Healing the Psyche?

If we define the psyche as the individual’s inner theatre of representations ― thoughts, feelings, wishes and fantasies ― then what does it mean to heal the psyche? The notion of healing is itself not unproblematic, and needs some thoughtful consideration.

There is a sense in which our psyche continuously strives to mend itself, even if unsuccessfully (that is, even when it never achieves the success it fantasizes is possible). As humans, we are, whether we realize it or not, almost constantly seeking ― desiring, or thinking about ― ways to heal. To make ourselves feel better, more integrated, more whole. Although sometimes framed as futuristic fantasy ― a utopian condition of our being ― more often than not, our own healing is self‑theorized in terms of reversion. That is, we think of it as a ‘return’ to a harmonious state in which ― so we typically believe ― we once resided or could have resided. It is as if we believe in the possibility ― past or future ― of a state of absolute euphony or internal concord, for which there is little or no present evidence.

These efforts at healing may be mundane or exotic, profane or sacred, modest or audacious, immanent or transcendent. A good night’s sleep, a nutritious meal, a restful vacation, more fulfilling work with appropriate reward, a deep and exciting connection with a perfect lover, fulfilment of a cherished ideal or vision, prayerful connection with a dimension that is divine, and so on. These are the means by which we believe we will alleviate or even resolve the struggles, conflicts, tensions, traumas ― the sources of dissension, anguish and torment ― that we harbour within ourselves. They are ways by which we believe we might return to a ‘healthy’ state of harmony that perhaps only manifests itself as an ultimacy in our myths and our dreams.

If the positivity of notions such as ‘health’ and ‘return to health’ has an inherently mythic or fantasy‑imbued quality (the exemplar of which, par excellence, is our diverse beliefs about an afterlife), then perhaps it is more realistic to define healing in terms of what it is not. That is, to define what healing cannot be, if it is to be authentic (and not some seductive but fraudulent or specious solution). Three tenets are relevant here, and they must be kept in focus if we are to understand why ― authentic ― psychoanalysis can be such a powerful mode of healing.

Healing is not the avoidance of pain. Today’s world of globalized capitalism surrounds us with counterfeit promises of easy healing. The contemporary marketplace is full of products that hold out the hope of personal growth (and easement) without pain: Tablets that will dispel anxieties and disturbing thoughts; Programs that will supposedly propel us into a state of self‑mastery with almost endless accomplishment; Subscriptions to religious, political, and ethnic or tribal organizations; Potions and prayers that will repel all things negative; Myriad treatments that are intended to evoke our sense of connection with a divine dimension of life, impelling us toward unbounded feelings of bliss or even everlasting ecstasy. And so on. We live in what the 20th Century philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski and others have described as the culture of analgesics, with its commonplace insistence that pain ― and even the pain of the inescapable loss ― can and should be avoided. Such a culture promotes a general failure to recognize the meaning of pain, instead advocating its immediate alleviation. It thus denies how pain is intrinsic to the processes of life itself and to the lifefulness of healing. At the very least, the movement of life entails loss, which almost invariably touches us painfully. Instead of accepting and confronting this reality, our analgesic culture commends the concealment of all that is painful, thus ensconcing us in multifarious lifestyles of ‘narcotization’ supported by manifestoes for promissory futures. Against this ideology, a genuine healing process surely cannot endorse any tendency to avoid confrontation with that which is painful. Personal growth requires the acceptance (and the use) of pain, if authentic healing is to occur.

Healing is not the avoidance of death. In Judeo‑Christian‑Islamic cultures and in some others, it has been traditional to think of death simply as the opposite of life. My own death is, as Freud asserted, intrinsically unthinkable (as soon as I contemplate ‘my death’ I am still affirming a ‘me’). However, I can think, extrinsically, about the death of others which, in concrete terms, means that their lives become absent to me, and I can then try to imagine how such an eventuality might pertain to ‘me.’ In the aftermath of Freud’s sublime, but problematically interpreted monograph of 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it is necessary for us to go beyond the conceptual opposition of life/death. This theme has been taken up subsequently by several brilliant philosophers (I think here of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Simon Critchley, and others). In brief, following insights articulated by Sabrina Spielrein in 1912, Freud attempted to articulate the deathfulness that inheres to life itself (at least that is how I think his essay should be read). Every moment, in which our energies crystallize or congeal into meaningfulness, requires the ‘death’ of other meanings ― the abrogation or extinction of other possibilities. Every creative congregation depends upon dissolution and dispersal of something else, effectively its destruction or self-destruction. Thus, an authentic healing process cannot involve any denial of this inherent and esoteric dimension that I will label ― modifying Freud’s terminology, but following the thinking of Jean Laplanche and others ― the deathfulness that inheres to the liveliness of life itself.

Healing is not a procedure of adaptation (to an external reality that is treated as immutable). Especially with the development of psychotherapies in 20th Century euro-american cultures, all too often the notion of psychological healing has been equated with being ‘well adjusted’ to current social norms and structures. That there are persons who are ‘model citizens,’ seemingly content and knowing their place in the sociocultural and political-economic order, does not mean that they are not in need of healing. Against this idolization of adaptivity, genuine healing surely cannot amount to living one’s life as the proverbial ‘brick-in-the-wall’ (or cog-in-the-machine) of systemic and structural contexts that are alienating and oppressive. In relation to our mental functioning, much counselling and psychotherapy seem to aim at normalizing the individual’s lived‑experience. That is, aligning the subject’s thoughts, feelings, and actions with normative cultural standards. All too often, this makes such professionals the purveyors of prevailing ideology. That is, the contemporary practitioners of those who make their livelihood from the formation and perpetuation of the illusions of the ruling-class or dominant sociopolitical and epistemological order (as Marx discussed in The German Ideology). ‘Normality’ is a notion of which we must be suspicious.

The protocols of healing surely cannot be authentically rallied by slogans such as ‘let’s get rid of pain, let’s deny death, and let’s follow the crowd.’ Rather, any truthful and liberatory healing of the psyche is launched with questions such as ‘Who am I? What am I? and Where am I?’ Whether such questions are explicitly articulated or left implicit (and how they bring together past, present and future), healing the psyche is always both existential or spiritual and cultural or sociopolitical in its implications or ramifications. It does not dodge pain nor deny the deathfulness of life itself, and it does not expect to result in ‘model citizens’ with bourgeois values that are adjusted to a barbaric world (values that are sexist, racist, and so forth). As the singular method of psychoanalysis is rediscovered, we will find that the praxis of free-association comprises a unique process of listening to the possibilities of response to such questions as Who? What? Where?