"But the dead must guide me"

Introduction

Freud, in "Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-analysis", writes about the "technique" of the psychoanalyst known as  "evenly-suspended attention":

The technique, however, is a very simple one. (...) it rejects the use of any special expedient (even that of taking notes). It consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly-suspended attention’ (as I have called it) in the face of all that one hears.

And he summarizes: 

He should simply listen, and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind.

The technique of "evenly-suspended attention" serves two purposes: the decongestion of the psychoanalyst’s memory and the "unconscious" perception of the words of the patient.

On the other hand the analysand

is to tell us not only what he can say intentionally and willingly, (...) but everything else as well that his self-observation yields him, everything that comes into his head, even if it is disagreeable for him to say it, even if it seems to him unimportant or actually nonsensical.

The aim is "to put his self-criticism out of action". The technique of evenly-suspended attention, i.e.

the rule of giving equal notice to everything is the necessary counterpart to the demand made on the patient that he should communicate everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection.

Therefore, the challenge for both analysand and psychoanalyst is exactly the same "putting self-criticism out of action". The free association of the analysand and the evenly-suspended attention of the psychoanalyst go hand in hand. They are "a necessary counterpart" to each other. At this point a revolution is announced, a radically different form of communication. The doctor is not the dominant subject who looks scientifically at the patient as an object of observation, exploration, and therapeutic "treatment". Their conversation is dispersed in an open horizon where they are "a necessary counterpart" to each other, a necessity which is not due to some rational determinism.  The following text attempts to search the nature of this necessity in the light of the poetry of George Seferis. And since here the first word and the first silencing are up to the psychoanalyst, I will start with his evenly-suspended attention. 

Freud asks the analysand to be "absolutely honest". The therapist responds with a "technique". This is deception. Because the analysand opens up to someone who just pretends to be open. This somehow, sooner or later, will poison their communication and will restrict it. Honesty, fairness, kindness to the analysand, to the way called psychoanalysis will not settle for a technique of  "evenly-suspended attention", but would form a therapist who would be unequivocally "evenly-suspended" himself. "Evenly-suspended attention" wouldn’t be a role but his way of being.   

How is an "evenly-suspended" one? One who doesn’t just pretend but indeed "doesn’t direct one’s notice to anything in particular", "doesn’t make choices", "doesn’t follow his expectations and inclinations"? The Ego is characterized precisely by paying attention to one thing and ignoring another, choosing, expecting, leaning towards this and that, i.e. has a character, a personality and thus places itself against a Thou, agrees and disagrees with it. The Ego has a field of gravity. The evenly-suspended one would have no Ego. But the pure form of the human who has stripped off his Εgo is the one of the dead. 

-  Are you not human? 

- No! 

- Are you an alien?

- Yes!

So, how is it possible for the one who has stripped off his Ego, a dead one, and he especially, be in a position to advice, to guide? And what does "dead" even mean here?

In the 10th Rhapsody of Odyssey, Odysseus hears from Circe that he must go to Hades, to meet Teiresias and find out from him the way to return home (V. 488-540). He does so in the so-called "Nekyia" (11th Rhapsody). 

The figure of Nekyia, the descend of a man to Hades to get advice, is found in a folk song:

To Hades I will descend

and to paradise

To meet Charon

to say a few words

Charon, give me

sharp arrows 

to throw them 

to two, three brunettes (...)

George Seferis writes in the poem "Stratis Thalasinos Among the Agapanthi"

But the dead must guide me ...

In another part of the poem he says:

(...) the living are not enough for me

(...) I have to ask the dead 

in order to go on farther.

In the folk song there is a direct relation to the myth - the search for help which, however, here, refers to the mystical relevance of Eros and Thanatos. In Seferis, unlike Homer and the folk songs, Nekyia is meant as a way of being, primarily as a way of being. We will follow the poetry of Seferis around three points:

1. How are the living, and are not "enough"? 

2. How does one ask the dead? 

3. How do the dead guide?

At the same time, I will attempt to describe the phenomenon of psychoanalysis as it appears in the light of the poetry of Nekyia. 

1. How are the living, and are not "enough"?

In A Scenario For Thrush Seferis describes such people:

▶ People like the companions of Odysseus: 

(...)

how stupid of us

to go ashore and eat

the Sun's slow cattle,

(...)

On the earth's back we hungered,

but when we'd eaten well

we fell to these lower regions

mindless and satisfied. (Odyssey)

These are people who blindly follow, like sleepwalkers, the "pleasure principle" (Freud), i.e. they are carried away by the immediate gratification of their desires.

and then would glance impatiently

toward where they were frying fish: like a cat. (Sensual Elpinor)

Here belong, as the other side of the coin, those who are dominated by stagnation and the desert of deprivation: 

The loneliness now a lake

the privation now a lake

untouched and untraceable. (Spring A.D.)

▶ The "patient men":

With what spirit, what heart,

what desire and passion

we lived our life: a mistake!

So we changed our life. (Denial)

People who "live" their life: give in advance spirit and heart, desire and passion.  They go on with an image for themselves, for the partner they want, for their parents and children, for their communication with others. But the way things are, is always ultimately stronger than how they should be, how I desire, I want, I fear them to be. All these are build on the sand: 

(...) but the sea-breeze blew

and the writing vanished. (Refusal)

▶ The "subdued and silent":

The example here is the "Argonauts".

They were good, the companions, 

(...) they didn't complain

about the work or the thirst or the frost,

In a way they are the contrasting figures of those who "live" their life. They now have   

(...) the bearing of trees and waves

that accept the wind and the rain

accept the night and the sun

Their souls become 

(...) one with the oars and the oarlocks

But unlike the bearing of trees and waves, the "good companions" paddle "with lowered eyes" and a "submissive skin". Their receptiveness is one of submission to a power that has silenced them. They go unnoticed: "No one remembers them".

▶ In the poetry of Seferis other people come, "sympathetic, emotional, average, and wasted".

They nestle in a microcosm which, in their myopic gaze, seems like the whole world:

'No, I originate from Syntagma, ' replies the other, pleased; 

'I met Yianni and he treated me to an ice cream.' (In the Manner of G.S.)

...

and the intellectuals clambering up their own heads (Letter of Mathios Paschalis)

...

‘I'm sick of the dusk, let's go home,

let's go home and turn on the light.' (The last day)

▶ They represent "soft things": 

they wander around and-yes-and-no, they bark without biting, they place stability and security above all:

And life's cold as a fish 

— Is that how you live? — Yes, how else? 

So many are the drowned 

down on the sea's bed. 

(...)

Ah, were life but straight

how we'd live it then !

But it's fated otherwise,

you have to turn in a small corner.

...

The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision;

(...) ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,' someone said. (The Last Day)

All these people are called "the living". Their life is restricted to life. Their existence is defined by their desires, by the condition of domination and submission, by the microcosm of the familiar, by the lack of braveness. Sometimes this one-dimensional existence might be experience as "still waters". Then it leads to loneliness, weight, suffocation and deadlock: 

God! what a struggle it is for life to keep going, as though it were a swollen river passing through the eye of a needle.

Heavy heat till nightfall, the stars discharging midges, I myself drinking bitter lemonades and still remaining thirsty; (Letter of Mathios Paschalis)

The easiest solution here is of course escaping forward, that is the even greater and sometimes desperate clinging to things:

‘(...) let's go home,

let's go home and turn on the light.' (The last day)

...

(...) And if we've held on by the loins, clasped

other necks as tightly as we could,

mingled our breath with the breath

of that person

if we closed our eyes, it was not other than this:

simply that deep longing to hang on

in our flight. (Flight)

Other times a question arises:

.... . . In the mirror how our love diminishes

in sleep the dreams, school of oblivion

in the depths of time, how the heart contracts (Erotikos Logos)

...

We find it strange that once we were able to build

our houses, huts and sheepfolds.

And our marriages, the cool coronals and the fingers,

become enigmas inexplicable to our soul.

How were our children born, how did they grow strong?

(...)

bodies that no longer know how to love. (Our country is closed in)

...

She will die, too; how is she going to die? (Young Man)

...

How are we going to die?' (The Last Day)

...

How did we fall, my friend, into the pit of fear? (The Figure of Fate)

...

Have you ever 

noticed how the mirror sometimes 

makes our faces death-like? Or how that

thief the sun 

takes our makeup off each morning? (In the Kyrenia District)

...

The sea; how did the sea get like this? (On Stage)

Those clinging to life will not consult a psychiatrist or psychologist, and certainly not a psychoanalyst. For those which the restriction has become suffocating, will look for a solution within the conditions of a life which is one-dimensionally limited to life: they will try to pass "the swollen river through the eye of a needle". They will resort to medication or to psychotherapeutic techniques which promise to make them as they were, i.e. to eliminate symptoms, or to teach them the know-how of life. This is because they are trapped in the crushing pressure of things in life that seem absolute, more so than death itself, which they survive it.  

Psychoanalysis will be considered by few who will reach a  question. The question may take the form of despair, as in "I don’t know anymore", "it can’t go on", "I can’t take it anymore".

and all went dry at once on the length of the plain, 

in the stone’s despair, in eroded power, 

in that empty place with the thin grass and the thorns 

where a snake slithered heedless (Engomi)

There you find

feet harvested everywhere 

dead hands everywhere 

eyes darkened everywhere (Santorini)

It can happened when you discover that you were fooled, you chased chimeras, you struggled and fought for the wrong things. In Euripides’ tragedy "Helen", it is revealed that she was never in Troy. Her "phantom image" was there.  

At Troy, nothing: just a phantom image.

(...)

And Paris, Paris lay with a shadow as though it were a solid being;

and for ten whole years we slaughtered ourselves for Helen.

(...)

if it's true that it is a fable,

if it's true

that 

(...)

someone unknown and nameless who nevertheless saw

a Scamander overflow with corpses,

isn't fated to hear

messengers coming to tell him

that so much suffering, so much life,

went into the abyss

all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen. (Helen)

Despair is not just tragic and painful. It’s an opening at the same time. Now one is more ready to listen to things which do not belong to his familiar world, which brought him at this point. This can happen at the beginning, or during psychoanalysis.

And to yearn for the other world to inhabit

today's suffocating loneliness

this ravaged present (Summer Solstice)

The "other world" would be like the coming of spring in the depths of winter:

‘This wind reminds me of spring,' said my friend

as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring

that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea.

So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?' (The Last Day)

The question "How are we going to die?" at the same time gives the direction for its answer: when unexpectedly in mid winter, spring comes. This reminds us of a verse of "Winterreise" (Winter Journey) by Wilhelm Müller which became known from the setting to music by Franz Schubert: "You  laugh probably at the dreamer who saw flowers in winter?"

2. How does one ask the dead?

I remind you that here the psychoanalyst is compared to, the still unclear, figure of the dead. Before we come to him, we will look for that way of existence, that availability which enables the communication with the dead, and, with the respective differences taken into consideration, the availability of the analysand for the psychoanalytic conversation. In Homer it’s the journey of Odysseus to the "Horizon" of the Ancients, to the edge of the world, and the descent to Hades. In the light of Nekyia in Seferis’ poetry, a polysemous sinking is mentioned. On the other hand, a key element of psychoanalysis is that the analysand lies down on a bed while the psychoanalyst is behind him. Neither this is just a technique. We could see this transition to the supine position as a sinking. In the poetic experience is expressed as follows:

Bend if you can to the dark sea (...)

Write if you can on your last shell 

the day the place the name 

and fling it into the sea so that it sinks. (...)

Let your hands go traveling if you can 

here on time's curve with the ship 

that touched the horizon. (...)

let your hands go traveling if you can (...) 

and sink- (Santorini)

Sinking is not deepening in the self, depth psychology, and the like. In Seferis, sinking speaks in the echo of Nekyia and is a journey - the journey par excellance: 

The first thing God made is the long journey (Stratis Thalassinos Among the Agapanthi)

In contrast to "the living" who inhabit "still waters": 

Our country is closed in, (...)

When we go down

to the harbours on Sunday to breathe freely

we see, (...)

the broken planks from voyages that never ended,

(...) (Our country is closed in)

...

The ships hoot now that dusk falls on Piraeus, 

hoot and hoot, but no capstan moves, 

no chain gleams wet in the vanishing light, 

the captain stands like a stone in white and gold. (In the Manner of G.S.)

How does the analysand even enter this journey? Thanasis Georgas in a speech cites a passage from Odyssey where Circe announces to Odysseus the journey he has to make:

- O Circe, who will guide us on this journey? To Hades no man ever yet went in a black ship.’

- Son of Laertes, (...) let there be in thy mind no concern for a pilot to guide thy ship,1 but set up thy mast, and spread the white sail, and sit thee down; and the breath of the North Wind will bear her onward. (10, 501-507)

The analogy with the basic rule of psychoanalysis is obvious. The analysand is asked not to resort to some "manual" where e.g. he would make choices, would exclude whatever he finds unpleasant, insignificant, meaningless, would stay with what is familiar to him etc. He is invited to let himself go where the wind blows - to let his hands go traveling. This is in line with a shift of the level of consciousness which, implicitly or explicitly, is often experiencing as sinking. The voices becomes distant, acquire something dreamlike, a rhythm that guides him, a breath that leads him like the breath of the wind, sometimes one wonders about his own words: "What am I saying now?"

And the boys who dived from the bow-sprits

go like spindles twisting still, 

naked bodies plunging into black light

with a coin between the teeth, swimming still, 

while the sun with golden needles sews

sails and wet wood and colors of the sea; 

even now they're going down obliquely, 

the white lekythoi, 

toward the pebbles on the seafloor. (The Light)

...

- Now I have no weight. 

- How is this? 

- It’s as if the mattress took all the weight.

Certainly, in psychoanalysis many lie down, but they speak as if they were sitting or standing. They stay on the surface. They stick to one-dimensional life: 

We found ourselves naked on the pumice stone 

(...)

Here we found ourselves naked, holding 

the scales that tipped toward injustice. (Santorini)

In psychoanalysis, lying down on a bed and the supine position, the sinking and the journey are not self-evident. They are a way of being, to which one sometimes changes into; they are the journey to meet the dead, they are the hand extended by the analysand while he travels to the one who will "guide" him.

let your hands go traveling if you can (Santorini)

...

and fingers caressing the light like an eel (...)

gold piercing the sky's white dome -

And all together sway at the edge of the abyss

without coherence, without ego (...) (Ariadne)

Hades is literally the place where vision and gazes are missing. The participants in the therapeutic conversation are not seen by each other. They reside in dark place. Outside live "the living": 

then fragments of marble and the lights of the city

and people—the way people usually are. (Summer Solstice). 

The place of psychoanalysis is a landscape where fellow travelers wander.

Like the Dead Sea, we are all

many fathoms below the surface of the Aegean.

Come with me and I will show you the setting (Stratis Thalassinos on the Dead Sea)

...

Blind voice, you who grope in the darkness of memory

for footsteps and gestures (Eleni)

3. How do the dead guide?

From a speech of mine:

(...) I no longer get involved in a relationship with my client. It’s just not an issue for me. It doesn’t happen to me neither as oppression nor as resignation. The person who comes to me could easily be a friend or an enemy, father or mother, son or daughter, sister or brother, lover, or simply indifferent, and exactly he/she cannot be so.  (...) In philosophical terms: In psychotherapy Ι am addressed as friend or enemy, father or mother etc, I respond surely, but without orexis (appetitus). / Moral and other judgements are foreign to me. Even the dimension ‘normal-pathological’ or ‘authentic-inauthentic’ is not an issue for me. I am not interested in expressing judgement on what is being said. If ‘thinking’ means perceive and connect, sort, explain etc, then I don’t think. (...) I apply no method and no technique. I don’t act as a ‘therapist’. (...) Perhaps a therapist is a therapist  when he doesn’t ‘cure’.

In a way the therapist is detached, absent like the soul of the mother who Odysseus meets in Hades: 

So she spoke, and I pondered in heart, and was fain [205] to clasp the spirit of my dead mother. Thrice I sprang towards her, and my heart bade me clasp her, and thrice she flitted from my arms like a shadow or a dream (11, 204-207)

In this sense I am not "real".

- You are not real. You are like air: sometimes it offers oxygen, sometimes it pushes forward, sometimes it caresses the face.

To this belongs a peculiar silence. The psychoanalyst is silenced, honestly and wholeheartedly, even when he speaks. This happens when, as I mentioned before, he has nothing of his own, doesn’t introduce anything of his own, when he says things as they are, especially when through his mouth the analysand, his discussant speaks. 

the words that touched and merged with the blood like an embrace (Erotikos Logos)

"But the dead must guide me" Seferis writes. However, how do the dead guide? What gives the therapist the ability to be therapeutic?

In a poem from "Mythistorima" speak the "weak souls among the asphodels", and say about the living:

We who had nothing shall teach them serenity. (Here end…)

The dead have nothing. One could question why "the living", who of course are characterized by the fact that they "have" e.g. an ego, an identity, parents and children and partners and things, are  excluded from this serenity. On the other hand, the dead, in order to teach it they must reside in it. How is the serenity of the dead?

In "In the Manner of G.S." Seferis cites a phrase from "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus:

ορωμεν ανθουν πελαγος Αιγαιον νεκροις

we beheld the Aegean flowering with corpses

It’s the messenger, and he speaks of a night storm which hit the ships of the Achaeans when at sunrise they saw the Aegean "blooming dead". In the poem of Seferis the dead are now

those who tried to catch the big ship by swimming after it

those who got bored waiting for the ships that cannot move (In the Manner of G.S.)

The place of the dead now is not the underworld but the sea with its depths, which is offered for a sinking, for a journey. Seferis repeatedly cites Clytemnestra from "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus: ἔστιν θάλασσα, τίς δέ νιν κατασβέσει; (There is the sea - and what man shall exhaust it?)

The sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry? (Andromeda)

...

Yet the sea is there and who could exhaust it? (Notes for a Week. Monday)

...

- But the sea / I'm not aware of it being exhausted. (Notes for a Week. Wednesday)

...

(...) and the voice asking about the sea, / who could ever exhaust it (The last Dance)

The inexhaustible sea has a place for everything. So there is nothing foreign, no otherness that could threaten it, that could challenge it: 

You stood your ground

while they screeched in your face, (...)

even as the slaves supplied them with knives.

Then glaring up and down at your body, their malice

was fully unsheathed. Only then did you raise your voice:

"If anyone wants to sleep with me, let him

come forward. Don't they say I'm the open sea?" (On Stage)

The serenity taught by the dead is the serenity of the inexhaustible, which as inexhaustible has α place for everything. Their world is the world, without the possessive case which would make it a microcosm of privacy. The therapist is not ambushed, is not surprised by anything because, living in the big world, being the big world, is already there. Such people

(...) smile in a strange silence. (We who set out…)

They speak

humbly and serenely, without effort (Upon a Line of Foreign Verse)

Their voice falls 

quietly into the heart of day, 

as though motionless (The wreck 'Thrush').

They know

the language of flowers only (Stratis Thalassinos among the Agapanthi)

...

Whether it's dusk

or dawn's first light

the jasmin stays

always white. (The Jasmin)

Serenity is not taught as a subject. The dead teach it, they give it away, as paradoxical as it may sound, through their living example:

He speaks...I still see his hands, that knew how to test if the

mermaid on the prow was well carven, without splinter,

giving me the unruffled blue sea in the heart of winter. (Upon a Line of Foreign Verse)

This serenity is what’s curing:

and how strange it is to become a man by speaking with the dead,

when the living who remain

are no longer sufficient unto you - none. (Upon a Line of Foreign Verse)

...

I know of a pine tree that leans near the sea. At noon, it bestows a shade upon a tired body and at night, as the wind passes through its needles it starts a strange song, like souls that have abolished death at the moment when they start becoming lips and skin. Once I spent a night under such a tree. At dawn I was as fresh as they’d just cut me off the quarry. (Mr Stratis Thalassinos Describes a Man)

- A man with exhausting panic attacks. One morning during vacation,at dawn, he wakes up and, like a sleepwalker, gets out of the tent and sits on the chair. Trees in front of him, the leaves moving in the breeze. It was as if they were saying to him, friend, you are like us, someday you will die, and this is neither bad nor good, this is how things are.  He is overcome by serenity, by bliss, he experiences it as cure.

The man experiences a word of Heraclitus, which returns in Seferis:

Hades and Dionysus are the same (Logbook 3, Memory II, Ephesus)

The existence of these dead is related, without being identical, to what in Zen is called the “great death”:

And yet everything was white because the great sleep is white and the great death

calm and serene and isolated in an endless silence.(Les anges sont blancs)

To know it you must, as mentioned, renounce all own, 

(...) to scatter

your blood to the eight points of the wind (Les anges sont blancs)

It happens

When the smile

breathing beside you conquers you, tries to submit and

doesn’t consent

when the dizziness that remains from your wandering

among books moves from your mind to the pepper

trees on either side

when you leave the petrified ship traveling with broken

rigging (...)

when you leave behind you the bodies deliberately carved

for counting and for hoarding riches (...)

when you let your heart and your thought become one

with the blackish river that stretches, stiffens and goes away: (Syngrou Avenue, 1930)

This would be a poetic expression of what we already saw as the “basic rule” which guides the analysand, and as the “evenly suspended attention” which characterizes the therapist.

Psychoanalysis does not stop in the recollection and management of the forgotten, “repressed”  past. At some point the past ceases to be alive, it becomes loosened from the present, in which it doesn’t belong anymore. So one can cut loose from the attachment of the ghosts of childhood which still haunt him - traumatic events, the longing for a hug, for an acknowledgement, the terror of darkness, the suffering of worthlessness, of phobias, of untimely guilt etc.

I imagine that the one who will rediscover his life beyond the piles of papers, the many emotions, the so many debates and so much teaching, he’ll be one like us, only a bit better with memory. (...) What can a flame remember? If it remembers a bit less of what it needs, it goes out. If it remembers a bit more than is necessary, it still goes out. (In the Manner of G.S.)

The journey continues, and it doesn’t stop in the old narrations:

Those who travel watch the sail and the stars

they hear the wind they hear the other sea beyond the wind

near them like a closed shell, they don't hear

anything else, don't look among the cypress shadows

for a lost face, a coin, don't ask

seeing a raven on a dry branch what it remembers. (Raven)

In the poem “The cats of St. Nicholas”, on the deck of the ship which moves forward, there is talk of some cats which saved a place from the snakes. Memories come, and thoughts bring this and that. Things of the past. Among these, rigorously inserted the commands for the course of the boat:

‘(...) Left ten degrees rudder!’ / Don’t stop traveller. / (...) / ‘Left ten degrees rudder’ muttered the helmsman. / (...) / Steady as you go! / (...) ‘Steady as you go!’ indifferently echoed the helmsman.

Translation: Maria Soupou, Psychotherapist

Most poems are cited from: 

Collected Poems, translated  by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard