part0007

The chaos of beginnings. Atoms and the void. Expanding out from the BIG BANG – planets, stars, and chemical processes. The tumult at the back of things. Lava flows. The gloom of Tartarus. Dionysus born of his own dismemberment. The risen Christ, “slain from the foundations of the world” (Revelation 13: 8). The whole of creation progressing deathward to no death. The eerie tones of oboes, kettle drums, and strings. Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps already performing itself tens of millennia before any men, let alone Stravinsky, had yet appeared. Origins building upon themselves; a glacial ballet. Tensions arising and then falling back again, but not as far back as the time before. Boulder giants and frost demons. Negentropy and the crash of thunder. Shafts of lightning. The illumined redness of tooth and claw. And also nature’s light. The associative thinking that is already there in things, in their likeness to one another, in the found alphabet of the letters that they are. Distinctions, comparisons, nuances; qualities, differences, reflexivities. A tree branch sounding in the forest as it falls. But not without the mediating layer, more dead than living – the bark of the tree, the exoskeleton of the insect, the character of the ego – that protects and provides for the sentience of the more delicate layers tucked away behind them …

Redolent of the buffeting forces from which it has dialectically emerged, life, in Freud’s view, has as its most basic tropism or instinct a compulsive urge to restore the preceding state of things. Now, since the earliest of all states was that of lifeless, inorganic matter, Freud regarded the repetition compulsion (present clinically in such phenomena as a patient’s mimicking of events that have traumatized him) to be an expression of a death instinct. In his discussion of this radical notion, the great analyst-mythmaker posed the question, “But how is the predicate of being ‘instinctual’ related to the compulsion to repeat?” His answer, so important for our reflections on trauma, immediately follows:

At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general … It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things, which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it in another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life. [1]

Originally, primordially, what later came to be known as instinct was very close to the inorganic matter from which life emerged, so close, in fact, that Freud defined the instincts as a conservative tendency to restore earlier situations, the lifeless state of inorganic matter being the earliest of all. Freud attributes the fact that complex life forms have developed despite this tendency to “the pressure of external disturbing forces,” which have made the path to death and the inorganic state of things more and more circuitous:

The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make even more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us today with the picture of the phenomena of life. If we firmly maintain the exclusively conservative nature of instincts, we cannot arrive at any other notions as to the origins and aim of life. [2]

After pursuing this line of thought to its extreme, Freud then relativizes it by introducing the idea of another set of instincts to which can be attributed “an internal impulse towards ‘progress’ and towards higher development!” [3] These are the sexual or life instincts. While the death instinct seeks to return to the state of inanimate matter, the sexual instincts “repeat the performance to which [organisms] owe their existence,” that is, they repeat “the beginning process of development.” [4]

[The sexual instincts] are conservative in the same sense as the other instincts in that they bring back earlier states of living substance; but they are conservative to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external influences; and they are conservative too in another sense in that they preserve life itself for a comparatively long period. They are the true life instincts. They operate against the purpose of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their function, to death; and this fact indicates that there is an opposition between them and the other instincts, an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses. It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey. [5]

Although the life and death instincts oppose one another, there is a sense in which the partial success of the death instinct facilitates life. Freud asks us to “picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation.” [6] The outer surface of this vesicle, the surface bordering on the external world, becomes altered by the impingement of external stimuli upon it. At some point, the outer surface, permanently changed by external influences, reaches a limit beyond which further modification is impossible. “A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by stimulation that it would present the most favorable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further modification.” [7] It is this “crust” or “shield,” this dead zone of organic matter that has returned to an inorganic state, that both protects the living substance inside it and makes it possible for that living matter to have consciousness of the external world. “By its death,” writes Freud,

the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate – unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield. Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli … The main purpose of the reception of stimuli is to discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens of the external world, to sample it in small quantities. [8]

Stated negatively, the repetition compulsion is an instinctual process of an entirely retrograde nature, a defense against the vicissitudes of the inorganic world wrought through identification with the inorganic world – a partial dying. Stated positively, the repetition compulsion is a post hoc attempt to thicken the skin, bake the crust, or harden the shield which protects the life inside. Viewed in this later perspective, traumatic dreams (as well as other psychological phenomena that do not operate in terms of the pleasure principle) “are endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.” [9]

When Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead, he punctured the “crust” mankind had baked around itself, which protected it from the vicissitudes of the inorganic world. Just as the outer layer of any living organism is supposed to be dead in order to protect the living organism from excess stimulation and to provide the limitations necessary if there is to be consciousness, theology is supposed to be dead – rigid, contrived, defensive, dogmatic – in order to fulfil its function.

Theology stands as a shield between mankind and trauma. A compromise with the trauma, theology is a return of our exterior surfaces to the inorganic world, that is, to the spiritual world, death.

To operate optimally, to protect mankind adequately, religion must be a dead shell – mere lip-service, Sabbath after Sabbath, mere duty. The Christianity of Bismarck’s Germany, the Christianity Nietzsche so hated, was a buttress of health and protection in this sense.

But Nietzsche courted higher altitudes and stronger sensations. He was not content with the stimulation that filtered through the scales and armored plates of Christianity, the death-in-life religion. He did not want to be a creature deadening his surfaces in a salvific compromise with the wholly other creator. He wanted to be a creator in his own right, more fully than had ever before been dared.

Referring to himself as both “the physiologist” and the “first psychologist of Christianity,” Nietzsche sought to tap the ruptures of Christianity’s protective shell for a philosophy of the most intense stimuli. Nietzsche’s philosophy is, as he himself called it, a philosophy of convalescence. In an act of super-abundant strength, Nietzsche sloughed off his protective Christian skin and stood exposed before the stimuli that the dead faith had helped to filter.

Nietzsche was a philosopher of trauma. By renouncing the benevolent protection of a dead God, he laid himself open to the “divine influx” of the powers that the dead God helped to keep at bay precisely through being dead. His personal ailments – his migraine, his phlegm, his syphilis – he raised to this meaning.

Nietzsche was forever talking about becoming harder and colder. His intellect was a robust body that could tolerate more and more arduous sensations and freedoms. By surrendering his culture’s armor of dead theology and exposing himself to what he called many “little deaths,” Nietzsche sought to become both sensitive and hard at the same time.

In Nietzsche, perception no longer dwelt behind a thick defensive layer of outer death. The act of perception, for him, was an aggressive act, an act of willing, inventing and making that developed its own rugged skin (and renounced it) as it proceeded. “There are many souls,” wrote Nietzsche, “that one will never discover unless one invents them first.” [10]

The doctrine of eternal recurrence plays a similar role in Nietzsche’s traumatic philosophy as the repetition compulsion plays in Freud’s theory of traumatic neuropathology. Just as repetition is a way of retrospectively mastering an overwhelming influx of stimuli by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis, eternal recurrence was Nietzsche’s way of mastering the stimuli released through his trauma-courting rejection of Christianity’s protective crust – the incarnation and its millennialist sense of history. By eternalizing every act and moment of his own life, by inflating his every action into the cosmological proportions of the original creation, Nietzsche sought to condition himself to the burden of his own existence. Nietzsche felt that if he could commit himself to his every creative act as if it had always been and would always recur, he could replace the protective shield of dead theology with the hard muscle of his own creating will. Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts, would then no longer be opposed; rather, the two forces would be subsumed under another drive, the will-to-power, the making of one’s own life and death and soul.

Sabbath after Sabbath we “act out what we cannot remember” and attempt to “master the [overwhelming] stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” [11] we call our religion. The job of religion is to fill us with the fear of the Lord – guilt, remorse, sin, and fear – that we might better face the traumas that overwhelmed our ancestors. The faithful are “obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience [i.e., worship and ritual] instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.” [12]

The tortoise in its shell, the fish in its scales, the rhinoceros in its hide – all creatures great and small – live by virtue of a protective outer crust of dead matter. The purpose of this protective crust or shield, according to Freud, is for “protection against stimuli.” [13] The shells, scales, skins, and furry hides function as extremely selective perceptual windows or filters, editing out the greater part of the “enormous energies at work in the external world.” As Freud writes:

Soul-making is the human refinement of the crust-making process, which is present in all living beings. Human beings, no less than other creatures, are beings with skins, crusts, shells, and hides. I am not just thinking of the history of what mankind has clothed itself in – the animal skins, shirts of mail, hoop skirts, corsets, jock-straps, mini-skirts, polyester suits, designer jeans, space uniforms, and bikini swim wear. I am thinking also of language and metaphor. Men and women live in their metaphors as a tortoise lives in its shell or an animal in its hide. The difference between the person we call “thick-skinned” and the person we call “thin-skinned” may be a function of the ways each dramatizes himself to himself. Whether a potential hurt rolls off us “like water off a duck’s back” or flays us alive depends in large measure on the metaphors and analogies we filter it through. To the extent that I can associate the “arrows and slings of outrageous fortune,” which befall me to precedents in a text, a work of literature, or a popular saying, I will be protected from the raw immensity of that stimuli and, yet, be able to “sample it in small quantities.”

Man, in his subtle body, is the most chameleon of all creatures. Faster than the agamid lizard can change its color and disappear against the foliage, the “naked ape,” Man, can change his metaphors. The significance of Man’s chameleonic capacity becomes clear when we compare him with creatures with extremely thick and inflexible crusts. The oyster, for instance, living on the ocean floor in its rugged shell, is so protected from the stimuli of the external world that the life inside is without a head. Receptive to an extremely narrow band of stimuli, oysters do not see, taste, or smell. Man’s capacity to change his skin, shift his metaphors, and wear a variety of garments protects him in a fashion that allows him to sample more of the stimuli emanating from the external world than any other creature. How unlike an oyster’s shell is John Donne’s metaphor “like gold to airy thinness beat.”

Given that Man owes the evolution of his sentient nervous system to his capacity to protect himself with subtler and subtler skins and linguistic distinctions (metaphors), it is not surprising that in his aesthetics he should value those same qualities. The thinnest porcelain, the most lightweight winter jacket, the slinkiest bikini, the most delicate poem: behind the making of each of these artifacts (though in a restrained fashion), is Shelley’s urge to break the imagination’s “dome of many-colored glass” to expose “the white radiance of Eternity.”

This brings us back to trauma. As a refining of the dead crusts that protect us, soul-making is an attempt to experience more and more of the traumatic stimuli emanating from the world external to us. It is a precarious process of refining sensitivity and perception. Ever and again the temptation is to smash the imagination’s dome, go out in to the wintry day in too lightweight a coat, or to lie on the sunny beach too long. Or going the other way, the temptation may be to step up the defensive function of the skin. Today, at a time in history when the world’s most powerful nations are devoting so much of their attention and resources to global-reach defense activity, the danger for the soul is that the shield may get so thick that closure results. Like the rugged shell of an oyster, such efforts as former president Reagan’s proposed “Strategic Defense Initiatives” and George W. Bush’s “Missile Defense Shield” could well facilitate an atrophying of man’s nervous system. Like the oyster in its shell, Man could find himself losing his head.

Like these totalized defense strategies, vicarious religion protects the soul so absolutely from exposure to events that the soul shrivels up for lack of stimulation. The black and white splitting, the reversal of murder into sacrifice and the subsequent identification with the aggressor, the displacement of all tribulation onto Christ, the dogma of original sin and its weekly confession – to say nothing of the hysterical conversion reactions – all result in such a blanket response to the challenge of existence that life is sampled in only the most minute dosages.

In what he took to be a “grander system of salvation than the chrysteain religion,” Keats, in his letter to his brother, argued for “Soul-making.” Soul-making, for Keats, would be the refining of a particularized awareness. Though there may by “sparks of divinity in millions … they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.”

Thinner, finer, subtler and more complex: thus soul wants us. The awareness of the particularity of an individual existence is dependent upon relationship with other particulars. But if our skins are so composed that stimuli emanating from another being are levelled out into an amorphous mass of static, or if the skin around the other is similarly constituted, there will exist an insufficient context in terms of which to differentiate uniqueness. The stimuli will continue to be propitiated and preserved at the level of trauma; the “bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence” will not be sensed; the soul will not be made.

Those deconstructionists! What thick skins they have! Imagine the luxury of being able to assert that words are not a function of the objects they seem to signify, but, rather, of their relationship to other words. When the psychotherapist reads these critics, he is filled with envy. If only his patients were so linguistically well-constituted. If only they could turn their projection-laden, referential communications into self-reflective texts. Like Socrates leading the slave-boy to recollect knowledge he did not know he had, the therapist helps his patients to see the connections between their words, hoping to free them of the blight of referents. If they could only realize that their symptoms are rhetorical, perhaps they would cease to vicariously ascribe blame and salvation to others.

The language spoken by a patient, however, is usually not the language of the text which the deconstructionist reads. The patient’s fictions of himself are to literature what prose is to poetry and what life is to death. While the patient’s language is a language of living referents, literature as literature is elegy, a language of dead referents. Poems, plays, and novels, as the deconstructionist critics rightly argue, are never about life. As a layer of dead referents, however, they may serve to protect the life we live in their midst. “This little fragment of living substance,” writes Freud,

is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thence-forward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers can devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus which have been allowed through it. By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate – unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield … The protective shield is supplied with its own store of energy and must above all endeavor to preserve the special modes of transformation of energy operating in it against the effects threatened by the enormous energies at work in the external world – effects which tend towards a levelling out of them and hence towards destruction. [16]

The histrionic speech acts of the patient point to the failure of literature. The free-associations, slips of the tongue, and reports of “what happened” are not the ravings of a Lear, the soliloquy of a Hamlet, or the story of an omniscient narrator, but, rather, seepage from the fissures in the corpses of these figures. The tragedy of the psychiatric case is the failure of the tragic genre to function as “a special envelope or membrane resistant of stimuli.” When a patient’s speech is frantic with anxiety, paranoid with referents, or depleted and depressed, it is “a consequence of an extensive breach [having been] made in the protective shield against stimuli.” [17]

Those critics who maintain the discontinuity between sign and signified, word and thing, speak from the robust standpoint of an imperturbably healthy literary narcissism. For them, it is true: inasmuch as they live in the presence of language, inasmuch as their being is a being in soul, there exists no transcendental signified. The psychiatric patient, on the other hand, has a thinner skin. His life has been invaded by an event large enough to wound the narcissism of his protective texts. In the sessions he must speak of it, refer to it, repetitively, compulsively, for, like an anxiety dream, his speech constitutes an endeavor “to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.” [18]

Absence, according to Derrida, is the most compelling form of presence. Applying this logic to the clinical situation, we could say that an insane patient is the amateurish understudy for the absent Lear. It is not just that such a patient acts out what he cannot otherwise remember, as Freud maintained. Rather, like Jung’s Solar Phallus Man (who was unfamiliar with the ancient papyrus in which his vision was already written), [19] he acts out as well what he has not read. Lacking the protection of a sufficiently recursive literary imagination, the patient is out there, vulnerable and exposed on the heath of his signified, incarnational life. Stumbling around in his unscripted role, he deadens his surfaces with perilous actions in an effort to fill in the lacuna in the text that should have protected him from the transcendental or traumatic signified, which, from the purely textual point of view, does not even exist. Each fiction and dramatization of the therapy hour is the patient’s attempt to thicken his skin with literary crust, whose absence has caused him to be traumatized. By repeating theatrically the trauma of the transcendental signified, the deathward trajectory of the overwhelming event, he attempts to cauterize his vulnerability and turn it into the metaphors of an impregnable literature.

Whatever traumatizes us we repeat. Whatever we repeat, we repeat with a parent. Up from Eden, it was ever thus. Subject to the Oedipus complex (as Freud claims every new arrival to the planet to be), we apperceive all that assails us in the light of familial vicissitudes. Call it an archetype. Call it compulsion to repeat. Call it defense and character structure. A crusty outer layer of us always bears a certain familial resemblance to the obdurate events that assail us – right back to that stony father of all, the inorganic. Is that why our forbears worshipped Gods of hewn stone?

Again, we may recall Freud’s thesis about man’s relating to the forces of nature on the model of his infantile relation to parents. Turning this around, such that the relations of the family are seen as being redolent of the very same cosmological drama that Freud adumbrates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle , we can also say that the repetition compulsion, the archetype, and the character defenses are expressive of the death-instinct’s will to return to the parental embrace of the inorganic world.

But what have these derivatives of the death-instinct to do with the love-cure? Or, putting this question more pointedly: what does the dead outer layer’s telos of saving the inner ones from a similar fate mean for psychotherapy?

When collusive counter-transferences develop in the therapist, when, that is to say, the therapist tender-heartedly tries to provide or be what the patient actually needs to renounce and mourn, a regressive death-marriage may be enacted between the pair. It is a hard lesson for the therapist, a most chastening experience, to learn how quickly goodness can go from bad to worse. But no one can say they were not warned. It’s right there in that adage about the road to hell that’s paved with good intentions.

Seduced into dropping his of her resistances by the kindness of the therapist, the patient becomes all the more vulnerable to being re-traumatized in the transference. The littlest thing, or nothing at all really, can send the project south. With some patients intuition alone is enough to bring about a savage re-doubling of the resistances and distrustful attacks upon rapport. If, however, the therapist is able to interpret these death-dealing dynamics while, at the same time, affirming the portion of life-instincts present in them, the patient’s attempt to retrospectively develop the crust necessary to get on with the life that it is actually possible to have will be facilitated. No longer merely a protective armor of the self behind rigid character defenses, the crust becomes more complex and refined in its structure. As an organ of perception now, it is capable of subtler, more nuanced observations and insights.

Does this mean that what Freud called “the negative therapeutic reaction” is analyzable after all? Though by the time of his late paper, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud had become very pessimistic on this score, the views he put forward there (I am thinking specifically of those based on the dark vision of his Beyond the Pleasure Principle ) provide a most valuable heuristic for listening and cure. [20] Just as the outer surface of a simple vesicle must die and return to the state of inorganic matter if it is to filter the stimuli reaching it from without in such a fashion that they may become accessible to consciousness, so the analytic couple must travail through much skulduggery if the patient’s capacity to love and work is finally to die into life.

A presenting neurosis is one thing, the transference neurosis another. If the cure of a patient’s presenting neurosis is not to be vicarious – a product, merely, of the seductions of suggestion – it must be approached analytically, that is, in the dark light of those elements of the transference neurosis that are beyond the pleasure principle. Said another way, before the patient can transform his presenting neurosis into “ordinary unhappiness,” the destructive, havoc-seeking transference projections must be received and worked through. Where important insights and good rapport had earlier been negated by the so-called negative therapeutic reaction, these in turn may be negated again in what Hegel called the negation of the negation. The dead love of the properly handled transference will form a protective skin around the patient making it possible for the patient to love and work again. “… when a particular stage in the advance [of the death-instincts] has been reached,” writes Freud, “the other group [i.e., the life-instincts] jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start …” [21] Able now to dignify the bitter-sweet intimacy of the therapy by assuming the burden of his or her own life, the patient is free to love and work again. Therapy has reached a satisfactory conclusion.

When I was a child in school we did a science experiment. One of the students wore a pair of glasses that reversed perception such that the world appeared upside-down. After several days of constantly wearing these glasses and stumbling around in an upside-down world, the boy’s perception began to normalize. In spite of the distorting glasses, the world again appeared to him right-side-up. The reverse of this was just as interesting. When, after several days, the boy took off the glasses, he was astonished to find that the world appeared upside-down to his naked eyes. He was just as disoriented, nauseous and confused as he was when he had first put on the distorting glasses. It took several days for his perceptual system to adjust and for his picture of the world to turn right-side-up again.

A trauma distorts our perceptions and turns our world upside-down. For days, or months, or years we stumble around nauseous and confused. Like the boy who wore the distorting glasses, we become hyper-vigilant. We scan the world for dangers while learning to use our new eyes. Hesitantly, gingerly, reticently, neurotically we walk through the world. (To outsiders all this can look like quite the opposite: staggering carelessness, self-abuse, histrionics, and hypomania.) Gradually, however, our perceptual system accommodates to the traumatic distortion of reality. We become used to the inverting lenses of our negative complexes. The nausea goes away. We find our comfort range. We know where we can go and where we cannot. Our gingerly gait, which is at the same time our staggering gait, comes to feel like our natural gait. Our trauma-skewed perceptions become our home, and we live in them like an agoraphobic, only comfortable when we are “inside” them.

When a chronically neurotic patient, a patient who has long been habituated to his complexed perceptions, complains of anxiety attacks, nausea, or disorientation, it may be because the distorting glasses are coming off. When this is the case, and the traumatic complexes through which he has been perceiving the world misplace themselves, break, or simply wear out, the world appears in what seems at first a distorted and threatening aspect. Having become so accustomed to the convoluted perceptions of a traumatized consciousness, situations anomalous to the expectations of that consciousness – benign, non-noxious situations – seem frighteningly suspect. The patient feels he is getting worse. He feels a nausea or anxiety that he had not felt for years. Now, however, it is because he is getting better. The distorting glasses are simply coming off, and the world of mainstream reality that is returning from repression seems at first upset.

With my patients I sometimes do a countdown. “How many minutes did your anxiety attack last? Five minutes? In the whole week you’ve had only ten minutes? So in the last ten years you’ve had only a few days or a week of anxiety, only a few days or a week outside the complex?” When the glasses come off, it may take the patient some time to get used to “real life” again. “This week I want you to have more anxiety attacks if you can possibly manage it. When the glasses come off, leave them off. Don’t pick up your bi-focals or your tri-focals. Expect to get a headache, a feeling of dizziness, a feeling of nausea. Make allowances for all that. It will take a while to get over the culture shock of recovery. Give your eyes a chance to adjust.”

Jesus, it is said, turned the world upside down. In the Christian dispensation, weakness became valued as strength, slaves replaced their masters and ruled with what Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals , called ressentiment. Will became anti-will. An eon of decadence began. “One should not embellish or dress up Christianity,” wrote Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ :

It has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts – the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the “outcast.” Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most deplorable example: the depraving of Pascal, who believed his reason had been depraved by original sin while it had only been depraved by his Christianity! [22]

Nietzsche defined Christianity as the “harmful vice” of “active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak.” [23] When looked at through the inverting lenses of Christ crucified, the symptoms of man’s weakness became legitimated. The “Good News” of the New Testament was for the poor in spirit. Whatever they could not absorb about themselves, the suffering Christ of vicarious atonement would absorb for them. The weak and afflicted gained an advocacy in the teachings of Jesus. Like diseased sheep huddling together for warmth, Christians enacted what Nietzsche called their “herd morality.”

After Jesus turned the world upside-down, Peter, the “rock” upon which Christ built his Church, became the cornerstone of the institutionalization of the Christian inversion of values by asking the Romans to crucify him upside-down. The universal Catholic Church was built from meekness and martyrdom and spread like a disease. As it grew, as it encompassed more and more of the world within its sickly embrace, the agoraphobics living inside it felt less shut in. Soon the soul itself was declared to be naturally Christian.

Nietzsche took off the inverting glasses, the God-glasses, of Christianity and stared down the Christian inversion of reality until it turned right-side-up again. He called his philosophic oeuvre “the transvaluation of all values,” by which he meant the subverting of the Christian inversion of truth, in order to return culture to the Greek values of robust health, strength, proportion, and power.

To step out of Judeo-Christianity, to step out of the Great Code as Nietzsche did, is to expose oneself to the dizzying uncertainty of an absolute, yet personally discreet, creative freedom. When perception is released from the inverting glasses to which it has so long been accustomed, the world at first seems upside-down and we, perhaps, feel crazy. Weakened by several thousand years of grace, our strength will seem clumsy, our reason, hyperbolic and deranged. After walking so long in the flock, we find it difficult to walk on our own two legs again.

Nietzsche recognized this condition and affirmed the strength latent in it when he called himself the philosopher of convalescence. He suffered from blinding migraine headaches, dizziness, nausea, days of vomiting, congenital (?) syphilis, and, later, cerebral paralysis. These enervations, in his view, were strength values of the will returning from the repression (inversion) occasioned by vicarious religion. Absorbed into his own soul-making efforts, they were the streams, which fed the river of his ascending will to power, his amor fati, his “yes” to life. Nietzsche’s life and death, and the vicissitudes he encountered in between, were his own. He did not give himself up to vicarious religion. By remaining ever on the side of strength, even when suffering the distress of his own post-Christian body, Nietzsche penetrated out of the Christian inversion of values, the cross of Christ crucified. As he expressed this himself in the final sentence of of his last book: “Have I been understood? – Dionysus versus the Crucified.” [24]

A middle-aged woman, who had been sexually molested by a psychotic relative before the age of five, suffered a variety of debilitating phobias, including agoraphobia. With the assistance of a small network of “helpful” friends, this woman was able to remain shut up inside her house for several decades. This “upside-down” world was her “normal” world. So long as she lived in the eye of her trauma, she was quite comfortable and free of anxiety, at least at the conscious level.

But then the inverting glasses began to come off. Several close relatives and several of her friends died. No longer was she able to enlist others to shop or run errands for her. No longer did she have a “support-system” to facilitate her agoraphobia and lend consensus reality to her mode of being, or not-being, in the world. Suddenly, the “real world” came into focus, although it seemed a topsy-turvy world at first.

The woman turned to psychotherapy for help. Despite an escalation in her level of anxiety, she was able to steal out of her house to attend her individual and group therapy sessions. I say “steal,” because entering the world she had so long been isolated from felt at first like stealing. The patient had long been used to living subversively, in her house, under her rock. She was used to back-doors and back-roads and the ordinances of her phobias.

Sadly, this kind of pathetic scenario is all too common. Divided against their own basic needs and desires, many people eek out a bare existence, often in the very midst of the plenty that they have become too inhibited to enjoy. What pleasure is taken in life is taken against what appears to be the requirements of a too-brutal reality principle, that is, indirectly, pervertedly.

At first, the afflicted one may feel illegitimate, bastardly, disinherited, and ashamed. Eventually, however, these feelings lose their acuteness, giving way to a sense of “squatter’s rights.” Simply by the act of surviving, simply by the act of re-articulating the world through his fears and avoidances, the neurotic ontologizes his disinheritance. With this development knowledge dawns, a knowledge composed of crooked insights and kinky conclusions. Having survived his abandonment to a traumatically-inhibited life situation, the neurotic finds that he has worked out its epistemology, sunken though this may be. Illegitimacy becomes his legitimacy; virtue is made of pseudo-necessity. Sure-footedly, he walks through the back-alleys of the soul with the instinct of a Kafkaesque dung beetle and the street-smarts of an orphan in a Dickens novel.

During her treatment, the patient had the following dream:

The boss who is away may be taken to be the patient’s anxiety neurosis or trauma. The soap-opera stars, likewise, may be taken to be the house-gods of her usual agoraphobic universe. For decades the patient has lived inside her trauma, watching soap operas on television. But here, in this dream, the soap-opera stars and the dream-ego transgress the boundaries of the complex and the rule of the trauma-boss. The patient had recently begun to leave her house and to appropriate ground in the wider world – if only, at first, in order to attend her therapy sessions. In these sessions she remembered – quite spontaneously – some of the repressed scenes of her early childhood molestations. This was a significant development. No longer inhibited by what she refused to remember, she was now able to handle the “molestation” that everyday life involves. Following the working-through of the traumatic memories, she took even more freedom for herself. No longer was she living vicariously through the lives of soap-opera stars. On the contrary, with the help of the example and encouragement they brought in her dream (Jungian theory speaks of the psyche’s prospective function), she began stealing each day a little more of the world forbidden to her by her old traumatic complexes, until gradually she entered the kingdom that comes like a thief in the night, the kingdom of “ordinary unhappiness.”

When we see a patient who is “complexed” by an event in the present which appears to be transparent to an analogous traumatic event, we tend to draw a simple equation granting etiological significance to the past event. That the present situation is difficult, that the patient abused during childhood is wary of seduction or usury by a friend, spouse, or the therapist leads us to assume that the patient has been severely hurt or even damaged by the earlier calamity. How unfortunate, we think to ourselves, that the patient’s perception of the present is so distorted by past impressions that he is inexorably drawn to re-enact his traumatic past.

But let us consider another way of conceptualizing these apparent re-enactments or compulsions to repeat, a gnostic way that is against the grain. The patient’s actions and perceptions, for all their distortion, are nevertheless at the same time valid; his transferences subtly true. Though appearing to be galvanized by the abuse of the past, he is actually perceiving by means of what once happened what is always happening – not just to him at some other time and place, but generally in life to us all.

Archetypal themes have been described as that which never was but always is. The abusive, traumatic, or more broadly and positively speaking, numinous event of the past is less important for what it was – hence the debate in psychoanalysis over the reality of these events – than for its compensatory portrayal of what always is. The historical actuality of life’s horrors notwithstanding, these overwhelming events serve as organs of perception for themes in life today as before, ever and always. Seduction, to take but one example, is a ubiquitous phenomenon. We are not only dislocated from our will and desire by childhood seductions, but by the ten-thousand things of our adult lives as well. Treatment of symptomatic suffering which confines itself to the actualities of the past may dislocate us from an awareness of what the symptoms are on about in the present. Could it be that the adult who was abused as a child is better prepared for the world as a result? Do the symptoms of suspiciousness and distrust, hypervigilence and paranoia, which we explain through reference to events of the past have a subtle validity for the present? Do we lose the immediate life value of these acuities by taking their déjà-vu quality literally and trying to historically reconstruct the traumatic scene? Said a different way, do those who have not suffered a particular calamity, and whose eyes have not been opened by its transgression upon their fate – are they not more subtlety seduced by the culture to which they all too easily adapt? Are the troubled actually more conscious than the untroubled? Have their eyes – vigilant and scanning – been opened to the darker vision that underpins real seeing?

The compensatory potential of what Jung has variously called the “archetype,” “collective unconscious,” “objective psyche,” “numinosum” and “self” may sometimes widen the dissociations and exacerbate the difficulties it has been activated to bridge or heal. While at one juncture of life the inner activation of a particular motif may influence perception, cognition, and affective experience in such a way that we find ourselves to be more or less adapted to situations we have never encountered before, [25] at another juncture, the idealized expectations inspired by the motif may act as a jaundice in the eye. Perceiving short-comings in our life-situation rather than opportunities, we may be given over to a finicky sense of entitlement to more. Or, taking the dirty end of the same stick, we may fall prey to a forlorn sense of alienation and despair. [26] Provoked by these Gnostic resistances, the archetype may then re-assert its imperatives, now with a traumatic intensity. Hell-bent on realizing itself anew through our bodies and our world, it may come upon us with such violent force that we are put out of our bodies and worlds in the process. It is in this way that the rent in the culture, the rent in religion, and the rent in God become a rent in us each as well.

Talk about being between or rock and a hard place, or worse still, of being in such a place without such a metaphor! When the world in which we actually find ourselves is grossly discrepant with the archetype’s designs upon the world, when our familial, social, and cultural environments are not adequately adapted to the trajectory of “God’s will” as this enacts itself through our lives, [27] we may find ourselves subject to the negative numinosity of the nonrepresentable archetype (the so-called Ding an sich ) in noniconic form as overwhelming affectivity, free-floating anxiety, nameless dread – the Trauma-God.

Mathematically figured these noniconic manifestations of the unconscious can be expressed in ultra-symbolic terms as the infinitudes x and y. I say “ultra-symbolic” here (in contrast to analysts who speak of the “pre-symbolic”) because equations written with these figures have frequently been shown to signify realities within the world, which physics, chemistry, and psychology, too, were only later to discover. As Jung, overcoming the traumatic math-phobia of his childhood, notes in his memoirs, “the properties of numbers are … simultaneously the properties of matter, for which reason equations can anticipate its behavior.” Substantiating this claim with an example, Jung states further that “equations governing the turbulence of heated gases existed long before the problems of such gases had been precisely investigated.” What is true of the math is true of myth and symbol as well: “… we have long been in possession of mythologems which express the dynamics of certain subliminal processes, though these processes were only given names in very recent times.” [28]

As suggestive as such occasional dove-tailings of spirit and matter may be, it is often the case, as deconstruction has argued, that our equations and computations are discontinuous with the world they may or may not model. Though “God ever arithmetizes,” [29] the relationship between His equations and our anxieties may be far from clear. God’s arithmetic can certainly be a trauma!

Is this why anxiety dreams so frequently draw upon the metaphor of the mathematics exam? Even when we have been proficient at mathematics in actual life, we may dream that we are anxiously trying to solve problems in this venerable subject. Do our traumas arithmetize, too?

2x-y=a+b+ … ??? The mathematics exam, which we recurrently dream that we are failing (to say nothing of literal math anxiety), is indicative of the fact that the algebra of the archetypes and the geometry of the spirit are always on a collision course with the crooked lines of life. The Trinity is but one example. While as a theological dogma that conceives of God in three persons the notion of the Trinity may, like an isosceles triangle, perfectly inhere in the logic of its internal relations (the square of the hypotenuse equalling the sum of the two sides), the dynamism of such a symbolic notion in psyche and life, being a function of the basic nonrepresentability of its archetypal essence, tends to express itself, or rather, inflict itself upon us in an utterly disturbing manner. In this connection we may be put in mind of Brother Klaus, the patron saint of Switzerland, whose face, it is believed, was permanently disfigured by a vision of the Trinity. [30]

Jung was right: “the gods have become diseases.” Not only does “Zeus no longer rule Olympus but rather the solar plexus,” [31] we now eschew as panic attack and anxiety disorder what was once mediated for us, if only by means of such propitiatory words as “God” and “Trinity,” as the indwelling power of a relentless, inaugurating spirit. Little wonder that we owe the introduction of the term “anxiety” (Angst ) to a theologian. [32]

Defending ourselves from the fact that the “pleroma,” as Jung put it, “is rent in us,” we comfort ourselves with the anaesthetic of a platitude. Recalling the words of Robert Browning – “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for” – we forestall for a moment the recognition that the gap dividing our reach from our grasp is precisely what can make life feel like hell. 2x-y=a+b+ … ??? – indeed!

It is the role of culture, as on a much smaller scale it is the role of dreams, to span this gap with bridging symbols even as it is the mission of each successive symbol of our cultural canon to be the squared hypotenuse in which both life and spirit tally. No symbol, however, can ever be this for long. Always new forms are required to match the changes in the tenor of the times. But as each of us heeds the imperative of the archetype (its inner constellation signalled by an anxiety dream about math), each may find himself heartened by a sense of destiny or call.

The jaundiced eye sees all this rather differently. Cynically asserting the impossibility of ever achieving adequate symbolic forms, it has ushered in the so-called postmodern era in which our focus has changed from the building of bridges to the demolishing or deconstructing of them. But when the passionate living of life has been effaced by critical theory, the Gods, enraged by our failure to observe them in new forms, become pitted once again against the titanic needs over which they had earlier prevailed. In our dreams and nightmares we are as modernist as ever.

It is characteristic of a time in which the culture no longer mediates the imperatives of the archetypal world that the sensible world becomes inundated by these imperatives in a confusing, traumatic, or insane manner. Collective symbols become personal symptoms, the Word a psychosomatic disorder. Said another way, without a sufficiently vital intermediary area of shared cultural forms, the green meerschaum pipe in René Magritte’s painting This is not a pipe ceases to be the work of art it so insistently claims to be, and becomes instead, like the paraphiliac’s shoe which is not a shoe, the fallen receptacle of a fetishist’s erotic intent! But the fact that a man may mistake a shoe for a woman or his wife for a hat is not only to be explained as a symptom of neurological disorder, as it was in the famous case of Dr. Oliver Sacks; such episodes of spilt algebra, sunken metaphoricity, and psychopathia sexualis are also indicative of the noetic malaise of contemporary culture. We live in a time in which everything is interchangeable with everything else, the random aim of a hand gun functioning in a grossly underdetermined manner as the profane equivalent or anti-type of the fingers in the Sistine Chapel. Bang, bang; bang, bang, bang. No longer subject to the “terrible initiative caress of God,” [33] or, rather, so identified with it that we can no longer think in such terms, we now take pot shots at each other as if we were God, the algebraic mytheme of God touching Adam into life abortively miscarrying its incarnational imperative to become, like some Buffalo Bill defunct, the Washington-area Sniper.

Ave Maria, 2x-y=a+b+ … ???, ave Maria. The angel that comes to Mary in our day is a terrible angel – angels and Mary having become defunct in our time, Gabriel some serial killer. Cribbing a theorem of Jung’s, however, may hearten us as we struggle to find new ones: Job’s silence when faced with Yahweh’s cruelty is already an annunciation of Christ. [34] Playing this theorem forward, well might we yet ask with Yeats: and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards New York, Washington, Bali, Moscow, and Baghdad to be born?