Never before in human history have past and future been so tightly condensed together within a present, intensely bubbling to a boiling point: Are we on the threshold of the total fragmentation of humanity’s collective self, and a global catastrophe, the shattering of our blue planet into smithereens, the annihilation of all living creatures? Or are we now facing a breakthrough of an infinite potential for a dizzying development of humankind beyond any imaginable horizon? These two potential aspects of our future impose on us, humans, a challenge that has probably never confronted humankind in its entire history.

On the seventh of October, 1970, Heinz Kohut came to the Berlin Free University to give his programmatic lecture, Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World. The buds of his seminal paper On Courage were already there for this historic occasion and, indeed, it required a great deal of courage to stand with unbound faith at that German podium and proffer psychoanalysis as a torch of light for humanity. Standing up in Berlin with great courage, neither passing judgment on history nor preaching about human nature, Heinz Kohut made one of the most chilling statements in psychoanalysis:

Yes, man is in danger. He may be on the verge of destroying himself. He cannot control his cruelty toward his fellow-man… The mere otherness of others frightens and disgusts him [my emphasis, R.K.]. And so powerfully impelling is the influence of these feelings on him that he would rather risk total destruction than bear the burden that an attitude of tolerance toward the demands of his fellow men, and the temporary renunciation of his own demands and of his own pride, would impose on him. (Kohut, 1978, pp. 526-7).

In the earliest plot recounted in the Old Testament after humanity’s introduction into worldly life, having been expelled from the Garden of Eden, God is severely reprimanding Cain: “Where is Abel thy brother?” And Cain, the first human born of humans, offspring of his parents, not of God, responds evasively, horrendously: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

In Hebrew, there are two synonymous words, for the English `I`: Anni, and Anokhi. But at the same time, the second word, Anokhi, stands in Hebrew for egoistic and egoism. In his exchange with God, Cain used the word Anokhi: Ha’shomer Akhi Anokhi? Thus, in Hebrew, two interchangeable words, of identical meaning, present us with the tragedy embodied within the `I`, revealing the totality of the narcissistic dilemma of the human self, torn between its I-ness and its Selfishness.

The tragic recognition of the human condition that is echoed in the disturbing biblical story of shattered brotherhood, reveals to us that liberty and equality are not the primary human commandments. Fraternity is! Human solidarity alone is our shield against the anxiety and disgust aroused in us by the otherness of others. Without solidarity the world will not exist, nor will a human, and another human, and another human… Our answer to each other is YES – I am my brother’s keeper! Shomer akhi anni!

Kohut believed that the future would force humans to cope with evolutionary psychological tasks that must involve superb narcissistic development, which he defined by the central term renunciation – the individuals’ relinquishment of themselves, placing the other instead and ahead of themselves. This process of mind transformation must lead to drastic changes in the quality of human urges, so as to repeal anxiety and disgust, desires and attachments. Unless this evolution toward ultimate ethics happens, humankind is doomed to self-indulgence and self-destruction. Transcending our personal existence is our responsibility as individuals toward the whole of humanity, since both the survival and the evolutionary fate of the human species is at stake, as Kohut warned his Berlin audience, soberly yet optimistically.

We must show that… psychoanalysis makes a contribution to the activation of wholesome social, cultural, and historical effects, which may influence the future of not only a handful of individuals, but of large groups, whole layers of society, and – yes! – even of mankind as a whole… What I do wish to express is the hope that the influence of psychoanalysis will indeed be brought to bear broadly on future generations and… as an important civilizing force will become actively engaged in man’s battle for his biological and spiritual survival. The goal of my presentation is therefore, generally, a moral one. (Kohut, 1978, pp. 514-516).

Reckoning and Reparation

The great cultural passage from modernity to post-modernity, which signified another salutary reinforcement of individuality in its definition as subjectivity, also engendered the deepening of egocentricity. When subjectivity is defined primarily as self-realization and as total self-absorption within the individual’s needs of the grandiose self, it becomes a source of suffering for both the human individual and human togetherness. This egoism engendered the increasing domination of particularism, causing the adoption of philosophical errors and political narrow-minded praxis, based on the assumption that there is no validity to universality: Universality, as a dimension that preserves the ethics of subjectivity and protects us from deteriorating into worship of the orientation of separation between individuals and groups – this universality is nowadays ignorantly and disturbingly attacked, viewed falsely as a violation of the uniqueness of contextuality as the source of particularism. As if universality is not the ultimate bedrock of total contextualism. The creation of a supra-contextual web embracing the private and the general, the similar and the different, the multiplicity within the oneness, within a universal matrix of total solidarity, summons us, as practitioners of theory and praxis, to elevate the Kohutian legacy to its final lofty destination, to the shores of selfobject psychology.

This proposal aims at the distillation of self psychology as a psychology of transformation, one that outlines the journey from a self-cherishing attitude to other-cherishing position, and perhaps even further, to an all-inclusive ethical commitment to the realization of enlightened mind.

Selfobject psychology presents for psychoanalysis a spiritual horizon, which will enable all of us to ensure that the unceasing search for contexts of an all-embracing matrix of empathy will summon us to the preservation and salvation of our world for future humankind. The role of self psychology in creating and nurturing a transformed humaneness for the purpose of preserving our world’s sustainability is very modest, but also uniquely crucial, and we are called by it to the mission of a serving leadership.

Poet and Philosopher – Idealized Selfobjects

Not too long ago, before we were swept by the pestilential tempest of these days, I had been privileged of coming across a modest and unique poem by Seamus Heaney, the famous Irish Nobel Laureate. Occasionally, an entire metaphysical philosophy is revealed in a line of poetry, as if by a bolt of lightning. This is what happened to me when I read Heaney’s poem St. Kevin and the Blackbird:

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
*
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

Poem © 1996 by Seamus Heaney. Source: The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney. By permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

✤

I shared this marvel of poetry with my colleagues at the faculty seminar of Human Spirit, the psychoanalytic-Buddhist training program of the Israel Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity. Human Spirit’s vision of psychoanalytic selfobject psychology is beautifully reflected in this poem that echoing the immortal tenet of Dogen, the great 13th century Zen-Buddhist teacher, which serves us as a spiritual compass guiding our path in thought, in speech and in action. And so it says:

To study the path of Buddha is to study the self
To study the self is to forget the self
To forget the self is to be one with everything

Forgetfulness of the self, after profound study of the self, enables us to cross the river of personal suffering onto transcendence, both ontological and ethical, which makes it possible for us to be not only ‘ourselves’ and for `ourselves`, but also to become a nature: like a tree branch in sun and rain, in order not merely to exist but to generate existence. And is it not our compassion – in extending our hand out of the small confines of our individual room of isolation, insulation or lockdown – the act that will assist the world’s motherhood in engendering new birth?

The river of Samsaric life, life of suffering inherent in the human condition, may be crossed towards the farther bank, the bank of enlightenment, but it requires a renunciation. That withdrawing forgetfulness of the self, embedded in the psychoanalytic metaphysical thought offered to us by Kohut, paves the possible trajectory for human narcissistic growth available to us, a growth tracing a path from individuality to subjectivity, and from subjectivity to selfobjecting. A path that is entirely a simple gesture of stretching out a hand from the prison of the I-ness.

The encompassing , broad-horizon compassion of the poet, telling us to “imagine being Kevin”, leads me to conclude this contemplation by quoting the unforgettable passage from Albert Camus’s allegorical novel The Plague, lines describing humans in both their baseness and their sublimity, each characterizing our human nature and our existential choice. The book’s last two pages outline for us the distilled introspective insights:

From the dark harbor soared the first rocket of the firework display organized by the municipality, and the town acclaimed it with a long-drawn sigh of delight. Cottard, Tarrou, the men and the woman Rieux had loved and lost, all alike, dead or guilty, were forgotten. Yes, the old fellow had been right; these people were “just the same as ever.” But this was at once their strength and their innocence, and it was on this level, beyond all grief, that Rieux could feel himself at one with them. And it was in the midst of shouts rolling against the terrace wall in massive waves that waxed in volume and duration, while cataracts of colored fire fell thicker through the darkness, that Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

For three decades now, I have used this passage when I present to psychoanalysis students my human faith about the possible extrication from evil as an explanation of humans and invoking the belief in goodness, ethical responsibility and solidarity as the foundations of the inner nature of all of us, the Buddha nature of the common man, everyman. “There are more things to admire in men than to despise”, the first line quoted in bold print in the text above, is my guide in discussing Camus’s thought – Camus the fallen, the exile, the Sisyphean rebel, who always rises to the promise made by his book’s protagonist, Dr. Rieux, to never abandon the human right of mutual compassion. And, lo and behold! In the lurking darkness of these very days, another inspiring line glows brilliantly in Camus’s benevolent contemplation:

…all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

How has it happened, seemingly miraculously, that Seamus Heaney and Albet Camus combine to weave the fabric of the web of our time, the spacious web of all times? Together they trace for us the path from saint to healer, from our human ability to be saints to our human responsibility to be healers when we are powerless to be saints.
In April 1957, Martin Buber gave a series of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry. Not all of them were recorded and printed. In one of the lectures, entitled The Unconscious, Buber proposed the fascinating idea of cosmic maturation, a growing-up complementing personal maturation and social maturation. Psychoanalysis has always been a potential source for human cosmic maturation. The constituting of selfobject psychology within the domain of the psychoanalytic movement in our time is a candid invitation for a leap of faith of a new order.

Will these days provide an opportunity to carve another part of the path leading towards our cosmic maturation?

May days of compassion come upon all of us.

References

Camus, A. (1947) La Peste. The Plague (1948), translated into English by Stuart Gilbert.
Buber, M. (1957) The Unconscious. In: Martin Buber on Psychology and Psychotherapy: Essays, Letters, and Dialogue. J. Agassi (Ed.). New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999, pp. 227-245.
Kohut, H. (early 1970s). On Courage. In: Self psychology and the Humanities. C.B. Strozier (Ed.) New York London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985, pp. 5-50.
Kohut, H. (1978). Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World. In The Search for the Self – Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1950-1978. P.H. Ornstein (Ed.) New York: International Universities Press, 1978, Vol. 2, pp. 511-546.
Kulka, R. (2019) Selfobject Psychology for a Troubled World. Kohut Memorial Lecture, 42nd IAPSP Conference, Vancouver 2019.

Shoresh, Israel, April 2020