Sartre/Laing Self and Other

Contents
Introduction    1
Sartre    1

Sartre's Self    1

Sartre's Other    2

Sartre's intersubjectivity    2

Why Sartre is silly    2

Laing    2

Laing's Self and Other    2

Construction    2

Maintenance    2

Aspects of self    2

Comparing Sartre and Laing    2

Philosophical Differences    2

Philosophical agreement    2

Psychological agreement    2

Bibliography    2


 

Introduction

Sartre

Sartre's Self

Hmm to understand Sartre's self we need a little bit of his ontology. Ok, so there is consciousness. This consciousness is of a situation that we find ourselves, sitting in a café. Consciousness is fully absorbed in the positionality of this scene, the relation of waiter, to table, to plate, to fork. There is nothing to consciousness apart from immanence of the being of this situation and it does at the same time have a non-positional consciousness of this engagement. Any posited Ego in this situation, that it is I who is conscious, is a reflection back on the consciousness. Thus there are two aspects of consciousness in the café. Firstly there is the pre-reflective consciousness: There is consciousness of the café situation, then derivatively of this consciousness there is the fact that it is my consciousness of the café situation.
Within the café scene then is a combination of facticity and transcendence. The objects that there is consciousness of are facts, in-itself structures, whose being is fully given in their appearance, who essence precedes their existence. This facticity is also wider than the mere objects in the café situation but also includes the language, culture, and personal past of this situation. All these aspects are fully given in consciousness.
There also exists a transcendence a for itself. Consciousness transcends itself to reach an object, its intention. This spontaneous transcendence of the pre-reflective consciousness also accounts for the negation that is part of consciousness's transcendence. In any situation there is activity of consciousness in so far as it negates the in-itself on the way to its original project.
Thus as I sit at the café with my desires, thus I transform the situation in which I sit, I may catch the eyes of one of the other clients, I may move the cup to my mouth and drink its contents or break the silence by humming a gentle tune. In short consciousness is activity\desire\negation and seeks to negate any situation in light of this.
The original project that motivates desire, is the sense that consciousness\the for-itself wants to realise its existence its being, its self-identity through its actions. Or in more poetic terms, the nothingness that I am seeks to be something, which whilst it can't fully realise is motivated towards.

Sartre's Other

As I sit in the café I am aware of sitting there, I reflect on my experience. At the same time as I take ownership of the pre-reflective consciousness there arises the you, the experience of the other, who partakes in this definition of I. As I reflect on this experience as mine, then I use language, the language that I was given, the language wherein the other exists. As soon as I reflect on my experience I objectify it, turn it to an in itself, who existence is solidified by the other. It is only through the other that I can make rules as I would never know if I had broken a rule without the other, thus my original project to make something out of nothing is co-extensive with the other.
As I reflect on an experience as mine, I reflect in the eyes of the other, who is there in this reflection however they exist as transcendental subject, as nihilating consciousness.
Thus my freedom which is manifest through my original project is at the same time curtailed by the facticity of the freedom of the other, which will negate me and my project.
As I sit there gently humming, the waiter comes close to me and gives me a dirty look which I think is due to my humming. I feel shame and guilt reduced to the object that shouldn't hum. Feeling this, I realise that I am the customer and he is the mere waiter and I look at him as such, reducing him to my servant and he shuffles away.
As I receive the look from the other then I am aware of objectifying gaze of the subject of the other. I encounter his freedom in so far as this is manifest by curtailing mine.
The meeting of the other, my being with others, is a bodily event. It is as I'm embodied as being in the world with the aforementioned facticity of language and culture that I meet the other. Thus the feelings of the gaze are essentially a bodily aspect, the shame of embarrassment is the shame of the body, the redness of my embarrassed cheeks.

Sartre's intersubjectivity

The for-itselfs nature is to nihilate in terms of the original project, thus as I encounter the other so I must nihilate them to achieve my project, I must treat them as object to satisfy my freedom as subject, thus the relations between people are sadistic where I objectify the other, or masochistic where I allow the other to objectify me.
The notion of love between people is an impossibility if love is to be the merging of two consciousnesses. The other in their freedom reduces me to object, yet in love wants to merge with me in my freedom, for my freedom to merge with theirs must reduce them to an in-itself, capable of being a determinate entity to merge with. Alternatively I can submit to their pure objectification, take the free choice to be their object, but then I still don't engage with them in their freedom, I am merely the outcome of their freedom, likewise the same failure of meeting exists within its contrary masochism.

Why Sartre is silly

• He takes the in-itself as pre-existing, but how can I recognise the plate as a plate unless I am already aware of it, is not consciousness embodied? In other words how can I assume a correspondence between consciousness of the in itself and the in itself. The for-itself and in-itself are unwarranted abstractions from experience for more details see being-in-the-world
• Nothingness which underpins the for-itself, is not a negation of being, of the in-itself. To be what I am not, is to replace what I am with another plenitude
• The in-itself is not an independent structure, but only exists in so far as it is a project of the for-itself, thus the table is made by man to put cups on etc, thus the in-itself is dependent on its being for the for-itself and has no fixed being
• The gaze does not reduce me to an in-itself like a table, but rather a factical restriction of the for itself. The gaze is actually me taking the eyes of the other, as I have no idea what they actually think, thus it is me restricting my for itself, through the eyes of the other. Maybe I am just an object of thought to the other, so they look at me as this sort of person at this sort of time but don't restrict me to thinking that's all I can be. Indeed doesn't the feeling of shame talk more about you doing something that you are not proud of, so the for itself choosing something it shouldn't, isn't the other merely a short cut to our view of freedom of our self, our looking at one of our choices and being appalled by it, thus it almost more speaks of a surprise and a disgust that our for itself could take us this way
• If the other is encountered through his objectifying gaze, as to have something in consciousness is to objectify it, then how can I be aware of myself as for itself, as to be conscious I must objectify but that would turn the for-itself into an in-itself

Laing

Laing's Self and Other

For Laing there is no metaphysically real self only "One's self-identity is the story one tells one's self of who one is" [Laing 1990 P93]. This self is deeply fabricated on assumptions of inner and outer, mind and body and the scope of our efficacy, i.e. when we act what our domain of effects are. This self is constructed by our interaction with others. Indeed our primary carers make the first and most significant effect in this area "We learn to be whom we are told we are" [Laing 1990 P95]. Thus the non-being of the self is not far away: "Man is always between being and non-being [..]this term is used to denote the insecurity inescapably within the heart of man's finite being" [Laing 1990 P51].
Thus for Laing self-identity is a dynamic insubstantial aspect that we must preserve for fear of descending into the madness of non-being.
Self-identity is both constructed by interaction with the other and also maintained by this.

 

Construction

The necessary element of any aspect self-identity always involves the other. "Emptiness and futility can arise when a person has put himself into his acts [..] if he is accorded no recognition by the other" [Laing 1990 P83]. Self-identity provides meaning and value to an individual, however meaning and value can only be attained if there is acknowledgement of this meaning and value by the other. This is almost of necessity as if the other gave the notion of self-identity in the first place, it is the other that controls value and meaning.
Likewise there is also a sense of defining oneself in terms of role, your mothers son, your friend's friend, the company employ and the like. Here in interaction with the other or with the group the self-identity is defined. The other here may be a person, the mother, or a group such as the company. If the latter then there is a nexus, the element that connects the group together and it will be this that defines the sense of self identity that is received.

 

Maintenance

As the self needs to be dynamically constructed by behaviour and intention, ie if I consider myself to be a generous person then this is dynamically constructed by being generous, then the other is needed to validate this position. When I meet the other, then I get confirmation that I exist, I also get confirmation that I exist as a certain person. This type of argument is underpinned by the Wittengenstinian notion that you cannot follow a rule without another person as you would never know that you broke the rule unless another told you. Another way of looking at this is meaning is a shared entity, what clever/generous etc is, is a definition made by a group, therefore something that is confirmed by the other.

Aspects of self

There are different aspects of self.

1. What I think I am
2. What I would like to be
3. What the other(s) want me to be

There is also an interaction with the other that impacts on my self-identity

1. What I need the other to be to maintain my self-identity (If I think I am generous I need another person to receive from me)

What I would like to be functions across, conscious and unconscious levels. I may be conscious that I would like to be clever, so actively work to achieve this, I may be unconscious about this and act in ways that a clever person may act without realising that I am doing it

Comparing Sartre and Laing

Sartre and Laing come from different discourses, Sartre a philosopher who produces psychological outcomes, Laing a psychologist who uses philosophical ideas, so direct contrast is difficult.

Philosophical Differences

Sartre is a dualist with the self being a separate entity to the other. Laing is a co-creationist with self and the other mutually constructing each other.
Sartre sees the self as defining the self by negating the in-itself and the other, Laing sees the other as constituting the self, thus Laing sees the other as more significant in the construction of the self than does Sartre who considers the negation of the in-itself to be as significant.

 

Philosophical agreement

They both agree that the self is nothing and needs to be continually constructed.

Psychological agreement

Their main agreement is in the non-existence of the unconscious as a an entity in the Freudian sense that is a certain type of substance. Sartre dismisses this as he sees the logical flaw in the notion of repression which would have to be conscious of that which it makes unconscious and therefore it would be conscious of the unconscious material.
Laing sees that unconscious is a term that is used to get out of the difficulties of defining reality against the polarities of inner\outer, mind\body, self\others and the like and sees the unconscious as what we do not communicate to ourselves or others.

 

Bibliography

RD Laing Self and Others Penguin 1990
The world of existentialism Friedman Humanity 1999
Four phenomenological philosophers Christopher Macann Routledge 1993

God and subjectivity

God and subjectivity

 
God has been a short cut to thought. In ancient times, whatever couldn't be explained spawned a god, the God of the Sun, the Sea and all other elements. Indeed the future could be assuaged by a sacrifice and a God would ensure the future was as was wanted.
As emerging talent and skill arrived so the gods departed, and was replaced by singular Gods of Christianity, Islam and the like. Here the difficult questions were still answered those of the purpose of life, of morality and the future and personal power. Isn't prayer a great thing?
God died in the seventeenth century, slain unwittingly by Kant's transcendental arguments, that were then picked up by later thinkers. As much as God was being driven out of the temple by post Kantians so Science came along to put a nail in its coffin.
Science still has some deific tendencies, with its presumption to explain everything in terms of the true, even if we haven't yet got there, it even attempted to provide some purpose for humanity in terms of genetics and evolutionary theory which both put a mild purposeful direction on human life.
God and to some extent now science provided answers to the individual, to the self, to make life more certain and to remove the effort that would be needed to reinterpret everything. God then stood as the inversion of the self, everything that was needed within the self, together they were beautiful.
With God came morality, its foundation and its tablets, that would instruct humans in the good life. Much happiness was derived from this as the good was achieved and the heart was warmed. Now as science takes it place, the science of utility and creation, now consuming, and owning become things that we worship and give us the good feeling that a pious life once yielded.
The self then is the necessary correlate of God, the biological self the necessary correlate of science. But as God is dead shouldn't we bury the self in the same motion?
Oh that that were the case. As a large rock falling into a pond has many ripples so has god, it has been impossible to reduce him to nothingness as his impact has been so widespread.
Within psychotherapy we can see him alive, within existential subjectivism we can see him alive. The authentic self, be it by end point or by process, is the rediscovery of God. For the self to find its true authentic self, or to be involved in its true authentic process, is a spectacular collapse of the intricacies, the ambiguity and indistinction that colour life. It reinstates the certainty that god provided, truth.
Whilst language is going to hold me back to a subjectivist view point, we are embedded in the world in a complex horizon that encompasses everything, all other people and all other things. Whilst there might be a unique perspective on this, there is no definitive end point that can be arrived at. The myriad of colours and shades and textures that illuminate this relationship make it so. It is a difficult thing to engage with as it has no definitive answer. To think that there is an end point is an easy shortcut to this difficulty and a reinstatement of God.
Likewise in psychotherapy an end point can be assumed. Notions of empathy, I You relationships trade in this space, that there is in some sense a fixed place where the other is, that with some magical projection, or bracketing of myself that I can access and together we can be. The most the therapist can offer is as a tool for the client to unpick and explore their world. The most the therapist can offer is a care of the unique perspective that the client may find, in the full knowledge that this is an unrelenting dynamic thing.
CBT offers the scientific equivalent. The client has objective distortion that with the therapist they will correct to get to the true position. Thus through believing the mantra of the independence of thought, emotion, behaviour and situation and their relatedness you will have a solid life.
There are certain key things that are tied up with the ego which can be responsible and therefore available to punishment and reward. Without values the ego would wither as there would be no point to it. As we say good and bad, then we can say pride and shame, and we can talk about punishment and reward. The ego thrives on this structure and some people can seek to be very good to further their individuation and some can be very bad to do likewise. The prisons are full of people who have made a bad name for themselves, Charles Bronson being one.
As much as values support the self, so does meaning. Frankl was right that it is meaning that constitute the life of the self. We are inveterate meaning makers, requiring personalised number plates, looking for patterns in random strings of numbers that we put there in the first place and conjecturing\requiring there to be alien life forms as a universe without meaning would be a scary place to be. The ability to find meaning, is that which underpins purpose, and purpose is the end point of action, which the self is responsible for. Take meaning away and action becomes pointless, and the self withers further as it cannot act and be praised or blamed.
Without the self there would be no psychotherapy. The common malaises are sicknesses of the self, depression, anxiety and psychosis. The self is depressed, through having suffered and seeing nothing else. The self is anxious through the fear of I know not what to itself. The self is psychotic and sees things that no-one else sees.
I fear that most strains of psychotherapy are merely a confessional to reinstate the holes in the armour of the self that have been left since God died. Is there another way?
I think there is but it's not pretty and I'm not sure the NHS is going to pay for it. It can arrive from many of the thinkers that underpin the existential tradition who take subjectivity as a start that gets dissolved into inter-subjectivity, into a unique perspective of the interconnected whole that we are part of. I dare say this will not be useful or make people feel better in the short term due to how embedded we are in individuation, but in time my friend, in time....

 

Merleau-Ponty, Theatre and Dance

Merleau-Ponty, Theatre and Dance

 
Contents
Introduction    1
The popular understanding of the world    2

Problems with Objectivist Thought    3

Merleau-Ponty's Thoughts    3

Primary of Perception    3

The nature of phenomena    4

Consciousness    5

Motor intentionality    6

Intersubjectivity    6

Lived Space    7

Sex    8

Dance/Theatre    9

Didactic ideas    9

Thematic Ideas    9

Summary    10

Bibliography    10

Contact    10


 

Introduction

To talk of theatre or of dance, is to say nothing more than to talk of politics. They are arenas, discourses which encompass many differing and conflicting approaches.
To lay my stall out: my theatre and dance is predominantly that which enhances my life, which moves it on, which enriches my engagement with myself and the world. Theatre at its best is the embodiment of idea; it is a real book which touches all of your senses. Dance at its best is the enriching of my body, my conduit to and my construction of the world.
Merleau-Ponty seems highly relevant to the world of theatre and dance for the following reasons:

1. The world is primarily accessed via perception which is an embodied event. Rational reflection, that creates the world of science is derivative of this
2. Perception is motor-intentional, i.e. the object of perception is action. We perceive and that perception holds within it a call to action, which we may act on or ignore
3. Consciousness is not external, but in the world, embodied. Thus to perceive is to see myself
4. As we perceive then we connect in that perception to the totality of the world, which includes myself and the world
   
    

In this paper then I will begin with a refutation of the popular held belief of the world which is called Objectivist thought, then I will flesh out the banner headlines of Merleau-Ponty's thought then I will attempt to put this into application in theatre and dance. Although hopefully Merleau-Ponty's thoughts will stimulate your ideas in the arts, to greater heights.
I worry that some of my prose may be awkward, I worry that some of the ideas won't be justified, but what I can assure you of is there are some diamonds in there.

The popular understanding of the world

I'll start at the beginning, like all good stories do, however this is an assumed beginning. My assumption is that the currently held belief of the nature of the world and perception is something like this. I'll describe it as Objectivist Thought and shorten it to OT when it seems right.
We live in geometrical space. So if we could see from Gods eye view, then there would be this big box called the universe in which there is the earth, every place has a dot, which is a co-ordinate in space. At any moment in the box there is a scene, called now. Now changes and when it is now no longer, we call it past, and there is also the now not yet that the current now will change into, called the future. Hope this sounds familiar.
So in this great box are subjects and objects. The subjects, hell lets call them humans, have minds which contain mental substance which is where thoughts\emotions and images lie. Then there is physical substance which is what a humans body is made of, and what the rest of the world is made of.
Science is held to give us best knowledge in the box, is the biggest tool you can have, it gives you power and status and all sorts of good stuff. Indeed some would see science as being the new god.
The model of scientific perception is two fold. The world is distinct, measurable and true, and if we make error in our perception, then the error is within us. The mode of scientific knowledge is to abstract from perception and to break things down into atomic facts\aspects and then to relate them causally.
Science attempts to give a theory of everything starting with the big bang (pop!) and taking us through time with the theory of evolution which attempts to give some mild purpose to the process.
We experience the world which is at different co-ordinates within the box by rays of light bouncing off them and creating ideas in our heads. These ideas generally represent the thing that they bounced off, but really, if we think about it, we can't be certain, as we only have our ideas not the objects themselves. Maybe we could pop outside the box and have a look, oh no we can't that's only for God, and he's sort of been killed off really
Science aims to explain everything, in the way god did before it, it aims to explain our beginnings, our middles and our ends, in short Science aims at omniscience.

Problems with Objectivist Thought

What are the alternatives? What are the fallacies in this approach? Hmm well, to start off with science attempts at universality, true for all time and all situations. So what it does is to take the scientist's experience, abstract all subjectivity out of that, then try to make an objective proposition. So the first point is the raw material for objective beliefs are subjective experiences, perceptions.
Secondly whilst science is undoubtedly useful, its abstractions don't describe human experience . As we are engaged with the world there is a two stage process one of being aware, or using and engaging with the world, which can be called the pre-reflective, the second stage is the reflective where I think of myself as having these experiences. Human arts should encompass the first motion, Science the latter.
So a refutation of Objectivist Thought within a paragraph will be a bit tricky but let's give it a go. Maybe 2 paragraphs...
So firstly there is incredible weakness in the model that has the notion of idea mapping out onto an object in the box. How could you ever tell that you had a true representation? In this space, how do you ever recognise something as something. So you see a rabbit, and the OT's model would be all the light rays come onto your retina and then you see it as a rabbit. But how would you recognise it as a rabbit, unless you already knew what a rabbit looked like. Then that leaves how did you recognise your first rabbit. I suppose the killer blow to OT's is that there are certain things that are assumed but never seen. The geometric box for one thing, causality and the notion of subject and object. If you just focus on the phenomena as received none of these exist, they are theorised. As i focus on my dear rabbit, all there is seen as rabbit, the whole of consciousness can be fully immersed in his floopy ears and button nose. Sure afterwards I can think of myself seeing the rabbit, but at the time all there is is flopsey.

 

Merleau-Ponty's Thoughts

 

Primary of Perception

The world as it confronts me is a combination of horizons and themes, or objects of focus. As I look at the desk in front of me, it stands out from the horizon of the room, which supports it, the horizon which I take my gaze away from to be aware of the desk. The 3 dimensions of the room are not given by geometry rather by my engagement with it, as I stand near the wall then I can see the back of the desk. If I stand in front of the desk, then I experience the desk having a back, as if I stood near the wall, even though I can't see the back of the desk. If geometrical space was to be believed, then I would experience anything out of sight as a void, a blackness, a cavern of nothingness, as there is nothing affecting my retina. However I don't and I give objects that I only partially see, the perspectives I have had of them, or imagine I would have from past experience.
Indeed at the edge of my field of vision objects get blurred and indistinct and my perceptual engagement of this is that there is a world outside my vision, that extends off in all directions. The world then that is perceived although absent is a dynamic one and expresses my current way of being in the world. Thus if stressed outside my field of vision is the room next door, that needs hovering and a hook hanging on the wall, and outside this is a street full of things that need to be attended to by someone. Whilst this is a simplistic example if you think of the world that exists outside your perceptual field then it will represent you in all your distinctness and ambiguity and current affective state.
As much as the horizons that I can perceive objects through are spatial so they are temporal. Any object that I perceive has a past and a future, even if I don't know what it is, known as pretention and retention. As with the world outside of my field of vision these are dynamic and again reflect my current being in the world.
The spatio-temporal horizons that I see are engaged with by two other key aspects : the body and the affects, i.e. emotion\mood\feeling etc.
As I perceive objects in a room, they are understood not in terms of concepts but in terms firstly of the body. The body is the conduit I have to the world. The desk that I see, I understand in terms of how my body engages with it, how my body knows it, how it would fall under and respond to my touch, I see the table in all of my senses, my ears, my nose . As I look at a glass I understand it through knowing the sound that it would make if it fell to the floor and broke, I know it by the taste of it as my tongue touches the rim and my hand holds the stem. In short I know it by the grasp that my body has had with it. We can see how the body operates in this fashion as we drive. A competent driver drives. They have no consciousness of the complex interactions of their hands and feet when they are a competent driver, rather their body drives. The only time this doesn't happen is when something goes wrong, the clutch is sticky, or they miss a gear, then consciousness and awareness of their action comes back.
Affective states are adverbs, how we act in the world, how we view the world. When I am happy the world looks differently to how it does when I am sad. When happy the objects within my world dance to my touch, when sad they appear slow and weighty. As much as my affective state colours the world and my interactions with it so does perceived actions of others as well as cultural phenomena. Thus when I see a person wronged, that would make me angry, then an aspect of my horizon can take on an angry hue. Likewise there are cultural events, such as an oncoming storm, or a birthday party that can give an affective hue to an environment. Of course I don't need to respond to what I see as a gloomy scene gloomily, but it is a factor in the overall affective state of me and the environment.

The nature of phenomena

So the thing about the objects of phenomena that we have is firstly they are given, secondly they are incomplete and thirdly they are ambiguous as their meaning comes out of the many horizons and affective states of which they take place....thank god I can't think of a fourthly or that would sentence would end up really cumbersome.
I've got to point out, if it is needed the stark difference to the objects of science. For science there are determinate objects, truth resides in objects and error resides in humans. Reminds me a lot about God really, God is objects (i.e. omnipresent) and true (i.e. omniscient), humans are consciousness and the source of error. Combined with the universality that requires God's eye view to validate the connection between idea and object, all I can say is praise be science, for it is God in different clothes!
For Merleau-Ponty error exists in phenomena, phenomena are real and incomplete, and are not representational of any world outside them. The incomplete and ambiguous nature of phenomena is due to the given-ness and their infinite relations with their current context their and their protentive\retentive chains.
The sense of perception being given to us in the pre-reflective space, all there is, is awareness of something giving and something receiving with a space between these points. There is no primacy here and to use subject/object terminology that isn't appropriate here, it's not certain whether the world thinks in us, or we think of the world. The giving and receiving is all there is, there is no primacy on either side.
The crazy aspect of this is that as we perceive the world with our affective states we see the world how we feel, as we give our objects of experience with protentive\retentive chains, as we fill in the gaps in our perception, the world that exists outside of our field of vision , the parts of objects we don't see, then what we have is the totality of our life. As we perceive so we see the world and ourselves in its entirety. To understand yourself its a question of looking out, not it.

 

Consciousness

The history of thought seems to have fallen foul of a technique the ancients used to use. Primitive animism saw spirits in all objects and through giving the spirit a name it freed it. Buddha, Socrates and Christ have all done this where they have named the soul/psyche. What they have done however is taken human experience away from its world, taken it from its corporeal reality. The strangest thing then in this space, is when we turn to look at ourselves, when we self reflect, in therapy or in the bath, we are actually taking a perspective of ourselves from a distance. We are thinking about ourselves as an object, an ego, which we are not, we are corporeally embedded in the world. We are reflecting on ourselves, so we are abstracting from our phenomenal roots in the world. It has often been said that the objects closest to us are the ones we know least well, I think there is some irony when you think about access to yourself.
When we do look at ourselves as an object, as something determinate like this we taken on the same qualities that objects have in the world, they arise from their horizontal background, they connect out to the rest of the world, they are ambiguous and incomplete. This view of human as object is in stark contrast to the ideas that the human sciences have where the human represents something that can be known causally and in time definitively.
There has within this view of the human psyche been a cost in making primary reflection rather than perception. It has spawned the duality of mind and body and the distance of subject and object, and these have come with a cost.
Embarrassment and shame are the emotional costs of denying the anonymous perception that is the body. These are the emotional tools that are used to individuate babies such that they move from their blissful unity in the world, to understand themselves as different from mother and father and the world around. Alienation, separateness and forlornness are the cost of the subject object split. With in-authentic lives being one of the costs of the mind/body split, as the mind is used to be the place that directs lives. The mind body split also leads to the freewill\determinist argument which again has led to some twisted lives. I couldn't help myself...I had to be free....etc. Indeed it is more than possible that our emotional life is directly tied up with our engagement with the world in terms of subject and object...I am depressed because I don't like myself, or Im not being treated well. Distress can in someways be seen as the gulf between how you want yourself to be and how the world is responding to you.
In Merleau-Ponty in phenomenal experience the mind and body are just two different necessary aspects of the same phenomena.

Motor intentionality

For Merelau-Ponty to perceive is to have the world call us to action and we will respond to that in some way. When we speak to a friend, then our discussion draws the words from us and quite literally the discussion speaks. Of course we may from time to time think before we speak, where we will talk to ourselves but generally and in fact even in this situation we find that as we are speaking our words are drawn forth. Likewise as I want to have a cup of tea, I may think this and as I enter the kitchen I see it as a place to make tea, and without thinking I move to the kettle and make tea. In other words the kitchen is not seen as a static place, but rather something that calls me in certain ways, dependent on how I see it.
When I play tennis, I don't see geometric space, rather I see opportunities arising in front of me to play the game. Indeed my body shapes itself to do this and responds naturally to its environment when things are going well. There is quite a strong aspect of the fact that tennis plays me, although this sounds quite an outlandish statement, it can be justified by thinking how the hours of practice effectively go into to show you how to perceive situations as opportunities to win tennis, and how your body has learnt this.

Intersubjectivity

Primal experience, perception before we start abstracting is a composite of the awareness of psyche and the body, it is anonymous, general embodied awareness. The body has knowledge, I can touch type, but yet I don't consciously know where the keys are, but my body does. Likewise the organist, who can learn on one organ, go to another and very quickly start playing it, even though it might be a different set up. The body is that which transforms ideas into things, it is embodied consciousness. When we start to see that our foremost being, our identity is the lived body then it puts a whole different slant on how can I know other people. Standardly the question is how can I know other people when I am myself because of my consciousness. With Merleau-Ponty the phenomenon on which we base our lives are anonymous and general. So the question here becomes how can I construct an identity out of this generality.
There is a word, it's not a pretty word but it's syncretic, which means indistinction of perspectives . The phenomenal space which is syncretic can be seen in babies. If you have many babies in a room and one starts crying the others will join in too, likewise you can smile at a baby and it can smile back, you can put your finger in your mouth and they will do the same. This mimesis ( mimicry) is testament to the fact that the baby is experiencing their world perceptually and they cannot distinguish between them having an experience and another. When a baby cries because another baby cries it thinks it is in pain, as it hears the cries knows that's what happens when it's in pain and then cries. The base phenomenal experience that we have explains the mimetic ability of babies.
The other amazing things that babies do with mimicry is to learn about the world, and to produce prehensile, i.e. knowledge how to grip objects, by watching others. As a baby watches a spoon being picked up it is without perspective, there is no ego or other here, there is merely the hand picking up the spoon, sometimes at a distance (the other), sometimes close up (mine). Thus the baby learns about the world from a distance at times, through not distinguishing its experience from the others.
The question then remains is why does a baby emerge from this blissful and complete state, why would they want to leave Eden? I don't think they do really, however the adults wants them to, it's through a series of failures in their world; the withdrawn breast, the sharp word, the being roughly handled. There are a series of type of events that start forging out the individual ego, the words of pride or shame from the significant carer, the mirror, where there is a gradual dawning of the relation between the body of the subject, and the body of the object, in other words to see the body in the mirror is to see an object, to form an ego is to also think of that as the subject. It is doubtful that the ego would emerge with purely the mirror, the interpretation of the adult is paramount, the pride and the shame that tells the baby what sort of baby they are is vital, as this provides a strong emotional cache, as the baby is chided for their faeces or congratulated for their eating.
Thus the crazy thing is that I am born through objectification, pride, shame and embarrassment, via the objectification of the other, that alienates me from myself and leaves me alone in the world. We originally were in communion with others as babies, our original experience in perception is in communion, and we have forgotten or ignored this fact, and then seek to retrieve them through football stadia, orgies, dance parties and the like.
It's a shocker, the whole nature of individuation, or people having characters, egos, psyches etc is an abstraction on primary experience. It is true that science is the same, which obviously has benefit, so I think with the human sciences whose results are not so determinate as the physical sciences, then we can see them as true, in so far as they are useful nothing more, and indeed a good deal of work could and should go into the phenomenal experience we have every day that makes us who we are, instead of focussing on the abstracted notions of experience.

 

Lived Space

Merleau-Ponty's world is not geometrical rather it is a lived space. The world that we have around us, our living room, our street is composed out of a combination of all those ways that we can interact with the objects. Our bodies have this knowledge as it glided over the pavement and sits on the wall of our neighbours without worry. The space then becomes an existential space, which is engaged with dependent on the perspective of where I am, that is to say, my emotional state and my physical state as well as my perspective. If I have hurt my leg, then I see and engage with the world in a different way to when this is not the case. Strong emotional states can change what the world looks like inordinately, or to be more accurate what the world is.
There is another strange aspect to lived space, in that there is a major split between concrete space and abstract space. To illustrate and justify this, there is the case of a poor guy called Schneider. This guy was injured in the head, during the war I think. Anyway the outcome of this was that he could perform concrete movement, say blow his nose, but he couldn't point to it. The former being something concrete that is required in the current space, the latter being an abstract gesture, which can form part of the possibilities of space.
The idea out of this, is that the lived body constructs our space, by interpreting that which it finds into two aspects I can and I may, the former being concrete the latter abstract, both forms of spatial engagement\construction can through sedimentation, this is in other words, the body learning. Thus with concrete movements they become fluid after more practice, and likewise the abstract movements. In the case of Schneider, the damage to his body prevented his engagement with abstract space. He understood the words, that he must salute but the only way he could do this was via imagination and forcing himself to believe that an officer was in the room, however if an officer was in the room, he would salute with aplomb...
To bring this split between abstract and concrete ability again shows how abstract grows out of the concrete, reflection out of perception.

Sex

Here's a funny one, I think there is a general sense that we find people attractive and that is what raises our sexual temperature, in other words someone in the world, can produce a sexual response in me and therefore they are the production of my sexuality. Merleau-Ponty has another explanation of sex than this. Merleau Ponty sees sexuality not as an autonomous cycle but rather something bound up with our cognitive and bodily being. It is a way of being open to the world and not something found in the world.
Again with Schneider, he had no sexual desire, images, ideas could produce no sexual arousal, no engagements with people who he would find attractive or repulsive could trigger sexual attraction or revulsion. He had lost a way of being open to the world, and that was his sexual way of being open.
Sexuality is the way of being with the body of another, this subsumes desire, revulsion, control, submission, flirtation, passion, in fact as you roll it out it pretty much encompasses the basis drama of inter human life. Thus sexuality is the term for our basic opening to the co-existence of the other.
I've had problems with such statements before, when Freud says everything is sex, then surely nothing is, or everything is and it seems an empty statement. I think the way I got around this is to have sex as one aspect of sexuality, and to see that as we mould our world around us, the same passion and desire that sees us with this person, the same revulsion and hate that doesn't see us with that person, colours both the aspect of sex, and the aspect of our co-created world.
To quote Merleau-Ponty "The importance we attach to the body and the contradictions of love are, therefore, related to a more general drama which arises from the metaphysical structure of my body, which is both an object for others and a subject for myself"
There is a fusion between sexuality and existence, such that in any action it is impossible to label one thing sexual and one thing non-sexual, as has been said before in light of the multiplicity of meaning, there is an indeterminacy about existence.

Dance/Theatre

So all this is very well and good but how does it affect the worlds of theatre and dance? Hopefully some ideas have emerged automatically out of the above. However I suppose there are two approaches to this, one would be performance that didactically articulated the previous points, although I wonder if that would be rather pedestrian, and if you want to explain an idea probably better in a book or in a lecture theatre. Although theatre is a rich medium, and maybe direct speech is a good way to do that

Didactic ideas

If that was the case then to summarise then ideas that get me going are

1. Our communal existence
   1. One person shouts in anger, the other person thinks they are angry
2. Space as created by body, as non geometrical
3. Space as existential, a combination of I can and I may
4. The construction of individuals through pain, their loss of Eden
5. Knowledge\Reflection as abstraction.
6. The incomplete and ambiguous nature of phenomena
7. The multiplicity of horizons being the ground for phenomena
8. Mimicry, being part of our living outside ourselves
9. Motor intentionality
10. The externality of the self, given in its entirety in the world

Thematic Ideas

So how would Merleau Ponty emerge in a performance, what would it be like to see the space in which the performance happen, be created and changed by the performers? What would it be like for a horizon, or stage and performers allow themes to emerge and have this horizon graduate to another in an explicit way to show another theme?
What would it be like to see a person be led by the intermingling of their body and mind, indeed for a person's identity to exist in that space?
The general understanding of the world is the future is progress as is shown by science and technology. There is a space here that Merleau-Ponty opens up where to fully understand human experience it's a question of going back, back to our perceptual roots, back to the roots of our childhood and to open this space up.
I suppose again something I find quite striking is the sense of the cost and pain of creating the individual out of communion. I get an image of the blacksmiths hot iron forging. Again in terms of theme as you move from the communal to the individual there can be this concomitant cost
The other thing that I love and seems to have legs is the fact that our bodies are subject and object, immament and transcendent and that they hold knowledge and intention themselves. I suppose this goes straight to physical theatre, but again there is a sense in physical theatre of the physical being used instead of the verbal, there does seem some mileage in the bodily overcoming, or showing its independence from the conscious.

 

Summary

I hope I've stimulated you. Merleau-Ponty has some quite striking ideas, that I think fit very well into the physical performance that is theatre and dance. I have struggled to make the connection with dance and theatre, but I know its there, I feel it, and whilst I'm better skilled and experienced with philosophy than arts, I felt compelled to write something for you, as when you spoke in class it triggered loads of connections in me.

Bibliography

Romdenh-Romlucs: Merleau Ponty and the Phenomenology of perception (If youre going to read one book about MP read this one)
Dillon Merleau-Ponty's Ontology
Merleau Ponty Phenomenology of Perception

Contact

Rob Thomson:
thoughts@RobThomson.co.uk

Jung and Merleau-Ponty

Contents
Introduction 1
Jung's world 1
The shadow in therapy 2
Merleau-Ponty's emotional challenge 3
Anima and Animus in therapy 4
Merleau-Ponty's Other 4
Bibliography 5

Introduction

In this essay I will give a brief description of Jung's psychic topology. This will lay the ground work, for looking at some ways in which the Jungian concept of shadow and anima\animus can be used in therapy. Lastly I will look at how Merleau-Ponty (MP) can challenge Jung's thought.

Jung's world

Out of unconscious so we emerge. I want to chart Jung's psychic topology and to look at the development of the individual psyche and that of society. To do this I will have to be a tad circular to look at the mother raising the child and the child's psyche developing which will then show how the mothers psyche in turn was developed. During the child's life the development of their psyche will be looked at such that we can see how society develops to provide the context in which the child is borne. So all a bit circular but necessarily so.
The mother has union with a man. There is a guiding light to this relationship and that is the anima\animus aspect. The anima\us links the ego to the deepest layers of the psyche that is to the image and experience of self. "The natural function of the animus (as well as of in the anima) is to remain in place between individual consciousness and the collective unconscious" (Memories dreams and reflections p392) "As to the character of the anima, my experience confirms the rule that it is, by and large, complementary to the character of the persona. The anima usually contains all those common human qualities which the conscious attitude lacks" (Jung collected works Vol 6 par 804).
What then is the persona? The personas are the roles that the individual uses to engage with the world, they are social constructs so that you would get the policeman, the neighbour, the busy bee for instance.
The anima/us is then the unconscious part of us and can form a very strong driver for attraction to others, as what we are looking to do is to reclaim a lost part of ourselves. The child then can represent the unity of self for both adults.
As the mother brings up the child she does this through engagement with the archetypes of mother and child, the variety of personas which she adopts, e.g. carer, home organiser and her complexes. That would beg the question what are archetypes and what are complexes.
An archetype is a universal pattern of behaviour which can be encompassed in an archetypal image.
"Man possesses many things which he has never acquired but has inherited from his ancestors.. [..] he brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function in a specifically human way, and he owes to millions of years of human development. [..] These inherited systems correspond to the human situation that has existed since primeval times: [..]sons and daughters, father and mothers, mating, and so on. Only the individual consciousness experiences these things for the first time, but not the bodily system and the unconscious. For them they are only the habitual functioning of instincts that were performed long ago" (Jung Coll. Wks. Vol 4, par728)
Archetypes are handed down from generation to generation as are personas. Archetypes are unconscious whereas personas are conscious. Personas are far more dynamic than archetypes, changing through the ages whereas archetypes are far more solid, although unless you see an archetype as a necessary condition for consciousness, then they must have themselves developed as did personas. Archetypes however are primarily unconscious structures, with conscious representation
Complexes are unconscious structures. They are composed from repressed memories, fantasies, images, thoughts and symbols and contain a level of psychic charge within them. They are generally created by highly charged emotional events or traumas and are made unconscious as there is too much affect for the ego to deal with, such that the effects of a domineering mother maybe pushed into the unconscious as a complex, and any hint or reminder to this complex will mean that the ego can be flooded by the latent psychic energy in the complex.
As the child develops then he confronts the external world and is frustrated by it. Those frustrations that are small enough can be assimilated into his ego, those which can't be will form into complexes. Likewise as he grows up and becomes aware of value, those things that he is that are morally repugnant will form his shadow, the unconscious structure of all that I am, but that is unacceptable. As the child develops and interacts with archetypes and personas thus he affects them and provides the context in society into which their children will be born and influenced.

The shadow in therapy

The notion of shadow is useful to therapy. For Jung "there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole less good than he imagines himself [..]. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.[..]if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness."(Psychology and Religion, CW, par 134)
Thus one aim for therapy is to make a person aware of their shadow such they can make choices about it and not be overwhelmed by it.
"Close examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow –reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive, or better, passive quality. Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weaker, and at the same time, they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. (The Shadow Aion CW 9 ii, par 15)
Here Jung is taking quite a radical stance, when we have emotions about ourselves, e.g. I'm happy that I finished my essay, then this is the indicator of shadow and the existence of a lower level of personality. Likewise when you have emotion about someone else, I'm annoyed because he's a greedy person having eaten all the pies, then this is a projection of the shadow onto the other.
To justify this, let's look at the two examples. I'm happy that I finished my essay, this could tie up with the following shadow aspects of myself;

1. The small boy who needs approval to feel good about themselves
2. An egotistical person, who now has achieved yet another thing, such that they can look down on the weakness of others

Likewise the feeling annoyed about him being a greedy person can show that really I am a greedy person but I cannot admit it to myself, otherwise looking at him eating all the pies, would be an emotional neutral event, such as looking at the desk in front of me.
The techniques in therapy to look at the shadow would be getting the client to investigate their emotional reactions and why they had them as opposed to neutral ones and also to look for other instances where they have shown the same behaviour they project onto another

Merleau-Ponty's emotional challenge

MP sees behaviour not as the outcome of conscious\unconscious causes but rather as a form of Gestalt, a relationship of significance or meaning. Thus behaviour is the result of the Gestalt that contains intentionality and phenomenal objects. He sees emotion as the structure of behaviour not the content of it. To understand an emotion, is "to ask oneself how it functions in human life and what purpose it serves" (SNS:53). There is a disruptive nature of emotions. Thus when a child is jealous at the arrival of the new born, he is rigidly attached "to the situation of the 'latest born' which was hitherto his own" (PrP:110). Likewise weeping for a lost one, symbolises ones struggle to adapt to the loss of a loved one, to move to a place where there is no more, or an acceptable attachment to the lost one.
"Anger, shame, hate and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness: they are types of behaviour or styles of conduct that are visible from the outside" (SNS 52-3)
For MP then the example Jung gave of shadow is as follows:

1. Being happy that I have finished my essay
   1. This would move me to a new piece of work as I can get happiness out of writing essays, or it might move me to new projects as this one is done
2. Being annoyed at someone being greedy and eating all the pies
   1. This would move me to stop the person eating all the pies, or to restricting the amount of pies I eat, or others around me eat as I think there is an optimum amount of pies that should be eaten

Anima and Animus in therapy

These are our relations to the collective unconscious for Jung. Their effects can be via projection into people that we love or hate "when anima and animus meet. The animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, singe the two are equally likely to fall in love" (The Essential Jung P112). Their effects can also be integrated into consciousness, the animus in Logos, the anima in Eros. Logos being the capacity for reflection, deliberation and self knowledge. Eros being the functions of relationship and relatedness.
Anima\Animus therefore provides two major aspects, energy and balance. The energy comes from the collective unconscious and the balance comes as the unconscious provides a balancing function to the ego.
"It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating functions of the unconscious ensure that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided." (The Essential Jung P117)
Thus for Jung an engagement with the unconscious can provide energy and balance to a person's life. The access to this, to reintegrate, anima/animus to the ego, for the client is 3 fold

1. In projection, through seeing that your views of the other are yours and can differ from their behaviour
2. In dreams through looking at what the images with strong emotional content say to you

Merleau-Ponty's Other

Whilst Jung has the Other as the balancing representation for the unconscious via projection, he has self and other as independent entities, which can only be reunited by an engagement with the collective unconscious and a return to the Self. Jungs position is then of a world of independent objects of self and other, that have lost their primal relation which is defined in the Self.
For MP the self is something that I discover in the world.
"Of the consciousness which I discover by reflection [..]it cannot be said that this is myself. My self is arrayed before me like any other thing, and my consciousness constitutes it and is not enclosed within it" (PP p417)


He sees that there is an initial experience that is had within the world, this subjective experience is the raw material that science then uses to objectify. Our bodies are intentionally related to the world and are the interface, if you like between the subject of ego and the object of the world. This isn't the body that we see by looking in the mirror but rather the body that receives sensation, the body that receives sight and has a perspective in the world.
To move from experience to consciousness is to allow experience to show itself from its ground.This ground is multifarious, it is the ground of society, of language, of temporality and of other people. Society is something we are thrown into and in which we understand ourselves. Temporality is the history that informs our present and the future of our projected plans. Language is the tools we use to demarcate our experience as our other people. MP's position is that we have a pre-reflective engagement with these grounds such that we develop conscious out of our pre-reflective engagement with them.
Thus our engagement with the other is dual fold. They constitute me, thus
"The objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed" (PP 413)
Thus MP would challenge Jung's understanding of the ego as distinct from the other, seeing that the latter is a transcendental constituent of the former. Indeed as the prior quote implies, without this, the notion of therapy,where the Other can know me, where I can't, would be impossible
Theres more I would like to say on MP, but alas the shortness of this essay prevents me. I will leave you with two quotes from MP on the Other.
"We are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity" (PP p413)
"I borrow myself from others, I create others from my own thoughts" (Philosopher and his Shadow p 111)
In short self and other are transcendentally co-constituting in an ambiguous relationship.

Bibliography

Substance Related Disorders:Perspectives from psychopathology and existential psychotherapy

Substance Related Disorders
Perspectives from psychopathology and existential psychotherapy
Contents
Introduction and aims 1
DSM IV 2
Purpose 2
Multi-Axial 2
Stakeholders 3
Substance Disorders 4
Definition 4
Source for Criterial evidence 4
Existentialism and the DSM 4
Axioms of DSM 4
Existentialsms refutation of DSM’s axioms 4
The logical argument 5
The phenomenologial argument 5
The argument from experience 5
The transcendental argument 5
The dictionary argument 5
Spinellis Worlding and Worldview 5
Existentialism and Substance Disorder 5
DSM’s disorders are not the clients 6
Sedimentation 6
Concluding Comments 6
Bibliography 6

Introduction and aims
In this paper my aim is to understand Substance Related Disorders as defined in DSM IV, DSM hereafter. This will be done firstly through understanding the DSM, it’s purpose, methods and how it is used. Then Substance Related Disorders will be explained from its DSM definition.
From there I will open up an existential perspective both with regard to the project of the DSM and then specifically looking at Substance Related Disorders.
In summary I will then look at what can be useful from both disciplines, that of the psychiatric view of the DSM and the existential view.
When I talk of existentialism, I am not talking about a unified body of thought, rather the disparate and competing views, who label themselves, or have been labelled under this banner.
DSM IV
Purpose
The DSM is the American Associations Diagnostics and Statistical Manual written by the American Psychiatric association. It provides taxonomy of psychopathology that is a set of groupings of psychic phenomena and behaviours that have been used to create a diagnostic framework for psychiatry.
“The utility and credibility of DSM IV require that it focus on its clinical, research and educational purposes and be supported by an extensive empirical foundation. Our highest priority has been to provide a helpful guide to clinical practice. We hoped to make the DSM IV practical and useful...by striving for explicit statements of the constructs embodied in criteria” DSM IV (2000 Introduction xxiii)
To clarify this statement the key aims are to provide taxonomy for diagnostic criteria for clinicians in the mental health arena, and to have an empirical, i.e. repeatable causal evidence to enable the diagnosis of a patient who presents a disorder.
Multi-Axial
The DSM doesn’t use merely atomic classification but rather uses axes to diagnose disorder. Thus they use a multiaxial assessment. There are 5 Axes, that split into three groups; the first that classify disorders and the second that isolates problems the person is having, and the third which focuses on the client’s ability to function as defined by the therapist.
Group 1
Axis 1: Clinical Disorders (e.g. Delirium, Dementia and Amnesia)
Axis 2: Personality Disorders (e.g. Obsessive Compulsive Disorders)
Group 2
Axis 3: General Medical Conditions (e.g. Post Natal Problems)
Axis IV: Psychosocial and Environmental Problems (e.g. Housing Problems)
Group 3
Axis 5: Global Assessment of Functioning (what is the overall level of functioning and its prognosis)

Therefore diagnosis would see a person’s behaviour plotted on the axes against the following criteria, for defining the symptoms in the first group:
1. Mild
2. Moderate
3. Severe
4. In Partial Remission (They used to have the disorder, but now only have a few symptoms)
5. In Full Remission(They used to have the disorder, don’t anymore, but it is clinically useful to remember they did)
A couple of points should be noted about the application of the DSM diagnostic criteria:
1. “There is no assumption that all individuals described as having the same mental disorder are alike in all important ways” DSM[Introduction xxxi]
2. “DSM IV often includes polythetic criteria sets, in which the individual need only present with a subset of a longer list” DSM[Introduction xxxii]
In other words the diagnosis only provides a heuristic tool and does not define the individual’s behaviour and that there need be no absolute match between all criteria, and it is down to the interpretation of the diagnostician which are to be significant.
Stakeholders
The DSM then gives common concepts and language for all those who are involved in the discourse of mental disorder. Here I use discourse in Foucault’s ideology in the sense of the combination of concepts, language, action and institution, the manifestation of power.
The people involved in this discourse are wide ranging. Directly the psychotherapist and their client will be involved in it. The therapist who will use the DSM to diagnose the client’s malady. The client, who will be led to this understanding of their condition. Thus the psychotherapist might say you have a bi-polar condition, and then explain this to the client. The advantages to both sides can be that they provide a degree of certainty. The client, who may be distressed, feeling they are going mad and going to implode, now has some structure to understand their existence. Likewise the therapist faced with the complexity of human behaviour, can provide help that is legitimised via the empirical evidence that supports his diagnosis. The other significant people to mention are:
1. The legal profession
a. Who whilst use experts to define diminished responsibilities, will in turn refer to the DSM to provide empirical support
b. To substantiate claims for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, e.g. Vietnam Veterans
2. The gatekeepers at mental institutions, who will admit, or section people based on diagnosis from the DSM
3. Medical companies, who will target the symptoms of these disorders to produce products
4. Governments, who can monitor the levels of mental health in a country and act accordingly
Substance Disorders
Definition
Now we have an idea of the workings of the DSM let’s see it in action when used in Substance Disorders.
“Substance Dependence is a cluster of cognitive, behavioural, and physiological symptoms indicating that the individual continues use of the substance despite significant substance related problems. There is a pattern of repeated self administration that can result in tolerance, withdrawal, and compulsive drug taking behaviour” DSM [P192]
Thus DSM defines the behaviour of someone who has a Substance Disorder. It then specifies the criteria for the key elements of:
1. Dependence
2. Abuse
3. Intoxication
4. Withdrawal
The other criteria they use is whether there is or isn’t physiological dependence, which means evidence of tolerance and withdrawal.
Source for Criterial evidence
The criteria that are used are indicated by the client and a constellation of people around them, from diagnostician, to family, friends, work colleagues and members of the social and legal professions who will testify to the clients mood and behaviour, which if maladaptive will mean they are classifiable under the above criteria. The other aspect that is included is Culture, age and gender features, which will help define the disorder by classifying what normal behaviour is.
Existentialism and the DSM
Axioms of DSM
The DSM has a wide ranging theoretical underpinning. The major one is that of subject and object. This can be seen by their use of diagnosis of the client. The client has a disorder which the therapist, through use of interpretative skill and knowledge diagnoses. Thus the client and therapist are separate and there is a distinct client (the subject) that has the disorder the object. The extension of this, albeit implicit, is that subjects live in a box called world where they can bump into other subjects or objects.
Existentialism's refutation of DSM’s axioms
Existentialists see this in another way, that of inter-relation and interpretation.
“We ... understand ... human beings through their inter-relational context” Spinelli (2007, P12)
This argument can be supported in the following ways using logic, experience, Immanuel Kant’s work and a dictionary.
The logical argument
Subject, Object and World concepts and relations must logically be a theoretical standpoint as you would need to stand outside them (take Gods eye view) to be able to define them.
The phenomenological argument
Perception or experience are always of something, you never experience the subject object split, but rather there is experience, which whilst can change I am fully immersed in.
The argument from experience
As people interact with their world thus there being changes, as new possibilities are shown and old possibilities removed. Indeed the past provides the possibilities that provide the actions in the present which are involved in our futural projects. These changes happen through interactions within a person’s world.
The transcendental argument
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant brings us the following. All experience is understood in terms of space and time, therefore space and time are conditions of experience and not facts for experience. Therefore all you have is interpretation as space and time do not exist in themselves. As space and time do not exist therefore all we are doing is interpreting the noumena with our categories.
The dictionary argument
In a dictionary all you is circular explanation. To understand dog, it points you to the entry on animal, on animal it points you to other definitions and so on, and thus it is circular. To say well I can point at a dog, is to presuppose the meaning you are trying to prove. Therefore all there is, is an interrelation between interpretations of our experience, there is no fact to work from.
Spinelli's Worlding and Worldview
On the basis that all we have is interpretation and that this only makes sense when taken as a whole. This is show within the ideas Worlding and Worldview from Spinelli. Worlding being the experience of Being and Worldview, being how we essentialise it, or interpret: “Worlding is the term that I am employing to express the process-like experiencing of the ontological conditions of human existence” Spinelli (2007 P31)“Worldview expresses the selective focus or bias imposed upon the ontic experience of Worlding” Spinelli (2007 P32).
So using the above thoughts the DSM is entirely misguided. It takes a disorder as being a discrete if complex aspect of the human that is a disorder that should be removed. The danger of this approach, is without fully understanding the behaviour, and how it fits in with the overall Worldview of a person, you may remove a thorn, to expose a greater and more gaping wound.
Existentialism and Substance Disorder
As discussed in the preceding section, an existential approach to substance disorder, would seek to understand how a person’s problems and conflicts fit into their overall Worldview. In doing so they would understand what it means to them, it would highlight their values in the world, and then if the client sees that their behaviour is not what they want then change would happen.
DSM’s disorders are not the clients
This is in distinction to the work of the DSM and psychopathology. Part of the defining criteria that the DSM uses for Substance Abuse is the testimony of those around the client. The therapist as part of this constellation is also the one who pronounces the disorder on the basis of diagnosis, which is then given to the client. In this way the client doesn’t own their behaviour, rather they are given it as outside things, such they might say “I have an alcohol dependence” or “I am an addict”. The changes that come from this depend on their levels of introjections, as a Kleinian might think, their willingness to accept and identify with the truths of others.
Sedimentation
One concept that an existentialist may use with Substance Dependence would be the notion of Sedimentation that comes up in Spinelli’s thought. “Sedimentation refers to fixed patterns of rigid dispositional stances maintained by the Worldview. For example: ‘I can’t tolerate making mistakes’” Spinelli (2007 P 35). This sedimentation which is an essential aspect of a person’s Worldview may be more or less articulated, or present to the consciousness of a person. In issues of substance dependence you have some very strongly sedimented positions: I must drink, I can’t survive without a drink. The use of imperatives in an “addicts” vocabulary is large. Indeed whilst I presuppose an “addicts” world, there are more than likely some other sedimented positions underlying these, such as No one will love me, and that the use of the substance, is there to manage the pain generated by how the world is, the Worlding and how it is for you, the Worldview.
Concluding Comments
A pleasing story is generally one with a denouement, where thesis and anti-thesis have been synthesised. Here I struggle as the worlds of psychopathology and existentialism diverge so strongly in their underlying theory and practice. The world of psychopathology however is more widely accepted and engaged with by professionals and the general populace than is existentialism. For someone practising existentially they may well find themselves with a client who speaks from the psychopathological world, I am bulimic, or I am bi polar. If this is something the client wants to work with then what is important is to find out what they mean by these words, not what the DSM states, as you are working with their world, and not the world of the DSM.
Bibliography
1. DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Edition (2000)
2. Spinelli(2007) Practising Existential Psychotherapy, The Relational World
3. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Translated by Norman Kemp Smith (1929)

Winnicott:Hate in the Countertransference

Winnicott:
Hate in the Countertransference

Contents
Introduction 1
What then is countertransference for Winnicott? 1
What may the therapist feel working with the client? 1
Hate from the therapist 2
The environment of therapy 2
Why the client needs hate. 3
Winnicott and Existentialism 3


Introduction
Winnicott's paper hate in the countertransferance looks at the position of hate in therapy. He sees therapy as the repetition of the maternal relation and as an attempt to correct any of the inadequacies of the initial mother infant relationship.

What then is countertransference for Winnicott?
1. Abnormal countertransference
a. The therapist identifies with what the client says and what is identified with is repressed by the therapist and they react to the client in abnormal or unfamiliar ways
2. Objective countertransference
a. Where the client replays a previous relationship with the therapist and the therapist has a very conscious and considered feeling, which can be hate or love

What may the therapist feel working with the client?
For Winnicott, the patient understands the therapist in terms of their own way of being in the world. Thus the psychotic whose early environment didn’t afford the ability for integration, realization and personalisation and leads to a psychotic relationship with the world, i.e. delusional and erratic will understand the therapist in these terms. To explain these three terms. Integration is the process of pulling together the soma and the psyche both individually and together. Realisation is orientating oneself within space and time. Personalisation is the process of understanding oneself in ones particularity, as rooted in this mind and this body and distinct from you. Thus the psychotic can have coincident love hate states of feeling, this is to say I believe that there is no integration of feelings in the patients world merely coincidence. Thus the therapist who currently shows love could also show hate, in reciprocation the client can show love as much as hate to the therapist without rational or integration between the two.

Hate from the therapist
There are then three aspects of how the therapist may feel hate. Firstly through transference from the client, secondly through the clients behaviour triggering repressed hateful feelings, i.e. abnormal countertransference and thirdly through the clients actual behaviour i.e. objective countertransference.
There are ways that the therapist can assuage these feelings of hate. They can see it as a necessary evil of therapy that can be put up with for the higher cause which they are involved in, the pay, the training or helping people.
However Winnicott sees hate as a sometime necessary reaction that should not be shied away from but should when the client is ready be handed back to them in a manageable form. For Winnicott therapy is the replaying of the inadequate prior mother infant relationship. What the mother / therapist needs to do has two central aspects. Firstly they need to provide a continual stable environment such that all aspects of the child/client can be acknowledge and engaged with such that the child/client can integrate these aspects into a unified whole. Secondly any aspect of the external or internal world that is acknowledged or handed back to the child/client must be done in manageable doses. The primitive state of the child/client is unintegrated where there is no connection between emotional or physical events the child that cries has no relation to the child who laughs. The mother who feeds has no relation to the mother who is absent. Gradually integration of self happens, gradually the distinction of the self to world happens and gradually the awareness of the other happens as does the relation between these components. If the difference between the current development of these structure is too small to cope with a piece handed back to the child/client then disintegration can happen. The unintegrated state is for Winnicott, the origins of man; we also carry it with us and is the font of creativity within our lives. For Winnicott we are poor if we are only sane The unintegrated state can only be managed or accessed in later life if there is a stable enough holding environment to support it. The disintegrated state is a terrifying plunge from integration to disintegration where the integrated state collapses and the holding environment doesn’t support the unintegrated state.
Thus the therapist needs to provide both the acknowledgement of all of the client and to only acknowledge those bits that the client can safely integrate. Thus the client can provide feelings of hate in the therapist. If the client’s relationship with the client or themselves is not significantly integrated or stable to withstand it, then the therapist must withhold this feeling. As the clients relationships with self and therapist strengthen the this hate can either be acknowledged directly or drip fed until the structure is in place to support this. There is something in all of us that we hate, for Winnicott a client needs objective love and this requires all parts of the client to be acknowledged and this includes the hated part, thus it can be necessary for the therapist to hate the client and for the client to be able to access this hate to know the objective love.

The environment of therapy

The analyst must be prepared to bear strain without expecting the patient to know anything about what he is doing, perhaps even for a long time. For psychotics and people who have not had an adequate early maternal relationship the environment that the therapist provides that does more work than the interpretation. For the neurotic the couch and warmth and comfort may be symbolic of the mothers love for the psychotic it would actually be it.
Winnicott sees that people can test their environment and seeks proof that he can be hated to get proof that he is truly loved. This is quite an outlandish thought, to think of the impossibly behaved teenager as wanting to be hated such that he can prove the love of his parents.
Winnicott sees the mother as hating the baby before the baby hates the mother. Winnicott calls part of the initial relationship between infant ruthless love where the infant cares for nothing but his own desires and will attack his environment in a wild rage including his mother if he doesn’t get his way. Winnicott uses the term ruthless love to distinguish a hate which doesn’t intend to hurt, as there is no distinction at this stage of self and other.
Thus in the therapeutic relationship the therapist must be open to the ruthless love of the client which may hate him, hurt him use him for his needs then dispense with him when his needs are done. In spite of all this the therapist as with the mother must be able to tolerate hating her baby/client without doing anything about it, in the non expectant hope that reward will come.

Without hating the client/child’s hate they will never integrate this, will never be able to tolerate their own hate. Hate is also seen as a crude way of loving

Why the client needs hate.
Winnicott’s development process sees hate as a central part. An infant initially exists as omnipotent if he has a good enough mother, where there is the sense that when he wants he gets, and contra wise when he doesn’t want he doesn’t get. Should the mother get this wrong badly enough then the child can create a false self, a compliant self as they find their own desires too traumatising. In the omnipotent stage the infant is not aware of their mother as a separate being and engages with their mother with ruthless love, in the way they would engage with their own desires. As the infant develops and the world is handed by the mother piece by piece, there is integration of the child’s soma and psyche and indeed in each aspect so the infant realises that he is the same infant who cries as the one who smiles. At each stage the infant needs to feel safe that they can move onto the next stage and a key element of this is when they realise that they are the same infant who loves and hates the mother. The mother makes this real in the infant by hating him. Klein talks about this as the depressive position whereas Winnicott talks about the position of concern.

This position of realising that you hate the person that you also love brings the idea of concern and care. When you realise you hate the person you love, you then start to think about caring for them, and developing feelings of guilt to guide this. Infants, who have been deficient in this stage, show no care of concern for those around them as they were not appropriately hated, and never integrated their love and their hate.


Winnicott and Existentialism
Winnicott is interesting sure, putting the relationship back into the arena of psychopathology and is an interesting development from Freud who had the psyche only as the arena of psychopathology. Whilst Winnicott adds something to the psyche’s development process by adding the mother in, the area he misses is what happens to the adult.
The well adjust child who had a good enough mother still has to face death, uncertainty and groundlessness. So as an aid to good parenting with Winnicott you can’t go wrong. As an aid to reparenting with Winnicott you can’t go wrong. However there are many areas of pain people suffer that are not to do with the outcome of their parenting.

Merleau-Ponty and psychotherapy

Merleau-Ponty and psychotherapy
Contents
Introduction 1
Science, objectivity and perception 1
The Body 4
Being in the World 5
Bibliography 6


Introduction
In this paper I will look at concepts from Merleau-Ponty’s (MP) writings that can aid in psychotherapy:
1. Science, objectivity and phenomena
2. The Body
3. Being in the World
Science, objectivity and perception
MP sees the worth and utility of the scientific view of the objective world, but doesn’t see this as primordial.
The common held scientific view is a combination of Newtonian physics , Cartesian dualism and Freud’s psychic topography.
Newtonian physics, sees a box called world which is spatial and in which there are objects. These objects are subject to cause and effect ,and this principle shows the temporality in which people move through this box. People access the world through perception and knowledge of objects, which are represented as ideas of sensations from these objects.
Rene Descartes book Meditations placed the mind in Newton’s world. He attempted to provide an indubitable position for knowledge. His position was the only thing that couldn’t be doubted was thought and through his attempt he established dichotomies: mind\ body and subject\object .The key aspect here is the res cogitans, the mind became a thing, and whilst he saw it as a non-material entity, that did not adhere to the laws of physics, this then led the way for Freud to apply physics to the mind.
Freud’s causal psychic apparatus saw that there are instinctive drives within humans coming from the id that have energy attached to them that must be discharged. Thus I am hungry, the ego is aware of this and interacts with the world to reduce this tension, which produces pleasure. Should the super ego, the internalised moral agent of society, object to this desire, then there will come repression that pushes the desire into the unconscious. The act of managing this repression will produce the symptoms that the client will then present with, and all the therapist needs do, is to ensure the clients ego is strong enough, reconciled with his super-ego and uncover the repressed desire. The patient is fixed like a car after a service, what Freud calls abreaction.
To view science as the ultimate truth is commonly held as is the client’s view that they can be fixed like a broken machine, by finding the causes of their distress, they can by changing their engagement with these causes (e.g. positive thinking and emotional catharsis) change their outcomes. Indeed CBT, REBT and NLP are testament to this approach.
MP whilst seeing the worth of a scientific view, didn’t see it as being able to fully explain human life. “A child perceives before it thinks” (Merleau-Ponty 1968 p27). Science draws universal laws that are derived from specific experience. There is experience first which is the raw data that science uses. It is this experience, or perception to use MP’s terminology that he seeks to investigate, as it is that which is the foundation of human experience.
What is perception for MP? Perception is our meaningful relation to the world. This isn’t the relation of subject to object, or idea to thing, but rather a relation that constitutes both sides. My perception is an embeddedness within the world, where my perception is of a world that is distinct from me. This world that I am aware of and embedded within, is one that I engage with meaningfully, and that supports or blocks my desires. Thus it is co-constituting, with each side dependent on the other. Thus mental phenomena are intentional, pointing out to objects within the world.
“Perception is precisely the kind of act for which there can be no question of distinguishing the act itself from the end to which it is directed...Perception and the perceived necessarily have the same existential modality..If I see an ashtray in the full sense of the word “see”, there must be an ashtray there...To see is to see something” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p435-436)
The nature of perception has several facets. It arises from a horizon which attention leaves to an object which it focuses on. The nature of this object, is related to and points to a united infinitude of objects which constitutes the world. Our engagement with it is by a unity of all of the senses, a perspective.
To explain this in more detail: when we perceive an apple then what we do is focus our attention on it, and the bowl in which it sits, has less attention, the desk on which the bowl sits less still, and we are not even aware of the floor on which the desk sits, although we know there is something there as we presume an infinite totality of relations. “I should realize it is necessary to put the surroundings in abeyance [...], to see the object, and to lose in background what one gains in focal figure” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p78)
The apple has meaning for me, it could satisfy my hunger, or should be avoided to protect my diet. My perception of it, is not purely visual, but rather through the entirety of the senses that the body has. As I see the apple, I can hear the noise as I push my teeth into its flesh, and taste and smell the sweet apple juice as I swallow, “the senses communicate in perception as the two eyes collaborate in vision” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p271-2)
What then can MP’s understanding of perception offer to psychotherapy? Firstly that causal objective explanations aren’t part of a client’s primal engagement with the world. Many clients want to be fixed by their therapist. This approach would always leave the client with an objective relationship with themselves, and not a more intimate one. Whilst this can have worth it is not the deepest and most significant relationship that can be had.
Engaging phenomenologically, to move to the things in themselves by using an atheoretical description of how clients experience their world as a meaningful place, is to move to the primal relation of perception that a client has. To look at the relations between things and events in a client’s world, instead of atomistically looking at parts, again moves towards this primal experience. MP would see the worth in psychotherapy of a deepening description of client’s distress and engagement with experience as being one that enriches and invigorates a person’s life.
MP’s belief in our embodied being in the world, means that he doesn’t believe in ideas, or emotions that are representetative of something else, i.e. idea with an object, or idea as symbolising a repressed desire in the unconscious.
In the example in the Phenomenology of Perception p186, a girl who has been prohibited by her parents from seeing her lover who loses her speech, this loss of speech is not seen to be an action that symbolises her unconscious repression, but rather it directly expresses emotion, “in so far as the emotion elects to find its expression in loss of speech” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p186) “Loss of speech, then stands for the refusal of co-existence. “ (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p186). The girl also loses her appetite. “the swallowing symbolises the movement of existence which carries them [...] the patient is literally unable to ‘swallow’ the prohibition” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p186)
What we see here is twofold. Firstly the act of the emotional is embodied action. When a client is depressed, they may eschew interaction with things and people, and solitarily comfort themselves with food or alcohol. This action is meaningful to them; they want to draw away from relation people and things for a reason. Emotional expression is often seen as an affective mental state e.g. my relationship ended and I became depressed; explained as my heart has been broken and the pain felt was the result of this. Emotions are seen as the product of the initial action and the thought being when I come to terms with them then the pain will go away.
MP sees emotion as an embodied way of being in the world. In depression this can be the withdrawal from the activities and people. MP would see depression as embodied action, and see how it serves you. You may well find out beliefs and values such as I feel shame as my relationship has ended and therefore I don’t want to be seen by people, everything goes wrong when I do it, so I don’t want to be active or maybe I can’t trust myself to do things so I can’t trust myself to be active or be in relation with people. So in psychotherapy MP would take us towards a combination of REBT, existentialist and logotherapy approaches. Emotion is embodied action, embodied beliefs and values, so to work with people in distress would be to understand that action in terms of beliefs and values through description, and then to hold that up to the client to see if that works for them.
The second thing to come out of this is the notion of symbolism. MP sees perception and emotion as embodied in the world and whilst fully given, not always obvious:” The body does not constantly express the modalities of existence in the way that stripes indicate rank” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p186). In the example above, the girl couldn’t swallow food which represented her inability to swallow the prohibition. Here we see the interpretation that is needed when working with clients, which the therapist can lead, but the client must always be the final arbiter of. This runs counter to the standard existential psychotherapeutic work, which is non directive and highly client led as they see everyone’s life as unique. However MP would take a different view. We are embodied beings within the world, we come to a world already existing and to a language that has meaning that is shared with others, thus interpretation is not purely subjective.

The Body
The body is a powerful phenomena, I see my body as an object in front of me and whilst changeable in form, permanent in presentation. It has a strong effect of me seeing myself as an object in the world and supports the scientific view of the world.
However it’s very different from other objects which I can look at from a variety of angles, but my body I cannot. The body is that which takes a perspective on the world, it sees from a certain angle, feels from a certain position. Thus there is proprioception, immediate self awareness of the senses that engage with the world. When I see I have immediate awareness of sight, if I feel hot or cold, I don’t need to look to see where I am hot or cold, I am immediately aware of it. Exterioception is the awareness of external things in the world. “External perception and the perception of one’s own body vary together because they are two sides of one and the same act” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p237)
When I look at myself in the mirror, listen to my voice in recording, I am not looking at my body from the proprioceptive angle but rather as an exterioceptive one. I see not my bodily being in the world, but see myself as an object.
The body then in its pre-objective sense, is that which enables us perceptions, but is not a direct object of perception. It is the dynamic condition of experience “my body appears to me as a posture with view to a certain actual or possible task” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p114-5)
Seeing the bodies initial relationship with the world as intentionally proprioceptive opens up possibilities for therapy. The body has sense and is intentionally directional in the world. This leads to interventions such as Gendlin’s Focusing, where the felt sense of the body is explored. This is a process of letting the body speak, of focussing internally on the felt experience and allowing it to name itself, not rationalising, or using emotions with it, but letting it name itself.
The sense of the body as a dynamic transcendental condition of experience again opens the way to altering a client’s engagement in the world. The work here could develop through looking at a client’s current perspective in the world, from their physical deportment, through their functional and conceptual directedness. Comparing their current conceivably distressed engagement with the world, to one where they have not been so, might show them how they can re-orientate. This can be seen in the recognition in NLP of how depressed people standardly look down, and that one way to change this, is to look up.
Being in the World
Being in the world is the primal, pre objective state of our engagement in the world. For MP “memory, emotion and the phantom limb are equivalent in regards to being in the world“ (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p99).
1. Proprioceptive
a. We are immediately aware of the world, via our bodily senses and perspective
2. Memory
a. Our memories which are actively chosen provide the horizon from which the present emerges
3. Emotion
a. We engage with the world emotionally in a primordial manner
4. Body Schema
a. The phantom limb example, where the limb is still felt though absent, highlights our body schema, how our body engages in the world, which is not purely physical but an intentional engagement.
All of the above are subsumed underneath the axis of intentionality and alterity, in that we are purposively directed to the world, and the world is other from us.
The impact that being in the world can have on therapy is the MPian notion of time. Time for MP is not succession of the events of now, the past being now no longer, the future being now to come and now being now. The subjective time for MP is an intentional flow that “projects around the present a double horizon of past and future “ (Merleau-Ponty 1945 p278) . Memory is the horizon from which the past flows out, and the future is that which flows out from the present. The flow is of the client’s intentionality. Past events are not defining, in that childhood trauma causes present distress, but rather, the past functions as the opening for the future and present. Looking at temporality this way enables investigation with clients where they can see how the past events form a path that lead to current action, belief and value. This means you can work with clients by making explicit the beliefs and values that have been part of their path, and the possible path to the desired position. The novelty of this can be understood in the following example.
I can drink too much alcohol. There has been a succession of choices that have led me to this which has involved beliefs such as I need comfort when in discomfort and that to do it myself is a dependable solution. There are a variety of approaches taken to dealing with substance misuse. The cognitive behavioural disciplines may well look at the activating events and beliefs and look to change these. Existential therpaists will look to get the client to a deeper understanding of their drinking such that they can see what values are contained there, then they can change if their current actions if they see that they are as a result of a now redundant values. Freudians will look to deal with the repressed desire that has its symptoms in drinking. These three approaches take a static approach to the problem, and either fix the beliefs, values or repression of the problem. MP thinks of the past and the future as horizons for the present.Then to use the path analogy, the movement from a client’s distress can be out of forging a path from where they are to where they want to be.
This could be seen as trivial, but for me this is a new way of looking at clients problems. The client emerges from their distress taking one small step that will implicate the next. In my case with drinking too much, the steps would be to start generally living more healthily, so for instance start always having breakfast in the morning. As this becomes a way that I engage in the world, then the next step comes where you start valuing having a clear head in the morning, so the drinking in the evening becomes less appealing. I have also noticed when I have thought to improve my life, I will buy and use some meditation cds, that even whilst I didn’t use them immediately, the act of buying them, then opened me up to other possibilities, so that I started to get involved say with a philosophy group down here, that I had always wanted to, but never got around to doing.
This path approach, can be used in whatever way the client feels capable of doing, so if they feel entirely hemmed in by their problem, even the smallest gesture, can start to provide the way to freeing themselves from their prison. Thus it is not a case of solving problems, but rather changing the emergent horizon such that problems don’t emerge.

Bibliography
1. Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception published 1945 reprinted 2008 Translation by Routledge and Kegan Paul
2. Merleau-Ponty Visible and Invisible 1968 translated A Lingis