DESCRIPCIÓN DE LA EXPERIENCIA

Oneness and Separation The fundamental impor­

tance of the distinction between self and not-self-the source of all other distinctions, it has rightly been said­

might suggest that it serves as the first principle of mental life, the axiomatic premise without which mental life cannot even begin. In fact, however, it is a distinction that is ac­

cepted, in the infancy of life, only with the greatest reluc­

tance, after fierce inner struggles to deny it; and it remains the source of our existential uneasiness, as well as the source of our intellectual mastery of the world around us.

Mental life in the broadest sense-as opposed to the life of the mind-begins not with a clear understanding of the boundaries between the self and the surrounding world of objects but, on the contrary, with the blissful feeling of

"oceanic" peace and union, as Freud called it. Selfhood

164 1 T H E M I N I M A L S E L F

presents itself, at first, as a painful separation from the sur­

rounding environment, and this original experience of over­

whelming loss becomes the basis of all subsequent experi­

ences of alienation, of historical myths of a lost golden age, and of the myth of the primary fall from grace, which finds its way into so many religions. Religion, like art at its best, seeks precisely to restore the original sense of union with the world, but only after first acknowledging the fact of aliena­

tion, conceived as original sin, as hubris followed by divine retribution, as existential loneliness and separation, or in the arts (especially in music, which conveys these experiences at their deepest level), as the rhythm of tension and release, conflict followed by inner peace.

What distinguishes contemporary art from the art of the past, at least from the art of the nineteenth and early twen­

tieth centuries, is the attempt to restore the illusion of one­

ness without any acknowledgment of an intervening experi­

ence of separation. Instead of trying to overcome this separation and to win through to a hard-earned respite from spiritual struggle, much of the literature and art of the pres­

ent age, and much of our "advanced" music as well, simply denies the fact of separation. It sees the surrounding world as an extension of the self or the self as something pro­

grammed by outside forces. It imagines a world in which everything is interchangeable, in which musical sounds, for example, are experienced as equivalent to any other kind of sound. It abolishes selfhood in favor of anonymity. As the avant-garde composer Christian W olff put it in 1958, in an article called "New and Electronic Music," this new music embodies a "concern for a kind of objectivity, almost ano­

nymity-sound come into its own. The 'music' is a resultant existing simply in the sounds we hear, given no impulse by expressions of self or personality." Music, like the other arts, thus frees itself from "artistry and taste." It excludes "per­

sonal expression, drama, psychology." In the same vein,

The Inner History of Selfhood I 165 John Cage, acclaiming Edgar Varese as the founder of the new music, notes that Varese "fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music" but deplores his "mannerisms,"

which "stand out as [personal] signatures." Cage exhorts composers to "let sounds be just sounds" and to surrender any attempt to impose order on them, "giving up control so that sounds can be sounds."

The avant-garde artist advocates a suspension or abolition of conscious control, as we have seen, not in order to open himself to the promptings of his unconscious thoughts and desires but in order to extinguish every suggestion of his own personality. This is why Cage goes to such elaborate lengths-tossing coins, consulting the I-Ching, using a stop­

watch to determine the time of performance-in his pursuit of random effects. He does everything he can to remove the possibility of an unconscious determination of his musical ideas. An inner agenda nevertheless underlies much of con­

temporary music, art, and literature, one that seeks to recap­

ture a sense of psychic oneness without taking any account of the obstacles, psychic or material, that lie in the way of that oneness. The same thing can be said of many of the religious cults that flourish today, along with a profusion of therapeutic cults and movements, experiments in psychic healing, and self-proclaimed countercultures. They seek the shortest road to Nirvana. Whereas the. world's great reli­

gions have always emphasized the obstacles to salvation, modern cults borrow selectively from earlier mystical tradi­

tions in the West, from ill-digested Oriental traditions, from mind-cure movements and various expressions of "New Thought," and from an assortment of therapies in order to promise immediate relief from the burden of selfhood. In­

stead of seeking to reconcile the ego and its environment, the new cults deny the very distinction between them.

Though they claim to extend consciousness into areas hith­

erto unexplored, they promote a radical contraction of

con-1 66 I ^{T H E M} I N I M A L S E L ^F

sciousness. They are founded on the need not to know, the psychic sources of which must now be considered in some detail.

Early Fantasies of Reunion The pain of separation originates in the prolonged experience of helplessness in infancy, one of the circumstances that most clearly distin­

guishes human beings from other animals. The human in­

fant is born too soon. He comes into the world utterly unable to provide for his biological needs and therefore completely dependent on those who take care of him, whom he endows in his unconscious imagination with superhuman powers. The experience of helplessness is all the more pain­

ful because it is preceded by the "oceanic" contentment of the womb, which we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture. The trauma of separation begins at birth and recurs every time the child is left alone by its mother or feels the pangs of hunger, terrifying because they are experienced as a threat to its very existence. Because the "young child actually perishes when not adequately protected and taken care of," as Bettelheim observes, "there is no greater threat in life" than the threat of desertion. Much of the uncon­

scious mental life of infants, it appears, and of children and adults, for that matter, consists of defenses against the fear of desertion and its attendant feelings of helplessness and inferiority.

In the womb, we lived in a state of blissful contentment, undisturbed even by desire, which, it could be argued, al­

ready presupposes the experience of frustration. The trans­

position of bodily needs into the register of desire, which seems so characteristic of humans and so foreign to other animals, begins only with birth, when we begin to experi­

ence instinctual demands not as needs inseparable from their fulfillment but as a clamorous assault on the lost equilibrium we seek to restore. The womb gave us an unforgettable

Tbe Inner History of Selfbood I 167 experience of absolute oneness with the world-the basis of all our intimations of immortality and of the infinite, subse­

quently reformulated as religion. At the same time, it gave us a taste of complete self-sufficiency and omnipotence. Our original relation to the universe was both solipsistic and symbiotic. Self-contained and therefore independent of the need for any external source of care and nourishment, we nevertheless flowed indistinguishably into our surround­

mgs.

Birth puts an end to the experience of narcissistic self­

sufficiency and union with the world, even though most parents manage for a time to recreate something of the safety and contentment of the womb and even though the infant himself recreates the atmosphere of the womb, moreover, by going to sleep for long stretches at a time. The newborn experiences hunger and separation for the first time and senses its helpless, inferior, and dependent position in the world, so different from its former omnipotence. Repeated experiences of gratification and the expectation of their re­

turn gradually give the infant the inner confidence to toler­

ate hunger, discomfort, and emotional pain. But these same experiences also reinforce its awareness of separation and helplessness. They make it clear that the source of nourish­

ment and gratification lies outside itself, the need or desire within. As the infant learns to distinguish itself from its surroundings, it understands the extent of its dependence on those who take care of it. It begins to understand that its own wishes do not control the world. The illusion of om­

nipotence, tenable as long as need and gratification were perceived as emanating from the same source, gives way to a painful sense of dependence on external sources of gratifi­

cation. The separation of birth, in short, is followed by further experiences of separation, which underlie both the discontents to which humans are uniquely susceptible and the creativity to which they alone are able to rise. Premature

168 I T H E M I N I M A L S E L F

birth and prolonged dependence are the dominant facts of human psychology.

"Before birth," writes Bela Grunberger in his study of narcissism, the infant "lived in a steady stable state of bliss,"

but his expulsion from the womb confronts him with "over­

whelming changes that are continually deluging him and destroying his equilibrium." "Assailed by excitation," he seeks to restore the lost illusion of self-sufficiency, for exam­

ple, by refusing to acknowledge in his unconscious fantasies what experience forces him to acknowledge in his conscious thoughts. Grandiose fantasies of omnipotence, as Geza R6-heim once wrote, represent an "attempt to find the way back" to a primal sense of union with the outer world. Only a complete disavowal of experience, however, can protect such fantasies against the reality of helplessness and depen­

dence; and a schizophrenic withdrawal from reality not only incapacitates a person for ordinary life but brings a new set of terrors all its own.

Another kind of unconscious fantasy seeks to allay frus­

tration and the fear of separation not by denying the fact of dependence but by refusing to recognize that the adults on whom the child depends can frustrate as well as gratify his desires. The child idealizes his mother (and later his father as well) as a source of unending, unambiguous gratification.

In doing so, he also disavows his own desire to injure those who frustrate or disappoint him. Unfortunately, overideali­

zation of objects often gives way, when the idealized parents continue to interfere with the child's pleasure, to a "catas­

trophic devaluation of the object," as Otto Kernberg puts it.

In the same way, grandiose fantasies of omnipotence, hard to sustain in the face of frustration and dependence, can alternate with feelings of complete insignificance and abject inferiority.

In another kind of defense, the child's fantasies dissociate the frustrating from the pleasure-giving aspects of the adults

The Inner History of Selfhood I 169 who take care of him. In his fantasies, the child refuses to admit that pleasure and frustration come from the same source. Thus he invents idealized images of the breast, side by side with images of omnipotent, threatening, and de­

structive maternal or paternal authority: a devouring vagina, a castrating penis or breast. The child needs not only the mother's nourishment but the unconditional, enveloping security with which it is associated. It is because the biologi­

cal need for nourishment is suffused with desire that the infant's greed is insatiable; even the temporary absence of the mother gives rise to frustration and to feelings of rage.

According to Melanie Klein and her followers, the young child envies the mother's power to give and withhold life and projects this resentment in the form of threatening figures, images of the "child's own hate, increased by being in the parents' power." But the attempt to restore a euphoric sense of well-being by splitting images associated with frus­

tration from gratifying images arouses painful fears of perse­

cution and, indeed, even spoils the capacity for pleasure and enjoyment. "Greed, envy, and persecutory anxiety, which are bound up with each other, inevitably increase each other." It is not for nothing that envy ranks among the seven deadly sins. Klein went so far as to suggest that "it is uncon­

sciously felt to be the greatest sin of all, because it spoils and harms the good object which is the source of life." The associations between envy and the fear of retaliation are expressed, in another religious tradition, in the Greek con­

cept of hubris, usually translated as pride but better under­

stood as a form of envy and greed, rooted in the infant's total dependence on its caretakers and its overwhelming need for the warmth and nourishment they provide. "Hubris grasps at more," according to Gilbert Murray, "bursts bounds and breaks the order: it is followed by Dike, Justice, which re­

establishes them." The Greek idea of justice, which punishes hubris, expresses more or less what is expressed by the

psy-1 70 I ^{T H E M} I N I M A L S E L ^F

choanalytic concept of the superego. The superego repre­

sents internalized fear of punishment, in which aggressive impulses are redirected against the ego. The superego-the primitive, punitive part of the superego, anyway-repre­

sents not so much internalized social constraints as the fear of retaliation, called up by powerful impulses to destroy the very source of life.

Gender Differences and the "Tragedy of Lost Illusions"

Early fantasies of reunion center on the incorporation of external goods on which the infant depends, in other words on oral desires associated with experiences of sucking, bit­

ing, and swallowing. As the child begins to discover other parts of his body, oral fantasies come to be overlaid with anal and genital fantasies, in which, for example, the child repos­

sesses the mother and thus restores the sense of primal one­

ness through the agency of his phallus.· When oral fantasies

·1 use the masculine pronoun, here and throughout this essay, trusting to the context to indicate when it is used as a generic pronoun and when it refers to males alone. This long-established usage seems preferable to the clumsy "he or she," to such recent coinages as "he/she" and "s/he," or to the use of the feminine pronoun as a generic-ideologically correct but intellectually useless expressions that serve only to announce a commitment, often a token commitment, to sexual equality.

It goes without saying that sexual equality in itself remains an eminently desirable objective: one that is not likely to be achieved, however, by a freer use of feminine pronouns.

In the present context, where the masculine pronoun is used once again in its generic sense, I admit that it may give rise to genuine confusion. The assertion that little girls dream, like little boys, of becoming a husband to their mothers seems to contradict common sense. But this state of affairs no longer seems so farfetched when we remind ourselves that the phallus, as Juliet Mitchell explains in Psycho­

analysis and Feminism, "is not identical with the actual penis, for it is what it signifies that is important." What it signifies, of course, is potency. In the child's unconscious fantasy-life, it appears to confer on its possessor undivided ownership of the mother and at the same time a certain independence from her. For girls as well as boys, it assures possession of the mother without the helpless dependence of infancy.

Annie Reich describes a number of women, whose mothers had treated them as substitutes for an absent or unsatisfactory husband, who reported fantasies traceable to the childhood wish to serve as the mother's missing phallus. One woman, having enjoyed some success as an actress, spoke of the euphoria of being

Tbe Inner History of Selfbood I 1 7 1 break down in the face of experience (though of course they never fully die, living on in the subterranean reaches of the mind), the child has to find new forms of wish-fulfillment, only to discover, in the course of time, that his genital equip­

ment is unequal to the task assigned to it by his unconscious desires. At every point in his development, disappointment and frustration impel the child into a new stage of self­

awareness. The failure of oral fantasies to sustain the illusion of self-sufficiency causes the child to take a livelier interest in the rest of his body, while the conflicts that grow out of the fantasy of sexual intercourse with the mother precipitate the Oedipus complex-an event that has to be understood, accordingly, as another variation on the underlying themes of separation, dependence, inferiority, and reunion.

Psychoanalytic theory since Freud has based its greatest advances on Freud's discovery of a more deeply buried,

"Minoan-Mycenean" layer of psychic conflict underlying the Oedipal conflicts that had dominated earlier psy­

choanalytic speculation and on the suggestion-thrown out at the end of The Ego and the Id and developed at greater length in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety-that "anxiety due to separation from the protecting mother" is the original source of mental conflict. It now appears that it is the child's growing awareness of the disparity between his wish for sexual reunion with the mother and the impossibility of

admired by an audience as an "intense excitement experienced over the entire body surface and a sensation of standing out, erect, with her whole body. Obviously,"

Reich adds, "she felt like a phallus with her whole body." Another said that

"during intercourse she felt as though she were the man with the phallus-like body making love to her self, the girl." Joyce McDougall calls attention to the following passage in Violette Leduc's novel, Tberese et Isabelle, which expresses very clearly the little girl's fantasy of serving as her mother's sexual partner. "So mother is getting married' . . . I used to say I was her little fiance and she would smile . . . Now I shall never be her man . . . . She has smashed everything; she has all she needs-a married women. She has put a man between us. Yet we were suffi­

cient to each other; I was always warm in her bed . . . . She wants a daughter and a husband. My mother is a greedy woman."

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carrying it out that precipitates the Oedipus complex. As poets, philosophers, and theologians have often pointed out, human beings are cursed with imaginative powers that out­

run their bodily capacities. Psychoanalytic theory restates this insight when it insists that the precocity of the child's mental and emotional development, the precocity of his sexual fantasies in comparison to his physical capacities,

run their bodily capacities. Psychoanalytic theory restates this insight when it insists that the precocity of the child's mental and emotional development, the precocity of his sexual fantasies in comparison to his physical capacities,