pain” or, better, a word the patient uses, “Phantom Heart.”
It happened with a patient I call Milton in Toxic Nourishment. If you
read about Milton in Toxic Nourishment, you will see in this passage
he has not gotten “cured”. From one perspective, he may seem to be
in as bad a shape as ever, except he is not in as bad a shape as ever.
There are many new things in his life that he couldn’t experience before,
many new moments and kinds of relationships with his wife and fam-
ily that were unavailable before. Still, what he goes through can sound
very bad, depending on one’s view of what can happen in therapy.
The moment I am going to speak about happened a decade after Toxic
Nourishment was published and if things sound as bad now as then, it’s
because in some way that’s true. The bad thing, the hurt and damaged
thing is there. It doesn’t go away. But other parts of personality grow
96 EIGEN IN SEOUL

around them and there’s more to him. Still, in our work we stick with
the damaged thing. He is one of those patients who must stick with the
damaged part. Someone observed yesterday how quick I am to run away
from it. But Milton won’t let me do that. And you won’t either.
When Milton came to therapy, the damaged point was not just the
damaged point, it was nearly his whole personality. In a way, it has
shrunk to a more contained area of feeling, while healthy elements of
his life expanded. Milton sometimes notes that I haven’t written about
him in a long time. Maybe he was proud that I wrote about him, letting
people know the truth of the experience he goes through, letting others
know it exists, is real. I wonder if I haven’t written about him in nine
or ten years has anything to do with my sense that I communicated an
essence of what he tried to express, tried to validate. I have a feeling
he misses my writing about him, misses this public witness of private
truth, a shared witness. Yet here I am talking about him, about to share
something that happened recently. How labyrinthine and enigmatic we
are, so many roots and branches.
Yesterday we were talking about constant conjunctions, including
conjunction of “dual” tendencies. I go one way, then another, start, stop,
do something, undo something. What I say one moment gets undone or
added to by the next. Mind in its serpentine, fish-like, bird-like move-
ments. Say one thing, then another happens. I say I haven’t written
about Milton in ten years, and here I am talking about him. Things are
watery, liquid, reversals are part of the way things happen, part of the
way things change.
Freud speaks of the fungus as a kind of psychic model. There are
different models of the psyche. One is a vertical model, like a tree with
roots and branches. Another might be more like a mushroom or fun-
gus, a rhizome (Deleuze & Guatteri, 1980). A fungus grows every which
way. It doesn’t have a simply vertical structure. It’s all tangled, reverses
on itself, grows this and that way, seeming to make up structure as it
goes along. Freud likened the dream to a fungus, spoke of a dream
navel that vanishes from sight. Freud in fact does have vertical,
hierarchical models too. But also a more mysterious one, where form
is elusive. We are tempted to try to go through the dream navel into an
ungraspable, mysterious world, where roots are everywhere, all there
is, liquid.
In the particular moment that I have in mind now, Milton began
speaking about how he can generate heartfelt experiences in others.
 DAY 3 97

He can move others deeply. And how painful this is to him because he
has no heart. It’s as if he stimulates the hearts of others but feels deep
pain because they are feeling something he cannot feel. He can make
others feel in a heartfelt way, but he himself cannot feel in a heartfelt
way. Nevertheless, he does his best and his close relationships have
improved enormously. His relationships have a wider range of feelings
than before, but he still feels a heartless core. In the session I am think-
ing of he said, “I have a phantom heart that can touch the heart of oth-
ers. And I’m very good at it.”
He adds, “All I have is the discipline of deprivation and despera-
tion.” What he means is that he acts like a caring person. He does well
by others. He treats others as best he can. He treats others in what seems
like a caring way. But he doesn’t feel any of this. He knows that love
exists. He knows from others that love exists. He sees it at work in their
lives. He acts as if he has a loving heart too because he has no bet-
ter frame of reference as a guide, none better to believe in. He sees no
other claim in the universe that’s better than love. He acts like a loving
person, does his best to do right by people, but insists this very action
is a discipline of deprivation and desperation. If one vanishes through
the psychic navel, one would live in a tangled world of deprivation
and desperation. In his deepest inside there is deprivation-desperation,
his truth, one of his truths. He tells me, “Though it pains me, I have no
recourse. I think it’s horrific, the kind of person I am is horrific. Even
as I say that I have no conviction in my stomach that it is horrific.”
In this mode, he experiences himself as an incurable monster, yet feels
no horror about it because this is the way he is. This is fact, reality for
him. Not even horror is horrible, even if it registers as horror, because
there is no real heart to experience it.
After a while, he begins talking about his childhood again. If you
read about Milton in Toxic Nourishment, you probably learned that his
mother was an alcoholic mess who stayed in bed much of the time. His
father eventually took him from her. This was something Milton had
wanted for years. His father was more active and alive but arrogant,
narcissistic, invasive, possessive. On the one hand he was warm, but on
the other an engulfing threat to Milton’s inner core. Milton wanted to
be with his father because his mother was not there or worse than not
there, a chaotic basket case. Yet his father was a threat to self. Milton
was caught between two kinds of annihilation terrors. In the session I’m
thinking of Milton tried to talk about lies or a birth of the realization that
98 EIGEN IN SEOUL

his parents lied, not just to him, but to themselves. It gnawed on Milton
that his father presented himself as the bearer of truth but lived a lie.
His father had an inflated opinion of himself that Milton saw through
but could do nothing about. His mother was a kind of vegetable. He felt
his father lived a lie and his mother’s state was deeper than lies, worse
than lies.
As he lived his way into his child self, he lived his way into some-
one who saw the reality of his parents, facts he couldn’t live with.
He could not stomach his father’s narrative: I’m a great person, look
what I did for you. I saved you from your mother. I’m more honest,
truthful, tougher, loving than other people. He felt his father wanted
to be worshipped, believed as he presented himself. But the impact of
his personality on Milton did not fit his self-description. The truth of
felt impact scared Milton. The impact of his father’s personality was
dreadful. In a way, it might have been better if Milton could accept his
father’s hypocrisies, his lies about himself and life, and gotten along
more normally. But inwardly Milton felt he was being killed, dam-
aged, mutilated. The truth of felt impact was devastating. He was being
saved from his quicksand mother by his devastating father. Inwardly
he couldn’t stop watching what was happening to himself. He could
not stop watching the damage.
In the case of Harry the other day, it’s as if he saw a reality and kept
on seeing the reality. In his case, the inner reality of killing with words,
which did not seem to get confirmed by actual events. His seemed
to express an unsustainable state in which aspects of affects failed to
have an impact and began to die out, lacking inner and outer suste-
nance. We did not have time to go far enough the other day, but if we
had, we would have touched moments early in life when reality was
unsustainable, too much to bear. Realities he could not influence or
change. Moments in which Harry became helpless in face of his own
feelings.
Oedipus saw, lived, underwent a reality he could not bear seeing
and living with. He put out his eyes, as if saying, “I don’t want to see
what I lived, I can’t bear it. I can’t bear the pain of what happened.”
In face of unbearable pain that can not be faced, Bion was led to say that
Sophocles created Freud, Oedipus created psychoanalysis (“Tower of
Babel” section in Cogitations). The moment, the structure that Sophocles
was bringing to the attention of the human race planted a seed that
Freud brought to fruition in a new way, another way—psychoanalysis
 DAY 3 99

as a new narrative about unbearable pain, a language of psychic

wounds.
In Milton’s case, a certain area of feeling loses impact. Oedipus can’t
bear what he lives and puts out his eyes. A minor penalty. The pain is
deeper than that. It’s like trying to put out the inner eye so that one
doesn’t know who one is or what one does. It’s not just the outer eye.
It’s what psychoanalysis is about—not being able or wanting to sustain
seeing and feeling who you are in some way. In Milton’s case, different
from Harry, different from Oedipus, he can’t stop seeing the traumatiz-
ing aspect of reality, as if the wound that never heals becomes all of
reality.
A schizophrenic may see the wounding aspect of what’s there
too but is unable to sustain it and it turns into hallucinations and
delusions. But if you look at hallucinations and delusions carefully,
you’ll see, in part, a history of wounds. Histories of unsustainable hor-
ror, unsustainable trauma. In Milton’s case, he can’t stop looking at the
damage. He can’t stop looking at the lie. He can’t stop looking at paren-
tal reality that is damaging him. He can’t stop staring at this process—
and what happens? He loses his heart. His heart stops. It’s like a core
of psychic being freezes or vanishes or leaves a hole. It is not there. His
eyes, his witness, his observer, the truth observer, the fact observer, the
scientist goes on and sees what’s there and sees the damaging aspects
of what’s there but a feeling is gone. I don’t think I’ve ever had a patient
before who was so clear about not having a heart. I have had many
patients who were clear about not feeling or lacking heart. But the way
Milton pinpoints it and does not let up: it’s like he’s letting me in on
the deepest secret of his life. How did we get here? I think one of the
ways we got here was my own trauma history having a deep respect
for his trauma history, resonance from trauma to trauma. My trauma
history did not leave me without feelings. I have very intense feelings.
I’m not exactly like Harry or Milton. But I am like them in being highly
traumatized, mutilated, damaged. I have a deep underlying respect for
Milton’s damage. He was telling me how it felt for him. It was differ-
ent than how it felt for me. But we share the fact that we’re both dam-
aged beings. Just waiting, being together over time let the chicken out
of the coop and out came the heartless area. I’m very moved by that,
the heartless area. So I’m one of those people who Milton can move by
being heartless. I think he is moved by my being moved. I think that
may be a new thing. I think he’s surprised that I’m moved by what he
100 EIGEN IN SEOUL

tells me about himself. He expects me to be horrified. I don’t know if I’m

horrified. I’m very touched. I think of the Wizard of Oz character who
says, “If I only had a heart …” Only in Milton’s case it isn’t sentimental.
It’s a raw, nude fact.
It’s about deep despair. He speaks of his own weakness, like his
mother’s. He is not in reality as weak as his mother. He is a competent,
accomplished person. Yet he feels weak like his mother, an inner mess.
This is what he sees, feels, his vision. I listen, bury it within myself, try
to take it in. It’s hard to bear the fact that he’s saying this about himself
and that he really means it. That in some way he is his mother is a fact
of his existence. He speaks of his own weakness as if it were like his
mother’s weakness. He speaks of how he is like his father at the same
time, displaying make believe strength, macho bravado, an inflated
being proud of sexual prowess, although, unlike his father, having sex
with various women stopped when he married and monogamous real-
ity deepened with the years.
A big lie was that his father was enormously egocentric but did not
have a clue that he was so egocentric. He was blind to his egocentricity.
He was not like the egocentric person who knows he has a “big ego”
and rejoices in it: Yes! This is the way I am! That might be there some-
times, part of it. But the lie that rubbed Milton was that his father was
hugely egocentric but tried to pass himself off as humble—seemingly
sincerely so. An egocentric person making a show of his humility.
An inflated ego passing himself off as a nice, well meaning, humble,
good guy who does not see his egocentricity, does not own it or cop
to it. He wants you to applaud him for his wonderfulness. He does not
see and does not want you to see damage he is causing.
Damage is denied, put out of play, gone. Donald Meltzer, in his
book Explorations in Autism (1975), used the word “gone” to speak of
a kind of dismantling of attention in an autistic child. The child, when
threatened by a break in therapy, might suddenly seem to disappear, be
nowhere, blank. Separation dread is one possible ingredient in blank-
ing out, vanishing. Milton’s heart is gone. In some way, his father’s
self-awareness is gone. Something that particularly bothered Milton
was his father’s need to be worshipped, often at the expense of others.
Others should give their personalities over to him, worship him as if
he were the center of existence. Milton hated the fact that his father
installed himself as a powerful center of his life, in one way lifting
Milton from his mother’s morass, and plunging him into a dilemma
 DAY 3 101

of psychological survival with the one who “saved” him. It seemed

like everyone was ‘gone’ in their own ways. Milton gave up his feeling
heart in order to survive, protecting himself from his father’s godlike
invasion. And Milton’s heart? We don’t know what happened to it. We
don’t know where it is. But at the moment it’s gone. One can be gone
in some ways, alive in others. In Milton’s case, the gone dimension
tortured him.
Now we’re reaching the turning point of the session. I feel a little
embarrassed that it’s going to sound so simple, anti-climactic after this
big build-up. The turning point comes when Milton starts telling me
about how he began lying in childhood. He began lying like his father,
and he lied and lost. He lost something important by lying but lying
seemed integral for survival. He recited all the different ways he lied,
a catalogue of lying ability. And suddenly he stops and says, “I could
have stopped lying.” A sudden revelation struck him and he now felt it
was in his power to stop lying and that, as a child, he should have and
could have done so. He was blaming himself for who he was and is.
It loomed as an uncompromising imperative: I could have and should
have stopped lying.
Can anyone in this room tell me how to do that? Because I don’t
know. No one has ever been able to figure out how to stop lying. But
Milton felt that he could have, should have, an absolute state. You can
see what demands he places on himself. An absolute, pure demand, no
flexibility or compromise, no compassion, no forgiveness. I, unlike my
father, could have stopped lying and become a different person. I didn’t
have to become the very thing I hated. I didn’t have to become the thing
I hated most about my father. I could have stopped lying. I could have
been a truth teller. This is what he believed that moment. A kind of hal-
lucination, a delusion—“I could have stopped lying.”
There ‘s a God structure in us. There’s a God structure in us that tells
us don’t lie. It says, I don’t lie, I’m God. I don’t lie—I just flood the earth
and kill people. I have tantrums. If I don’t like people, they’re gone or
go to hell. But God doesn’t lie. There is this lunatic, crazy thing in us, a
lunatic psyche that gets the idea that, like God, “I could have stopped
lying.” A lunatic God psyche tormenting you for not being able to do
impossible things and not being able to stop doing them on a dime,
instantaneously, once and for all. A sudden absolute realization and
command: I could have stopped lying. For me, it’s like saying, “I could
have stopped breathing.”
102 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Milton says “I could have stopped lying” and I say “How? You’d
have to become inhuman. You’d have to die.” These words came by
themselves, nothing I thought about, just a moment’s feeling. What
would happen to me if I stopped lying in childhood? I probably would
be a better person but I wouldn’t be here today. Psychoanalysis says
no human being lives who doesn’t lie. Psychoanalysis says things get
rerouted, displaced, defensive. In a way psychoanalysis is a catalogue
of lying, deep lying, unconscious lying, unconscious self-deception that
besets the human race. To some extent, psychoanalysis helps us catch
onto how we are necessary self-deceivers in face of what we go through.
The fact that we can sense such deep lying processes in our nature is
also a testimony for our need for truth about ourselves. Truth, lying—a
tangle no one has escaped, no Houdini among us to untie our knots. So
when Milton said, “I could have stopped lying,”—the question “How?”
broke out from my heart. “You’d have to become inhuman,” I added.
A Satori moment. Impact. Bang. For a moment, Milton sees the vio-
lence that getting rid of lying would entail. It’s not a symbol, not make-
believe, not a proxy. It’s real. The thing itself. He sees and experiences
first hand what getting rid of lying would have involved for him as a
child, a child in the predicament, the state he was in.
It’s about as close to a moment of compassion for himself that he ever
felt. He feels what he would have had to do to himself to end lying, the
violent impossibility of pulling out the roots of make believe, making
things up, diverting, dodging, hiding, displacing, rerouting, rationaliz-
ing. How do you pull the roots of these processes out? How can a child
end the mercy of lies in a traumatizing world? Lies that soothe, lies that
torment.
Buddha says it took him millions of years with millions of teachers.
Some Buddhist teachers say he never arrived. He never got there. Oth-
ers say he was always there. Others say, no, Buddha was never Buddha.
He never made it, he always was it, there is no making it. Confucius
says in the Analects that he feels like a failure. All his life, he loved the
Way, spoke of the Way, tried to help others move along the Way yet he
felt he never achieved it, not fully, not permanently. As an older man, he
felt that he himself failed to reach the state he was advocating through-
out his lifetime. My feeling is that Confucius likely lived a much better
life than he would have had he not tried to live the Way. But in the end
he confesses failing to do it. Now, if Confucius failed to do it, what else
is there for us to do but have compassion for our failures. It doesn’t
 DAY 3 103

mean we shouldn’t try. But it does mean we should have compassion

for ourselves in whatever state we end up in, in whatever state we find
ourselves.
Milton came as close as I ever saw or felt with him, to having a
moment of compassion for himself, coupled with the realization of
how vast lying is in life. All the fungus tangles, turns, unseen parts,
unknown processes. He had a moment of freedom. A moment of free-
dom that carried over into the weekend. He had feeling sex with his
wife, fuller than ever. And was better able to get along with his wife and
children. A more flexible weekend, fuller, a better weekend altogether.
That may not sound like a lot after maybe twenty years of work. For me
it’s what we live for.
We’ll take a short break and come back with questions and discus-
sions. I thought this was going to be a short case but it was much longer
than I expected. I have a lot of cases I’d like to share, but time is at issue.
If there’s time there’s one more I’d like to do. We’ll see how it goes.
I have an idea that many of you are getting used to me because many
more people are here at the end of the seminar than in 2007. As the
seminar in 2007 went on, I had the impression that fewer and fewer
people showed up. Today there’s a big crowd at the end. So, if you’re
learning nothing else, as Bion said in New York, you’re getting the feel
of what it’s like to bear working with someone like me. And I’m very
grateful. Thank you.

* * *
I don’t know if we’ll have time, but I’ll try to do one more, a little bit of
a case. We’ll see what we do. Feel free to share any of your thoughts or
requests.

Question 1
I feel that the three days have been quite a long trip. And from
yesterday, from Bion’s theory, T in O and F in O, the formula, the expres-
sion … if we look at Freud, he has his structure, id, ego, super ego.
Klein has her paranoid schizoid and depressive positions. But it feels
like Bion accepts humans as they are, doesn’t try to split them up or
divide them into categories. And I feel if one goes deep into Freud, one
can meet Klein and if one goes deep into Klein, one can meet Bion. We
also talked a little bit about psychoanalytic life, what that’s about and
104 EIGEN IN SEOUL

I feel that it is connecting the past, present and future. The frustrations
and pain of life, past and present, we embrace that. And anxieties about
the future. We don’t know what’s going to happen. A lot of worries. It’s
enduring all that and being able to open our minds towards the future.
I want to thank you for giving me this realization.

Response 1
You are talking about embracing, accepting, enduring. I found Bion very
accepting. When I saw him for sessions in New York in 1978, I brought
him some of my dreams. As we talked about the dreams, he sided with
scary figures in them, telling me these are real. They are emotional real-
ity. It’s not “just” a dream, not a symbol. It’s real. Later in one session
he suddenly caught himself speaking about “parts of the self” and said,
“You know we talk about parts of the self but there are no ‘parts’. Talk-
ing about parts is a way of speaking. We are really talking about you.
The ‘parts’ are really you.” Not this part of Mike Eigen, not that part of
Mike Eigen. Me.
Your image of Freud, you could’ve said Jung too, Freud, Klein, Jung,
Adler, Matte-Blanco, Winnicott, Milner, Christopher Bollas, Adam Phil-
lips, James Grotstein, the list goes on. You said that they all go into one
another, if you go far enough into one, you find the others. They all
meet each other. That’s the rhizome. Under the surface, there are all
kinds of connections.
David Bohm, a physicist, talked about two modes of being, the expli-
cate and implicate orders. Loosely speaking, the explicate order refers
to all the things that are on the surface that you can see, the distinctions
between things. There’s you, there’s me, there’s this object, that object.
You might say all the things that Adam named in Genesis, and that we
keep naming and adding to today. The implicate order involves the
deep unknown that you can’t see. Everything is interconnected below
the surface. Everything grows with everything else in ways we see and
don’t see. Sometimes you find yourself in the explicate order and don’t
know that you’re connected with everything else. You see something
over there and think oh, that’s the enemy. You don’t see the unseen
connection. It’s important what you’re saying. All these schools fought
each other and still fight each other. Yet they’re deeply interconnected
and meet each other, whether or not this is seen and digested. If Bion,
Klein, Lacan, Jung are all stripes on a tiger, then Bion’s saying still holds.
 DAY 3 105

Maybe someday we’ll meet the tiger itself. (“Psycho-analysis itself is just
a stripe on the coat of the tiger. Ultimately it may meet the Tiger—The
Thing Itself—O.” Memoir of the Future; for further discussion of Bohm’s
implicate-explicate orders and their relation to psychoanalytic thinking
on creativity, see “The Distinction-Union Structure” in Contact With the
Depths, 2011).
I was thinking of the story I told about a man from Brazil calling me.
The man who didn’t leave a clear enough message for me to reach him
and I started getting frustrated and irritable until a therapist from Brazil
helped me. Once I got helped, the message got through and the man
and I began to work together. There are many forms of communication
we don’t ordinarily credit or take into account.
One day a woman in my seminar talked about a patient who rings,
hangs up. The patient calls her therapist and when her therapist answers,
she hangs up. This went on for several months. I told my seminar mem-
ber about my frustrating experience with the Brazilian man, what I went
through and how my feelings began to close up and the intervention by
my colleague that led to an opening. Within a week after telling her the
story, her patient stopped hanging up and calls between sessions began
to diminish (For more on start-stop, ring-hang up structures, see the
chapter “Ring-Hang Up, Start-Stop, On-Off” in Contact With the Depths.)
We are not sure what leads to what or what is causing what’s happen-
ing in a given moment or sequence. Often modes of communication we
fail to consider play an important role.

Question 2
(The question did not come out clearly on the tape. It had to do with
what we do in therapy and being at sea, how the therapist might
approach what isn’t known, the role of attention and the therapist’s
anxiety in staying with it when it’s not clear what you’re staying with.
How can you keep an open attentional state when the patient is making
demands and showing strong feelings and arousing strong feelings in
you? Especially when there is so much pain?)

Response 2
Everything I say is incomplete, partial, a tiny bit of what could be said.
For one thing, you can use what is happening as a spiritual exercise.
106 EIGEN IN SEOUL

Stick with it. You don’t have to act. You don’t have to do anything. Look
at it, feel it. If you are in an anxious state or angry state, see what it feels
like, stare at it. Sometimes it helps to make believe the patient isn’t in
the room. All there is, is what you are feeling. There is nothing except
what you are feeling and looking at. Just keep staring at it. If the patient
demands a response, say whatever you want, select something from
whatever comes to you, or have some favorite words to fall back on
when needed. If the patient is in a bad state and can’t bear your not
speaking, just say something. “It’s a nice day.” “It’s a bad day.” “We’re
having a bad day.” “We’re having a hard time.” “I feel badly that you
feel so badly.” “You have strong feelings and you’re right to have such
strong feelings.” The main thing inwardly is for you to keep looking at
the negative feeling you are having, that’s coming into you, that you
are feeling with the patient. Perhaps the patient is putting this strong
feeling into you. We don’t know if that is so or not. You might be feel-
ing the effects of the patient’s force field or you might be up against a
semi-collapse or weakness or deficit in yourself. It is not so unusual to
come upon limits in your personality, a hole in your being, incapac-
ity. To keep on paying attention to it, attending it if only intermittently,
when you are up to it—this is your practice. Paying attention to what
you can’t do, to the jams, to the incapacities, is a practice. How long and
with how much of you can you attend to something that doesn’t seem
to be working? Ten seconds? A minute? An hour? Day? Month? On and
off for years? Keep staring at it, at the rough spot, the tender spot, the
impossible spot, and see what happens with it.
If you look at something painful long enough and intense enough,
it becomes like a worm-hole. It opens up and you find yourself in
another space. This is what Buddha did. At some point early in his life,
he had the realization that life isn’t what he thought it was, that there
wasn’t only happy times in the palace, there was suffering. People were
homeless, hungry, in physical and psychological pain. There was great
suffering in the world and he felt that suffering. The whole world put
its pain into Buddha. A patient puts his pain into you, puts his neg-
ativity into you. All the negativities went into Buddha and he didn’t
know what to do. He tried techniques of renunciation. He tried yoga.
And he finally, eventually stayed with the suffering. My sense is he
stayed with the suffering, stayed with the suffering. Stayed with it,
stayed with it. And at some point, a psychic perforation occurred. The
intensity of staying with it, intensity of attention perforated the psyche,
 DAY 3 107

opened it, something gave way, burst, opened up. (For more discussion
of intensity and psychic wormholes, see the chapter, “I Killed Socrates”
in Flames From the Unconscious: Trauma, Madness and Faith, 2009).
You pay attention to something intensely, something opens. You could
be a physicist, poet, psychoanalyst. If you stare at something intensely,
something opens. Picasso spent hours staring at a picture he was work-
ing on, hours looking at it and looking at it. At some unpredictable point,
he might see what the next move should or could be. It’s similar with
patients. Pain is your homework, their pain, your pain. Negativity is
your homework. My feeling is look at it—the pain, anger, grief, anxiety,
the horror, the beauty—in the session. If need be, ignore the patient and
stay with the pain you’re looking at. Let the patient fade away. If your
antenna picks up signals that the patient needs you to say something,
if your soul antenna tells you, “I need to say something now,” then say
something, Meanwhile, you’re still looking at the negative thing.
We’re very inventive and at times more in touch with the unknown
than we’re aware of. There may be a thread that links the deep unknown
with a momentary utterance. You are in the middle of a pain reverie and
you sense the patient needs your presence or word. You say, “My God,
we’re in a tough place together.” “You’re talking about something very
real, very strong, circling a deep wound.” We’re very creative. “I appre-
ciate all you’ve gone through, all you’re going through. I wish it could
be easier.” It’s a little like jazz improvisation. Say anything. Your back-
ground, training, reading, thought, feeling provides a sediment for
something relevant to arise. You draw on a lifetime of experience and
work. If you are a new therapist, you draw on the future. Already you
have a “feel” for the work growing, an incipient feel for psychic reality,
a wish to learn by doing. This doing has its own “feel”.
A main thing is to keep on staying with the negativity until some-
thing happens with it inside of you and takes you to another place.
It transforms. If it transforms in you, it will transform in the patient
over time, little by little. What I’m saying is not very satisfactory, no
formula, unless the formula is a little distance combined with a little
attention. I guess one of my “formulas” is stay with it. Stay with it ten,
twenty years. I’ve been with Milton a long time. We keep at it. Then
something happens in the session I tried to speak about. No strategy.
It just happened.
In my book Ecstasy (2001) I write about daily pains, things going
wrong, my inability to handle so much that happens. In Rage (2002)
108 EIGEN IN SEOUL

I describe trying to create a little more distance between myself and my

first reaction. I needed to do this because I felt I was hurting people by
failing to wait and modulate initial feelings and see what else was there.
Little by little, pressured by life, I became a teacher to myself. You begin
to sense signals inside you telling you to step back. As if something
inside said, “Don’t do anything. Wait.” I had a supervisor who, when
I brought up my quandaries, sometimes said, “When in doubt, wait it
out.” This was very helpful.
Nothing can save you from the pain of your own being, the pain of
your personality. This is going to be with you for the rest of your days.
You are going to suffer on and off all your life. Over time, you may
find your own way of responding to that suffering, your own way of
approaching and relating to it.
When Buddha went through a worm-hole, he came out in nirvana.
Nirvana didn’t stop his suffering. But it gave him a different attitude
towards it, a different perspective towards suffering. That didn’t stop
suffering itself, although it ameliorated it, modulated it. The same
thing in psychoanalysis. Going through something over and over
again—there is always variability in repetition—can build psychic
endurance, psychic persistence, psychic muscles. Not always—for pain
can be crushing. But with help, with “catching on”, you get better at
going through things. You get more attuned to the signals. You can go
through a lot in an adumbrated way, rather than always an all-out, full
way. It takes time, experience, a kind of growth of sensing. It’s a practice
of staying with it as best you can, intermittently, now and then storming
the gates.
All or most experience is unsatisfactory in some way. Life is frus-
trating. Experience is frustrating, something emphasized by Buddhism
and psychoanalysis in their ways. In psychoanalysis we realize how
frustrating the attempt to communicate can be. Or even the attempt to
contact what needs to be communicated. Nevertheless, much happens
that is satisfactory, at times better than satisfactory. We learn to make
room for the frustrating aspect of moment to moment and long term
living (or need to learn to make room for it). Frustration built into exist-
ence is not something we can get rid of. We can change our attitude
towards it, even at times reshape it. We may try to make believe it’s not
there, but a cost is paid.
Now I’m in my seventies and I’ve worked with patients a long time.
I don’t expect them to make me feel good, certainly not all the time.
 DAY 3 109

I know they are going to cause me pain, perhaps severe pain. I’ve
gone through desperate pain with my patients millions and millions
of times and have my own inner ways to make room for it. Sometimes
my psychic horizon expands in ways so that psychic pain takes up less
room. Suffering never vanishes, not for long. Not for the Buddhist in
nirvana. Nor for Saint Thomas in the beatific attitude. Pain does not
go away but you can make/find a bigger field, so that it takes up less
room. Doing this takes time and practice. There is no substitute for prac-
tice. At the end of his New York seminar, Bion responded to a question
about psychoanalysis by saying something like: Keep doing it, just keep
doing it. Something happens if you stay with it long and fully.
In New York I hear a lot about therapist burnout. All the pain one
meets may deaden a therapist. Sometimes I wonder if such a therapist
was dead before, but got worse in this work. I wrote a book called Psy-
chic Deadness (1996) to explore the continuum of aliveness-deadness in
sessions and in daily living. As a therapist, I’ve had to work with much
deadness. Among other things, I describe a kind of staring at the dead-
ness, akin to going into a dark theatre, and as you get used to it, you
begin to see things you didn’t see before. As you see more if it, deadness
becomes more interesting, more variable. Like Darwin studying plants.
The more you look, the more species of deadness appear. You begin to
find different ways that deadness works.
It’s the same with the pain you’re talking about. Pain is like a mush-
room, like a plant. It has many parts, many roots and possibilities. Use
the pain as a stimulus to grow bigger than the pain. That may take
years. Don’t give up. But if you give up, give up temporarily to take a
rest and then come back. Of course, if you find this work is not for you,
that’s another story. There’s plenty to do in life. Doing therapy has its
own special difficulties. You know what? That’s no different from life
itself. It’s a challenge to be with another person. No one solves that.
You can try to live in a cave. Not everyone is suited for a cave. If you’re
going to be with other people, you’re going to get hurt. But you grow
bigger than your hurt. And if the hurt is bigger than you, the hurt is not
all you are. You’ll get hurt in a cave too. Perhaps we have to find what
kind of hurt we’re best suited for.
From a Christian point of view, this requires going through end-
less crucifixions. Crucifixions don’t stop. Maybe they get more intense
and then subside, agony and relief. Something like the way pain
throbs, or sound waves oscillate, a kind of rhythm of pain. If you stay
110 EIGEN IN SEOUL

with it, there may be resurrection. A kind of constant conjunction,

crucifixion-resurrection. A basic rhythm I call a rhythm of faith. It goes
on all life long. One gets the hang of it after awhile, but you never mas-
ter it. At best you become a partner with deep processes, a little like
Socrates calling himself a midwife, but you never know …

Question 3
Yesterday I told you about a dream. The yin and yang and the God part
it connects to. Today I’m associating it with the pupil of the eye. I want
to thank you for staying with us, for staring at us, for looking with us,
for inviting us. My question is related to the question yesterday about
the unforgivable mother and Milton’s father. How to live with these
kinds of people? I feel them inside us. We have to live with them. Can
I fight with them? Can I hate them? Can I have compassion for them?
Can I have all of this for them? My feeling now is that I’m afraid to
take them in. And if only you would tell me that I don’t have to hate
them and God would take care all of this, then I feel that I would be
relieved.

Response 3
I wish I could say that it’s all going to end nicely and you’ll have a
very happy ending. But I don’t know. I think that it’s good to have
faith. And you should always return to that, return to faith. But this
doesn’t mean that there’s not tragedy. Life is filled with tragedy. Every
life is a tragic life. No life is without tragic aspects. We share that. So it’s
not a matter of just loving, just hating, or just anything. I get angry
with some patients on some occasions. I might say about parents you
describe, “How awful, I’d like to kill them.” It depends. There are no
rules on this. The main thing is to be flexible and not get caught up in
any one position so that when the next moment changes you automati-
cally change with it. It’s like having a camera that adjusts automatically
to light conditions. Whatever happens, it changes with the condition.
There’s nothing wrong with hating someone at one moment and seeing
something positive in that person in another moment. You shouldn’t
be bound by the idea that if you feel one thing, it’s forever, it’s the only
thing. It’s just a part of the colors on the artist’s palette. What you want
to use, what feels usable for the moment, what color mixtures work is
 DAY 3 111

going to change depending on what you’re trying to paint and how you
see things.
Freud says that he artificially blinds himself so that he can see.
Bion says that too. And James Grotstein recently published a book called
A Beam of Intense Darkness (2007). The implication is that it is through
this intense beam of darkness that the psychoanalyst sees.
Well, I see we’re running out of time so you can see that all experi-
ence is frustrating because I didn’t get to share with you any of the
other sessions. But we did get to share intense experience for three days
that I find highly pleasurable. I remember at the end of the seminar
Bion gave in 1978 he makes a remark “How is it that going through
and staying with such painful business ends up being such a pleasure.”
Definitely it is. For me, doing something like this is definitely fun,
psychoanalytic fun. I’m grateful for the chance to do it. Since I see we’re
ending I’d like to end with something that we began with at the begin-
ning of this seminar when I asked “What is the core of a dream?” And
a woman answered, if I recall correctly, the core of a dream is emotional
experience. Let me put it a little differently now. What is a person trying
to do by telling you a dream? An answer is they’re trying to share emo-
tional experience with you, an emotional experience that the person
may not yet know.
I feel honored to share with you the dream of this seminar. And thank
you for having me.
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