Voices from Israel | Archive

July 18, 2018

We are happy to present a profound, unique and thought-provoking paper: A Story of a Split and Hope. This paper is the fruit of collaboration between analyst – Amina Taiber – and her supervisor – Yossi Tamir. The paper unfolds a process that most often is kept hidden from our observing eyes – the all-important process of supervision and its significant influence on the analyst work and on the analysis itself.

Amina and Yossi describe their joint effort to understand the patient, Idit, and her suffering. The supervision provides a free and safe space for Amina to explore her difficulty to approach Idit empathically, until a moment of enlightenment occurs, a moving moment that opens channels of hope were a split have resided until then.

You may find herein below the paper’s abstract and preliminary notes, the concluding remarks and the references used in the paper.

For those of you who have access to the Psychoanalytic Inquiry journal, the following link leads to the full paper in Volume 39, 2019:
Issue 3-4 : The Ubiquity of Unconscious Communication

A Story of a Split and Hope

ABSTRACT

This article, written by the analyst and his supervisor, presents the handling of a persistent obstruction of the analyst’s empathic capability. The mutual activation of a relentless empathic search led to the obstruction’s dissolution through the revelation of a personal part of the analyst’s life, and its connection to the patient’s inner life. The recognition of the split that existed in the analyst and the joy of finding the lost empathy and expanding it opened a new path in the analysis and enabled the beginning of a psychic transformation in the patient, which main essence is Hope.

In the gloomy night an iridescent phantom flies.

It spreads its wings and rises over infinite, black humanity!

Everyone invokes it, everyone implores it!

But the phantom disappears at dawn to be reborn in the heart!

And every night it’s born and every day it dies! (Puccini, 1926).

Preliminary notes

This article describes the working together of an analytic work and a supervisory process based on the recognition of the central role that empathy plays in the therapeutic discourse (1) (Kohut, 1984). By recognizing empathy as the central tool for identifying what is happening in the subject’s mind and adjoining empathy to introspection, Kohut (1959) defined the essence of the mind’s processing within the therapeutic space. This outlook reflects the basic characteristic of both the intrapsychic and the interpersonal communication, and hence it makes redundant the conceptualization of the therapeutic discourse in terms of unconscious communication or projective identification.(2) The systematic and continuous application of Kohut’s revolutionary paradigmatic change brought the recognition of hope as a central and major component of the human mind (Tamir, 2010). Paraphrasing Freud, one can speak about “hope and its vicissitudes.” In many mental conditions, we can recognize the various ways by which hope can be splinted, attacked, concealed, or rejected. Usually, we reveal that what lies behind this attitude toward Hope is a very intense “dread to repeat” (Ornstein, 1974, p. 241), or a “fear of breakdown” (Winnicott, 1974, p. 174).

Sometimes, as is shown in the clinical account presented here, it might be difficult for the therapist or analyst to establish the required connectedness with the patient’s concealed hope. Winnicott (1967, pp. 98-99) pointed to this difficulty in his essays on the subject of “antisocial tendency.” We refer to this difficulty as obstruction in empathy.

The role of supervision in those cases is crucial. It has to provide the space for an open conversation where the analyst’s difficulties can be liberally and freely expressed. The role of the supervisor at this level is to assist the analyst in identifying and improving his listening capability and, at the same time, try to release the obstruction in this capability. The intention is not to treat the supervisee, but rather to expand and unfreeze his/her introspective capacity, in those areas where it diminishes or freezes. The supervisor’s role in this context is not intended to attempt to reveal the repressed contents from the depths of the supervisee’s unconscious, but, instead, to try and mend the inner empathic discourse that was disrupted and that does not enable the prolonged empathic immersion with the patient.

In the following clinical presentation, we show how, through this mutual work, the path to the restoration of hope has been opened.

Concluding remarks

The supervision space, which was cocreated by us, provided full freedom to expose ourselves. For the analyst – the difficulties encountered in being empathically there for the patient, and for the supervisor – the unrestricted expression of his wandering thoughts. Together, we established an observation space, which succeeded in uncovering the origin of the analyst’s difficulties. The option of moving, during the supervision, from the familiar place of the known facts of the analyst’s own life, which seemed irrelevant to Idit’s emotional world, toward joint thinking and renewed pondering about the familiar and known. Actions and mental contents, which have been repeatedly dealt with, were discovered as carrying new and different outlook, bearing the reviving potential for Idit, and appeared as critical to her emotional world.

For the analyst as well as for the patient, the moment of revelation and understanding is one which contains the excitement of creation. Creation is the expression of hope, and excitement is being alive. Creation and excitement sprouts the potential movement of the mind, from blocked places that lack the pulse of life, toward a full existence that differs from compulsory life. The experience is sudden; both the analyst and the patient can say that “Suddenly, the story of my life comes alive!” And most exciting is that Idit turned from a suffering stranger (Orange, 2011) to a suffering companion (Suttie, 1935). The moment of revelation is also a moment of a very specific joy: It is the silent joy of becoming a selfobject for another human being. It is the joy of finding and refinding the path to being and feeling human with all one’s might toward another human being. To our mind, this joy is the core of hope.

References

Kohut, H. (1959), Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis – An examination of the relationship between mode of observation and theory. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 7: 459-483.
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Amina Taiber, Ph.D., is Clinical Psychologist; Member of the Israel Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity, teaching and supervising programs of the association; and training in the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

taiberamina@gmail.com

Yossi Tamir, M.A., is training and supervising analyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society.

yostamir@hotmail.com

SEVENTH COLUMN

I am glad to introduce a new book written by Yorai Sella, Ph.D., From Dualism to Oneness in Psychoanalysis: A Zen Perspective on the Mind-Body Question (Routledge, 2018). Yoral provides a synopsis and outline of the book’s chapters written by Yorai. In this significant, interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional project, Yorai demonstrates the shift that occurred in contemporary Psychoanalysis which has paved the way for moving from dualism to a oneness perspective in the meta-theoretical paradigm on the mind-body question. Yorai suggests that both the contributions from phenomenology and from the philosophy of language partake in this paradigm shift. Focusing on Buddhist non-dualist tenets, the book stresses the unique contribution of Zen-Buddhism to the conceptual validity of this paradigm shift in contemporary Psychoanalysis.

From Dualism to Oneness in Psychoanalysis: A Zen Perspective on the Mind-Body Question

Dear colleagues,

I am happy to announce and share my excitement – as well as my joy, trepidation and a number of others – at the publication of my book “From Dualism to Oneness in Psychoanalysis: a Zen Perspective on the mind-body Question”.

Whilst in the throes of finding the right words for presenting this personal-academic project I was gratified to encounter Raanan Kulka’s words in the previous edition of “News from Israel”. Raanan’s depiction of his unusual immersion in the transmutive complementarity of ore and clapper, stillness and motion, ownness and oneness has provided me with a firm footing for suggesting that an attuned non-dualistic body-mind-set in contemporary psychoanalysis (chapter 9) is more prevalent then hitherto recognized.

Self-Psychology has provided a major frame of reference for some of the central issues dealt with in this book; the work done by members of the Israeli section of IAPSP was highly supportive. Companionship was invaluable. More than anything else I was inspired by the example set by the “Human Spirit” project towards integration, transmutation and transformative potentials. Vacillating between instances of uneasy, graceful or frustrating ’emergence’ and moments of ‘dissolution’, Raanan Kulka’s assurance that the two were complementary provided me with deep reassurance in moments of doubt.

Finally, I hope this volume may serve to support others who – like me – seek and are nourished and inspired by fleeting images of non-duality.

So here goes … what follows is a synopsis and then an outline of the book’s chapters.

Freud’s revolutionary project delineated a one-way interaction – “the mysterious leap from the mind to the body” – as the vantage point for the psychoanalytic revolution. Contemporary psychoanalysis has gone further, charting out a two-way body and mind reciprocity as creating ‘unitive experiences’ such as ‘vitality’ and ‘potentiality’. In intersubjective, neuro-psychoanalytical and religiously inclined psychoanalysis, these concepts converge to constitute a paradigm shift, suggesting that true embodiment is a spiritual venture (Bollas, 1991, p. 151).

What the above proposals lack is a firm conceptual, philosophical base, transcending Cartesian dualism.

The book depicts the manner in which – in innovatively reaching beyond the constrains of dualism – psychoanalysis’s current paradigm shift relies on an interdisciplinary and dialogical approach. In an integrative interdisciplinary manner I suggest that both phenomenological contributions – markedly that of Merleau-Ponty – and contributions from philosophy of language (largely Lakoff and Johnson’s) partake in this paradigm shift.

Focusing on Buddhist non-dualist tenets the book stresses the unique contribution of Zen-Buddhism to the conceptual validity of this paradigm shift. In particular, Ehei Dogen’s – Zen-Buddhist mystic and philosopher – study of the phenomenology of the body-mind goes far towards substantiating the non-duality of immanence and transcendence, subject and object, body and mind. Stemming from an immanently non-dualistic philosophical-religious tradition Dogen maintains that through “body and mind study of the Way” one arrives at the inevitability of “body-mind-oneness”. His mystical realism – cited in numerous psychoanalytic articles – is an invaluable contribution to psychoanalysis’s attempts to trace the route leading from alienation and duality to what Bion has termed “at one-ment”.

The book follows these conceptual threads along 4 conceptual trajectories potentially furthering the constitution of a non-dualistic unitive body-mind meta-theoretical paradigm and a cohesive unitary terminology:

Potentiality of existence preceding substantial manifestation

Constant change as a substantial and categorical position

Constraints on linguistic and discursive formulations of non-duality

The meditative state as a non-dualistic psyche-somatic mode of being and participation

I accompany all of the above conceptual postulations with examples from my personal voyages of discovery in analysis, in training as an Oriental Medicine practitioner and in meditation and martial arts. Each chapter is interspersed with them and also includes vignettes from my clinical experience.

Outline

Chapter 1 shows how psychoanalysis replicates the classical philosophical ‘body mind’ debate, adhering to categorical, evaluative and developmental fissures between psyche and soma. With contemporary psychoanalysis displaying a growing recognition of psyche and soma non-duality, the need arises for extra-disciplinary theorems to outstep these engrained presuppositions..

Chapter 2 traces the legacy of the energetic and psychosomatic models and explores the manner in which recognition of non-verbal modes of interaction upsets the conventional division between biologistic and hermeneutic meta-theories. It focusses on the need to formulate a theory accommodating multiple “leaps” between the patient’s and analyst’s ‘psyche’ and ‘soma’, suggesting intricate and reciprocal interactive psyche-somatic functioning.

Chapter 3 traces the ascension of the ‘soma’ and bodily determined subjectivity and suggests that psychoanalysis has come to acknowledge the enacted and performative aspects of interaction as intersubjectively determining subjectivity. This is cast against the aspirations – and perceived limitations – of linguistic interpretation.

Chapter 4 considers specific strands within psychoanalysis which have embraced unitive experience and unitary formulations regarding psyche-somatic ‘pre-reflective’ structures and processes designated ‘oneness’, ‘fusion’ or ‘undifferentiation’. Overarching linguistic categories – such as ‘aliveness’, ‘vitality’ and ‘rhythm’ as well as ‘proto’, ‘pre’ or ‘supra’ ordering structures – are shown to straddle and override ‘psyche’ to ‘soma’ divisions,

In chapter 5 ‘paradox’, ‘complementarity’, ‘mysterious undercurrents’ and ‘systems/connectionist’ models are considered as potential resolutions for the dilemmas posed in the preceding chapters. The perceived limitations of the above explanatory models set the stage for the introduction of Eastern paradigms as alternative paradigmatic explanatory models.

Chapter 6 focusses on the philosophy of ’emptiness’ of substantiality and of intrinsic meanings as the precursor to Zen Buddhist notions of ‘non-duality’. The ‘non-plurality of the world’, and the ‘non-difference of subject and object’ are shown to be inextricably co-determined by an embodied, participatory, “without-thinking”, active cognizance. Additionally, configurations of ‘potentiality’ of existence continuously subsisting substantial manifestation, and the ‘substantiality of constant change’ are shown to nullify orthodox ‘body’ to ‘mind’ dichotomies.

Chapter 7 presents the ‘body-mind’ as a stringently interactive system, manifest as body-mind impromptu selfhoods, described as a series of continuous ‘events’. Dogen’s radical view as to the indivisibility of the ‘body-mind’ system is evaluated and the issue of the “clinical body” is conceptualized as an intricate physical-mental-emotional network, defined and organized by the liminal concept of “qi”.

Chapter 8 examines ‘discursive’ versus ’embodied’ thinking. Dogen’s unique epistemological approach is introduced, stressing his concepts pertaining to a joint ‘physio-mental’ posture and to the “molting” of body and mind. Within Dogen’s category of ‘expression’ language and ‘practice’ are shown to be indivisible, welding verbal utterances with an embodied cognizance, thus creating “live words”

Chapter 9 outlines an embodied therapeutic disposition – nourished by meditative practice – conducive to furthering body-mind integration. It then focuses on Zen’s particular contribution to mutual psyche-somatic ‘attunement’ and its relation to the concepts of ‘attunement’, ‘interpretation’, as well as ‘intercorporeality’ and ‘interpenetration’ in contemporary psychotherapy. Finally, the notion of the therapist’s embodied empathic-compassionate role as constitutive of the patient’s body-mind integration and transmutation is introduced.

Chapter 10 reexamines the point of departure and the basic premises on which the entire manuscript rests. The culmination of this chapter is in outlining the epistemological, ontological, phenomenological and linguistic contributions of Zen-Buddhism to psychoanalysis’s view of the psyche-soma. These converge in the re-contextualization of ‘potentiality’, ‘change’, ‘meditative states’ and ‘constraints on language’ as comprising an infrastructure enabling the reappraisal of unresolved dilemmas and paradoxes presented in the first section of the manuscript.

A brief outline for future research and its potential implications is then presented.

https://www.routledge.com/From-Dualism-to-Oneness-in-Psychoanalysis-A-Zen-Perspective-on-the-Mind-Body/Sella/p/book/9781138579132

Yorai Sella Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, a Humanistic-integrative psychotherapist and a member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Having originally trained in Shiatsu and Oriental Medicine he founded and directed ‘Maga’ school for Zen-shiatsu therapists and is the co-founder and co-director of Dmut Institute for integrative East-West Psychotherapy. Additionally, he has practiced Tai-Chi and martial arts for the past 30 years and is a student of Zen-Buddhism.

Yorai teaches on the Self Psychology post-graduate track in the Psychotherapy Programme, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University where he also teaches a course on “Buddhist contributions to the mind-body question in psychoanalysis”. He is a member of the Israeli chapter of IAPSP, of the steering committee of the ‘Integrative Psychiatry’ service, Haemek Hospital and of ‘The Israeli Association for Interdisciplinary Psychotherapy’.

SIXTH COLUMN

The Self Psychology community has soared as its activities have accelerated and expanded. Within our Israeli community we have numerous initiatives including basic and advanced psychotherapy training programs, study groups, conferences and clinical seminars. As one of its flagship projects, the Israeli association is conducting a pioneering project called “The Human Spirit: Psychoanalytic Buddhist Training Program” in its ADAM Campus which is based in the city of Lod, and we have slowly begun to weave the threads that enable our members and students to contribute to the therapeutic needs of this town’s weakened communities.

This column is meant to serve as a platform for Israeli members to present and share their ideas, thoughts, writings and experiences, related to their clinical practice, theory and activities with the broader IAPSP community, thereby enriching our international discourse.

With great enthusiasm we hereby share with you Raanan Kulka’s speech delivered at an extraordinary and moving ceremony that took place recently for the inauguration of the 24th World Peace Bell at the Adam Campus.

The bell was awarded to the Adam Campus by the Japanese World Peace Bell Association (the first Peace Bell is located in the United Nation’s headquarters in NYC).

World Peace Bell

Adam Campus

Lod – Israel
Inauguration Ceremony

Raanan Kulka and Ven. Sangye Khadro (a budhist teacher in the “human spirit” project)

Dear guests,

I wish to welcome all of you and to thank you for coming to celebrate with us the very unique and precious event of inauguration of the World Peace Bell in Adam Campus at the city of Lod.

In 1954 the first World Peace Bell outside Japan was donated by the Japanese Association to the United Nation Headquarters in New York. Not many people know the amazing fact that the stones which formed the pedestal on which this U.N. bell was located had been specially donated by the State of Israel.

This day, a somewhat miraculous circle is closed, and the 24th bell is donated to Adam Campus, in the city of Lod, Israel. Our profound and humble gratitude to this generous donation is almost inexpressible, and we fully realize what a great commitment and obligation this donation bears with it.

This day we pledge ourselves to do whatever is humanly possible to prove worthy of the invaluable mission involved in the bell, namely, to propagate peace across this country and throughout the world, and it is with humility and with pride that we now join the global family of the World Peace Bells.

Miraculous acts of grace occur in the universe extremely rarely. A Buddhist metaphor illustrates the stupendous rarity of enlightenment by comparing its occurrence to the possibility that a wondrous sea turtle cruising in the depths of the ocean will suddenly rise to the surface in a single unique moment, and insert its snout and head into a tiny wheel that has been floating on the water for thousands of years, devotedly awaiting this very event.

The arrival of this bell, that is now before us in this plaza, has been indeed an extremely rare and serendipitous event, of a rarity as astounding as that turtle and the wheel in the ocean, if not more so. But before elucidating this event, let me tell you a few facts about bells.

Probably even fluent Hebrew speakers do not know that the body of a bell is called Zog. This is a rarely used word, originating in Midrash Rabbah, an ancient interpretation of the Old Testament Torah. The word encompasses a profound mystery, just as mysterious as the bell itself, whose very existence is a secret within a secret, concealing within its body, the Zog, the generator of its sounds, the clapper. Inbal, Hebrew for ‘clapper’, is a word whose spoken sound alone reverberates delicately within our souls with echoes of hidden treasures.

This bell before us, the one brought to us from faraway Japan, is not like all other bells. To begin with, it is a bell without a clapper, devoid of that sound-generating internal organ which, like the uvula in a human palate, facilitates the sound production of human speech. The musical notes produced by the bell now planted in the soil of the city of Lod, inside the entrance lobby of the Adam Campus building, need a human hand for their sounding. For this bell to sing its song, it needs a human, an Adam, to serve as its clapper, from the outside of its body. The rings-embraced wooden rod hanging here at our side is awaiting our human agency in order to make contact with the bell’s body so as to transform it into a ringing percussion instrument. The wooden rod and the metal body make this instrument of ours here a beautiful representative of the famous and beloved Asian bell, the Bonshō – as it is called in Japanese.

The Bonshō bell now before us has another special feature, a unique characteristic all its own. It is unlike standard bells, whose bodies have a conical shape, like a skirt starting at a narrow waist on top, descending in a wavelike motion and forming a broad outward-flaring hemline. Our bell here is formed as a strait cylinder, a shape that makes it resemble a distant and mysterious visitor, foreign in origin but one which we have been expecting urgently, coming from afar and bringing messages from other worlds.

The World Peace Bell

Bonshō bells have been the recognizable symbols of Buddhist temples in Japan for fifteen hundred years. The process of their casting in Japanese foundries is a meditative craftsmanship in itself, and families of master craftsmen have specialized in this casting expertise for generations. During the Second World War, as part of the war effort of the Japanese Empire, huge numbers of Bonshō bells had been taken away from the temples and the monasteries and melted down into raw metal for the production of weapons in service of that terrible war.

Having said that, we now can relate the special story and the unique characteristic of this bell here. It is one of 24 bells produced after the war, melted and cast in a reverse process. True, the raw material did not originate in weaponry turned into ploughshares_. However, the special Japanese association founded for the purpose of propagating the ideal of world peace, called upon all the world’s nations to contribute national coins and war medals awarded for battle exploits, and these were melted down to provide the metal for the manufacture of the bells that were then distributed across Japan and throughout the globe.

There is incredible grace infusing the manufacturing process of the world peace bells: the bells come into existence as a transformation of matter into spirit, exactly resembling the process via which we, humans, transform ourselves from self-centered persons into members of the human race, involved directly and intensely in mankind.

Immersion and Merger

The keywords of psychoanalytic self psychology are immersion and merger. These keywords denote the spiritual state of mind lifting us at the highest mode of our selfhood, the transforming mode of substitution. Is this not in fact the same kind of melting matter into spirit, melting soul into spirit, fusing soul with soul?

Unity and Oneness

The coins and war medals contributed by the world’s countries, including Israel, represent the idea of unity within multiplicity and, in addition, the idea formulated by psychoanalytical self-psychology in Israel, the idea of Oneness. This concept signifies the humane-spiritual condition in which we merely seem to be two, or three, or many, but indeed we are always one.

At the entrance to the Adam Campus building, right here by the doorway, next to the wonderful mosaic tapestry, there is this inscription:

All of us are one human tapestry – words that seek to substantiate and to assimilate the concept of Oneness.

History in a nutshell

As already mentioned, the first time a Bonshō bell appeared outside Japan’s borders was the occasion when the peace bell was installed in the United Nations plaza in New York City. The foundation for this bell was formed from stones donated by Israel, and they are still there supporting that same bell. In a certain way, today, here in Lod, we have come full circle, as if the bell itself returned to us full and complete, from top to bottom, matter and spirit, to reside in our country, in Israel.

It is particularly gratifying that Lod, a special city whose uniqueness requests recognition, is the site where the Israeli peace bell is deservedly located, so as to become a place of pilgrimage for all peace-lovers from across Israel, and from all other places in the world whence visitors come to view the wonder that is Israel, that does not cease to amaze, yet at the same time prompts troubled soul- searching: Do we maintain this place and preserve its uniqueness in the proper and just manner? with heartfelt solidarity amongst the children of Adam? with truly profound understanding that peace is the foundation of everything and for everyone – for the individuals, for their identity group, for all their human brethren?

In this place, in the Adam Campus – a place generated and constituted through a pioneering initiative of the Israel Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity – a rare combination has occurred: the “Human Spirit” project, a psychoanalytic-Buddhist training program, designed by the Association, and the actions of benefactors motivated by exceptionally rare spirit of altruistic generosity, have mutually combined to accomplish an act of benevolence that is nearly miraculous. This is an act performed by a wholly committed group of people, fully devoted to the creation of a new culture in the city of Lod, through the fundamental instillation of a fully-evolved psychoanalytical school of thought, Self Psychology. This is being done with the object of healing pains of the psyche, of generating human growth, and of promoting the collective development of the local population – and all this will make Lod the place that it deserves to be, a candid mirror of Israel as it can be for all of us.

It is no wonder that this peace bell before us has been donated by the initiators and heirs of the unique project distributing peace bells throughout the world as a consequence of their visit to Adam Campus, which since its inception as an abstract idea until its actual and material realization inspires everybody with its benevolent radiance.

Altruistic Encounters

Philanthropy, in its manifestation as an altruistic-spiritual posture, is that elusive quality which, in its pure state, tends to spin a web of additional altruism in the world. No wonder, then, that when Mr. Katsumi Sato, the representative of the Peace Bells Association, visited the Adam Campus, witnessing the pioneering vision of merging the most elaborate psychology created in the West, psychoanalysis, with the ancient Asian tradition, the twenty-five hundred years old Buddhism – no wonder, I say, that this naturally aroused the visitor’s cross-boundary altruism, like a moment of enlightenment, guiding Mr. Sato to the spontaneous decision to make the Adam Campus at Lod a beneficiary of the 24th bell in the history of the Japanese World Peace Bells Association.

Peace

A final word about the pride and satisfaction we feel here today, in Lod, for being requesters of peace rather than its pursuers. We request to achieve it, and are committed to bring it about rather than passively to await it. Nowadays, commitment for peace is considered naivete, unrealistic innocence to be avoided. But we, as self psychologists, know that when humans hold in their mind, faithfully and courageously, the configuration of an ideal and its inherent potential, it does indeed become reality. This will be the future of peace, if people will grasp it without embarrassment, without shame, without anxiety, and without discomfort at being considered naive, at being true and committed believers in the ideal of human solidarity. Only then, will peace become a living event, a growing entity; not a duty, not even a necessary duty, but a magnificent right awaiting us, beckoning us to lift it with both hands with courage that is never contaminated, but dedicates itself to the greatest duty, the greatest right, the shiniest privilege – peacemaking.

Heinz Kohut, the compassionate and wise teacher whose teachings we study for the sake of humans, all humans, stated on the first page of his first book that the object of psychoanalysis as a legacy, a science and an act of healing human beings, is to create “the realization of inner peace and happiness”. Inner peace is, then, the ultimate foundation of joy, of happiness and of peace in the world.

Let us be worthy of this basic statement, and as we embark upon our daily task at Adam Campus, let us renew constantly this right and privilege of contributing to inner peace and to world peace for all of us and for all mankind.

Yesterday, in order to achieve a good meditative preparation for today’s ceremony, I came here at midnight. I stood for a while in the dark beside this huge object hanging on its imaginatively-designed arm, and watched as it calmly awaited our welcoming ceremony. The wind was rustling in the branches of the familiar trees, like old friends, testing the newcomer and swirling around it, evidently curious and astonished by its inspiring and somewhat mystic shape. (And just to remind ourselves that ru’akh, the Hebrew word for ‘wind’, also means ‘spirit’ in Hebrew, and the adjective ‘windy’ derived from it, ru’khanni, also means ‘spiritual’ in Hebrew). At a certain moment the wind increased its speed and all of a sudden the bell responded to the windy caress with a soft, almost inaudible delicate sound of omm, enveloping me with great love that made me shed gently happy tears of gratitude.

We welcome you, the 24th Bonshō of World Peace Bells surrounding the world, with gentle love. Let us join for a couple of minutes of serene meditation.

Raanan Kulka

Raanan Kulka, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, is the visionary and chair of the ‘Human Spirit’ Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training Program.

Raanan was the chair of Israel Association for Self-Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity between the years 1997-2016.
He is a member of the International Council of the IAPSP, a former member of its Child Psychoanalysis Committee and member of the IAPSP’s teaching Research Committee.

Since 1983 Rannan has been a member of the teaching faculty of the Israel Institute of Psychoanalysis and is a founding member of its Program for Training in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis. Rannan is also a member of the teaching faculty of the Program of Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy, as well as of its division of Self psychology, at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.

Rannan has also been teaching, training, supervising and lecturing in various prestigious programs and forums, and has published and presented numerous papers in major psychoanalytical journals and events around the world.

FIFTH COLUMN

“Voices From Israel” – is an open space for our Israeli members. In the past few years, the Israeli Self Psychology community has soared as its activities have accelerated and expanded. Within our Israeli community we have numerous initiatives including basic and advanced psychotherapy training programs, study groups, conferences and clinical seminars. As one of its flagship projects, the Israeli organisation is conducting a pioneering project called “The Human Spirit: Psychoanalytic Buddhist Training Program” in its new campus which is based in the city of Lod, and we have slowly begun to weave the threads that enable our members and students to contribute to the therapeutic needs of this town’s weakened communities.

I am happy to present Sigalit Boneh’s insightful paper:
“Exploring How Selfobject Presence Per Se Enables the “Human Spirit” to Become: Experience-Near Clinical Moments with a Toddler who Suffers from Multi-Faceted Developmental Delay”. As a candidate at the “Human Spirit” psychoanalytic-Buddhist training program taking place in the city of Lod, Sigalit shares with us experience-near clinical moments from her meetings with two and a half years old Ronny. Sigalit introduces us to a unique therapeutic setting called “escort” and its relevancy to the Buddhist – Self Psychology approach, which is part of the program’s first eighteen months by describing the sessions she had with Ronny that all took place in his day to day environment rather then in the therapy room.

Exploring how Selfobject presence per se enables the “Human Spirit” to Become: Experience Near Clinical Moments with a Toddler who Suffers from Multi-Faceted Developmental Delay.

By Sigalit Boneh

“Human Spirit”, a psychoanalytic-Buddhist training program in Israel, includes for the first eighteen months an introduction to psychoanalytic therapy, in which the students meet four hours per week with a patient in an escorting framework. Instead of having the patient step out of his or her everyday milieu and come to the clinical setting and therapy room, it is the therapist who comes to him and escorts his daily routine, wherever it may be. The aim of this unique setting, which we have called ‘Escorting’, is to exercise the presence of the selfobject per se as it manifests itself in the world. I believe this has revealed a bridge that renders help and therapy more accessible to a weaker population, to people who experience suffering and deprivation, yet are unable of their own accord to cross the gap between the reality of their life and the therapy room – be it physical, economic, emotional or cultural. In my case, the bridge became a two-way crossing and after a year and a half of escorting, both the escorted patient and I were able to move on to psychoanalytic treatment at the clinic. However, I here wish to focus on the escorting part, especially its beginning, and to observe more closely how the manifestation of the selfobject of a toddler, diagnosed as autistic, formed his emotional space and reinstituted his connection with the human world.

I first met Rony when he was two and a half years old, a toddler who suffered from multi-faceted developmental delay and was diagnosed as autistic. To the observer he is clearly a child well-cared for and loved by his parents, always clean and beautifully dressed, yet his face and his eyes are void of expression. He doesn’t raise his eyes or present his face to the other. He lacks any face-to-face encounters, and precludes any such encounter with anyone seeking it.

Instead, his face carries bruises and sores, traces of his encounter with the world. Things collide with his face, they strike him before his eyes perceive them. Or, conversely, when he tries to reach or make contact with something, he falls down in the alien space between him and the object. He has no body image, no awareness of the space he is in. Rony is in constant motion, running from one thing to another. He falls, gets hit, collapses, is thrown off his course. He doesn’t express pain or opposition, and he doesn’t stop, he just continues forward and onward in quick motion. I imagined him as a consciousness lost in time and space, shapeless and unattached, moving ceaselessly in a stubborn attempt to encounter something familiar, comprehensible and permanent, where it could reside and rest.

When I began working with Rony, I myself completely entered the space he occupied, body and soul, and learned to see the world through his eyes, predicting his intentions and the path of his movements. My experienced hands learned how to complete the spaces for him so that he wouldn’t fall, to move aside the barriers in his way, to open the doors and gates, to hit all the right switches, so as to provide him with an open space in which he could function in the world.

At the nursery school, covering the big door that exits to the play yard, is a large, wide, rolling electric shutter. This shutter was Rony’s most beloved object and I learned to see it from his perspective: it is a rational, amazing mechanism of immense movement that lurches upward and then comes all the way down, without the force of gravity, without weight or effort, and it is operated by a small, comprehensible movement of one finger on the switch. The movement of the shutter embodies the partaking and enjoying of the beauty and force of motion in the world together with the pleasure of individual competence, of mastering initiative and action. The ideals together with grandiosity, the two facets of the experience of the self, are here intertwined inseparably.

Of course, the nursery school children were forbidden to touch the switch, which was located high up on the wall, far from the reach of Rony’s willing hands. However, at times when the two of us were alone in the nursery school, a different set of rules took hold. Immersing myself in Rony’s perspective spawned a single body that was able to easily and safely allow Rony’s finger to reach the switch, for no other reason than to enable him to be both the doer and the witness of this wondrous motion in the world.

According to Kohut, in the first archaic stage the connection between the self and the selfobject is that of merger. The other does not exist as a separate entity, but rather as an extension that, through its presence, can determine whether or not a self-body will emerge, which functions as a cohesive unit of orientation and movement in the world. I do not exist as yet in Rony’s consciousness, but he does. In answer to my question, “Who opened/closed the shutter?” he replied happily and proudly, “Shutter… I”. The clearly defined movements in the world generated a coherent self-body experience within him that manifested itself in his answer, “I”. Indeed, the cohesive and coherent movements also gave birth to language and words.

Immediately after this cohesive self-body emerge, he discovers that within this space between him and the shutter there is also the other person, someone who knows and feels with all her heart the immensity of this amazing occurrence. At that moment Rony has no problem lifting his gaze up at me, presenting his face to me, all lit up with excitement and joy, and discovering that my face too registers and reflects the same feelings. This is a more advanced stage in which the self is emerged, not by the merger with the body of the other, but by his/her resonating glance. The merger with the selfobject is based on similitude or twinship.

The shutter, just one example out of many, illustrates how Rony’s face-to-face encounter was born and became something so simple and accessible to him. As if he had never had a developmental problem in making eye contact, as if this complex function had simply been superfluous and void of significance. Opening up the empathic channel between him and the other is what returned this function to Rony all at once, and not just between us. Rony became an open child, talking and communicative, full of love and happiness towards the other, so much so that his diagnosis and placement in the educational framework changed. That isn’t to say that all his problems were solved and all the developmental gaps were closed. However, today Rony has no communication problems. On the contrary, his relationship with adults and later on with his peers became his strong points.

I may add that in relating to the shutter, other aspects were included – shape and body, motion and space. I couldn’t imagine that, already then, it contained far broader meanings that had also waited for an empathic resonance in order to be born. A few days later, while all the children and staff were in the play yard, Rony sneaked inside, climbed on a chair and from there on to a table and pressed the electric switch himself. The shutter that came down confined everyone to the yard, while he remained inside, in sole control of the switch. I was later called in for a talk and duly reprimanded. Of course I understood and was very sorry about the potential danger and the discomfort caused to the children and staff. Yet part of me was glad and even laughed at the rather humorous situation that Rony had staged.

Beyond the motion in space and its physical existence, opening and closing the shutter also contained a certain wrangling and dramatization of questions that unfold in the expanse of human and emotional existence. Who is included and belongs, and who is excluded and locked out? Who here is captive in the world of will of the other and who lets his own will lead and determine? I know this also because these issues were repeatedly dramatized in clearer ways during our joint work later on, especially when analysis began. But that belongs to another chapter.

Before ending, I would like to describe another much-loved situation, which took place at the end of a day’s vacation from nursery school, while I was at Rony’s home, involved in all the routine activities of a toddler and his caregiver – playing together, going to the toilet, lunch and a shower – life. As the afternoon nap was approaching, Rony, washed and relaxed, with the sweet fragrance of all beloved infants, was lying on his bed, watching the children’s channel. There, in that animated world, the lawn is always green and the water is always blue. The animals are colored pink and light blue and they jump around, chatter and laugh in sweet voices. Rony laughs with pleasure, his hand seeks out and finds mine, as if he is saying to me, ‘Look, look’. ‘I see a little boy, I see the sweetness, the open wisdom, the pleasurable laughter and the life within you’, my hand says to his hand through its loving touch. He turns his head and looks into my eyes with surprise. And for a moment, once again, all the beauty of the world is spread out between his eyes and mine.

And what do the Buddhist studies contribute to this observation? In order for Rony to be able to live in an actual reality, clearly he must develop a cohesive self. To the question of who opened/closed the shutter, he gives the answer, “I”. He doesn’t know nor needs to know that behind his finger not only I am standing, but also all the teachers in the program – the psychologists and the Buddhist monks, the supervisors, the steering committee, the generous donor who made this program possible, the city’s welfare and educational personnel, Rony’s parents, and also of course Kohut in his philosophy and spirit, Emmanuel Levinas, Raanan Kulka, the Buddha Nature… and so much more, without an end. In the ultimate reality there is an entire world standing behind him and, and as in Barak Obama’s campaign slogan says: “Yes (together) we can!”

Sigalit Boneh is a candidate in “Human Spirit” Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training program in Israel. She is a clinical psychologist and supervisor, member of the Israel Association for Self Psychology and Graduated Self Psychology Psychotherapy Track at the Tel Aviv university. She has been the chief Psychologist in the psychosocial service for residential education, and was involved in the development of guidance and treatment of adolescents in boarding schools.

FOURTH COLUMN

This time, I will present a short paper written by myself which deals with the ethical aspect of the poetic gesture and its relevancy for the Psychoanalytic field (walking at the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee and Stanley Cavell).

Poetics as a Bridge between Man and World
The Ethical Aspect of the Poetic Gesture and its Possible Application in the
Psychoanalytical thinking and Practice

(walking in the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee and Stanley Cavell)

Orly Shoshani

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are,
which is, as yet nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of
knocking together a bridge. (J. M. Coetzee)¹

In the collection of stories written by John Maxwell Coetzee, the South African writer and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature (2003) titled “Elizabeth Costello”, Coetzee states that “People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on” ².

But what about the times when the horizon is hidden in a heavy mist and the far bank is covered by darkness? What if we are trapped in between, in a place that is in fact, nowhere?

While sitting inert in his seat, his arms hugging the upper part of his body as though he would otherwise be tossed to the ground like a rag doll, Dan who came to me for therapy following a long period of deep and continuous depression, would asked me this question: “What is the point of talking at all?”
As much as his silence terrified him, words were even worse. They are strident to his ears. They had become dead, disconnected signs. No word was the right one. No word sounded different to the previous one.

This unbearable experience of a person’s disassociation from his world, indefinite detachment from time and space, is expressed by Fernando Pessoa in these lines from his poem Magnificent:

When will this drama without theatre
– Or this theatre without drama – end
So that I can go home?
Where? How? When? ³

Poetic sensitivity serves Pessoa and other artists as a bridge across the abyss of despair, reinstating themselves, and us along with them, in the centre, in the heart of the world. This is the responsibility imposed upon the artist, as it is upon us the therapists.

In this paper I will try to ask what that poetic sensitivity is, that enables the artist to see what we often find it hard to see, and how we can learn to empathize if we walk in their footsteps. I will be using the work of Coetzee, focusing on the fabulous collection of stories Elizabeth Costello, particularly the chapters of “What is Realism” and the two section of “The Lives of Animals: “The Philosophers and the Animals”, and “The Poets and the Animals”. ⁴

Back to Dan: Slowly over the years, sensation relate to events, breathing and looks converge; we breathe life into the fallen letters that hang between us that symbolize Dan’s exclusion, the hushed sound of a mental breakdown. In situations so tragic that possible horizons of existence are blurred, foggy to the point of despair, we as selfobject are required to be poets. “So the poet at work is an expectation” wrote Paul Valéry, “he is transition within a man… His ear speaks to him… We wait for the unexpected word – which cannot be foreseen but must be a waited”.⁵

This state of openness toward the yet unheard, this transition that occurs in a person
which we, the therapists, also long for in order to openly listen to the distant echoes that were laid out beneath the despair of the adult within the child, which absorb any possible imagined future⁶, is described in a great sensitivity by Coetzee who gives it a name, calling it “Poetic Invention”⁷: the opportunity found rooted in the heart of one’s humanity, to always be towards open possibilities. Coetzee also presents the implications of disengagement from these opportunities as a result of traumatic events imposed on us, or a worldview, a perception which impedes us.

In Elizabeth Costello, and in the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s essay⁸ in which he responds to Coetzee stories in the collection that relate to “The Lives of Animals”, I find some challenging and enlightening ideas regarding questions that relate to the connection between poetics and ethics, which both Coetzee and Cavell address, as well as to the possible applications that emerge from their writing to psychoanalysis and clinical practices.

Coetzee presents us with ethical challenges that stem from our entrenchment within the constraints of the epistemic approach that characterizes all fields of research and modern thinking, showing how these constraints might endanger us through our denial of the suffering of others, and the loss of the potential inherent in our existence as human beings. It also delineates a possible way of extraction from these contingent constrictions that are expressed in language, and sometimes it is language that perpetuates them. Perhaps, Coetzee suggests, intellectual tradition is nothing but a “language game” ⁹ amongst other possibilities, and that it is not necessarily the language that awards us accessibility to the secrets of existence. The poetic invention is suggested here, following Coetzee, as an ethical practice which we, too, can adopt. The creative work, and it’s prominence of shape and unique aesthetics, allow us to delve in. It is a product of the artist’s poetic sensitivity which translates into a tendency to deviate from herself and move much more flexibly than we do in between the different language games.

The artist’s flexibility is testimony to his openness, to his being more exposed than we are and ready to be touched.

The liberty of the poet allows him an overview, extracting it for us from the one dimensional reality of the vernacular. Due to the aesthetic uniqueness of the poetic gesture, it can reflect the most personal aspects of our being while raising questions relating to the existential condition of man in the world, exposing us to what Cavell calls “Inordinate Knowledge”‘ which he defines as “knowledge that can seem excessive in its expression, in contrast to… archived knowledge” and without which we might live detached from aspects of our world.

Coetzee certainly recognizes the quality of writing and the power of fiction. and through the fictional figure of Costello, a brave Australian writer, he shows how it is precisely fiction that helps us see things as they are. Coetzee himself told the story of Costello for the first time, when he was invited to lecture before University of Princeton Academy members. He evidently needed her, a fictional character, in order to ensure that they listen to that which infuriates and perturbs the banal and the habitual. It could be that his outcry, which he surely feared would not be heard, he voiced by means of Costello, through her he dared to disturb the ordinary. Through Costello’s voice, Coetzee demonstrates to his reader the unbearable and disturbing analogy between the tragedy of animals, and the mechanisms of the Third Reich. In these stories, Coetzee raises difficult questions about our ability to be humane when we refuse to suffer the pain of others. We try to protect ourselves at the cost of losing the connection with other persons, and with animals, that he sees as our allies in life on earth we all are rooted and embodied with. Coetzee, and following him Cavell, do not stop at the discussion of animals but ask: what is the responsibility of those who have language?

These are the opening words of Costello to the members of the academy:

In the lecture I then gave. (Referring to a lecture given some years before) I had reason to
refer to the great fabulist Franz Kafka, and in particular to his story ‘Report to an
Academy’, about an educated ape, Red Peter, who stands before the members of a learned
society telling the story of his life – of his ascent from beast to something approaching
man. On that occasion I felt a little like Red Peter myself, and said so. Today that feeling is
even stronger ¹⁰.

And in response to the frivolous comments heard in the audience, Costello proceeds:

the remark that I feel like Red Peter – was intended. I did not intend it ironically. It means what it says. I say – what I mean. I am an old woman, I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not Mean.¹¹

Costello is a renowned writer who embarks on journeys around the world, lecturing about the tragedy of animals led to slaughter, prepared for chopping and packaging on production lines in the slaughter houses behind the suburbs, about which we may know but mostly are not aware of.

Costello presents us with the challenge, but also outlines the way, by inviting us to see her not just as an old woman, but as another facet of her humanity: to see her as Red Peter, as a wounded animal. The poetic space Coetzee creates enables us to experience the most personal and the most collective anguished that are possible at the same time. And indeed, Elizabeth Costello cries out the cry of the individual who is struggling for humanity in a world devoid of compassion, that of Coetzee, of Kafka, of Red Peter and the animals led to slaughter, exposing herself to criticism and rejection in the reality of the fiction. Her outcry is accompanied by a growing sense of unease. Costello’s brave intent, her meaning of every word she says, allows us to bridge the gap that exists among people, and between man and world. Cavell, following Wittgenstein, claims that when words are brought with their full meaning, something else happens than when they are presented merely in literal terms. “When we mean something, it’s like going up to someone”.¹² Avoiding this intention means forgoing the opportunity to be open towards horizons of existed and it decrees a state of confinement as a form of defense that protects us from the horror. Hanging onto ourselves, we lose something of our humanity.

The authors, says Coetzee, know how to bring themselves to become the living body by the process of “poetic invention that mingles breath and sense”.¹³ Coetzee views authors and poets in the realm of those who are awake to these gaps in which we fall asleep. Costello explains to the Academy members that by glorifying the intellectual concepts, preferring them over humane gesture, we forget the embodiment of the imprisoned ape used for research, Peter the Red. We are not shocked by the information. we cannot experience intellectual concepts.

Costello suggests us to learn from the poets who can achieve the empathic experience we are looking for. This ability of the artists paves the way for us too. Costello recommends that we follow them so that we can sense the living vibrations, the ripples, which poetic sensitivity can restore to the experience. We too, can offer ourselves to the being of the embodied soul, we can “bring the living body into being within our self”.¹⁴ One of the names for this experience of full being says Coetzee, is joy.¹⁵

When Dan came to see me for the first time, he said in a feeble voice, “I have nothing to say”. To my response “You are here”, he replied, “This is the last chance”. Dan placed in my hands the full weight of the grief that enveloped the primordial joy: a soul embodied in flash emerges – Birth. I felt the weight of responsibility placed on my shoulders, to pave new ways, to build bridges, to follow the poets.

Costello describes the poet Ted Hughes’ well known poem “The Jaguar”¹⁶ as an example of experience-near poetic work, where the poet devotes himself to the being of the jaguar in the cage. We can’t experience concepts, but through immersing ourselves in the singular experience of the particular being of the Jaguar we can enrich the platonic ideal of Jaguarism.

By his poetic sensitivity, Hughes gives life to the jaguar as Kafka gives life to Red Peter, and Coetzee to Costello. This capability, which stems from the heart of our humanity, may be the result of us being rooted in life as we are rooted in each other, sharing “the substrate of life”, as Coetzee claims.¹⁷

References

¹ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello ,New York: Viking, 2003, 1.
² Ibid
³ Fernando Pessoa, A Little larger than the Entire Universe, New York: Penguin, (2006).
⁴ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Viking, 2003
⁵ Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, Volume 7, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985, 174.
⁶ “Self-Psychology has discovered the despair of the adult in the depth of the child – the actuality of
the future. the child whose selfobject failures is, in his depression, mourning as unlived, unfulfilled
future.”
Heintz Kohut, The Search of the Self, ed. Paul H. Ornstein,V. 3, London: Karnac, 2011, 390.
⁷ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Viking, 2003, 98
⁸ Stanley Cavell; A touch of Words, In: Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, ed. William Day and Victor J.
Krebs Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010
⁹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 1977, §7.
¹⁰ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello New York: Viking, 2003, 62.
¹¹ Ibid
¹² Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation. Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 1977, §455.
¹³ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Viking, 2003, 98.
¹⁴ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Viking, 2003, 98.
¹⁵ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Viking, 2003, 78.
¹⁶ Ted Hughes, Collected poem by Ted Hughes New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux pub, 2003.
¹⁷ John Maxwell Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Viking, 2003, 80.

THIRD COLUMN

Our recently launched column – “Voices From Israel” – is an open space for our Israeli members. In the past few years, the Israeli Self Psychology community has soared as its activities have accelerated and expanded. Within our Israeli community we have numerous initiatives including basic and advanced psychotherapy training programs, study groups, conferences and clinical seminars. As one of its flagship projects, the Israeli organisation is conducting a pioneering project called “The Human Spirit: Psychoanalytic Buddhist Training Program” in its new campus which is based in the city of Lod, and we have slowly begun to weave the threads that enable our members and students to contribute to the therapeutic needs of this town’s weakened communities.

We are happy to present the abstract for Adina Halevi’s inspirational article. In her paper, Adina wishes to expose us to the possibilities that Self Psychology approach offers us by its a prioi state towards the human self as an infinite spiritual being. When the therapist holds this stand regarding the human spirit, an existential opportunity can open up during the clinical situation even for whom life circumstances were especially difficult. Adina does so by sharing with us a therapeutic encounter with a young woman which she conducted.

The complete version of this paper is available at:
http://www.selfpsychology.org.il/You-re-a-good-girl-and-you-re-at-home.html

Abstract: “You’re a good girl and you’re at home”
On creating a psychic home when resources are deficient

Adina Halevy, MSW.

Knowing that first and foremost, self psychology sees in Man an infinite spiritual being and as such, one who can attain a supra-individual existence along with the possibility of accepting “destiny” as a “given” in which the dimension of choice is present, constitutes for me a home port, an assurance of anchor when setting sail into the heart of the storm of the human drama.

The young woman described, lives life under poor circumstances. She is deprived in every parameter: welcome to the world, familial background and physical health.

The goal of the paper dealing with a unique existential therapeutic encounter is to shed light on the question of where one draws vitality under difficult conditions, when the initial matrices, maternal and genetic, into which one is born are deficient.

What defined by Kohut as Courage and “transformations of narcissism”- may explain her viability in spite shortage of primal resources.

Entanglement developed in this therapeutic encounter, in spite of the different cultural and religious backgrounds of the patient and therapist, enabled us to sit together within the folds of the tent of Abraham, our common father.

This paper was presented at the IAPSP conference held in Jerusalem on October 2014 .The complete version of the paper is available at: http://www.selfpsychology.org.il/You-re-a-good-girl-and-you-re-at-home.html

You are all welcome to comment on this paper at:

Adina Halevy, MSW. Served as a clinical social-worker of the Psychiatric wing of Hadassah Medical Center (2001-2011). Since 2001 is working in her private practice as a psychotherapist for adolescents and adults. She is also a Supervisor at The International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential. Lectures and writes on the interface between psychoanalysis and the arts, mainly poetry and language.

SECOND COLUMN

We are pleased to publish our second article, written by Chaim Aharonson, which deals with the tremendous potential contained in a Self Psychology approach applied to the education field.
In his paper, Chaim shares with us ideas supported by practical examples derived from his years of experience, as part of working as a psychoanalyst with teams of education professionals

This is a short version of the paper. The complete version of this paper is available at:
http://www.selfpsychology.org.il/Self-Psychology-outside-the-Consulting-Room.html

Self Psychology outside the Consulting Room: Teachers as selfobjects who create a generation committed to ‘selfobjecting’
Chaim Aharonson

This paper discusses the potential contribution of Self Psychology to the field of education. Through recorded practical experience, the paper examines ways of encouraging teachers to become selfobjects for their pupils.

How can teachers help their pupils develop these goals in such a way as to allow them to choose to do so for themselves? How can they help them become men and women with values without impinging on their self-fulfillment? These are serious issues, with philosophical, pedagogic, scholarly, and psychological ramifications.

Those of us influenced by various psychoanalytic approaches – specifically Self Psychology – ask how teachers can become selfobjects for their students. In the following examples, I will share my experiences – some are mine and some involve my colleague, Dr. Noah Weitson – a dear and modest man with extensive knowledge as an educational and clinical psychologist who works with groups of teachers. The central aim of our project is to promote a dialogue between teachers and pupils and to encourage and enhance the teacher as a selfobject for the pupils. From time to time, I shall elucidate the principles we were attempting to apply and the insights we gained during the interactions.

We met for a series of meetings with teachers in elementary and middle schools from the Jewish and Arab sectors, working with training teachers and young teachers who had just embarked on their career paths. We sought to be attentive to the teachers’ experiences in their complex encounter with their students, encouraging them to bring dialogues they had had with them – whether short exchanges linked to discipline issues or longer ones, such as getting to know them more deeply. We also encouraged them to meet with the pupils. It was important for us to examine how each interaction with a student included additional latent and deeper meanings that was not originally apparent to them.

Some of the teachers were apprehensive about meeting with the pupils, fearing that the disciplinary stance would be compromised and that they would lose authority and control. Some teachers were worried that they had no skills to conduct a dialogue with their pupils, being called upon to enter a world of relationships and intimacy without having the ability to do this. They understood that to enter into a dialogue, a relationship, meant that they would have to change. In writing about the first analytic session, Ogden (1989) remarks that the therapist’s deepest anxiety is not that the patient will leave but that he will in fact stay. Our teachers similarly feared engaging in any intimacy or meeting the various conscious and unconscious parts of the pupil. Meeting the ‘other’ and themselves at a new depth was an intimidating experience for them. So we had to relate to their need to defend and protect themselves. The continuous meeting between people who are meaningful to one another – therapist-patient, teacher-pupil – always oscillates between opportunities for growth and transformation and difficulty and pain.

We deliberated with the workshop participants whether a new kind of meeting between teacher and pupil was in fact possible, since we all bring to relationships internalizations, attitudes, and worldviews. In the workshop, we not only thought about this in the context of the teacher-pupil relationship, but also how these things played out between us, the group leaders and the teachers in the workshop. We also pointed to the fact that a new meeting was actually possible: we could contain and suspend sides within us, open ourselves up to something foreign and different than us, and learn to empathize and conduct a deep dialogue with the other, both outside and inside ourselves.

It was important for us to deal with the teachers’ experiences with their pupils – to locate the areas of friction where it was difficult to be empathetic and identify the teachers’ ability to understand deeply or unrecognized skills or knowledge. In order to help the teachers become the selfobject for their pupils, it is not enough to speak about ideals. You must enter into their simple, daily experiences – which include frustration and struggle.

We asked the teachers to bring examples. As an example of a simple interaction – one that may easily get lost in the day to day pressures and stress that a teacher faces – we can imagine a case in which a student in math class suddenly blurts out: “Oof, I don’t feel like doing math now.” In such a situation, the teacher can ask himself “Why doesn’t he feel like doing this?,” the teacher can completely ignore his outburst and tell him to get on with the exercise, or he can tell him: “Well, sometimes I don’t feel like doing math either, but right now you have to do the exercise.”

If we focus on the student’s statement, we may perhaps think it is insignificant or not deserving attention. We could ask ” What doesn’t he like?- The class?- The encounter with the teacher,-or with other students?” Is it a way of expressing some sort of difficulty and if so, what? What does he feel like doing? Is he missing something else by being in the lesson? Does this happen to him in other contexts? When? With whom? Does it matter to me at all that he feels this way? Do I want to tell him something about that? Is there a place in the learning relationship for such feelings? Will the learning be affected if I engage him in a conversation about what he said? Do I even have the tools to talk about it?

Numerous considerations exist here with regard to the teacher’s role in a such a situation in relation to his professional beliefs – his hesitations in regard to the relevance of the comment to the learning process, the importance he attaches to the child’s feelings, his familiarity with the student’s response, his self-confidence. The most significant question, however, is the teacher’s willingness to engage with the student in order to try and understand him. There is never a situation where the teacher has no influence. There is no situation we can call neutral.

The fate of just such a moment rests first and foremost, of course, on the emotions aroused in the teacher. If we assume that he is hurt by the remark, he will feel frustrated and disappointed because he’s taken time to prepare the lesson, the student is important to him, and he has invested effort in equipping him with tools and skills. Unwittingly and unconsciously, he may begin to feel unmotivated, find his enthusiasm ebbing, begin ignoring the student, and become critical of him. Such responses can occur outside the teacher’s conscious awareness and represent his unconscious attempt to cope with the pain, frustration, and disappointment he feels towards the pupil.

If the teacher wants to resolve the situation and find out precisely what the student meant – even if only later when he is alone with him – something new and unexpected can occur. As we know from our clinical work, such behaviours and statements are only the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Understanding teachers as potential selfobjects expands the teaching experience to include students’ individual development as an intrinsic component of teaching, so that in turn the students could become themselves selfobjects for others. This paper elaborates on the importance of creating a dialogue between teacher and pupil, as well as, on the importance of the dialogue with the self. It suggests how teachers can find their own ways of establishing a path to each individual student, and explains why it is essential for teachers to understand themselves and their reactions to different situations, before they can assist others.

The teacher’s sensitivity to the individual student and to his or her unique character and problems, forms the basis of any potent connection between teacher and student. Such a connection, that will always be based in an affective dialogue, should be “open” on both ends, that of the teacher and that of the student. In order to become emphatic selfobjects, teachers must develop a sincere relationship with their students, so that they may be optimally responsive to their specific needs and talents. Finally, by way of some prominent examples, it is stressed that this development in teacher-student communication has the ability to influence not only the student and teacher, but also their entire surroundings.

Chaim Aharonson is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and his main focus is on pupil – teacher relationships.

FIRST COLUMN

I am pleased to introduce a new column “Voices From Israel,” an open space for our Israeli members. In the past few years, the Israeli Self Psychology community has soared as its activities have accelerated and expanded. Within the Israeli community we have numerous initiatives including basic and advanced psychotherapy training programs, study groups, conferences and clinical seminars. Recently we have launched our pioneering project “The Human Spirit – Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training Program” in our new campus which has come to life in the city of Lod. We have slowly begun to weave the threads that enable our members and students to contribute to the therapeutic needs of this town’s weakened communities.

The column will serve as a platform for Israeli members to present and share their ideas, thoughts, writings and experiences, related to their clinical practice, theory and activities with the broader IAPSP community, thereby enriching our international discourse.

We are happy to open our column with Claudia Kogan’s article, “On Human Goodness: From Super-Ego to Idealization,” which deals with the enormously valuable question of how the nature of human goodness is seen in the psychoanalytic field. Claudia outlines and elucidates the contribution of self psychology to this issue through theoretical and clinical examinations.

This is a short version of the paper. The complete version of this paper is available at:
http://www.selfpsychology.org.il/On-Human-Goodness-%E2%80%93From-Super-Ego-to-Idealization.html

On Human Goodness: From Super-Ego to Idealization
Claudia Kogan

More than two decades ago a very dear patient presented me with a parting gift at the end of her treatment. Since then this gift has accompanied and heartened my thoughts and heart.

It was a splendid edition of The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

Over the years her symbolic act has received various meanings, in accordance with my winding professional journey; and so I have looked upon the magical narrative as analogous to the therapeutic process. Initially, I perceived the therapeutic constellation as resembling the journey taken by Dorothy and her friends to seek that which from the start lies hidden deep inside them, but which they ‘mistakenly’ try to find outside themselves, in the belief that it will be given to them by someone else.

As I grew personally and professionally however, I looked more closely at the same journey itself, almost from the opposite angle, at the way in which significant experiences and encounters enter our lives, constituting a foundation from which to discover ourselves and realize our hidden potential. I mean of course, the presence of selfobjects.

Now, I have become intrigued by another aspect of the book: Dorothy and her friends, who captivate all our hearts, together constitute a description of all the fundamental components that create the person as a whole. Thus, the Scarecrow, who is seeking his brain, his intelligence and rationality; the Tin Man, who is seeking his heart, the ability to feel emotion; and finally, the Lion, who is yearning to find his courage.

Rationality and emotion, or reason vs instinct/drive, can be seen as the central foundations that totally define the individual.

The presence of courage however, is more difficult to understand. How can one explain the fact that this is the third request? Outwardly it does not seem to have the same level of importance as rationality and emotion. It appears to be too specific a trait in comparison with the two other basic components of our human existence. However, is this true? Are we talking about just a small, local caprice of the lion? In this article I shall argue that the opposite is true, that what occurs in The Wizard of Oz is that the Lion’s wish , significantly and radically alters the picture by introducing the loftiest and most sublime, that which defines our human quality, the foundation that emphasizes the best of mankind, that which distinguishes those who wish, as did the Lion, to find the ability to go beyond their own narcissism, beyond their own limits in order to be there for their others for meaningful purposes, and for the sake of their values and ideals.

The Lion symbolizes the way in which man is able, and even needs, to expand his ethical capabilities as a fundamental act of being alive, of living a life derived from listening to the core of his self(6) in order to create a life that enables the fullest realization of the human potential hidden inside him.

Thus, too, has Self Psychology, rescued our perception of mankind from the cyclical/repetitive-mechanistic perspective (instinct vs reason), and succeeded also to include man’s ideals and values as an essential component.

Thus, being a good-hearted person, or attempting to live according to one’s values / principles is not an artificial occurrence or a complex product of one’s attempt to curb or repress drives; but rather, it might be the very meaning of one’s being, and as such it requires recognition and nurturing. Now, following this introduction, we must not forget that which Dorothy herself sought on her journey in the Land of Oz. Little orphaned Dorothy’s greatest wish was to return home. However, it is only when both heart and head are in the right place, and the possibility to believe in human solidarity returns, that she can return home, for it is only there that her complete existence as a human being is enabled.

The present paper provides a clinical and theoretical examination of the relation between goodness and human nature through the clinical illustration of Moran:
A young woman in her early twenties, impressive in her outstanding intellectual abilities, arrived for treatment in the wake of heavy feelings of depression, lack of vitality, a sense of not belonging, and constant overall suffering. Prominent in her initial presentation was the feeling that she was flawed and “wrong”, as well as a critical view of others.

What became apparent during the course of therapy is that her parents, who later divorced, created an atmosphere that was highly critical and chaotic. There was never a consistent basis for criticism; it was something that could descend on anyone at any time for any reason. This phenomenon weakened the entire home, which became a battlefield in which sarcastic comments and hurtful remarks flew in every direction. This phenomenon can be conceptualized as a chronic deficit affecting the selfobject needs for both mirroring and idealization.

Moran oscillated between guilt feelings and outbursts of rage, leaving her with the sense that she was alternately wicked, flawed or crazy, or worse yet, all three simultaneously.

Treatment illuminated many of the prosocial activities Moran engages in within her community and society as a whole: she volunteers, demonstrates for causes, and is involved in various projects close to her heart. She frequently sheds tears when speaking about the suffering of others to whom fate has not been kind. These activities and traits of her personality are of course all subjected to criticism and scorn by the family. On many occasions they attack her and force her into unpleasant reactions .The gap between her empathic stance for the suffering people that she meets as an activist, and the rage that erupts from her during the attacks on her in her home, is the source of the rupture within herself and results in her experiencing herself as forever damaged.

The therapeutic approach taken here focuses on recognizing and appreciating her willingness to act according to her principles. In the complete version is a clinical vignette from two sessions that occurred during the first year of Moran’s therapy.

The topic of goodness and human nature constitutes an essential concern for therapists and patients alike. In particular, the concept of idealization within the framework of psychoanalytic self psychology is contrasted with the structural-model concept of the super-ego. Self psychology postulates that the need to possess a purpose larger than oneself and to become an integral contributor to the human tapestry is a fundamental and inherent self need, and not a product of external influence that is in opposition to primal instincts and impulses as conceptualized by classic psychoanalysis. This theoretical shift has wide-ranging implications for clinical practice. To explore these implications, developmental and psychopathological perspectives concerning the concept of idealization in self psychology are considered and illustrated via clinical cases.

The paper is based on the theoretical assumption that the individual is a product of other individuals’ presence, who offer themselves as selfobjects. When these selfobjects provide a nurturing presence, the individual can exploit the human potential hidden within him or her.

The therapists should observe the human ethical stance not as something that is contrary to human nature, but rather as a manifestation of the fundamental essence of human self-motivation. It suggests that accepting values and ideals as essential elements in human existence may considerably advance the therapeutic process.
This is why the paper rejects the categorical understanding of people who try to do good as “pleasers”. For goodness is not a side-effect but a cause and reason that stimulates different actions independently. Therefore, the clinical approach presented in the article regards the patient’s generosity, courage, kindness etc. as a central subject in therapeutic interventions.

Based on clinical experience as shown in the clinical vignette, the paper shows how the therapist may create a calming presence, and a mirroring of the patients’ beliefs and values, which can bring about the transformation of their self-understanding.

The therapeutic process assists patients in recognizing their own goodness as a trait, and not as reactions to something, enabling them to enhance and develop these traits as a goal of its own. This leads to the avoidance of possible feelings of guilt that may derive from regarding acts of goodness as motivated by self-interests or personal gain. Therapy can guide the patients in this process of transformation, helping them accept the trait of goodness as an essential part of the Self.

Recognizing human aspiration to do good is part of what the therapeutic process should offer. Once patients perceive themselves through the understanding that goodness is a vital component of their psyche, they can move on, using their goodness, not as an external action but as a goal, with no other interests besides the aspiration to help, contribute, and assist others.

If we adopt the position that our holding and believing in values and ideals is inherent in being human, then psychotherapeutic practice must recognise our patients’ expressions of idealization as a way to acknowledge their ethical stance as basic to their existence, and that such expressions reflect their deep desire to live in a position of supra-individual participation in the world. Their being good people does not cover anything else, at least most of time. To interpret for our patients the unconscious motives for their values and ideals conveys a message that these are only ‘a story that man sells himself’ in order not to see his own naked drives, and that those same ideals are an alien product to the human psyche. Rather, the position suggested here is that this is an essential need.

I believe that it is important to observe this individual, the patient, as one whose dominant basic component is that of sensitivity and empathy towards other human beings. Consequently, it is possible that sometimes this is an individual who in childhood was ‘exploited’ by his environment for the selfobject needs of those surrounding him. Thus, even if there is something that has become distorted in his personality, one should not doubt the deep and real basis of his kind heart.

Consequently, deriving from the conceptual infrastructure conveyed here, a clinical approach is constructed that locates the patient’s generosity, courage, desire to be kind to those around him, and the human warmth that emanates from him, as a central subject in therapeutic interventions.