Undead and Mortals

Abstract

I will attempt to approach the subject of "Art and Madness" in the light of a phenomenon known in psychopathology as Dissociation, which includes "depersonalization" and "derealization": The self or/and the things become alien, uncanny: their identity collapses like a building during an earthquake. 

Sometimes the self-enclosing and the defense against "dissociation" appear in the form of "madness" - in a mute, unspoken burden, but also in depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive ideas and actions. 

More rarely "dissociation", the opening of its chasm, becomes a hosting place. The self then or/and the things disappear in their alienation, to re-emerge in blessful times, purified, enriched through the negation that penetrated them. Among other things they also appear as a work of art; also as an "interpretation" in a therapeutic meeting. In this light psychoanalysis could be rather relative to art than to its scientific representation. 

Lecture

Martin Heidegger writes somewhere that human beings are the mortal ones. And he clarifies: They are called mortals because they can die. The sense of this "can" is puzzling. I can, for example, fix a socket. I have this potential. But I can also ask for an electrician. The fact that I can fix the socket doesn’t imply that it is necessary for me to fix it anyhow. But what does "I can die" mean? Is that within my capacity? Can I also not die? 

I read the last paragraph from the "Trial" by Franz Kafka. K is the key person and there are two other men who follow him throughout the whole story: 

But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.’s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. “Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

And another story we heard from our mothers: 

A young man falls desperately in love. The girl accepts to be with him under one condition: to kill his mother and bring to her the mother’s heart. The young man, not thinking twice about it, kills the mother, plucks out the heart and runs crazy and all to hand it to his girlfriend. Rushing to go to her he stumbles and falls. And the heart says: "did you hurt my son?"

The shame outlives K, mother’s love outlives the mother. Shame and maternal love don’t die along with them. They outlive them because, as Freud says, unconscious things bear no relation to time. Shame and maternal love are timeless (zeitlos). They seem like fossils that were once a pulsing life, organically hinged in a story with a starting and finishing point. And sometime they escaped time, became a stone, falling into a completely different dimension, outside of this world, without communicating anymore, and now go on indifferently for the years to come. 

We bring such fossils with us. When, for example, one meets with any situation more or less in the realm of "it’s my fault"/"it’s on you", even with variations, then this position has very little to do with the peculiarity, with the singularity of any given situation. Quite to the contrary, this "it’s my fault"/"it’s on you" occurs almost mechanically, as if it follows its very own depersonalized causality. And this "it’s my fault"/"it’s on you" will outlive him, for example by regarding his death as punishment against him or the others.

As I said already we carry such rough edges with us. Let me remind you what we speak of here: we speak of rigid repetitions of a behavior that is more or less cut off from real and immediate communication. Just like those pieces of boiled potatoes that are found within the mash. Those rough edges could refer to anxieties, depression, phobias, security and insecurity, but also to frugality and greediness, benevolence and suspiciousness, taken advantage of and being a servant etc. 

Any of those rough edges has developed a gravitation field which holds its carrier confined to its orbit. From all things, this one behavior has become the master that pushes any other behavioral aspect to its corner. Like the river bed, where all water from the rain and the melting snow will end up in. 

Those human beings, and we all are such beings, die without being capable of dying. Their death comes always untimely. K and the mother and all others are not mortals. Something survives them. This something, like a fossil, is not something alive, so it cannot die either. It is undead. We talk here of a pathology that lies beyond the field of psychiatry and psychology. Perhaps we could speak of a variation of that which Martin Heidegger called "fallenness (Verfallenheit)". 

The more "character" one has, the deeper his ways of thinking, sensing, behaving and communicating are engraved (greek "charazo"), the less alive he is - and so the less he can die. Sometimes, this undead we are talking about refers not to something but to the person himself; one’s mere existence. One then becomes himself a fossil. Undead

Erwin Hügin was a chronic schizophrenic whom I met in a clinic in Zurich around the 70’s. His file consisted of numerous poems. In one of them, titles "Lost in the streets" he writes:

Completely cut off from people, 

I pass through streets

flooded with people

I see through their faces

I look at their bodies

I look at their hands

no sparkle jumps out-

so, people are lifeless

or perhaps they are not people at all?

They are assembled mechanical 

dolls, yes, 

I see now that is what they must be -

and in those two seconds that I realize this

I don’t move on, I am moved on, a pair of glass eyes

are watching through me, with no life left behind them,

life has left the whole body - but for where?

And now the machinery -

they march one-two.

Where, where, where is life?

Where is life? Another poem by Hügin refers to his attendant doctor Schöl:

I see an image: I approach Mr. Schöl with words,

I say: I would like to be close to you, yes 

I yearn to find myself under your warmth, near you

I go to meet him, he spreads his hand,

this is becoming excessively big and strong

Hand Lead Schöl

it throws me down

down into darkness

in a mine of rocks

death

Just before death: court

judge:

You weren’t allowed to feel

to come close to a human

it was forbidden for you!

Me:

I still feel them inside me 

life sensation sounds passion

Judge:

You were born not to feel

you will live only on appearance and even,

without it being obvious by anyone, the death inside you

you will carry death, you hear, death

Life by appearance and death by appearance. That is what it means to be undead. The undead is too dead to be alive and too alive to die. A psychopathological instance of such predicament is the one known to us as "Dissociation" and includes "depersonalization" and "derialization". We saw them in the previous examples. Dissociation is encountered as a standalone phenomenon accompanied by silent, unspeakable anguish, but also during depression, in schizophrenia, in obsessive-compulsive ideas and actions. 

I met Dissociation. As a medical student, I learned at some point the scientific version of seeing: An object X transmits a light radiation, the retina perceives that as an image and through the optic nerve it sends the relative electric stimuli in the visual cortex where the image is restored, and in collaboration with the rest of the brain parts is identified and located in the room, etc. At some point I experienced this scientific version: my eyes had become something like windows, the things around the room were entering through them and appearing behind the eyes and inside my head, they were there just like little houses and people are found inside a crystal ball, which once shaked it is filled with falling snow - but now I was experiencing all this like a nightmare. All that remained out there was the X objects, like a moonscape, which are signaled and given meaning first in consciousness and in the brain. No experience has ever affected me so deeply and made me feel so intensely sick, no matter how brief it was, as this one. 

I met Dissociation in a different way as well. Once, when I had to draft a biographical note, I started with the phrase: "Kostas Gemenetzis was born in 1944…" and right after I felt like writing: "…and died…". Already, as a child I queried about my name. The world applied to me and addressed me by the names "Kostas…", "little Kostas…", "Gemenetzi…". And so at some point I wondered: do I find myself completely in my name? My answer was clear: No! Those who speak to me, apply to me. And if "Kostas" doesn’t fully cover "me", does the pro-noun "me" have a noun, a name which fully covers "me"? The answer was once again clear: No! Many years later I felt relief in realizing that I was not alone with such query. Somewhere in Kierkegaard I read: "I look into existence - and I see nothing." The query had now started to subside, giving its place to a light "nothing", which contains me much more than any name. Acceptance of a light "nothing" that follows my name, doesn’t allow for any absoluteness, it allows my name to rest in the cradle of its transcience, and in each "I was born" it prescribes "I died". 

My name wasn’t the only thing that emptied me out. Sometimes it was also a sense of despair with life, where the only way out was to flight towards the front, the extremes, without resting on half words and superficial knowledge. It’s exactly like that which happens to Aretousa in Vincencos Kornaro’s "Erotokritos". When the king of Athens Hercules learns about his daughter’s Aretousa’s love with Erotokritos, he throws her in jail. There, the poet writes:

In seeing all those torments, Aretousa loses her 

Class and humbleness to foolhardiness.

What stopped her from talking and all that shyness lost, 

And with boldness spoke to her father.

Erotokritos is sent to exile, lot of things happen, and sometime he comes back and wants to test Aretousa. He pretends to be a friend of Erotokritos who is going to tell her news about his luck and they set a meeting. 

He finds her…unrestrained.

He comes close to the window, and Aretousa starts

Talking with boldness and looking straight at him.

She is not shy anymore, she is not ashamed, all that suffering 

Has banished her shame away.

And languorous she wanted to know right away, 

Whether Erotokritos is alive or he is dead and lost.

The torments and passions and the pain "un-restrain" Aretousa. Class and humbleness, putting obstacles in her tongue and fear in her soul, are now lost. Suffering banishes shame. Aretousa, the princess with the once suitable manors, class and shyness and shame, loses her character: loses her virtue. Loses her name (Arete in greek: virtue). Becomes nameless and faceless. Becomes depersonalized. Torments, passions and suffering "un-restrain" her - empty her.

a void under the mask

And also: 

Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls

carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence

a dark spot that you see travelling like a fish

in the dawn calm of the sea:

a void everywhere with us.

What is going on with this void? Leonard Cohen, Anthem:

There is a crack in everything

that’s how the light gets in.

Those kinds of things were meant to mark my course as a therapist, amongst others. 

And as such I experienced one of Elias Canetti figures of speech that I came across much later: 

…a wound that becomes a lung and through which you breathe.

Perhaps it has also to do with my advanced age, which the elders, who lived and died in synchrony with time, called "old age". A characteristic of old age is that one, after many "turnings of the wheel" (Erotokritos), in vicinity with death, loses his shame: to someone unknown to me, for example, in the metro, when I ask to pass through in order to get out in the next stop, I will address him with a familiarity as if I knew him since forever. And that is a phenomenon of depersonalization: Our faces, us as humans, him and me, with completely different stories, references, personalities, all these are completely irrelevant. The familiarity, with which I refer to him or her, is something completely different that is not based in anything that could connect us or separate us. It is the familiarity of "un-restraint". 

Depersonalization could very well then constitute the return to a prime phenomenon instead of referring necessarily to a privative one. Psychopathology doesn’t know that. Both depersonalization and derealization are classified under the term "Dissociation". It carries the conviction that "association" is the normal, a connection and continuance that is now interrupted, something like an intellectual fracture. But Dissociation could be a structural quality of existence instead of an incident. The undead could be the womb hatching the mortal. The latter is in time and when he says "I was born" he also says "I died". 

This, beneficial now, dissociation split, becomes at one point the place where art resides. This piece of art could be conceived also as a fossil, as if art had looked in Medusa’s face. During the award of the Büchner prize, Paul Celan the poet says in his speech:

Lenz, that is Büchner, has […] very contemptuous things to say about "idealism" […] And this conviction about art he describes vividly through a personal experience: "Yesterday while I was walking up next to the valet, I saw two girls sitting in a rock: the one was tying up her hair, the other was helping her· and the golden hair were falling down, and a serious pale face, but still so young looking, and the black uniform, and the other girl looking after her with so much care. The most beautiful, the deepest images of the old German school do not convey any of this. Sometimes one would wish to be with a Medusa head to be able to transform such a complex into a stone and call people." 

And Celan goes on:

Ladies and Gentlemen, your attention please: "One would wish to be with a Medusa head in order to…capture the natural as the natural through art!

He who has art in front of his eyes and his mind, he is - that’s where I am in my account about Lenz -, he is gone. Art creates distance from the Ego. Art demands here in a certain direction a certain distance, a certain path.

And poetry? Poetry, that definitely has to take the path of art? Then it would have been given for sure the path towards the Medusa head and automates!

The poet T.S. Eliot talks with regard to the artist’s divergence from the ego, his relation to the Medusa head and the automate in a treatise of his titled: "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot uses the word "depersonalization" to refer to the analogy between the artistic creation and science. He clarifies with an example from chemistry: 

When the two gasses referred to earlier [oxygen and sulphur dioxide] are mixed in the presence of platinum fibers, they form sulphuric acid. This combination is possible only under the presence of platinum· however the new acid that was formed doesn’t contain any trace of platinum, and the platinum itself remains untouched· has stayed inactive, neutral and unchangeable. The poet's mind is the piece of platinum. It can, either in part or in full, function upon the person’s experience· however the more perfect the artist is, the more separate inside him will be the person that suffers from the mind that creates· the more perfect will be the way in which his mind absorbs and converts his passions that are his material. 

[…] The poet’s mind is indeed a vessel for the storing of numerous emotions, phrases, images, that remain there until all the parts that can be combined and create a new mixture, are present together. 

The artist goes through the "self-sacrifice", as Eliot says, of depersonalization, and then the derealized parts could perhaps at some point, "combine and form a new mixture" - like the naked presence of platinum makes the mix of sulphuric acid happen. Dissociation doesn’t exile from time, doesn’t create the undead, but fits time, tradition’s past and the present of today’s piece of art, endows mortality.

"What kind of artist are you?" asks the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion the new therapists in one of his seminars. "And what if we are not artists?" someone asks back. Bion’s answer: "Then you find yourself in the wrong profession". 

And so, psychoanalysis could constitute a peculiar case of the subject of our congress, an "and", that is a place where "Art and Madness" meet each other. In those happy instances of such an "and", a mutual exchange happens: "Art" consists in the fact that the therapist becomes crazier than his client. And the latter, "the crazy", through the "piece of art" created during their meeting, finds his salvation. 

What does it mean then that I as a therapist become crazier than my client? Let’s remind ourselves of Celan’s "gone" and Eliot’s "depersonalization". In my client’s undead stuff, that cannot die, I oppose my own depersonalization, a death of my own. This would mean: I accept everything; I even accept them to a depth and breadth that my client could not even conceive. It is a acceptability of the dead: without anticipation, without agreement and disagreement, without resistance and objection. Sometimes even with a laugh, that we share, and which, without ridicule, it takes away from things the seriousness and the heaviness that they seemed to have. 

Under this depersonalized eye, interpretation, if we can still hold on to this encumbered word, has something from the artistic creation that we heard of by Eliot: Interpretation conceives past things and gathers them in a completely new form. And all this in an atmosphere that George Seferi’s verse conveys beautifully:

But the dead must guide me

And why is it that the dead especially must guide you? In another poem the same speak, "the weak souls among the daffodils": 

We who had nothing will school them in serenity.