This unpublished paper was delivered at Playing the Other Conference, Sesame Institute, London May 8th 2010.
Playing The Other
On the face of it the question of the Other doesn’t seem of burning
importance when we come to talk about psychotherapy and what matters
in psychotherapy. There is a certain understandable impatience in those
who practice psychotherapy when faced with the more philosophical or
theoretical aspects of their chosen field: “Why can’t we just get on with
talking about how to improve our clinical work?” “How can endless
reflections about otherness possibly help us in that?”
While I am sympathetic to this impatience, it does seem to me to be worth
emphasising that it is crucial for us to reflect deeply on the ideas which lie
behind our clinical practice, because those ideas can make an enormous
difference to the way we conceive of what we are doing in the consulting
room and if we are not fully aware of what those foundational ideas are,
then they will dominate our practice all the more powerfully through our
unconscious preconceptions and prejudices.
Perhaps the reason why the question of the other is so rarely posed in
theoretical discussions around psychotherapy, is paradoxically that the
entire field is, and always has been, saturated with it. Every account of the
emergence of dynamic psychiatry and psychotherapy in the latter half of
the nineteenth century emphasises that doctors at that time were
struggling to deal with phenomena of alterity or otherness: multiple
personality, for example: the appearance within the psyche of one or more
personalities alien to the normal dominant personality. By taking on such
conditions, medicine inherited forms of pathological otherness which, in
previous periods, had been considered the field of religion (e.g. the
phenomenon of possession in which an alien spirit took hold of a person).
By contrast dynamic psychiatrists start to view these phenomena as inner,
rather than something imported from without. Hence arose the important
concept of the ‘unconscious’ a blanket term which somehow managed to
take care of the otherness that seemed unassimilable by the conscious
mind. Freud, Janet, Jung and many others seized upon this concept as
explanatory of all those powerfully disturbing phenomena which seemed
deeply other, but which were now to be acknowledged as part of the
human psyche.
Looked at in this way, the whole practice of psychoanalysis evolved as a
discipline devoted to engaging with the Other, in its unconscious form.
Though attitudes toward this otherness vary in the different schools which
originate in psychoanalysis, they all acknowledge the importance of the
unconscious, and therefore of the Other. They also, of course, engage with
the Other in the sense that the practice of psychotherapy consists in an
approach to and a relationship with the other person, the patient.
Having acknowledged this uniformity, we can perhaps go on to distinguish
two very different fundamental approaches to otherness as it manifests in
psychotherapy. This is where clarity with regard to fundamental ideas and
goals starts to become important. As psychotherapists we need to know
where we are with regard to these contrasting approaches because they
lead in very different directions. It is perhaps because these questions are
not often posed in these terms, in terms of otherness and alterity, that
confusion with regard to these questions seems to be the prevalent state of
affairs.
The contemporary Freudian Jean Laplanche has described the two very
different approaches as, on the one hand, the Ptolemaic and on the other,
the Copernican (Laplanche, 1999). As you will remember, before
Copernicus developed the modern image of the solar system, in which the
planets revolve around the sun, the dominant picture was that of Ptolemy,
in which the earth was found at the centre of the universe, and around it
the planets, including the sun revolved. According to Laplanche, Freud
developed a psychology which was radical in much the same way that
Copernicus had been, in that, recognising that the conscious ego is no
longer master in its own house, he thus decentered it in favour of a
dynamic unconscious. Just as Copernicus had revolutionised not only the
science of astronomy but the entire cultural perspective of the west by
decentering the earth and therefore humanity, so now Freud did the same
intrapsychically, with similarly wide-reaching results in terms of how we
regard the conscious subject, the ego. However, Laplanche also points out
that Freud was not always consistently radical in this Copernican vein, but
sometimes fell back into a Ptolemaic attitude, whereby the ego remained
central:
“‘Internal foreign body’, ‘reminiscence’: the unconscious as an alien
inside me and even one put inside me by an alien. At his most
prophetic, Freud does not hesitate over formulations which go back
to the idea of possession… But on the other side of these Copernican
advances… the dominant tendency is always to relativise the
discovery and to re-assimilate and re-integrate the alien, so to
speak”. (ibid. p.65)
Laplanche argues that the tension between these two tendencies (on the
one hand a disturbing perception of otherness and on the other a need to
domesticate it) accounts for a certain incoherence in some of Freud’s
central concepts, and has led in the post-Freudian world to on the one
hand the development of an Ego-psychology which is definitely Ptolemaic,
and on the other a correspondingly Copernican Lacanian psychoanalysis. In
my opinion a similar tension may be found in Jung’s psychology, though in a
very different form.
Otherness seems to be a persistent theme, not only in Jung’s psychology
but in Jung himself: “Somewhere deep in the background I always knew
that I was two persons.” (Jung, 1961 p. 61) This quote announces the motif
of the other in his autobiography, Memories Dreams Reflections, and the
radical alterity of the unconscious psyche (and its consequently
transformative potential) is a constant theme throughout Jung’s writing. As
he describes it in MDR, the ‘confrontation with the unconscious’, “brought
home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I
do not produce but which produce themselves and have their own life.”
(ibid. p.183) This seminal insight coloured his attitude to, for example,
dreams, (“One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a
totally unknown object” (Jung, 1934 §320)) and psychic complexes
(described as “discordant, unassimilated, and antagonistic” (Jung 1931
§925)). In these passages and many others like them Jung makes it clear
that he values an attitude of unmediated openness to psychic phenomena,
an approach of ‘not-knowing’, and even that the unsettling and disruptive
effect of the Other might be a kind of gift, which helps us avoid becoming
muffled and restricted by our own ego-syntonic structures.
Jung constantly draws attention to the autonomy of psychic images, which
he says could be described metaphorically as “psychic daimonia”. He
stresses how important it is to take them seriously: These “forces of the
unconscious” are “dangerous antagonists which can… work frightful
devastation in the economy of the personality. They are everything one
could wish for or fear in a psychic “opposite”.” (Jung 1952, § 1504) Jung is
here pointing out that there is a phenomenon of Otherness within the
psyche which retains radical alterity, and that the encounter with it is a fact
of experience which is not reducible to a metaphysical statement: “Thanks
to its autonomy, it forms the counter-position to the subjective ego, since it
represents a piece of the objective psyche. It can therefore be designated
as a Thou.” (Ibid. 1505) Such passages indicate that Jung’s concept of the
Self is clearly intended to de-centre the ego, and permit the opening up of a
space within which meaningful and non-pathological experiences of alterity
can be acknowledged and encountered. We might then accurately describe
such a psychology as Copernican.
Unfortunately, like Freud, Jung also has his Ptolemaic side. Often when he
writes about the Self he seems concerned to emphasise the goal of
individuation (literally becoming undivided), by which fragmentation is
overcome through the integration of those parts of the personality which,
first appearing as Other, later are to become consolidated into a greater
whole through the reconciliation of opposites. Here the identification of
and isolation of Other, in the form of alien parts of the psyche, become
merely steps toward a higher aim: that of arriving at the Self, at which point
the Otherness of the psyche will have somehow have become transcended
and overcome, all in the name of a healing of our sense of splitness. When
Jung is writing in this vein it looks very much as if he sees his psychology as
tending toward an erasure of the other.
Some have argued that Jung’s Self (capital S) is to be identified with Other
(capital O), but such an argument will not hold. As Emmanuel Lévinas (the
French philosopher who has most uncompromisingly explored the problem
of the other) puts it, our encounter with the face of the other “is an
experience in the strongest sense of the term: a contact with a reality that
does not fit into any a priori idea, which overflows all of them....” (Lévinas
1987, p. 59) Lévinas maintains that Same and Other can never exist in a
union. As Lucy Huskinson describes it:
“otherwise both Same and Other would be part of a greater totality
or whole which would invade and invalidate their separateness.
Lévinas therefore says they are paradoxically related as a relation
without relation. It is a relation because an encounter does take
place; but it is ‘without relation’ because that encounter does not
establish any understanding, the Other remains resolutely Other.“
(Huskinson 2002, p. 445)
Jung’s constant emphasis on the goal of individuation as a union of
opposites via the transcendent function sounds very much like an attempt
to create a totality through the integration of the Other into the self. How
can the other retain its sting of otherness if it has been assimilated into a
greater whole?
So when we look at Jung’s psychology we are faced with two apparently
incompatible approaches to the other: on the one hand there is the
Ptolemaic Jung of “unity, order, organisation, wholeness, balance,
integration, totality, regulation, pattern, centrality and synthesis” (Samuels
1985, p.71) and on the other, the Copernican Jung who constantly reminds
us about the sheer alterity of a genuinely unknown unconscious which
always meets the ego as an adversary.
Let’s try to take this apparent impasse forward by looking at what Jung had
to say about the Self. He insists upon the impossibly paradoxical nature of
the experience: “Whenever the archetype of the Self predominates, the
inevitable psychological consequence is a state of conflict” (Jung 1959,
§125). Seen from this perspective, a state of splitness, wherein we fully
experience the tension of the opposites is an unavoidable corollary of
individuation. When we hold two incompatible truths in consciousness at
the same time the consequent inevitable temptation is to break the tension
and veer toward one of the two. But, according to Jung, when we talk
about Self we are alluding to the experience of maintaining a course
between the opposites: acknowledging their pull, but without falling one
way or the other. Seen in this way the opposites retain their character as
opposites, but are held in the same dynamic tension.
Jung uses the image of the crucifixion as a symbol of this pull of impossible
tensions. Imaged as the x this reminds us of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm.
Merleau-Ponty uses the term chiasm when discussing his idea of ‘flesh’
which is an attempt to express the intricate and interlaced relationship
between lived-body and world. Merleau-Ponty uses a richly textured
variety of metaphors to suggest this elusive structure: it is “a gaping
wound” “a zero of pressure between two solids” a “hinge”, “pivot” or
“articulation” (Merleau-Ponty 1968 , pp. 148 & 224) but most often it is the
chiasmus, which derives from the Greek khiazein meaning to mark with the
letter u. In grammar a chiasmus is defined (in the OED) as “a figure by
which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the
other.” In Christianity, u is of course the sign of the cross. Significantly, for
Merleau-Ponty and Jung, deeper reflection reveals the opposites as
somehow implicating each other. For Merleau-Ponty, at the intersection of
the chiasmic cross, opposites fold into each other completely reversed or
“turned inside out” but it is important to emphasise that this enfoldment is
not fusion: the differences do not collapse, but instead the mutual
implication of opposites ensures that neither pole dominates the other.
Such an enfoldment reminds us of the alchemical ‘complexio oppositorum’
(literally a folding together of opposites), one of Jung’s favoured terms for
Self.
With regard to our topic of Self(same) and Other this implies that Jung’s
Self concept is, at its most evocative, an attempt to suggest an arena
wherein a dynamic encounter occurs between ego and other. This arena
may be seen as a fissure or wound whereby the very holding apart of those
forces felt to be most in conflict provides the capacity to reveal their most
intimate intertwining and mutual im-plic-ation, such that the terms “I” and
“other” themselves become destabilised. The result is that I experience
my-self most fully through and in the other, and vice-versa, and this
experience provides the conditions for Jung’s stated aim for individuation:
“In this way there arises a consciousness which is no longer
imprisoned in the petty, oversensitive, personal world of the ego, but
participates freely in the wider world of objective interests. This
widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of
personal wishes, fears, hopes, and ambitions which always has to be
compensated or corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies;
instead, it is a function of relationship to the world of objects,
bringing the individual into absolute, binding, and indissoluble
communion with the world at large.” (Jung 1916/1935, para. 275)
When, like Merleau-Ponty we emphasise the embodied nature of our being
in the world, not only do we highlight this intricate and intimate
intertwining of self and other, we also reveal the importance of pathos in
this engagement. Let me explain what I mean by this: The ego likes to paint
our existence as one of “action on”: I see the other, I approach the other,
but this does not do justice to the experience: actually the event of
perception does not start with an intentional act of observation. What
happens is that my attention is aroused and provoked by what strikes me.
It is the frightening or tempting situation which, by attracting or repelling
me, incites me to action. Even thinking cannot be said to be truly
intentional: ideas occur to me, and thus set in train my thoughts.
As German philosopher Bernard Waldenfels puts it, the essential psychic
movement here is one of pathos: “the way we are touched, affected,
stimulated, surprised and to some extent violated”. (Waldenfels 2007, p.74)
I may like to believe that “I” am the subject and author of my actions, and
indeed the very structure of our language encourages us in this belief, but a
truer description would be that there are events that are undergone by me:
things happen to me. From this perspective I am less the subject of my life
than the patient. And this is where embodiment is revealed as crucial, for
my body is precisely the realm of what is to do with me without being done
by me. From this perspective, the Self, rather than being reified as an
inflated, all-inclusive, whole version of the ego, may instead be
characterised as a space of openness within which that Otherness that
arouses, provokes, touches, invites, wounds and, in brief, af-fects, may
manifest, thus making possible the productive chiasmic encounter
mentioned above.
Our inevitably ego-oriented bias towards the familiar, the known, the Same
means that the Other as revealed through this world of pathos tends to be
seen, felt and experienced as unwelcome and therefore manifests primarily
through psycho-path-ology, and this has therefore become the primary
science through which we study the ways in which soul is touched. As
Freud says, “We can catch the unconscious only in pathological material”
(Andreas-Salomé 1965, p. 64).
It is an awareness of this pathic nature of psyche which underlies Jung’s
insistence that the relationship of analyst with patient is one of mutual af-
fect: “For two personalities to meet is like two different chemical
substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. In any
effective psychological treatment the doctor is bound to influence the
patient; but this influence can only take place if the patient has a reciprocal
influence on the doctor. You can exert no influence if you are not
susceptible to influence.” (Jung 1929, para. 163)
To sum up: what I am describing is pathic and chiasmic manner of being in
the world in which the strict dualism of object/subject, I and other are
profoundly undermined, but without a consequent collapse into fusion: the
other is folded into me and I into the other, but both I and other remain
distinguishable and held in a dynamic tension. Looked at in this way, when
Jung said, “I always knew I was two persons” he was not in fact offering
such a split as a problem to be overcome, but was perhaps stating the way
it is and must be if we are to fully experience the paradoxical state of
Selfhood.
I want to spend the rest of this paper arguing that there is a faculty which,
despite recurrent suppression and taboo, has been and remains crucial to
our ability to do justice to this paradoxical state: that of mimesis.
A few words about this Greek word: mimesis. It is often translated as
‘imitation’, but actually this doesn’t begin to convey the richness of the
term, which is almost impossible to pin down. It seems to be rooted in an
oral tradition and this keeps it close to body-related motions, rhythms,
gestures and sounds. In the Greco-Roman tradition mimesis in its earliest
forms seems closely related to the god Dionysus, first through enacted
ritual then through the development of theatre. It is arguably the crucial
trait which separates humans from other animals, and seems to play an
important role in the development of human culture, as Aristotle puts it:
“First, the instinct of mimesis is implanted in man from childhood, one
difference between him and other animals being that he is the most
mimetic of living creatures, and through mimesis learns his earliest lessons
[...]” (Aristotle Poet. 4.1448b5).
Historically the notion of mimesis seems to lose its potency when a more
logos based, less embodied culture becomes dominant. In the western
tradition, it is at around the time of Plato that this seems to occur. What
we see is a kind of denigration of mimesis so that it starts to become
characterised as mere imitation or copying of the ‘appearance’ of things.
The word mimesis gets translated into Latin as imitatio, thus shedding its
nuanced multi-dimensionality. Later it gets translated as ‘representation’. It
would not be too strong to say that mimesis is repressed throughout this
period: the blueprint for this is Plato’s: there is truth, then there is
appearance, and then mimesis is the copying of that appearance: a long
way from truth. From this point on, even those who are in favour of
mimesis tend to restrict it to the field of aesthetics.
This negative form becomes fixed and even exacerbated at the time of the
enlightenment. So the repression of the mimetic goes back a long way and
takes many forms: Plato’s banishing of the artists from the republic, the
Judaic injunction against graven images, recurrent bursts of iconoclasm in
Christianity and Islam, what has been described as the anti-theatrical
prejudice. It is a repression which seems to run in parallel with, and indeed
is closely related to, the repression of the Dionysian. It is powered by a fear
of losing self, in other words becoming contaminated by or deliquescing
into the other. When we mimetically play the other it becomes hard to
ascertain, especially from without, where we end and the other begins: we
become protean, the strict lines which define our boundaries lose
definition: is a male actor playing a woman masculine or feminine? What
was going on when a boy actor played the girl Rosalind pretending to be a
boy pretending to be a girl? Plato was right, if you watch too much of that
stuff, or even worse take part in it, it starts to dissolve all your certainties.
And the ultimate fear is that of fusion - the loss of ego.
So if this is right then mimesis leads us to lose our ego boundaries, and if
this happens we also lose any sense of other as other - because what
happens is a kind of merging. And of course that would rule mimesis out as
a means of engaging with Other. But I don’t think this is an accurate
representation of what occurs in mimesis as a conscious faculty. The fear is
that mimesis dangerously collapses subject-object dualism, so that we fall
into what Jung calls participation mystique. However, I think Adorno is
right when he says that mimesis is “an attitude toward reality distinct from
the fixated antithesis of subject and object” (Adorno 1997, p.110). In other
words, it inhabits an area, not where subject and no object have merged
into one, but where that relation is not yet fixed in opposition and
separation: where there is still fluidity.
This all sounds rather vague, and perhaps hard to imagine. Let’s look at a
field in which the concept of Mimesis has in recent years been taken
seriously, that of anthropology. In 1993 MIchael Taussig wrote a book
called Mimesis and Alterity (Taussig, 1993) in which he applied some of the
insights of Walter Benjamin to his own field, anthropology. For Benjamin
mimesis is not a theory but a faculty: an inherent part of the human
condition:
“Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest
capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing
similarities is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in
former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is
none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a
decisive role” (Benjamin 1986, p.333)
Taussig in turn defines the mimetic faculty as “the nature that culture uses
to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore
difference, yield into and become Other” (Taussig, 1993, p.xii). Mimesis,
for Taussig, retains the idea of copying, imitating but also that of ‘sensuous
contact’, in other words an embodied, physical tangible aspect. What he is
doing here is to bring together the two classes of primitive sympathetic
magic which Frazer distinguishes in The Golden Bough: that of magic of
contact and that of magic of similarity or imitation. Taussig says that here
both occur together: and in this kind of magic the copy or imitation has the
capacity to affect “the original to such a degree that the representation
shares in or acquires the properties of the represented” (1993, p.47).
Taussig’s ideas have, in turn, been taken up by anthropologist Rane
Willerslev, whose field work has been among the Siberian Yukaghir people.
(Willerslev, 2007) Willerslev describes the Yukaghir cosmos as being “in
effect a hall of mirrors, as various dimensions of reality are conceived as
replicas or reflections of others” (ibid. p.11). It is a thus a mimeticised
world in which everything is paired with “an almost limitless number of
mimetic doubles of itself, which extend in all directions and continually
mirror and echo one another.” (ibid.) The Yukaghir hunter who seeks to
bring an elk into the open does so by mimicking its movements, but as for
Yukaghirs animals take on human shapes and live lives analogous to those
of humans when in their own lands, there is a strange kind of mutual
mimicry going on.
One of the interesting things about this mimicry is that it only needs to be a
very rough kind of copying. When the old hunter Spyridon sets out to bag
an elk he puts on an elk-hide coat, a hat with protruding ears, and skis
covered with elk skin (so as to sound like an elk in snow), but there the
resemblance ends: below the hat his human face is visible, and he holds a
loaded gun, which on the whole elks tend not to do. He has not stopped
being human, but he has entered a between place, a liminal place: not elk,
but also not not elk.
This potent ambiguity of this status, by which he is both similar to and yet
quite different from the animal he imitates, is crucial when we look at the
psychology of mimesis, because it allows for a state which is neither cut off
in difference, nor fused into sameness. Thus although the stress in
mimesis is always upon similarity, what Taussig calls sensuous contact, this
very concept of similarity always depends for meaning upon its opposite:
difference. And it this awareness of difference which enables the imitator’s
direction of attention, which in its manifest form is all toward the object of
imitation, to turn back into self-awareness as imitating subject. And this
reflexive turn is very important because it precludes the possibility of fusion
or unity with the object.
The reflexive aspect of what is going on here is not in opposition to
mimesis, but is built into it, it is part of it. If it were not there, then the
hunter would have fused into the elk, lost himself in elkhood, (and this is
something which can occur among the Yukaghir, and is looked upon as a
disaster) But when that happens we are no longer talking about mimesis
but metamorphosis: the difference between copy and original would have
gone. So in mimesis we move between identities and exist in a liminal field
of ‘not me, not not me’. And this tension between same and different, or,
as we might describe it, between self and other, is absolutely characteristic
of all mimetic activity: it is what allows the actor playing Hamlet, and the
child being a train to inhabit their role, without losing themselves in it.
What does mark out the world of the Yukaghir from ours is that it seems to
be saturated with this liminality (souls are substance and not substance,
people are soul and body, self and reincarnated other, hunters are human
and animal, predator and prey) and generally it is this liminal quality that
seems to be characteristic of animistic cultures.
But what needs repeated emphasis is that just because the kind of
Cartesian mind/body, ego/other separation which we in the west have
grown used to is absent, does not mean that this is a world of
undifferentiated participation mystique in which subject, object, self and
other are all fused into one.
It seems to me that this complex and sophisticated form of related
reflexivity, what Willerslev calls ‘depth reflexivity’, which is characteristic of
mimetic engagement brings us back again to Merleau-Ponty’s image of the
chiasm. What is occurring is precisely a folding together of I and other
within which we maintain both our difference and the intimacy of our
sameness. In animism both ‘self-involvedness’ and ‘world-involvedness’
are accommodated in a single coherent mode of being-in-the-world: that of
mimesis whereby the imitating self can enter into intimate relations with
the other, and be transformed by the other, yet not be lost to itself.
But, while for animistic cultures the mimetic may be the acknowledged and
customary way of being in the world, the question remains, surely such a
style of engagement is no longer available to us in the developed west?
Wasn’t all that irredeemably lost centuries ago?
Well my answer to that question is NO. Despite all attempts to repress it in
western culture, un-thematised and mainly unconscious, it still feels to me
like a more convincing way of looking at the way we all live in the world
than the split and individualised vision of Descartes, which, incidentally,
continues, mostly unacknowledged, to undergird much psychotherapeutic
theory. Moreover, the fundamental nature of the mimetic mode of being
in the world receives support from several different directions.
Developmental psychology suggests that the very young child has no sense
of being different from the world of others, but specifically learns this by
mimetically incorporating an other into the self, which then comes to be
experienced as both “me” and “not me.” There thus emerges a duality or
doubling of perspectives, which allows the child to see itself as another
would see it from an external vantage—that is, it comes to observe itself
reflexively.
But these ideas are also supported by very exciting recent research in the
field of neuroscience. In the 90s Italian neuroscientists studying the
Macacque monkey brain discovered the existence of what they called
mirror neurons, and they went on to confirm that humans too possess
these neurons. These neurons provide prima facie evidence that there is,
on a brain level, a direct link between our own brain-body-system and the
brain-body-system of other individuals. In other words, when we see
someone acting, performing a movement, it is not only the visual part of
the brain which is activated, but part of the motor brain i.e. The bit of the
brain we normally employ to control and execute similar actions, similar
movements, experience similar sensations and similar emotions. So when I
see someone kicking a ball, the very part of the brain which would have
been activated if I were kicking the ball is activated in my brain, thanks to
these mirror neurons.
Clearly this is quite a discovery, and it has implications in all sorts of fields,
for example how we account for empathy, how language might have
developed, and what is going on when we enjoy art. However, for the
purposes of this talk what matters about this discovery is the light it seems
to shed upon the intimate relationship between this mirroring mechanism
in the brain and the kind of mimetic practice I have been talking about. For
one thing, mirror neurons seem to offer neuroscientific support for
precisely the kind of intimate intersubjective intertwining which Merleau-
Ponty spent his life attempting to suggest is our primordial way of being in
the world. If we are already intimately involved, to the extent of our
motor-brain becoming activated, just by looking at someone smiling, then
what a small step it is for us to mirror that smile back to them. The mystery
of how neonates, newly born infants, can imitate the facial movements of
an adult is solved. One could almost say that I am already engaged in
mimesis, long before I actively imitate, simply through my perception of the
world. I don’t have to cry when I see someone crying, or leap when I see
someone leaping in order to be profoundly mimetically involved, deep in
my body, with that crying or leaping. This is of course precisely how
theatre works: the audience member shares in every action, and every
emotion portrayed by every character, but now we know that this profound
engagement is occurring on the deep embodied level of mirror neurons
firing in the brain. I am of course not suggesting that such an engagement
can or should be reduced to brain activity alone; it is nonetheless
fascinating to see how the latest research gives weight to Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenological intuitions.
One of the interesting things about these mirror neurons is that they don’t
just fire or not fire, they are activated to various degrees. For example, a
practiced juggler will have much more activity in his mirror neurons when
watching another juggler perform than will a non-juggler. His neurons are,
as it were, better trained. So we are more or less attuned to what goes on
around us, depending upon how well practiced our mirror neurons are, so
that for example, if I have never felt sad my response to seeing sadness in
others will be correspondingly blunted, and vice versa. We can see how it
is then that our history of pathos, the very woundedness I was talking
about earlier, does indeed prepare us for the very nuanced receptiveness
we might need as therapists to effectively mirror the woundedness of
others, and thus perform a listening which is healing. Hence the archetype
of the wounded healer. The more wounded we are, the more affected we
are, the greater our potential for mimetic mirroring.
Our mimetic skills depend upon practice as well as theory: our Siberian
hunter observes his prey and mimics his prey: he becomes better at
mimicking the better he observes, and he becomes better at observing the
more he mimics. It is precisely this upward mimetic spiral that the autistic
person is excluded from, and it has been suggested that absent or defective
mirror neurons might well explain what is failing to occur in the interaction
of the autistic child with his environment, so that the kind of mimetic
practice which non-autistic children fall into at as we have seen is a very
early age, is simply never begun. The autistic child’s primary engagement
with the other is stalled from the get-go, the other simply remains
inexplicably other, precisely because, on a brain level, none of the complex
mirroring and counter-mirroring by which we all automatically perform the
extraordinary complex task of recognising the other as other, while
simultaneously recognising the other in ourself, and thereby making the
link which enables at one end of the scale, empathy, and at the other
comprehension of the simplest human gestures.
So what does all this add up to? I started by making the point that the
phenomenon of the Other is central to the psychoanalytic tradition, but
that the great danger is that we prematurely erase it by attempting to
assimilate it into sameness: it seemed other, but now that we have got to
know it we realise it is actually same, the dark continent of Africa seemed
dangerously other, but now that we have colonised it, its just like a warmer
version of home. This makes, I think, the goal of wholeness potentially
problematic, even intrapsychically neo-colonialist. I offered Merleau-
Ponty’s chiasm of flesh as a rich resource for thinking this problem: through
this perspective we can begin to see the opposites of self and other as
intimately folded into each other, but without melting or fusing into one,
like the yin/yang sign or like the effect of marbling. So we are made up
fundamentally of a chiasm of self and other and it is this chiasmic aspect
which enables a strange knowledge of the other, via, as it were, the other
within. This realisation led me to a consideration of mimesis, as a mode of
being in the world which plays creatively and consciously on this borderline
of self and other. Mimesis is, as it were, the praxis which accompanies
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of chiasmic flesh. However, our mimetic existence
in the world goes far beyond the manifestly mimetic practices of mimicking,
imitation, and play-acting. Though theatre offers a wonderful metaphorical
model for the way mimesis actually works (first to relate the actor to the
other of the role, thereby releasing and creatively outwardly fashioning her
own otherness, then to relate the audience to the spectrum of otherness
performed before them, releasing and inwardly fashioning their own
otherness) the point is that such processes are in fact going on in every
area of life, though less manifestly. We see what a more comprehensively
enacted culture of mimesis might look like when we look at animistic
cultures like that of the Siberian Yukhaghir tribe, where every aspect of life
and every relationship is haunted by the mimetic. When we do so the
Western emphasis upon absolute dichotomies such as objective/subjective
and self/other, far from being the ontological categories they are claimed
to be, become relativised and are revealed as culturally and historically
conditioned. Even the science which has grown out of western duality
seems to be beginning to undermine its own originary assumptions, not
only in subatomic physics but in neuroscience: the fundamentally mimetic
intertwining of I and you, man and nature begin perhaps to be revealed in
discoveries such as that of the mirror neuron.
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"In forty five years inhabiting the Jungian field, I've found very few books to be game changers. This is one... a masterly rejig of analytical psychology that bears the hallmarks of an original mind, a brave soul, and a terrific writer. Never mind that Saban ruffles your Jungian feathers! It is vital that all serious analysts and scholars get into this material as quickly and as deeply as possible."