The Navel of Reality: Trauma Makes Psychoanalysis Possible
Idan Oren
* This work was presented on the 29th of February, 2016, at a French-Israeli conference on “Psychic Trauma” organized by Comité Freud and Association Lacanienne Internationale (ALI) in Tel Aviv
A young patient with anxiety constantly thinks of potential disasters. He had a dream in which he is about to go on a trip and afraid of what may happen there. He then returns from the trip, safe and sound. When he woke up he thought – you are wasting time worrying so much, you see, nothing bad really happens, and he was relieved. I told him, what happened in the dream happens to you almost daily and yet it is the dream that gives you assurance that things are ok. He responded that he trusts his dreams and made a striking affirmation: there is no safety in reality, in reality anything could happen. It is striking because commonsense suggests that it is in the dream that anything could happen – we fly, become someone else or even an object – we are free from time and space. And yet the patient is more right. In the dream there is pure consciousness, freedom from the body. It is this freedom from the body that allows safety. Because no one with a body is really very safe. I adopt here Newton’s First Law of Motion: a psyche in motion will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by a body. The body interrupts thinking, imagining, it makes a shortcut in the thought machine. What do all drugs do if not offer an exemption from our body? Every drug is a narcotic drug. This is true for any addiction. It puts the body to sleep so that we can go on mentalizing uninterruptedly. This mentalization may very well consist of a frozen image. And indeed, when is a dream interrupted? We wake up from a dream when we encounter something that produces strong anxiety. Anxiety is quite physical. So we can say that another safety mechanism in the dream is that we are able to wake up and say, thank god, it was only a dream. And yet this relief – it is only a dream – is never full, because the dream gives rise to unrelenting questions. Why did I dream this crazy dream? This is why this anxious patient, not only does he not feel relieved that something is only a dream, but rather this is exactly where his anxiety appears, when he encounters something, which is not a dream, outside the order of the dream, in what he calls “reality”- there he is anxious, unsafe.
Freud, in the beginning, was apparently also taken by this commonsense idea that anything can happen in a dream, when he stated – we all know this formula – that a dream is a fulfillment of a wish. But, being phenomenally responsible as Freud was, he made two remarks, as early as “the Interpretation of Dreams”, concerning the “navel of the dream”, a part of the dream impossible to be interpreted, obscure, a point when the dream “reaches the unknown”. So there is a part of the dream that is not determined by one’s unconscious wish. Twenty years later Freud introduced the Death Drive, making perhaps the biggest change he introduced into psychoanalysis. This navel of the dream is at the core of the Death Drive. It’s worth mentioning that some schools of psychoanalysis totally ignored this revision. This is how I consider the awkward child of “psychotherapy” was born, conceived – with this denial.
The dream, then, is governed by two forces- an unconscious desire- Lacan translated Freud’s Wunsch as desire – and this desire may be interpreted; and a force pushing to the limit of knowledge, to a mystery that cannot be reduced to knowledge, at least not knowledge that may be articulated. This is where the dream touches upon the body, and it is there that anxiety may appear. So the dream is actually not that safe either.
A different patient suffers too from anxiety, which appears in many circumstances. One of which is airplanes. She also dreams of airplanes too heavy to lift themselves, they begin to take off and the weight pulls them to the ground, over and again. She said something beautiful – while she knows the mechanics of airplanes and the physics of aviation, something in her can’t believe, can’t grasp the idea that something so big and heavy can remain in the air. No knowledge can pacify her perplexedness, and at that point she cannot assume a position of belief, and so she is anxious.
It is useful to phrase it like this: there is mystery in the force that keeps something up in the air, an enigma in flying, which may not be unraveled. Faced with this mystery – she is anguished. This mystery is encountered in what I suggest calling the navel of reality. This patient hates being examined, and she often feels examined. The idea that someone can see or know something she doesn’t see or know is hard for her to bear. This marks her position in respect to the unknown – something very far from curiosity. Any sense of the navel brings anguish for her. She can’t enjoy the wonder of flight exactly because of this position. At the end of this session, I told her – say something last. She said, I want that in my dreams the airplane will be able to fly. I was moved by this statement. She didn’t say “I don’t want to be anxious when I am on an airplane”, because she knows that in order for her to stop being anxious in what the first patient called “reality”, something in her position in dreams must change. To put it simply, she knows that until she is able to dream the airplane in the air she won’t be able to get rid of her anxiety in “reality”.
The anxiety of this patient became worse after a person very close to her, and very young, died unexpectedly. Literally fell of his feet and died. And while she was explained by doctors the medical phenomenon that caused this abrupt death – the mechanics of flying – there is a question that remains impossible to be convincingly answered: why him and not herself. Indeed, it may very well have been herself. So upon this death she was faced with the question that some of us go throughout life without facing– what is this force that keeps the airplane up in the air, humans up on their feet? We must distinguish this question from the essential questions of each subject– what does the other want from me, what do I need to be in order to be loved, what do I desire. With these questions the young subject looks for clues, all the time looks for clues, and builds an unconscious phantasy, and this phantasy keeps him dreaming, and in this dreaming he is kept flying, up in the air. This patient’s encounter with the enigma of flying pierces through these questions into the navel – into the question not of love, but of existence, of being. This is what I can grasp of her anxiety in face of the mysterious force that sustains the airplane, that sustains life, that sustains the body. So the first question, about love, supports the wish, desire, identity – what do I want, who am I, and the second question concerns the support of life—what is the cause of life?
We keep stressing that death is unperceivable, that the encounter with it is potentially traumatic, beyond thought, outside of life. But life is no more perceivable, no less mysterious than death. Each patient is necessarily struck by how little she knows about life – eventually, this is why she comes to us. This is a crucial point, because we are used to saying that patients come because they suffer. And yet you cannot do analysis with wanting to suffer less. Because there are many ways to reduce suffering. One can only enter analysis with a disturbing question, which is urgent for the subject to find an answer to. Our first task when a patient complains about things that cause suffering is to encourage him to exhaust a question from his suffering, even to construct the suffering as a suffering from a question. This is very different than suffering because things don’t go as I like, and this is different than suffering because I am not loved enough. In this elaboration of the question the subject goes through the clues he caught from things he heard and saw and deduced from his experience. And much indeed may be covered by desire, by knowledge, by love. But there is a remainder impossible to eradicate. While there can be satisfactory answers to the question of desire and identity –what’s good for me about flying, where do I want to fly to – even if not ultimate answers, this is why I say satisfactory answers –there cannot be a satisfactory answer to the question what is life. Thought, consciousness, reaches its limit there, at this navel, in this encounter with an enigma impossible to reduce. Let’s consider the Primal Scene. There is the question of desire there – of course. What does father want from mother, what does mother want from father, what binds them together. And there are answers to be found –psychological, prosaic and literary stories, condensed in the form of the unconscious phantasy. But the primal scene is also a mythological image of the moment of conception of each subject, it is the moment in which he became a living creature. No story may cover this giant leap of creation of a new life. There is a structural discontinuity there. This image of the copulation of the parents is also a paradigmatic navel of the life of the subject, an attempt at a representation of that which may not be represented. It may only be marked by a scar. This is the scar that the borderline, for example, keeps scratching until it bleeds, thinking that there is an ultimate answer beyond the scar, but this, of course, only leaves her in a constant state of trauma.
I must conclude. When we wake up anxious from a dream and say “thank god it is only a dream” – negation is operating here, for what we in fact do is make sure that we go on dreaming while we are awake. The appearance of god here is nothing but accidental– we agree to put our faith in something Other than us so that we can live more joyfully. Both the dream and the unconscious phantasy sustain the subject’s sleep in reality; they are a compass in the jungle of bodies. The holes in this support of the dream, these limits, offer the greatest challenge to the subject as such, to the subjective structure. When Lacan speaks, for example, of crossing the plane of identification as the aim of analysis – and the word “plane” is wonderful here, because of my patient’s airplane—this is because when we cross this plane we encounter the question of what supports this plane, and this is what I call here “life”, the question of life, and it is there that I posit the core of the encounter which is traumatic. When this enigma hits the unsuspecting subject on his head.
The enigma of life may produce two contrary effects: it may be terrifying, mortifying, hence “trauma”, but it may also produce enthusiasm. So those moments of anxiety may be transformed in psychoanalysis from anxiety, or at times even horror, into an enthusiasm with life. Psychoanalysis then, is an operation that transforms anxiety into desire, into something that makes life enjoyable. Anxiety and desire revolve around the exact same hinge. What pushes the weight in the direction of desire is the extent to which one is able to delegate his being to the unconscious. This is perhaps Freud’s greatest discovery concerning what mental health is. This is how I understand his famous imperative of psychoanalysis, Wo es war, soll ich werden. This is why an analysis may not be concluded without a good trauma, because essentially, it is there that one may know of his unconscious as real. When it becomes clear what is impossible, something also becomes possible. What becomes possible is to bear life with more dignity. Desire is to be interpreted, desire has to do with speaking, and life –what is left for one is to bear it. This is where the body enters – it is the body that bears life.
One of the most beautiful things for me that Lacan had said is that most anyone who would have dreamt Freud’s famous Irma’s Injection dream, the pivotal dream in “The Interpretation of Dreams”, would have woken up much earlier in the dream than Freud did, and that it is Freud’s strong desire for psychoanalysis that supported him in going on with the dream, bearing serious anxiety. He did not take Clonex nor any other pacifying object. He took great risks as a subject in order to produce beauty, knowledge, joy. I heard many patients who were in treatment in the past, reciting psychological insights about themselves. These insights may be very good ideas, smart ideas, serious ideas, but if they do not bear on the body of the subject, on his being, they are not worth much. I am reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s saying that arguments are always vulgar and often convincing. Being convinced in psychoanalytic terms is not an epistemological or rhetoric operation per se, because the only authority that convinces the subject of something, in the last resort, is the unconscious. The unconscious is the final recourse for the subject. Only the confirmation of the unconscious offers the subject sustainable satisfaction.
What is at stake in analysis, then, is to find ways for the unconscious to support the subject in these holes, theses navels, which may be encountered anywhere in life, so that instead of falling into anxiety, anguish, depression, despair or even just fatigue, boredom or cynicism – which seem to me prevalent nowadays – instead of this, the subject may produce from his being beauty, joy, delight. Perhaps this is the most robust knowledge a subject has at the end of an analysis.
I finish with a few lines from a poem by Jack Gilbert: “If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine.”
The poem:
