The Psychic Home

The Psychic Home: Psychoanalysis, consciousness and the human soul develops,
from a number of different viewpoints, the significance of home in our lives.
Roger Kennedy puts forward the central role of what he has termed a psychic
home as a vital psychic structure which gathers together a number of different
human functions. Kennedy questions what we mean by the powerfully evocative
notion of the human soul, which has important links to the notion of home, and
he suggests that what makes us human is that we allow a home for the soul. As
an illustration of this concept he explores how it can help us understand a vital
element of William Wordsworth’s development as a poet.
The word ‘soul’ is both abstract and yet also powerfully emotive. Kennedy
shows that it can be approached from a number of different angles, from psycho-
analysis, philosophy, religion, sociology, literature and neuroscience. The Psychic
Home discusses the mysteries and complexities of the soul and aims to evoke
some restoration of its place in our thinking. It illustrates how the word ‘soul’
and similar key words, such as ‘spirit’ and ‘inwardness’, express so much that
is essential for humans, even if we cannot be too precise about their meanings.
Insightful, enlightening and broad reaching, The Psychic Home brings the
concept of the soul centre stage as an entity that is elemental, an essence, irreduc-
ible and what makes us human as subjects of experience. It is essential reading
for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, neuroscientists, philosophers and those
interested in spirituality and religion.

Roger Kennedy is a psychoanalyst in private practice and past president, British

Psychoanalytical Society. He worked for 30 years as an NHS consultant. He is
a child psychiatrist at the Child and Family Practice and at Ashwood Associ-
ates. He has published twelve previous books, including Psychoanalysis, History
and Subjectivity (Routledge, 2002) and The Many Voices of Psychoanalysis
(Routledge, 2007).
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The Psychic Home

Psychoanalysis, consciousness
and the human soul

Roger Kennedy
First published 2014
by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Roger Kennedy
The right of Roger Kennedy to be identified as author of this
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and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kennedy, Roger.
The psychic home : psychoanalysis, consciousness and the human
soul / Roger Kennedy. — First edition.
pages cm
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Consciousness. 3. Soul. I. Title.
BF173.K4146 2014
150.19ʹ5—dc23
2013033373
ISBN: 978-0-415-71013-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-71014-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-81553-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times
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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 A home for the soul 1

2 Psychic home 12

3 The importance of a psychic home in the life and

work of William Wordsworth 34

4 Towards the soul: The identity issue 45

5 The soul and its home 65

6 Loneliness and solitude 89

7 Happiness and misery 115

8 Summary 138

References 147
Index 155
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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Neil Vickers, who helped with the writing of Chapter Three on
Wordsworth and also was very encouraging in the early stages of the book. Stephen
Gill generously sent me unpublished Wordsworth poetry to help with Chapter
Three. Nicholas Humphrey was very encouraging about the project, as was Michael
Parsons.
‘Settlements’ is taken from Selected Poems by John Burnside, published by
Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of the Random House Group, Ltd.
Permission is granted from Oxford University Press to quote extracts from
Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
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Chapter 1

A home for the soul

Home is one of those simple yet elemental words that can convey powerful
feelings of belonging and yearning. I was reminded of this when assessing a little
boy with regard to his long-term future. He had spent much of his first year in
hospital due to a condition which meant that he was unable to take food by mouth
and that his vocalization was delayed. In addition, his parents had significant
social and mental health issues, so that they effectively abandoned him in
hospital. It took some months of trying various options before at last he ended up
with very devoted foster carers; he needed constant care because of his disability.
One of the issues was whether or not he should stay with the carers. There was a
dispute about this, which necessitated a court process. The local authority had a
view that he should be adopted, as they considered this would be in his long-term
interests. However, if the foster carers were to adopt him, they would lose all the
financial and service support they were entitled to as foster carers, and he needed
24-hour care.
By the time I saw him at the age of 3, he was beginning to become stronger.
He could talk but only a word at a time, and he could walk but became easily
tired. After half an hour or so of playing with some toys, which he did quite well,
he was clearly tired. He had not said very much, and what he said was difficult
to understand, although he seemed happy with his carer. But suddenly he uttered
one word very clearly to his carer – ‘Home’. That one word seemed to convey so
much – not only the simple fact of having had enough, but also about where he
wanted to be after all the earlier instability. I have to add that when I then talked
to his grandmother about possible options for this little boy, she became very
distraught at the idea of him being moved from his current placement; she felt
that he was alive thanks to his carers’ devotion. She described him as a ‘dear little
soul’, who would not last a move from the carers. I felt that she was right, and it
was the first and only time that I myself became visibly upset in an assessment. I
had a sudden image of what it might be like for him to have to cope with a move,
both psychologically and physically; I felt that such a move would be a terrible
risk. It was as if his soul hung in the balance. I cannot give details of the ins and
outs of the court process, except to say that, rather typically, information from
the paediatricians was not obtained for court until the very last minute – I was
2 A home for the soul

prevented from contacting them, supposedly as I might bias their response – and
they supported him remaining where he was, at the place which had become his
home, and the court supported this view. His early life in hospital was a physical
space where he could be kept alive but was obviously not a place where he could
be emotionally sustained; it was not a home, not a place where he could develop
an organizing and sustaining psychic structure.
Much of this book develops, from a number of different viewpoints, the sig-
nificance of home in our lives. I shall put forward the central role of what I have
called a psychic home as a vital psychic structure which gathers together a num-
ber of different human functions. Along the way, I shall also question what we
mean by the powerfully evocative notion of the human soul, which has important
links to the notion of home; indeed, I shall suggest that what makes us human is
that we allow a home for the soul. The word ‘soul’ seems to be both abstract and
yet also powerfully emotive. It can be approached from a number of different
angles, from philosophy, religion, sociology, literature and neuroscience. No one
discipline has the monopoly on understanding the soul concept. I shall certainly
not have the final answer to the mysteries and complexities of the soul but hope
to evoke some restoration of its place in our thinking. I shall explore how the
word ‘soul’ and similar key words, such as ‘spirit’ and ‘inwardness’, express so
much that is essential for humans, even if we cannot be too precise about their
meanings.
This desire to explore this field began in earnest while I was visiting the
National Gallery. One of my greatest pleasures is to spend time there contemplat-
ing a few pictures at a time. An hour or so is generally enough to make contact
with a group of paintings, such as the Rembrandts and other Dutch masters, a few
Renaissance masters, some of the Impressionists or some other group that may
suddenly catch my eye. Rather than skim through loads of paintings in turn, I
have learned to focus on a few, finding in them depths of expression and content
by means of repeated visits. In some ways, this is like getting to know some-
body, gradually appreciating aspects of their character over time. It may even
be something like falling in love: opening up to the other and letting the other
interpenetrate one’s own being.
Intimately linked to the artistic process for any artist or writer is, I think, their
ultimate generosity of spirit, so that despite all their personal hesitations and
doubts about their capacity to create a new work, there is a willingness to commit
themselves, to put it down on canvas or on paper, in a brave and generous act of
exposure. With the artist of genius such as Rembrandt, one can see a development
of means and technical mastery, in his case, moving from the haughty confidence
of youth to the reticent, almost ‘shy’ knowledge of maturity. In his last paintings,
his self-exposure seems to come at a price – that seeing into the depths of one’s
self, both the darkness and the light, is not possible without having to bear lone-
liness and suffering. Not everyone can bear such knowledge; few can find the
means to express it so movingly and cogently.
 A home for the soul 3

As you contemplate a late Rembrandt self-portrait, his eyes seem to take you
into the picture, into the depths. Unlike a mirror, which reflects your own image
back to you, the Rembrandt urges you to reflect into yourself in the act of being
drawn into his image. Repeated visits are like drawing from some primal source
of light and intensity, leaving you changed in some way, both uplifted and more
melancholy. There is, of course, the presence of Rembrandt’s own eyes as well,
not only those you see in his self-portrait looking out at the spectator, or rather
beyond the spectator to some other region, but also those eyes of his which look
inwardly so poignantly at himself, scrutinizing and accepting what he saw with
so few illusions.
The effect of such viewing remains, to me at least, something of a mystery.
How is it that the portrait of a dead artist can have such life? How can marks
of paint, however cleverly applied, still speak to us over and over, continuously
drawing us both into the picture and into ourselves? It is as if we are witnessing
some source of inner light in the picture itself. What is that elusive something
that makes this happen? What is it in ourselves that is drawn out by repeatedly
viewing the self-portraits?
I have no clear answer to these questions, but it does seem to me that we are
here in the area of the human soul. It is what the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
has recently called the ‘soul niche’, a ‘place where the magical interiority of
human minds makes itself felt on every side’ (2011, p. 154). Though very much
rooted in cognitive science, he quotes with approval the theologian Keith Ward
from the latter’s book In Defence of the Soul. Ward makes the point that the whole
point of talking of the soul is to remind us that we transcend the conditions of our
material existence; we are not just molecules and genes. Thus,

to believe in the soul is to believe that man is not just an object to be studied,
experimented upon and scientifically defined and analysed, manipulated and
controlled. It is to believe that man is essentially a subject, a centre of con-
sciousness and reason, who transcends all objective analysis, who is always
more than can be scientifically defined, predicted or controlled. In his essen-
tial subjectivity, man is a subject who has the capacity to be free and respon-
sible – to be guided by moral claims, to determine his own nature by his
response to these claims.
(1998, p. 119)

Such a view about what makes us human resonates with the psychoanalytic
view of the human subject. Sigmund Freud’s discoveries were very much about
bringing back into the realm of the human subject elements of the mind such as
dreams and fantasies which had been devalued as mere objects of, at best, some
objective knowledge or, at worst, of no consequence, just debris of the mind. The
psychoanalytic encounter is very much about helping the patient become a subject
through a process of recovery, or discovery, of their unconscious subjective life;
4 A home for the soul

dreams and fantasies, for example, are precious signposts towards capturing
the elusive human subject. As described in detail elsewhere (Kennedy, 1998,
2007), I mean by this that the analytic patient brings to their analyst all sorts of
different stories, fixed patterns of relating or symptoms, hopes, expectations and
resistances. Patients often come with a sense of isolation, of either being alone
with suffering or suffering from being alone. And they come to analysis subject
to various forces in their life, past and present. If the analysis works, then there
is the possibility of their becoming subject of their experiences and ultimately
their lives, with a sense of no longer feeling isolated, while being more in contact
with others. Some patients have described this shift as finding themselves, or
finding meaning, of feeling real, or of having a centre where before there was
chaos or nothingness, and even occasionally that they have found their soul or
that the soul has been put back into their lives, which until then had become
‘soul-less’.
Everyday language occasionally uses the soul concept in somewhat similar
ways in order to express something alive in the human subject. Music can be
described as having soul when it hits the emotional core of the listener. And of
course there is ‘soul music’, whose basic rhythms reach deep into the body to cre-
ate a powerful feeling of aliveness. People talk about occasionally finding their
‘soul mate’, the person to whom they feel especially close, with whom they can
share their most intimate emotions with ease. On the other hand, music or litera-
ture can be described as lacking soul, lacking some essential quality of sensitivity
or depth of feeling. A person can be described as lacking a soul in the sense of a
deep moral sense; some people would ‘sell their soul’ in order to get what they
want, if they have a soul at all.
Saul Bellow went so far as to write in his essay ‘A Matter of the Soul’ that ‘what
novelists, composers, singers, have in common is the soul to which their appeal is
made, whether it is barren or fertile, empty or full, whether the soul knows some-
thing, feels something, loves something’ (1994, p. 77). Here he was contrasting
the world of the arts with the materialism and disenchantment of the new social,
economic and technological order. He wrote that essay in 1975, but it seems even
more relevant today, where technology, however useful, has created new dangers
for the human soul, ever-new ways of alienating us from ourselves and from ordi-
nary everyday contact with one another. For those who need convincing, I suggest
observing passengers in an overground train at the end of day for a few moments.
While not denying the amazing usefulness of the mobile phone, to see so many
people playing with phones or tablets, needing to keep drawing out the phone
from their pocket as if anxious that communication will otherwise cease, and once
to even see a young man talking on his phone to his friend nearby rather than
face to face, is deeply depressing. Anachronistic thoughts about our souls being
sold to the devil even come to mind. We seem to be living in a fragmented new
world, what Zygmunt Bauman (2004) calls the era of ‘liquid modernity’ (p. 12),
with our mobile world being cut into fragments and disconnected episodes rather
than providing stable experiences. Indeed, it was experiences such as that in the
 A home for the soul 5

train that have led me wanting to return to the notion of the soul as something that
involves an essential aspect of our subjectivity.
It was Bruno Bettelheim who reminded us that Freud himself considered that
psychoanalysis was ultimately the treatment of man’s soul (German, Seele).
Freud was not precise about what the soul was. Bettelheim suggested that Freud
chose the term ‘because of its inexactitude, its emotional resonance. Its ambigu-
ity speaks for the ambiguity of the psyche itself, which reflects many different
warring levels of consciousness simultaneously. By “soul” or “psyche” Freud
means that which is most valuable in man while he is alive . . . it is intangible,
but it nevertheless exercises a powerful influence on our lives. It is what makes
us human’ (Bettelheim, 1983, pp. 77–8).
Of course, as Bettelheim emphasized, the German use of the term soul is dif-
ferent from that in English and has less obvious religious overtones. Freud was
also influenced by contemporary thinkers such as Franz Brentano, for whom
psychology was the ‘science of the soul’, the whole domain of the inner world
(1982, p. 163). For Brentano, the soul makes up the unity and particularity of a
person but has multiple activities.
German does have another word, Geist, or spirit, which is common in German
philosophy but which has different and again more religious resonances in
English. Spirit seems to merge at times with ‘subject’, ‘mind’ or even ‘soul’.
There can be a world spirit, a spirit of the times or a human spirit. The philosopher
Ernst Cassirer wrote how the human spirit has created ‘symbolic forms’ (1955,
p. 78) in the sciences and the arts as expression of its creative intellect.
The point is, I suppose, that there are a number of these powerfully resonant
words aimed at capturing some essential human quality; they overlap to some
extent in their meaning and history. They may be difficult to define, or their defi-
nitions may evolve, but they remain embedded in our culture and seem to speak
to us in significant ways.
If we were to take Bettelheim’s view of Freud seriously, then it would be more
accurate to talk about ‘soul analysis’ rather than psychoanalysis. The advantage
then is that we would be approaching nearer to Freud’s human endeavour; the
disadvantage in English is that the word soul still has more religious meaning
that it has in German. This will not, however, prevent me from endeavouring to
explore the use of the word soul in its manifold meanings.
The philosopher William Barrett, in his book pointedly titled Death of the Soul,
commented that the notion of a soul is more encompassing than the reasoning
self and that ‘we have a new and more powerful reason to be aware of this with
the emergence of psychoanalysis . . . “Psyche” in Greek means soul – a meaning
we should not let ourselves forget – and psychoanalysis, accordingly, is a therapy
which deals with the individual soul . . . [W]ith the historical appearance of
psychoanalysis it is as if the psyche, long submerged by our culture, has become
very real and has resurfaced’ (1987, p. 19).
Two other areas of experience have recently led me to take up the soul theme:
the death of my parents and then renewed thinking after those, and other deaths,
6 A home for the soul

about my daily clinical work as a psychoanalyst with patients, which I certainly

agree can be seen as very much dealing with the care of the patient’s soul.
As a young doctor I often saw people die, particularly on medical wards,
which are mainly populated with the elderly. However much one was supposed
to remain unmoved and objective as a doctor in training, it was not possible to
ignore the intense and complex cluster of emotions surrounding the dying patient.
In those days there was relatively less focus on doing everything possible to keep
someone alive, less use of technology and more attention to making the patient
comfortable during the process of dying. Sometimes the family and patient took
part in the death with full knowledge of what was happening; at other times it
was clear that the patient had no wish to consciously know what was happening
to them. There was usually a discussion with the relatives about what the patient
wanted to be told, and a judgement made about what was thought to be bearable.
Each person has his or her own death. Some fight to the very end, others give up
quickly out of despair; some accept the inevitable with grace, others have no idea
what is happening to them, particularly of course when their brain is severely
damaged as with a stroke or in dementia.
One cannot escape the reality of the death of the body, but dying, as I have
indicated by just a few remarks about the process of dying, is not just a bodily
process. The body dies, but what of the person? The relatives have not lost a body
but a loved one. Heartbeats and blood pressures can be monitored, but how do
you monitor that love? Can you put a figure on the quality of attachment? The
ancients distinguished diseases of the body, which can be observed and treated,
from those of the soul such as passions, including happiness, misery and mad-
ness; the physician was concerned with the former, the philosopher with the latter.
However, as Jackie Pigeaud (2006) has pointed out, this division is far from clear;
there is considerable overlap and a complex interaction between the fields of
the body and of the soul, even in these ancient writings. Thus, from early on in
Western thought, the phenomenon of disease and dying brought to light funda-
mental dilemmas about the encounter between the material body and what it is to
be human, and what is lost when dying.
Although I saw many deaths when I was young, it was only being present at my
parents’ recent deaths that brought back to life some observations that had made
no sense at that earlier time. I would summarize these experiences in terms of a
‘special light’ associated with the person’s aliveness going out. It is well known
that as the person is nearing death, something goes in the eyes; the eyes no longer
reflect back our own gaze. The dying person’s eyes may not be focusing well,
their physiological functions may be failing and their expression loses its qual-
ity, but something else seems to be happening. The person’s gaze goes; they are
retreating from the other’s gaze, becoming ever more distant, leaving us increas-
ingly looking on, until at the moment of death, the light behind the eyes appears
to go and there is only darkness; the person has gone, their special light extin-
guished; the link with us is broken. The end of the dying person’s gaze gives us a
sense of what in life we call our soul, the place, wherever that is, where the other’s
 A home for the soul 7

gaze gives back to us who we are, gives us a sense of our own identity. The focus
of where this kind of intersubjective exchange takes place is between the eyes of
the participants, but the source of the inner light remains a puzzle, much as it is
when looking at a Rembrandt self-portrait. From these sorts of phenomenological
observation, I would suggest that the soul is essentially an intersubjective entity,
emerging from interactions between human subjects, not just an entity involved
in a magical ‘interiority’. Such a view has resonances with Emile Durkheim’s
notion of the soul as the ‘social principle’ (1912, pp. 242–75). On the one hand,
one can see the soul as the best and most profound part of our being, and on the
other hand, as a temporary guest that has come to us from the outside, that is from
society, that lives inside us as distinct from the body, and that must one day regain
independence. The soul in the latter sense represents something within us that is
other than ourselves; it is the voice of society within.
This experience of the light leaving the person is probably one of the roots of
the notion of an immortal soul that inhabits the body and then leaves the body
after death. I am certainly not making any claims that this is indeed what hap-
pens, and anyway this is not my area of expertise, to say the least, though I think
it is clear that what is essentially human, the link with others, dies with the body.
I would call that which links with others the human soul; that is, I am proposing
an essentially psychological model of understanding the soul. I would not rule
out that what I am describing at death is a reflection of the end of brain function;
I certainly think it is clear that the world of human functions is dependent on an
intact brain. Certain major injuries to the brain, such as those involving the frontal
cortex, are well known to fundamentally change an individual’s personality, so
that they may be unable to regulate their emotions or safely regulate their behav-
iour. Furthermore, we are divided within our own brains, between left and right
hemispheres, though somehow we try to make a unity of that division, if only as
a metaphor of what is possible (McGilchrist, 2009).
It may well be that in talking about the soul, one is essentially describing an
important human function to see beyond the physical presence of other people.
But because there is overlapping territory at this point between religion and
psychology, much of what religious thinkers have to say about the nature of the
soul is of great interest and lasting significance, even if one is a thoroughgoing
materialist.
And while not going along fully with the claims of religious belief myself,
I would also follow William James’s suggestion in his The Principles of
Psychology that

one cannot afford to despise any of these great traditional objects of belief.
Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great drift of reasons, positive
and negative, towing us in their direction. If there be such entities as Souls
in the universe, they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences
that go on in the nervous centres. To the state of the entire brain at a given
moment they may respond by inward modifications of their own . . . I confess,
8 A home for the soul

therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-
states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me
the line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained.
(1890, p. 181)

But do we need the notion of a soul? Can we live without it, and if so is there
a price in so doing? Is there too much religious ‘baggage’ to make its use any-
thing but anachronistic? Do we go along with Gilbert Ryle (1949) and assume
that the term soul, like that of ‘mind’, owes its existence to a form of category
mistake, in which we give a name to a collection of functions over and above
the functions themselves, like imagining Oxford University is an entity different
from the colleges making up the university, forming a kind of ghost university,
a shadow of the actual one? Similarly, do we go along with Daniel Dennett who
states that ‘the trouble with brains is that when you look in them, you discover
that there is nobody home’ (1991, p. 29)? Alternatively, perhaps we are to accept
the detailed arguments of Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, who maintain that
while neuroscience can ‘discover the neural preconditions for the possibility of
the exercise of distinctly human powers of thought and reasoning, of articulate
memory and imagination, of emotion and volition . . . What it cannot do is
replace the wide range of ordinary psychological explanations of human activi-
ties in terms of reasons, intentions, purposes, goals, values, rules and conventions
by neurological explanations’ (2003, p. 3).
That is, they argue that only human beings think, feel and relate, not brains.
That is not to say that one can learn much about brains that may well have some
bearing on how we think, feel and relate. Indeed, I shall make reference to such
work in Chapter Five. But to explain human activity purely on the basis of
neural pathways is a fundamental conceptual confusion. As Bennett and
Hacker put it, ‘It is human beings, not their brains, that are said to have minds,
and to say that is simply to say that human beings have an array of distinc-
tive capacities’ (2003, p. 106). Such a view very much echoes the thought of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom Hacker has written major works. Thus in his
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that is only of a ‘living human
being’ that one can say that it has sensations, or is conscious or unconscious
(1953, rev. 2009, section 280).
Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein’s student, put this issue very clearly:

Present-day philosophy has justifiably turned away from the Cartesian view,
but has proposed instead something equally absurd, namely, that the human
brain, or even the computational states of machines, are the bearers of mental
predicates. It is as if philosophers could not believe that the living corporeal
human being is the subject of those predicates.
Human life contains many elements or stages: birth, childhood, family
life, schooling, sexual awakening, love friendship, marriage, work, pov-
erty, parenthood, ageing, illness, death. These destinies and vicissitudes are
 A home for the soul 9

undergone and suffered by people, by you and me: not by immaterial minds
or brains or machines. The human being who encounters those conditions is
the subject.
(1984, pp. 100–1)

If this view of the limited role of neuroscience in understanding how we think

and feel is correct, then a considerable amount of time and energy spent trying
to figure out the brain processes involved in creating human consciousness is a
waste of time, for such an approach will never understand what makes us human.
This is not say that it is a waste of time per se, because neuroscience, such as
described by Antonio Damasio (2010), is producing some very interesting find-
ings about the brain and how consciousness may be formed by the interaction of
different parts of the brain, and I shall refer to some of these findings in Chapter
Five. But that still leaves out what we find significant about our lives, which
brings us to the soul territory.
My view is that the soul is a psychological and cultural concept, not a natural
science concept. Thus it is of interest what happens in the brain, but it is neither
here nor there, although it is important and relevant when, for example, diseases
affect the brain and cause disturbances in behaviour and emotional regulation.
But it is of only marginal interest to know the composition of the molecules in
Rembrandt’s portraits, or what pathways in the brain are firing when we enjoy
looking at a work of art. We want to know how Rembrandt talks to us humanly
and how his pictures impact on us as living human beings, soul communicating
with soul. It will be of great interest to know how the brain produces conscious-
ness, and I certainly enjoy reading about neuroscience, but it is irrelevant to
understanding the Rembrandt portrait, which speaks to us at another level alto-
gether, that involving the communication between human beings, that is, at the
soul level.
I would also maintain that to do without the notion of a soul, even if at the
very least it is kept as a metaphorical expression for being alive, would be to
lose too much that is precious about being human. Without something like souls,
what are we? According to Wittgenstein, we could be automata; but, he wonders,
how do we then feel pain? For those of us who deal with the extremes of human
mental suffering, it is difficult to understand how people split off areas of their
experience, can maintain often very strange states of mind or can behave in what
appears to be completely against their best interests, unless one looks for explana-
tions beyond mere physical events.
In addition, living without some notion that oneself and other people are not
just physical objects but something different can have disastrous consequences.
One can see this with autistic children who may not grasp the notion of another
person. This is described as them not having a theory of mind. My experience of
seeing many autistic children is that while this is undoubtedly a crucial and diag-
nostic feature, these children also have the ability to empathize, even if distorted;
they are not callous. There is even recent scientific evidence for this observation.
10 A home for the soul

Thus, one might say that they have a mind problem but still have a soul, though
a soul in need of coming alive.
Even Dennett, who is deeply sceptical about the existence of a central self, talks
about looking in the brain (Dennett, 1991). But who is it that is doing the look-
ing in the brain? Why is the ‘third-person’ perspective being privileged over the
‘first-person’ perspective? How do we move from physical-chemical processes
to personal experience? How do we bridge the gap between the pattern of firing
of neurones in the brain and a person’s experience of pain, sorrow and love? Is it
by nature unbridgeable, or can we bridge that gap? There continue to be attempts
to do just that. For example, Damasio’s latest book Self Comes to Mind (2010)
gives an elaborate theory of how consciousness is created by the brain, a theory
that is well worth examining. But when (p. 70) he describes that the mind is the
‘consequence’ of the brain’s incessant and dynamic mapping, we are still no wiser
about how this occurs; minds emerge from the dynamic interplay of nerve circuits,
but we are no wiser as to how they emerge. As the great physiologist Sir Charles
Sherrington put it in his book on human nature, physiology has gotten far in
examining the electrical activity in the ‘mental’ part of the brain, but ‘has it
brought us to the “mind”? It has brought us to the brain as a telephone exchange.
All the exchange consists of is switches. What we really wanted was the subscrib-
ers using the exchange. The subscribers with their thoughts, their desires, their
anticipations, their motives, their anxieties, their rejoicings’ (1940, p. 222). Yet we
cannot get that latter knowledge from just knowing the electrical circuits, as inter-
esting as these circuits may be. Something more must be found, and that is where
the human subject, the first-person perspective, has to come into the picture.
Is there a home for this first-person perspective? Is there a home for the notion
of the soul? Or are there, as Donald Davidson (1970) argues, two realms of expla-
nation for human activity – mental and physical events, each with its own set of
justifications, each irreducible to one another? Is there, then, an unbridgeable
divide between the brain and the mind, the circuits and the subscribers?
There are no easy answers to any of these questions, and even pure material-
ists can express considerable passion about their passions being only caused by
physical events. I will look at some of the arguments for and against a purely
physical explanation of human activities in Chapter Five but have decided not to
get too bogged down by these sorts of questions, at least at this early point of my
narrative. I have decided to take a more ‘tangential’ approach to this whole field
and attempt to approach the soul question in a relatively loose way, assuming, as
does Humphrey, that we need such a ‘magical’ notion as part of our human world.
Once I have taken this approach, I will then reexamine the strengths and limita-
tions of using such a concept, by tackling those for and against such a view from
philosophical and neuroscientific viewpoints.

***
I would suggest that when we talk about a person’s soul, we are touching on
something elemental, their essence, something irreducible, what makes them
human, their sense of being a subject of experience, what Bishop George
 A home for the soul 11

Berkeley (1710, p. 136) called an “active being,” their unique voice, what goes
deep within the person, much of course unconsciously – hence the need for some
psychoanalytic understanding in exploring the soul territory.
I would add here that in considering what we mean by the soul, we cannot
escape the influence of past thinkers, including those of ancient Greece, because
much of what we take for granted in the way we think about such matters bears
their traces. Thus, just to take Plato’s notions of the soul in the Phaedo, an
account of Socrates’s last moments before being executed with poison – Socrates
is described as discoursing on the nature of the soul, its relation to the body and
the issue of whether or not it is immortal, and if so, how the soul comes to inhabit
the body and then leave it. For Plato, the body is a kind of home for the soul; the
soul certainly becomes fastened and welded to the body, but as though in a prison.
While the soul has communion with the invisible world of truth, the divine, the
immortal, intellectual and indissoluble world of forms, the body is tied down by
pleasure and pain, the world of the senses. The soul is weighed down by the body
and dragged back into the visible world of the senses; death is a potential release
for the soul from this prison house.
One may not agree with Plato’s argument for the immortality of the soul, and
yet it is difficult not to be moved by his descriptions of the soul and its struggle
with the body. These sorts of arguments have certainly become the basis for sub-
sequent thinkers, for example, when considering issues such as whether the soul
and body are of the same or different substance; if different, how they relate; if
the same, how, if at all, they can be differentiated; whether the body is a prison
for the soul or in a more comfortable relationship with the body and so on. Such
different views of the soul’s nature have certainly influenced my own thinking,
as will become clearer.
However, I will start with the assumption that the soul is a description of an
important human ability to see beyond the physical aspect of a person, to see more
in a human being than physical and chemical processes. I shall be proposing that
one way of encapsulating the place of the soul in one’s life is to describe a human
being as providing a ‘welcoming’ home for the soul, in contrast to Plato’s prison
house. This will mean having to look at some length at what we mean by the con-
cept of home, and I will particularly focus on my notion of the importance for life
and identity of having what I call a psychic home, an organizing psychic structure
central to the notion of personal identity. This is, I would suggest, one answer to
Dennett’s view that there is ‘nobody home’ in the brain. As an illustration of this
concept, I will explore how it can help to understand a vital element of William
Wordsworth’s development as a poet. Thoughts about the human soul merge to
some extent with those concerning issues of identity and subjectivity; there are
overlapping territories or ‘fields’ of thought, each field adding depth to the others.
The book will look from various angles at some basic aspects of the human
condition, including loneliness and solitude, happiness and misery and the
complexities of human identity, as ways of trying to explore more fully the
soul territory and how such the notion of a soul helps us to feel at home in
the world.
Chapter 2

Psychic home

Home and homelessness

Having a home implies both having a physical entity, the physical structure of the
dwelling, the house, but also something that goes beyond the building blocks into
the area of the interior of the soul. Having an idea of home is just as vital for a
person as having a physical shelter; it is one of the most basic human needs. We
need to feel at home in the world – it makes us feel secure, it provides the base
from which we can explore; the loss of a sense of home is deeply traumatic, as is
of course the loss of a house. Yet we need to leave home in order to find our-
selves, in order to mature and have a firm sense of identity. If exiled, we may be
able to carry the sense of home with us, yet there is often a poignant yearning for
the original home. This may be conveyed by that sense of one’s physical presence
being in one country, but one’s soul in another.
The sense of home is so basic that we can take it for granted unless the con-
tinuity provided by a stable home is undermined. I often see the way that a lack
of a clear home can drastically affect a child’s stability while doing assessments
for social services and the courts. Children often have to be placed in foster care
when their own family has become unsafe. While they may settle well into the
foster placement, it is rare not to see how confused and troubled children become,
if only beneath the surface, until a final decision is made about their future. Some
young children in these circumstances will draw two houses, with little con-
nection. Others may be unable to represent the confusion symbolically and just
remain confused and behaviourally challenging. One’s original home consisted
not only of the bricks and mortar of the building, its physical surroundings and
interior structures, but also the memories of relationships. Before describing my
own concept of a psychic home in detail, I will look at some of the general issues
raised by the meaning of having, or not having, a home, which will provide some
of the framework for my ideas.
Renos Papadopoulos (2002), exploring psychoanalytically issues raised by the
treatment of refugees, also emphasizes how the notion of home is one of the most
fundamental for humans; it is both the place of origin and the destination we try
to reach. Thus home and homecoming are basic to many human experiences and
 Psychic home 13

much of literature. Already this is clear in Homer, when, for example, Odysseus,
near the beginning of The Odyssey, yearns to see the smoke from his homeland
and then die, setting the theme and the tone for the poem.
One could add that there are a number of famous examples in Homer’s
Odyssey where one can see the resonances of the place of home and homecom-
ing, for example, when Odysseus has finally returned home to Ithaca after nearly
twenty years away, disguised as a beggar but also greatly changed physically.
As he approaches his home in order to confront the pack of suitors who have
intruded disrespectfully into his palace and are vying for the attentions of his
wife, Penelope, he is accompanied by a friendly swineherd, who is unaware
of Odysseus’s royal identity. Nearing the palace, they come across an old dog
left abandoned on a pile of mule and cattle dung, hardly able to move. But as
Odysseus passes, the dog pricks up his ears and raises his head, recognizing the
master who trained him and went hunting with him. Odysseus is unable to recip-
rocate as he wishes to keep his identity secret but carefully wipes a tear away. As
the master passes on, the dog finally gives up his struggle and dies.
Later in the palace and still disguised, Odysseus is offered hospitality by his
wife, who still does not recognize him. She asks his old nurse to wash his feet as
a token of hospitality. This nurse at first finds him strangely familiar, very much
like her old master. But Odysseus manages to fob her off. However, as she pre-
pares to wash him, he has to reveal his thigh on which is engraved an old scar he
received from the tusk of a boar while hunting. When the old woman passes her
hand over the scar, she at once recognizes who he is and lets the basin fall onto
the floor. With tears in her eyes, she wishes to let her mistress know his identity,
but Penelope is distracted and the moment passes. Indeed, it is only later, and
after he has slaughtered the suitors, that Penelope is convinced of her husband’s
identity when he reveals the intimate secrets of the marital bed, which he himself
had built out of a thick olive tree.
Thus we have here, in Homer’s homecoming scenes, so many of the basic
issues surrounding that of identity and what I shall later describe as a psychic
home: for example, how much a person remains the same over time, how much
they change beyond recognition, yet are still capable of being recognized, given
the right conditions; what kind of evidence we require to confirm a person’s
unique identity; what marks out the subject as having that unique identity; how
the identity of the subject and recognition by the other are intimately linked; and
how one’s identity is marked forever by one’s home, the psychic home one car-
ries around in exile, during various adventures in foreign climes, as well as when
at last one returns to the family hearth. As Papadopoulos describes, ‘The funda-
mental sense of home forms part of the substratum of identity which is structured
as a mosaic and consists of a great number of smaller elements which together
form a coherent whole’ (2002, p. 17). This mosaic substratum provides us with
the primary sense of our humanity, continuity and belonging – hence the degree
of trauma when a refugee loses their home. I shall return in more detail to the
whole issue of what we mean by identity in Chapter Four.
14 Psychic home

Only a few psychoanalytic thinkers use some explicit notion of home in their
work. For example, John Bowlby (1988) emphasizes the importance for the
child’s future secure attachments of having a secure base from which to explore.
The quality of the primary attachment, or home base, affects the quality of the
child’s subsequent development and sense of security. The little boy I described in
Chapter One had finally found that home base after a year of uncertainty. Donald
Winnicott (1965, p. 236) laid great emphasis on the importance for development
of a good enough, commonplace home. For him this was the basis for a demo-
cratic society, where development can take place without undue interference. As
he put in the title of one of his books (Winnicott, 1986), quoting from T. S. Eliot’s
poem ‘East Coker’, ‘Home is where we start from.’ Although other analytic
thinkers may not specifically refer to the place of home, the need in any theory
of development for a starting place for the development of the self or subject is
common.
In his evocative book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard examines the
meanings of domestic space philosophically and poetically. In his study of human
intimacy, he ‘poses the problem of the poetics of the house’ (1958, p. xxxvi).
He uses the image of the house to explore the depths of the soul; for him, ‘there
is ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul . . . Not
only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are “housed”. Our soul is an
abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms” we learn to “abide” within
ourselves’ (1958, p. xxxviii).
One could thus say that the physical space of an established home has an
important function in helping to shape the interior life, as can also be seen in
Diana Fuss’s book The Sense of an Interior (2004). There, she explores the link
between the inner mind and the inner dwelling through exploring the rooms of
four writers, including Freud and his consulting room. Interiority is described
here as ‘a mental structure constructed over time, with inner chambers and inner
walls that exceed in strength and resistance the physical supports of any actual
building’ (Fuss, 2004, p. 7). There is an interaction between the subjectivity of
the writer and the interior space where they write. The home is thus both part of
the world, an object in the world, and a symbol for the human being and their
relationships, a subjective entity.
Simon May has written a comprehensive history of love in its many manifesta-
tions. Finally, for him, love is the rapture we feel for people and things that inspire
in us the hope of an indestructible grounding for our life. It is a rapture that sets
us off on – and sustains – the long search for a secure relationship between our
being and theirs.

If we all have a need to love, it is because we need to feel at home in the

world: to root our life in the here and now; to give our existence solidity and
validity . . . This is the feeling that I call ‘ontological rootedness’ . . . [l]ove’s
overriding concern is to find a home for our life and being.
(2011, p. 6)
 Psychic home 15

This sense of home as the ground of our being, the place we need in order to
feel secure, is of course fundamental, and I shall certainly incorporate this sense
in my own concept of a psychic home. Yet we often feel to a greater or lesser
extent incomplete, divided, and lacking a sense of the whole. There is a yearn-
ing for wholeness, for a home where we can feel truly ourselves. Some find this
home within, others need something external and still others need a being that
transcends daily life, such as a God, in order to feel complete. Whatever the
nature of the home we seek, the fear of homelessness is never far from that of the
sense of being at home.
Some philosophers have even found a place for the home and homelessness
within their structure of thinking. Thus for Martin Heidegger ‘being’ and coming
home are interrelated in complex ways. Although the sense of being homeless,
with an accompanying loss of meaning, is a basic given of the human condition,
we need to find ways to come back home. ‘Home-coming is . . . both the process
and goal of authentic being’ (G. Steiner, 1978, p. 49). When we become lost in
everyday existence, we feel homeless (German, unheimliche), unhoused. But in
pursuit of authentic being, one begins to truly ‘dwell’ in the world (Heidegger,
1971, p. 145ff.). Man may inhabit a house, but dwelling there requires some-
thing more than mere habitation. ‘Dwelling . . . is the basic character of Being
in keeping with which mortals exist’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 160). In addition, for
Heidegger, language is what he calls the ‘house of being’ (qtd. in Steiner, G.,
1978, p. 122), where man dwells.
John Gale (2000) from the charity Community Housing and Therapy (CHT)
has developed these aspects of Heidegger’s thought in their application to
residential community treatment of mentally ill patients. Thus for him, Being
is always residential. One exists in relation to a location, even if homeless; this
location is a fundamental part of human existence. Schizophrenics, who are given
great help in the homes that CHT runs, are dis-located; they experience psychic
homelessness wherever they are physically placed. By providing a therapeutic
residential setting for such patients, CHT can help them begin to retrieve a sense
of location, of dwelling in the world rather than retreating from it.
Madness and being dis-located, or psychically homeless, is vividly illus-
trated in King Lear. Once Lear has handed over his power and authority to his
daughters, he seeks to live in each of their homes with his household retinue, his
knights. But of course neither Regan nor Goneril will agree to have him, at least
on their father’s terms, and he eventually goes off into the storm on the heath,
mad with grief and homeless. He finds shelter in a hovel, a temporary home,
together with Edgar, who is feigning madness to escape death. There, Lear at last,
despite of or because of his madness, begins to see the truth behind appearances.
As he is finally persuaded by Kent to enter the hovel, he muses,

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
16 Psychic home

Your looped and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this.
(King Lear, Act Three, Scene Four, lines 28–31)

One can see here allusions here both to the loss of a physical home, but also to
the loss of reason when the home no longer provides shelter for the mind
or soul.
The poet John Burnside constantly questions what it means to dwell in the
world. A number of his poems specifically address what it means to have a home.
The quest for a dwelling place is not free from difficulties:

1 A Place by the Sea

. . . what we think of as home
is a hazard to others
our shorelines edged with rocks and shallow
sandbanks
reefs
where navigation fails . . .
(Burnside, 2000, ‘Settlements’, lines 1–6)

III Wells
– there’s more to the making of home
– than I ever expected: . . .
(Burnside, 2000 ‘Settlements’, lines 7–8)

This poem’s very appearance on the page, with indentations and spaces, repre-
sents the hazardous nature of the home he is describing, one that both shelters the
self and creates dangers for others and ultimately for oneself. His poetry is a
‘complex exploration of our place in the world, one which poses a series of ques-
tions surrounding what it means to dwell’ (Pass, 2011, p. 45).
Burnside, as he described in an interview for the poetry magazine Agenda,
has certainly read Heidegger. ‘We have Heidegger to thank for understanding
that the real problem for mankind is our homelessness – and we have centuries
of philosophical thought to thank for the recognition that, if something presents
itself to us as a problem, our best answer is to embrace it. It may sound perverse
of me, but the truth is that I’d rather follow the path of homelessness to wild
dwelling than accept the costly shelter of a certain kind of building – building that
displaces, violates and domesticates what some have called, in translation and as
a kind of shorthand, the great spirit’ (Burnside, 2011b, p. 23).
Home is a world for Burnside and is both suffused by the commonplace, the
world of everyday, yet also determined by the ‘spirit’, which the participants
 Psychic home 17

bring together to make a home. It provides a place in which to dwell and yet
is fraught with hazards. Unless one takes account of the hazards, one may lose
oneself or be wrecked; home, then, can becomes a catalogue of wrecks. Hence
the need to retain a certain flexibility; home may provide a settlement for the
spirit, or the soul, but to be too comfortable, too settled, may risk losing what
you are searching for. ‘In short, the perpetual need for settlement, like the quest
for the moment’s grace, is necessary because home, like grace, is a temporary,
sometimes fleeting thing, and cannot be occupied as such . . . [m]y view of home
is a bit like some conundrum from quantum physics. Home is there until we try
to pin it down . . . It’s like happiness, I think. Let it happen, and you’re fine, but
you can’t make it come true’ (Burnside 2011b, p. 23).
In Shelley Mallett’s critical review of the literature on understanding the home
concept, home can be seen as a place, a space, a feeling, a practice and a state of
mind. It is a multidimensional concept and can function as a repository for com-
plex, interrelated and at times contradictory sociocultural ideas about people’s
relationships with one another. For example,

it can be a dwelling-place or a lived space of interaction between people,

places or things; or perhaps both. The boundaries of home can be permeable
and/or impermeable. Home can be singular and/or plural, alienable and/or
inalienable, fixed and stable and/or mobile and changing. It can be associ-
ated with feelings of comfort, ease, intimacy, relaxation and security and/or
oppression, tyranny and persecution . . . Home can be an expression of one’s
(possibly fluid) identity and sense of self and/or one’s body might be home
to the self . . .
(2004, p. 84)

As Susan Neiman points out, the metaphor of being at home in the world is
an old one. Kant listed four rather unappealing models of home that different
traditions held the world to provide – a cheap inn, a prison, a madhouse and a
latrine. Yet home is, ‘the normal – whatever place you happen to start from and
can return to without having to answer questions. It’s a metaphor that may seem
to fit reduced expectations. We no longer seek towers that would reach to the
heavens; we’ve abandoned attempts to prove that we live in a chain of being
whose every link bears witness to the glory of God. We merely seek assurance
that we find ourselves in a place where we know our way about’ (Neiman, 2002,
p. 304).
But, as she points out, the absence of such assurance is the touchstone of the
modern. Ever since the massive destructive earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, our
confidence in a world we could trust has been shaken, and since Auschwitz,
even more so. Yet, as Hannah Arendt put it in her seminal book Eichmann
in Jerusalem, we still wish to find a place fit for human habitation (1963,
p. 233).
18 Psychic home

For the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the essential homelessness of the human
spirit is the ground of all religion, as ‘the self which stands outside itself and the
world cannot find the meaning of life in itself or the world,’ (1941, p. 14). In
contrast, William Barrett in Irrational Man, his classic study of existential phi-
losophy, charted how in losing religion modern man ‘lost the concrete connection
with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all
its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no
longer answered the needs of his spirit. A home is the accepted framework, which
habitually contains our life. To lose one’s psychic container is to be cast adrift, to
become a wanderer upon the face of the earth’ (1959, p. 25).
Deprived of his customary home, man became both a dispossessed and frag-
mentary being. Existentialism can be seen as an attempt to answer the challenge
that this new view of man provides – accepting man’s fragility and the threat of
nothingness, how then to find meaning? Kierkegaard’s answer within religion
involves a personal choice, an either/or, where the subject has to make a deep
encounter with the self or subject, always hovering around an abyss of despair or
dread; the aim is to become a ‘subjective thinker’. Nietzsche, harking back to the
Greeks, before Christianity had put its blight on human drives, urges a joining
together of the Apollonian world of order and individuation with the Dionysian
world of intoxication and the feeling of one-ness, loss of self. For Heidegger,
the challenges raised by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are answered through
being open to being, facing the reality of man’s finitude and his homelessness
and then reaching back to being where subject and object meet (Barrett, 1959,
p. 237).
Finally, if one is to understand the place of homelessness in the human psyche
or soul, then Freud’s paper on The Uncanny – das Unheimliche, in German, liter-
ally, the ‘unhomely’ – is fundamental. Uncanny experiences include those that are
frightening and arouse a sense of horror and dread. Freud traces such experiences
back to what is previously known and familiar, and yet which erupt in unexpected
ways. The word heimliche in German can be traced back to what is homelike,
what belongs to the house, but also something that becomes concealed, with-
drawn from the eyes of strangers (Freud, 1919, p. 225). Typical uncanny experi-
ences include inanimate objects apparently coming to life, a sudden appearance
of a double, the appearance of ghosts and spirits and other hauntings. Something
becomes uncanny when the distinction between imagination (Phantasie) and
reality is effaced (1919, p. 244). Ultimately, the uncanny is something which is
secretly familiar and has undergone repression and then returned from it (1919,
p. 245) – hence the double feeling of the strange and the unfamiliar that is indica-
tive of an uncanny experience.
Heidegger, in his early Being and Time (1926, p. 223), describes anxiety as
a basic state of mind where one feels uncanny, or not at home. We can flee
from this primordial sense of anxiety into the state of being ‘at home’ as an
escape, rather than face the reality of not being at home. That is, for him the
‘not-at-home’ is the more primordial phenomenon. This perhaps contrasts with a
 Psychic home 19

different emphasis he makes in his later thought (Heidegger, 1971, pp. 145–61),
where dwelling becomes the basic character of being. Dwelling is different
from being housed. Man may inhabit a house, but dwelling has a different and
more elemental quality, which for him involves some kind of safeguarding of
freedom; the house is not just a shelter, but also a place where man dwells at
peace and, I think, connected with the world around him in a primordial and
open way.
Anthony Vidler in his book The Architectural Uncanny, influenced by Freud
and Heidegger, explores the uncanny as a metaphor for a ‘fundamentally unlive-
able modern condition’ (Vidler, 1992, p. x). With an architectural emphasis, he
traces the history of the spatial uncanny through the numerous ‘haunted houses’
of the romantic period, as well as in the way that it can become a means of
understanding a number of contemporary architectural and urban projects. As he
points out, the unease felt in the uncanny experience had as a favourite motif the
‘contrast between a secure or homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien
presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other
is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome
because apparently the same’ (1992, p. 3).
At the heart of this anxiety about an alien presence, Vidler suggests, is a fun-
damental insecurity – that of the newly established bourgeois, not quite at home
in its own home. Since then, estrangement and unhomeliness have emerged as
the intellectual watchwords of the modern, given periodic material and political
force by the resurgence of actual homelessness generated by war and/or poverty
(1992, p. 9).
There is thus an uneasy tension in the modern soul between feeling at home
and feeling estranged. This tension is revealed in uncanny experiences, which
one might say remind us of the precariousness of our hard-won sense of psychic
organization. The French psychoanalyst Michel de M’Uzan (2009) emphasizes
how uncanny experiences commemorate a crucial phase in the development of
psychic functioning, a moment which brings to the fore the indeterminate nature
of identity, when the self becomes ‘strange’ to itself.

Home: A history and the emergence of the interior

So far, the notion of a home as something central to us both psychologically and
philosophically has been taken here as a given. Yet the notion of an interior space
and of a domestic private space within the home has a particular history, which
provides the backdrop for the developing notion of the individual’s interior or
inner world. While the notion of a domestic interior began with the development
of Dutch interiors in the seventeenth century, it was only in the early to mid-
nineteenth century, following the turmoil of the French Revolution, that develop-
ments in England led to the notion of a private place within the household for
sleeping and family life, and with this the notion of a domestic home with private
spaces. The domestic interior gradually emerged as an entity at a particular
20 Psychic home

moment of history. The emergence of psychoanalysis as a treatment within the

confines of a domestic space has to be seen within this historical context. Freud’s
consulting room became a privileged place where the patient’s interior life could
be laid bare, questioned and challenged, but that was only possible once the his-
torical conditions were favourable for such an undertaking.
Witold Rybczynski, in his history of the idea of home, describes the way that
the notion of home changed over the centuries, linked to social and cultural
changes, including the way that the family and children were perceived. The
typical medieval bourgeois house combined living and work, while the poor were
extremely badly housed. People did not so much live in their houses as camp in
them. Even the aristocracy did not have a sense of the comforts of one home; they
often had many residences and might travel between them, taking their portable
furniture with them. Life in the medieval home was full of people and activity,
with large households, and houses were used for entertainment and for transact-
ing business. Life in general was a public affair, and ‘just as one did not have a
strongly developed self-consciousness, one did not have a room of one’s own’
(Rybczynski, 1986, p. 35).
After the end of the Middle Ages and until the seventeenth century, the condi-
tions of domestic life slowly changed. Houses became larger and more sturdily
built, amenities gradually if slowly improved, and with the development of rented
accommodations, people no longer had to work and live in the same building.
The house was then gradually becoming a more private place. ‘Together with this
privatization of the home arose a growing sense of intimacy, of identifying the
home exclusively with family life’ (Rybczynski, 1986, p. 39). However, within
the home personal privacy was as yet relatively unimportant. Rooms were still
crowded, and there was no separate space for children.
The transition from the public feudal household to the private family home
where privacy was possible gradually got under way. This was a crucial develop-
ment. ‘The growing sense of domestic intimacy was a human invention as much
as any technical device. Indeed, it may have been more important, for it affected
not only our physical surroundings, but our consciousness as well’ (Rybczynski,
1986, p. 49).
It was in seventeenth century Netherlands that the family home emerged
uniquely, reflecting the growing importance of the family in Dutch society.
Special rooms for sleeping were differentiated, children were given special atten-
tion and a ‘snug’ [a Dutch word] home atmosphere began to be created. In Dutch
society, ‘ “home” brought together the meanings of house and of household, of
dwelling and of refuge, of ownership and of affection. “Home” meant the house
but also everything that was in it and around it, as well as the people, and the
sense of satisfaction and contentment that all these conveyed’ (Rybczynski, 1986,
p. 62).
One can see this transition in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of domes-
tic scenes, which became popular items to hang on household walls. One can
see in them the beginnings of a sense of a separate and special interior space.
 Psychic home 21

Simultaneously, the Dutch home acquired a special feminine atmosphere, thanks

to the significant and increasingly dominant role played by women in the home.
It must be said that this view of Dutch paintings has been challenged as reflect-
ing later family values projected backwards onto them (de Mare, 1999). Instead,
others have emphasized the way that the paintings mark out a new visual space
rather than reflecting a new domesticity (Hollander, 2002). My own view is
that looking at these paintings, as with my description of an encounter with a
Rembrandt self-portrait, provides a new way of seeing the human subject, one in
which the subject is beginning to look inwards in a complex way. In this sense, I
would agree that comfortable domesticity is not merely being represented in them
but something more complex and challenging.
According to Rybczynski, it was in French homes of the eighteenth century
that furnishing became increasingly informal and comfortable, with furniture
specifically designed for women – such as easy chairs and chaises longues. The
idea of comfort took some time to develop and was developed most significantly
under the influence of Georgian England (1986, p. 104). The sedentary English
bourgeois spent most of their time at home, especially those in their country
homes; there, they would visit each other’s homes, gossip and play indoor games,
and there would be dances and dinner parties. This world is pictured in the newly
created form of the novel. In addition, the English garden is created, where pleas-
ant walks could take place. ‘Since all these activities took place in and around the
house, the result was that the home acquired a position of social importance that
it had never known before, or since. No longer a place of work as it had been in
the Middle Ages, the home became a place of leisure’ (1986, p. 107).
As a result, private rooms for the family began to be differentiated, with chil-
dren having their own bedrooms. The multiplication of bedrooms indicated not
only that there were new sleeping arrangements, but also that there were new
distinctions between the family and the individual. ‘The desire for a room of one’s
own was not simply a matter of personal privacy. It demonstrated the growing
awareness of individuality – of a growing personal inner life – and the need to
express this individuality in physical ways’ (Rybczynski, p. 110–1).
As described in the collection of papers, A History of Private Life, Volume
IV (Perrot, 1990), the nineteenth century was the time of crucial developments
in the domestic interior, led by changes to the English home, which were a
reaction to the storms of the French Revolution and the radical shifts between the
public and private realms. During the French Revolution, boundaries between
public and private life became unstable (Hunt, 1990, p. 13ff.). An absence of
boundaries between individuals was assumed to be the condition of public life
(Perrot, 1990, p. 9). At the same time, the Revolution recognized, in theory at
least, individual rights. As a reaction to the turmoil in France, English domestic
life turned inwards, establishing the ‘sweet delights of home’ (C. Hall, 1990,
p. 47ff.), where home became a place of tranquillity away from stress and strife.
Coincidentally, the Romantic Movement encouraged a withdrawal into the self
and the withdrawal of the family into a more clearly defined domestic space
22 Psychic home

(Hunt, 1990, p 13). This can be seen in the pattern of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth’s lives, as I shall trace in the next chapter.
Homes that were designed exclusively for domestic living with gardens sur-
rounding them were new. Home became the haven for the harassed and anxious
man who had to produce the material wealth on which the home depended
(C. Hall, 1990, p. 74). A new category of ‘housewife’, the guardian of domestic
virtue, the homemaker, was created. Religious evangelism with its message of
sin, guilt and the possibilities of redemption fed the fear, which had affected
the British classes in the wake of the French Revolution. ‘Evangelism offered
middle-class men and women new identities, new ways of giving meaning to
their lives and making sense of some of their experience’ (C. Hall, 1990, p. 59).
However, alongside this new emphasis on the safe haven of home, various
problems and conflicts began to emerge. Privacy could also lead to secrecy.

The nineteenth-century family found itself in a contradictory situation. Its

power and dignity reinforced by society, which saw it as an essential agent
of social control, the family attempted to impose its own ends on individual
members . . . Yet egalitarianism was also honoured, and individualism made
quiet but steady progress. As a result, the family was subjected to centrifugal
forces, which led to conflict and at times to disintegration . . . Defence of
the family honour remained the most basic rule. Honour required keeping
the family’s deepest secrets, secrecy being the mortar that held the family
together and created a fortress against the outside world. But that very mortar
had been known to create cracks and crevices in its structure. Cries and whis-
pers, creaking doors, locked drawers, purloined letters, glimpsed gestures,
confidences and mysteries, sidelong and intercepted glances, words spoken
and unspoken . . . The family was an endless source of drama.
(Perrot, 1990, p. 139)

One might add that the home was now ripe for repression and neurosis, once
it became the place where private life was walled off into special and sometimes
secret places. On the one hand, the home established roots; it was where the
family gathered. On the other hand, it was also the place where secret retreats
from the world could be maintained. The desire for a private space of one’s own
reflected a heightened sense of individuality, an awareness of individual personal-
ity; it became the fundamental place for the recall of childhood memories, the site
of imagination (Perrot, 1990, p. 356–7), and the individual’s sense of self gained
new depth and complexity (Corbin, 1990, p. 455). But that private space could
also become a source of secret fantasies, forbidden pleasures, hidden sexuality,
frustration and even abuse and domination.
The sense of identity began to become more distinct, and by the mid-nineteenth
century living space had become less crowded. The single bed became a feature
of the bourgeois home, as opposed to the communal bed, and this reinforced
the sense of individuality and independence, making room for monologue and
 Psychic home 23

also solitude. In such homes, people began to have their own bedrooms. A girl’s
bedroom became ‘the temple of her private life’ (Corbin, 1990, p. 480). People
groomed in private in order to appear in public. Introspection became more com-
mon, and diaries flourished. The Romantics had already transformed the imagina-
tion, blazing new paths for reverie, enriching the forms of interior monologue and
inviting their readers to engage in meditation, contemplation and mystical ecstasy
(1990, p. 512). With the developments in the domestic interior, new walls arose
‘around private life, stricter hygiene, more strenuous exercise, the new concern
with modesty, and closer management of time, [which] must have encouraged
some to seek escape through the imagination’ (1990, p. 513). Silent reading pro-
gressed, as did interest in the solitary pleasures of the study.
At the same time as an increase in individuation, there was an increase in feel-
ings of vulnerability and loneliness, a failure to connect. This ‘forced members
of the dominant classes to retreat into solitary pleasures; the internalization of
ever more strict rules of sexual morality . . . intensified feelings of guilt’ (Corbin,
1990, p. 549). Progress towards individuation gave rise to new subjective forms
of suffering. The image of the hysteric became increasingly influential, with vari-
ous debates about its origin, ranging from the influence of the womb, to heredity
or, according to Charcot, nervous shock. With sexuality becoming increasingly
‘locked’ in the private domestic interior, the bourgeoisie began to suffer from its
morality. But the nineteenth century became the golden age of the confessional,
with doctors increasingly becoming the new confidants. Souls which had been
tormented by evil and sin became sick and in need of treatment. It was in this
historical context that Freud could find a market for treating hysterical patients.
Charles Rice’s book The Emergence of the Interior (2007) adds further details
to how the domestic interior emerged both as a concept and as a material mani-
festation of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘The
Twofold Room’, which charts the twofold experience of his room both as dream-
like and then suddenly as a material reality, merely his hovel and the dilapidated
context for his work, Rice uses the poem as emblematic of the interior’s ‘double-
ness’ – where it can be both imagined and inhabited. Rice points out that the
Oxford English Dictionary records that ‘interior’ comes into use from the late fif-
teenth century to mean inside as divided from outside and to describe the spiritual
and inner nature of the soul. ‘From the early eighteenth century, “interiority” was
used to designate inner character and a sense of individual subjectivity, and from
the middle of the eighteenth century the interior came to designate the domestic
affairs of a state, as well as the sense of territory that belongs to a country or
region. It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that
the interior came to mean the inside of a building or room, esp. in reference to
the artistic effect; also a picture or representation of the inside of a building or
room. Also, in a theatre, a “set” consisting of the inside of a building or room’
(Rice, 2007, p. 2).
Thus, the interior emerged in a new way, reflecting as in Baudelaire’s poem the
world of imagination, reverie and dream, but also a material reality. Baudelaire
24 Psychic home

himself was not only contrasting the dream and reality but also his own artistic
hovel with the emerging bourgeois world of comfort and domesticity. One can
see how the interior became the sight for self-definition, the space where the com-
plexities and paradoxes of subjectivity would be played out. This development
may well have been linked to changes in the way that the bourgeoisie saw child-
hood, which began to take hold as a history of the self, soon to become theorized
by Freud (Steedman, 1995). The interior certainly became the context in which
psychoanalysis went to work, as well as providing an analogy for the structuring
of the psyche (Rice, 2007, p. 4).
Thus, one could say that the older notion of the interior as the spiritual and
inner nature of the soul became, in Freud, wedded to the emerging notion of the
double nature of the interior as site of dream and material reality to create a new
notion of private life and of the human subject. The psychoanalytical interior, or
what I shall put forward as the notion of a psychic home, becomes a revolutionary
account of the human subject, one that challenged bourgeois domesticity while
providing a comfortable space for exploration of its conflicts.
Authors with an architectural background, such as Fuss and Rice, have paid
particular attention to Freud’s consulting room as the site of a revolution in the
experience of both the domestic and psychological interior. They both point out
that, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud used the metaphor of
a suite of rooms, a bourgeois interior, to explain the structure of the unconscious,
with an entrance hall, a drawing room and a threshold in between.

Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance

hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individu-
als. Adjoining the entrance hall there is a second, narrower room – a kind of
drawing room – in which the consciousness, too, resides. But on the threshold
between these two rooms a watchman performs his function: he examines the
different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the
drawing room if they displease him.
(Freud, 1916–17, pp. 295–6)

Rice points out that this striking spatial analogy doubles the domestic situation
experienced by Freud’s patients and which often drove them to seek psychoanaly-
sis – ‘impulses held on the threshold of rooms, jostling between individuals, acts
of guardianship that permit or deny access . . . There is a sense that regulated
behaviour in the bourgeois domestic interior offered a powerful explanatory tool
in Freud’s understanding of the structure and workings of the psyche, and also
that this sort of domesticity was the context wherein psychoanalysis went to
work’ (Rice, 2007, p. 40).
Edmund Engelman (1976) captured the layout of Freud’s Bergasse 19
consulting room as it appeared shortly before Freud’s fleeing to London. His
photographs portraying the detailed layout of the rooms and the many collected
objects captured ‘what half a century of Freud commentary has overlooked: the
 Psychic home 25

location of the analytic scene within the walls of a crypt. When patients arrived
at Freud’s office, they entered an overdetermined space of loss and absence, grief
and memory, elegy and mourning. In short, they entered the exteriorized theatre
of Freud’s own emotional history, where every object newly found memorialized
a love-object lost’ (Fuss, 2004, p. 79).
The interior of Freud’s consulting room was thus not a passive context for
analysis, but actively participated in it. Indeed, it is inevitable that the analyst’s
consulting room will convey their own subjectivity to the patient; it will convey
what I describe below as their own psychic home. Like their patients, psycho-
analysts carry their psychic home with them, though it will manifest itself differ-
ently. The analyst may not reveal details of their private life to their patients, but
they carry their psychic home with them into the session. Their choice of interior
design of the consulting room, not to mention the books and any objects, reflects
the nature of the analyst’s psychic home; there is an interaction between the sub-
jectivity of the analyst and the interior space where they work. An alive psychic
home can provide a sustaining space for the analyst, allowing them to cope with
the inevitable loneliness of the work.
While the analytic work of analyst and patient carries on in separate locali-
ties, the worlds of patient and analyst intertwine in various ways, in a dynamic
fashion. Sometimes the analyst may find that their psychic home is invaded by
the patient, with little space to think or feel; or else there may be a confusion of
spaces, with little sense of a boundaried psychic home.

Psychic home, or the psychoanalytical interior

The main thrust of my own contribution to this field, influenced by many of the
authors I cited previously, is to put forward the notion of a psychic home, of hav-
ing an internal sense of a secure home base, as a key feature of identity. The
psychic home provides an organizing psychic structure for the sense of emerging
identity. Such a home base must be built up from a number of different elements,
as with the physical home, which forms its substrate. There are intrapsychic ele-
ments but also intersubjective elements, involving the social world.
1. There is the basic structure of a home as a protected and hopefully welcom-
ing space for shelter, providing the core of the internalized psychic home. The
physical space of the home has an important function in helping to shape the
interior life, as already described; but at any moment, as in Baudelaire’s poem
‘The Twofold Room’, or in uncanny experiences, the material reality may sud-
denly bring the human subject face to face with the precariousness of their inner
reality. One may say that the psychic home has a dual aspect – as both physical
and psychical container.
In this notion of a psychic home, the physical structure of the home has an
important part to play in providing an overall, containing structure or psychic
container, which becomes internalized as an organizing configuration. Thus, the
fireplace creates warmth. Usually the first thing one does coming back to a cold
26 Psychic home

home from being away is to light the fire. The hearth, the seat of fire, the place
resistant to heat and combustion, has always been a central part of the home.
Interestingly in Latin the word for hearth is focus. Thus, referring to focal work
with families, Alan Wilson pointed out that ‘In a psychological sense, the focus
also represents an important functionally organized aspect of resistance, that is
resistance to instinctual forces, resistance to processes which the focus makes
possible to use’ (Wilson, 1986, p. 61). The English word home derives from the
Old Norse, heima, and perhaps encapsulates something of the Viking longing for
home and hearth as a stable physical base to return to after their many voyages
of exploration and conquest.
The physical structure of the home has an interior marked out by defining
walls. The boundary between the interior and the exterior may be firm and stable
or flimsy or permeable; the bricks and mortar of the family home may be loose
or secure, with a clear focus or none. One may recall here the story of the three
little pigs – only the house built of bricks could withstand the breath of the hungry
wolf. Indeed, it was the third pig’s fireplace that eventually killed off the wolf as
he climbed down the chimney.
The boundaries of the house also have to be seen in context, within a com-
munity of other homes, and within a society. The home must be permeable to
external influences, or else it will become the source of unreal relationships.
At the same time, one could say the division between the interior’s inside and
outside mark the boundaries of the soul or human subject, a theme which will be
developed in more detail in Chapter Five.
2. There is already a preestablished intersubjective symbolic space predating
the building or setting up of the home. The home-to-be already has a place in
the family history and narrative, already situated as an element in a complicated
network of relationships. There is a lineage, reaching back generations. The
individual in a family is already situated before birth in a complicated, mostly
unconscious network of symbols, or kinship structure. Influenced by the work
of Claude Levi-Strauss on how unconscious social laws regulated marriage ties
and kinship, structuring them like language, Jacques Lacan called this network
the ‘Symbolic Order’ (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, p. 89). It is the Order into
which the emerging subject has to structure themselves, language, for him, being
the key element through which this structuring takes place. I would want to add
the vital contributions to the emergence of the human subject of the rich pre-
verbal world, the world in which language is beginning to take shape.
3. The contents of the psychic home, its mental furniture, consist essentially of
identifications with family members making up the home’s interior. In the secure
home, the parents provide continuity over time in their homemaking, providing
a supportive base for the children to eventually leave, and ultimately to build up,
their own home. A stable psychic home involves individuals being recognized as
being autonomous yet dependent, and receiving respect for their own individu-
ality with secure attachments. One can perhaps see most clearly here how the
psychic home is integral to the notion of identity with the adolescent, for whom
 Psychic home 27

identity formation is a crucial task. They need the home base from which to
explore but also they need it to be there for their return. This is perhaps why it can
be so traumatic for the adolescent when their parents split up at this crucial point
in their development, supposedly as they are now old enough to be able to cope.
One can also see how a sense of individual identity depends upon the mutual
relationships in the family being respectful of personal autonomy; that is, bound-
aries within the home need to be respectful, with individuality being respected
and recognized.
For any individual, alternative psychic homes will develop in time, particularly
if the family of origin is unstable or rejecting. Work for many people can become
one such place; the workaholic can be locked into a sense of only being at home
at work, even though it can never really be an adequate substitute for an actual
home. At the same time, for those with a core sense of a psychic home, it may be
less conflictual to seek alternative psychic homes, to feel at home in a number of
different places, cultures, overlapping and interpenetrating. Nonetheless, leaving
one’s home where one has lived for long periods can still be destabilizing, as viv-
idly described by Salman Akhtar (2007). He shows how the nonhuman elements
of the home, such as the child’s toys, blanket and elements of the environment,
contribute to the sense of security and are formative in our psychic development.
He emphasizes how the analyst working with traumatically dislocated individu-
als must be prepared to ‘receive’ nonhuman, largely environmental transferences.
The way that such a patient brings into the space of the consulting room their
sense of dislocation needs to be accepted and understood.
One can see a particularly poignant dilemma concerning the psychic home
with adoptions, particularly when the adoptee reaches adolescence, as Betty
Lifton (1994) has pointed out. When adoptees reach adolescence, especially
with closed adoptions, and when the adoptee cannot find their birth parents, or
when the adopted parents deny the reality of the past, particularly difficult issues
around identity may arise. ‘If your personal narrative doesn’t grow and develop
with you, with concrete facts and information, you run the danger of becoming
emotionally frozen. You cannot make the necessary connections between the past
and the future that everyone needs to grow into a cohesive self. You become stuck
in the life cycle, beached like a whale on the shores of your own deficient narra-
tive’ (1994, p. 65). If the adopted parents do not respect the reality of the child’s
past, adoptees can grow up with a divided self, walling off essential aspects of
themselves, and emotionally frozen, not feeling sufficiently recognized for who
and what they are. They may remain hungry for a psychic home, bereft of the
links to such a home.
There may be some overlap in conceptualization here with John Steiner’s
notion of ‘psychic retreats’ (1993). These are pathological organizations in more
disturbed patients, referring to when patients can withdraw or retreat into states
of mind experienced as if they were places in which the patient could hide. Such
states of mind may appear as literal spaces, such as a house or a cave. One could
add here, that if the patient makes a retreat, then presumably they are retreating
28 Psychic home

from something, from live contact with the other, or from some living psychic
home.
4. The ordinary home consists of activities; it is not a static or frozen entity.
What could be called the ‘work of the day’ (Kennedy, 2007, pp. 246–60) takes
place within the home. This refers to significant events, which require thought
and/or action. The ordinary work of the day, structured around everyday activi-
ties, involves attention to all the significant, and at times deceptively indifferent,
thoughts, feelings and experiences that occupy us during the day and provide the
raw material for thinking and for dreaming. Much of this psychic work carries on
automatically without us being particularly aware of its regular occurrence or of
its everydayness. It is usually taken for granted, unless the family has major prob-
lems, of the kind where the family home has broken down, and where ordinary
family life cannot be held together safely.
When home life has broken down, when it is, for example, chaotic or danger-
ous, one can clearly see how the basic conditions for secure attachments and
identifications cannot take place; the internalized psychic home then becomes
precarious or dangerous. From such pathology, one can perhaps see how the
core of the psychic home is probably linked to early experiences where psyche
and soma are beginning to be linked together, when the psyche begins to feel at
home in the soma, along the lines described by Winnicott (1949, pp. 244–5). The
infant’s psyche begins to dwell in the soma, with a sense of being self-centred
inside his or her body, and this process depends upon the mother’s handling, her
ability to join up her emotional and physical involvement.
Thus, one can see how the notion of a psychic home consists of a number of
different and interacting elements, including the physical interior of a home but
internalized as a psychic interior. The notion of ‘personal identity’ refers to the
development and then maintenance of a person’s character, how they put together
in some way their various multiple identifications, as well as including wider
issues concerning a person’s cultural and social influences. I am suggesting that
the basic elements of the psychic home can be seen to provide a way of organiz-
ing the person’s identity, or can be seen as intrinsic to any notion of identity, a
theme I shall develop in more detail in Chapter Four on identity.
In psychoanalytic treatments, one can see the notion of a psychic home in a
variety of ways. Just take a few brief examples from my own practice:
Mrs X, for example, now has a good home, with a stable family, but she never
feels secure in herself; she carries around inside some deep anxieties linked to
the experiences of her early life. Her parents split up when she was very young,
her mother soon remarried and then the patient was sent to boarding school soon
after. Until the analysis, she had never questioned what had led to the breakup
of the family, or why she was sent away from home. She carries around quite
a fragile sense of a psychic home, afraid of expressing dependent feelings, and
quite emotionally inhibited as a person.
She struggled for a long time with the analytic setting. She wanted to come to
sessions, but as soon as she arrived, feelings of dread and despair would quickly
 Psychic home 29

arise, making, as she said, the couch uncomfortable. She managed her discomfort
by a sort of freezing, with her body stiff and immobile on the couch. The analytic
setting for a long time thus became a necessary but dreaded place. She would
often wonder why she wanted to come, when on entering the consulting room
she would feel so awful.
One of the main themes was an almost complete absence of early memories,
particularly after the breakup of her parent’s marriage. She could recall losing a
precious soft toy, and that her mother took her to an expensive store to replace
it, but no substitute was found to be suitable, though she made do with some
hard toys. However, bit-by-bit over the years, some early scenes came to her
mind, after we had gone over some of the difficult feelings she had experienced
at boarding school. There, she often felt lonely, cut off and not one of the group.
She began to make connections with some of her current fears about intimacy
and those boarding school experiences. One session seemed to convey something
of a turning point. It was the first time that she had made a stand about coming
to her analysis.
She began in a fairly animated way. She was annoyed because at work there
was a new computer system, and she had been told that she will have to set
aside some full days to learn it. That would mean missing both personal commit-
ments and her analytic sessions. She was angered by her (female) manager who
expected this of her. However, she was not going to go along with this and would
leave early to come to her sessions. My patient was also annoyed that she herself
was made to feel neglectful by not going along with her work’s expectations.
I was immediately struck by her making sure she would come to her analysis
despite the pressure to miss out.
She was also worrying about a vulnerable client who was angry about having
their invalidity benefit being removed. She was not sure what he would do to
himself. There were also worries about a close family member who was ill and
still in hospital.
I said that she was telling me about a number of outside pressures that had to
be overcome. She did overcome them when she had decided she would come to
her analysis.
She said that in fact her manager was normally reasonable, but what annoyed
my patient was that the manager herself was being put under pressure from above
but that she could not stand up to it. My patient did not want to be the one who
made a fuss. She feared both standing out and any retaliation – the latter was a
real fear, as someone in the team had in fact been effectively excluded for making
a fuss previously.
I said, ‘You mean, do people make a fuss, or do they have to put up with what-
ever comes their way.’
This comment made her think of her relative’s treatment and how they had put
up with whatever was done to them, even if the staff were incompetent.
(I was thinking, ‘Do I put up with her or make a fuss? What kind of manager/
analyst am I for her?’)
30 Psychic home

She continued – her relative would not find out what is happening to them.
Typically for her family, they just give themselves to the doctors.
I said, ‘Well, there is a doctor here, and maybe you fear giving yourself up
to me.’
She agreed. She talked about it being difficult here, with issues of control and
power. She has to fit in with the holiday dates I had recently given her. Though
she also sees they are reasonable, given the reality of the summer holidays and
her own children’s school dates, but there is an imbalance of power. She cannot
make me say things. She does not know when I will say things. She wants me to
say more. She has ‘zero control’ over me. She added that she often had a sense of
deprivation here; she felt deprived much of the time.
After a pause, she said that she was having thoughts about mothers and babies,
and all that babies get from their mothers in terms of physical contact and visual
stimulation, as much as talking.
I linked what she told me about her own possible early deprivation experiences
as a baby or young child, with a mother who came and went, and how she could
not make a fuss; she had to put up with what she was given, the hard toys for the
soft ones.
She said that when I do speak, she can feel in contact, and that does give her
enough to keep going, but the feeling of deprivation is still often there. So she felt
better about being here, even though it was also difficult.
I acknowledged what she had told me and then finished the session.
While of course there were many different elements to the session and to what
was going on in the analysis at that time, I would point to the fact that it was a new
experience for her to take a stand about her sessions. This did seem to be linked to
a developing, if fragile, sense of being more at home in the analysis, even though
that meant having to experience difficult feelings. Given the fact that home for
her was so full of conflict – with a mixture of loss, displacement and rejection, I
did feel this was a significant development.
For Mrs Y, home is not a place she can easily identify with. Her own mother
was exceedingly narcissistic, never having recognized the patient’s own individu-
ality. The family was not one where emotions were easily expressed; they had to
be buttoned up. There was great emphasis on good behaviour and not complain-
ing: the typical stiff upper lip. She was also sent to boarding school, where she
felt happier on the surface in some ways, at least able to find a way of relating
which did not demand having to accept mother was always right. Though she
married and had children, she has always felt it difficult consciously to identify
with a sense of home; home has always reminded her of being unacknowledged.
She has always felt more at ease out of the house, socializing or working. Home
was not somewhere where she could find peace and calm.
In fact, she quickly became committed to her analysis and moved into attend-
ing sessions five times a week as soon as possible. Her analysis became the
place where she could express herself and feel understood. Yet the analysis was
not without many difficulties. From the beginning of the analysis, there was a
 Psychic home 31

profound fear of being dependent on me, while at the same time a frantic search
for live contact with me. In the initial years of analysis, a certain amount of
analytic work took place during the week, but by Friday desperation would arise
about the coming weekend. By Monday, it felt as if we had to start from scratch.
This became a constant and worrying feature of the analysis, making it difficult
to build up a sense of continuity.
Building up the picture of life at boarding school, the ‘institutional home’,
became therapeutic in that it clarified how she had turned to an ‘institutional
mother’ as a way of coping with feelings of abandonment and rejection. Being
compliant and well behaved disguised her deep-seated feelings of anger and
betrayal towards her parents for agreeing to send her away and for not having the
capacity to understand her desperation. The work of building up a detailed picture
of what might have happened at the time when she lost her sense of a home life
went hand in hand with looking at how this scenario was repeated in the transfer-
ence to me from week to week. It was important that I recognize the quality of her
desperation about being left. Gradually a sense of the past week developed; the
weekends remained difficult but not unbearable. She no longer had to create her
world from scratch each Monday but could feel that she had something to hold
onto from the past weeks.
In a later session, the theme of her unhappiness at home, despite a number
of significant positives there, came to the fore. It was then that I put to her the
suggestion that it was not her real home that was troubling her but something
internal, linked to what we had discussed about her feelings of having to turn to
an institutional mother when she found her own mother was unresponsive. The
notion of a psychic home made a lot of sense to her; indeed, she felt that in some
ways she has spent her life moving away from a psychic home, and yet yearning
for it. It seems to encapsulate her own problematic particularly cogently. She also
felt that her analysis had become her psychic home, or at least the place where
she could begin to feel a sense of aliveness for the first time. That seemed to have
helped her find more contentment with her own home life.
Ms Z has had quite severe mental health problems, probably of the borderline
kind. Though educated and intelligent, she has found it difficult to work and finds
close relationships challenging. Her family is important for her, indeed a con-
tinuing and major influence. They want her to live near them, outside London,
and continue to offer incentives for her to do so. However, the atmosphere at
home is quite deadly. Independence is discouraged, the parents are very intrusive
about personal matters, and there is little sense of a differentiation between gen-
erations. One sibling is probably schizophrenic and lives at home; another has
only managed independence by living far away and by not having much contact
with the family. A psychic home for the patient is fraught with the danger of
breakdown.
In the analysis, these issues have come to the fore very intensely. Early on,
sessions would involve quite large swings of emotion, between despair and a
manic buildup of excitement. I found myself having to be calm and composed,
32 Psychic home

as if I were trying to manage being in a very unsteady sea. She did find
this helpful, though also frustrating; she had a constant critical internal voice,
which undermined her, and also found it difficult to believe that I was not mock-
ing her.
Among the many elements of the analysis, one which contributed to her feel-
ing steadier and more able to function socially was using the direct experience of
what she was feeling in the analysis as a way of understanding the volatility of
home life and the impact it had on her. Due to my calm stance, she was able to
begin to explore her inner world without massive feelings of panic and fear about
intrusion and abandonment. However, she also found it difficult to trust the analy-
sis, often being drawn back to the disturbed family environment, even though
when she actually stayed at her parents’ home, she felt increasingly anxious and
out of touch with reality. Part of the difficulty is that she is very sensitive to shifts
of mood; she can feel as if spinning out of control when her parents argue or show
direct anger towards her.
There has often been an oscillation between the stable psychic home repre-
sented by the analysis and her unstable family home, where emotions could not
be regulated effectively. There seemed to be some progress when she managed to
sustain employment where her sensitivity with people could be used. However,
I still have the sense that her psychic home is precarious.
For Mr W, work as a professional is the only place where he has relationships.
From his description, his own flat is a complete tip. It is hardly ever cleaned and
is grossly neglected. He has never asked anyone back there, and outside of work
events he has no social life. He has never had a close relationship, only friend-
ships. Such an existence would probably surprise his colleagues, who respect him
and his work. He keeps his home life secret from them all; I only began to know
the details over a period of time as he felt able to trust me.
He has an intense and highly conflictual relationship with his mother, who is
demanding of his attention. His father, to whom he felt very close and whom he
resembles physically, died many years ago. Indeed, he describes feeling as if he
stopped developing psychically at that point. It is as if he lives in a dead world,
in perpetual mourning, like Miss Haversham in Dickens’s Great Expectations.
The psychic home for him has never moved on; it remains full of dead introjects.
Everyone carries the psychic home with them; for Mr W the only escape from this
dead weight is at work. There is a real terror that the psychic home might come
alive, and that he, like his father, might have an early death.
I have chosen samples from various analyses to illustrate the way that one
may think about the notion of a psychic home in the analytic session. Clearly,
I have only selected small samples from the work and have excluded much else.
A major reason for this is the great problem about maintaining patient confiden-
tiality.
I would say that over the years the way that I listen to patients has been signifi-
cantly influenced by the fact that I worked for nearly thirty years as consultant
to the Cassel Family Unit (until its unfortunate closure in 2011). Working with
 Psychic home 33

highly troubled families meant having to focus quite minutely on the ‘work of
the day’, the family’s everyday life and activities. I became acutely aware that
a therapist could only attend to a fraction of the patient’s life, even when see-
ing them five times a week. However, one can listen to the way that the patient
uses the everyday, how they manage the work of the day in the 23 hours or so
of not seeing their analyst in the week, or over the weekend. It is difficult to
describe how this listening differs from other kinds of analytic listening. I should
say it does not replace other forms of listening but is additional. It pays atten-
tion to the quality of the psychic home, the psychological bricks and mortar, as
it were.
In the next chapter, I shall focus on how important it was for William
Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, to find a psychic home, important both for
their personal lives and for his poetry. This will also be another opportunity to
illustrate what I am trying to convey about the notion of a psychic home.
Chapter 3

The importance of a psychic

home in the life and work of
William Wordsworth

One of the most persistent themes in William Wordsworth’s poetry, particularly

in his early work and during the years he wrote his greatest poetry – between
about 1795 and 1805 – is that of home. He writes of yearnings for home, loss of
home, intense homecomings, homes that are ruined and may become a shelter for
the homeless and characters who have lost homes or who are homeless.
Coincidentally, his life began to change significantly when, in 1794 he and his
sister, Dorothy, set up home together for a few weeks, sealing their coming
together after years apart, with her having led a life of drudgery in other peoples’
home, and he having led an itinerant life in England and France. It was not long
before they were living in a permanent home, eventually settling back in the Lake
District, their childhood home, where Wordsworth wrote his most intense poetry,
including Tintern Abbey and the early versions of The Prelude. After years of
wandering, he found the stability he needed to fulfil his potential as a great
writer, and she found what she considered her first real home in her life with her
brother. I have described the emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior after
the turbulence of the French Revolution in the previous chapter. One could see
Wordsworth’s personal journey as reflecting a general trend of that time. In the
end, he found a physical setting for his writing, which became a major theme of
his poetry.
Of course, home was not the only space that Wordsworth found to be a source
of creativity. The other space to which he returned again and again was that of
the vast exterior space of nature as a source of imagination and intense feeling.
These two spaces, home and nature, the bounded and unbounded, were to be
major sources of inspiration.
The theme of home is so persistent that one must look for an explanation of its
importance in Wordsworth’s life and poetry beyond merely a wish for domesticity
(Page, 2003), as important as that was for Dorothy and him, given the fact that
they had lost both parents when they were children. There seems to have been
at work something psychically deeper than the mere idea of home, something
which one can recognize as a psychic space that provided a structure for his
emotional life and thereby his poetry – that is, a psychic home. Using evidence
from Wordsworth’s life and poetry, one can see how the notion of a psychic home
 Psychic home and William Wordsworth 35

can illuminate his development as a poet, as well as illustrate its existence as a

persistent psychic structure.
As I have described, a psychic home is a concept arising out of clinical work
with patients in psychoanalysis but also from wider sources. The psychic home
can be seen as an organizing structure in the mind central to the overall sense of
personal identity, involving elements from within the mind, from interaction with
others in the social field and from nonhuman elements, physical objects.
In order to see how the concept of a psychic home can be applied to
Wordsworth’s life and work, one can start with some basic biographical facts
about Wordsworth and his sister, which set the context for their creative life
together. On the first page of Gill’s life of the poet (1989, p. 1), Gill notes that he
faces the task of trying to write a biography, given that the poet himself spent a
lifetime sifting, selecting and reordering much of the material available himself,
even though much of the most significant material remained unpublished during
his lifetime; these unpublished works included pieces such as Home at Grasmere
(1800), which was a celebration of his life with his sister, and the various versions
of his great autobiographical poem The Prelude, the poem which represents the
growth of his mind.
Because of the death of both parents in Wordsworth’s youth, the shape of his
life has been described as having a ‘pattern of severances and ruptures counter-
pointed with periods of continuity and calm, which began in a childhood that
seemed to give a solid start to life and to promise a secure future but denied both
in his most formative years’ (Gill, 1989, p. 13). He described his earliest years as
involving a positive memory of his house, when as a 4-year-old, he played in the
garden and the fields and admired the distant hills (J. Wordsworth, 1995, 1799
Prelude, lines 17–26). But in the opening of the 1805 Prelude, he moves straight
from that early period to his time at his boarding school at Hawkshead, when he
was 9 years old, thus significantly eliding what was an unsettled period.
The basic facts of his life include the death of his mother in 1778, when
William was 7 years old, and when he and Dorothy had been farmed out to their
rather overly strict grandparents, a frequent occurrence, partly as a result of their
father often being away on business, and their mother evidently finding it difficult
coping with the children. It does seem that these early years were troubled as a
result, though he and Dorothy turned to one another for comfort. However, after
their mother’s death, Dorothy was separated from William and her other brothers
and did not see him again for nine years, at the end of his school days, a major
blow.
Wordsworth’s school, Hawkshead, near the Lake District in the vale of
Esthwaite, provided him with a real home for eight years. He lived in the cottage
of an affectionate woman, Ann Tyson, to whom he pays tribute in The Prelude
(1805, IV, lines 19–28). He regarded the whole region there as a paradise, and
it was from there that he would get a glimpse of ‘what he was to make his own
first real ‘abiding place’, Grasmere (Gill, 1989, p. 23). It was when he was there,
too, that his father died in 1783 when William was 13. Memories of this event
36 Psychic home and William Wordsworth

surface in the long poem he wrote at the end of these intense school days, The
Vale of Esthwaite, as well as in the 1799 Prelude. But what is striking is that ‘in
both poems what Wordsworth recalls is not the actual death of his father but the
intensity of his own longing to be home’ (Gill, 1989, p. 34). For example, there
is a passage in the Vale of Esthwaite which refers to his father’s death. In the pas-
sage, Wordsworth is waiting with his brothers for a horse to take him home for
the holidays.

Long Long upon yon steepy rock

Alone I bore the bitter shock
Long Long my swimming eyes did roam
For little Horse to bear me home
To bear me what avails my tear
To sorrow o’er a Father’s bier.
(Wordsworth, 1977, lines 431–7)

Then, a little farther, there is a reflection in the present on that past trauma.

Nor did my little heart foresee

–She lost a home in losing thee
–Nor did it know – of thee bereft
–That little more than Heav’n was left.
(Wordsworth, 1977, lines 445–8)

This section of the Vale ‘strives to define what “home” means and to seek
reparation for its dissolution’ (Wu, 2002, p. 7). It was also significant that, follow-
ing his father’s death, the large family home was sold, so that he and Dorothy in
reality had no actual home to go back to, something she was to bitterly complain
about in a letter written in 1787 (Wu, p. 8). Even in 1793, Dorothy complained to
a friend that their parents’ loss meant that ‘we in the same moment lost a father,
a mother, a home’ (Wu, p. 10).
The various versions of The Prelude also describe this incident and his reaction
to his father’s death. Thus,

Ere I to school returned

That dreary time, ’ere I had been ten days
A dweller in my father’s house, he died,
(J. Wordsworth, 1995, 1799 Prelude, lines 349–51)

The latter phrase seems ‘notable for its biblical ring and for its impersonality.
Wordsworth had been born in the house, and spent his childhood there, but the
reference hardly makes it sound like home’ (J. Wordsworth, 1995, p. 547, n. 351).
There is certainly some evidence here of a profoundly ambivalent relationship
 Psychic home and William Wordsworth 37

with his father, not merely anger at his death and guilt about having angry
thoughts towards him. Indeed, there is no evidence in The Prelude of the father–
son relationship being warm or close (Ellis, 1985, p. 19). Wordsworth says that
after his father’s death, he remembered it as an ‘anxiety of hope’ (J. Wordsworth,
1995, 1805 Prelude, line 371), but this was probably no more than an eager-
ness to go home (Ellis, 1985, p. 19). Yet subsequently in his poetry Wordsworth
repeatedly reveals a profound sympathy for, and identification with, displaced
people – those who are without a home, widows, beggars or those cut off, as he
was, from the parental home.
Dorothy and William were finally reunited at this time, though not yet perma-
nently, causing her considerable frustration: she had to remain in her unhappy
and unwanted situation in her grandparents’ house while William went off to
Cambridge, a place which was ‘to provide a lodging but not a home’ (Gill, 1989,
p. 36). At Cambridge he was unable to fix on anything. Instead,

I was detached
Internally from academic cares,
From every hope of prowess and reward,
And wished to be a lodger in that house
Of letters, and no more . . .
(J. Wordsworth, 1995, 1805 Prelude, Book 6, lines 29–33)

Yet at the end of his time there, he completed a poem, An Evening Walk,
which reveals elements of his greatness as a poet. In it, he yearns for the sights
and sounds of the Lake District, but it begins with an address to his sister,
who from now on becomes increasingly central to his life, despite subsequent
wanderings.

Far from my dearest friend, ’tis mine to rove

Thro’ bare, grey dell, high wood, and pastoral cove . . .
(Wordsworth, 1977, lines 1–2)

After leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth began a period of apparent aimlessness,

walking around Europe and then remaining in revolutionary France, where, in
1792, he met Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter, though they will be soon
be separated for some nine years due to the revolutionary wars, and he became
politically radical. Clearly, the experience of revolution in France was both intense
and life changing, producing a revolution in his own thinking about the world,
questioning his beliefs and assumptions, which would become integrated into his
finest poetry; indeed, three books in The Prelude are devoted to his French expe-
riences. On returning to England in 1793, he spent part of the summer walking
alone across Salisbury Plain and composed a poem which captures some intense
period of brooding, influenced by a number of writers, including Rousseau and
38 Psychic home and William Wordsworth

Spencer, and probably reflecting his turmoil about being separated from Annette
and his daughter. His poem, Salisbury Plain, begins, echoing Rousseau, with the
proposition that, for the naked savage,

Hard is the life when naked and unhoused

And wasted by the long day’s fruitless pains.
(Gill, 2004, lines 1–2)

The poem describes a story of a woman, driven out of her home, robbed by war
of her husband and children, wandering aimlessly with ‘no house in prospect but
the tomb’ (line 393).
While Wordsworth’s life was in chaos, Dorothy’s continued to be stifling,
stuck in a life of domestic bondage, while both desired to live together and to
find a resting place. What radically changed their lives and in the end provided
this peace, a physical and psychic home, was an offer they received in April to
May 1794 to live together at Windy Brow, a farmhouse near Keswick. For her,
it marked the end of her drudgery, and after a year, she remained with William
in various stable homes for the rest of her life. For him, it seems that ‘it was a
time of equal importance. Drinking in pleasure from the landscape and resting
in the stability of his relationship with Dorothy, he seems to have begun the
attempt to establish what really mattered to him and to take more command
of his life,’ (Gill, 1989, p. 80). His poetical activity was certainly intense at
this time with his undertaking of substantial revision to An Evening Walk and
Salisbury Plain.
However, it was only a year or so later, after Wordsworth had spent months
in contact with London radical thinkers, that he and Dorothy were able, in part
thanks to a legacy, to move together to Racedown, a substantial house in the
West Country, in September 1795; soon after, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
an event which would also, of course, have lasting significance for his life and
poetry. William and Dorothy stayed there for two years before moving back
permanently to the Lake District, and it is of some interest that they also took
with them the child Basil Montagu, age 2-and-a-half, whom they would continue
to bring up as one of their own family, not wishing him to experience the early
disruption in his care that they had experienced.
From accounts of that period in The Prelude, it seems that Wordsworth
retreated into himself after the stimulation of London, but that Dorothy’s care
for him and his contact with nature produced a healing effect. Perhaps this was a
time of breakdown, certainly crisis, which the intense coming together of brother
and sister did much to resolve. With a stable home, for the first time in their
lives, William was able to channel his feelings of guilt towards Annette and his
daughter, as well the conflicting feelings concerning radical politics – on the one
hand, he was sympathetic to the poor and downtrodden, but on the other hand he
had personally experienced what radical politics could lead to: the terrors of the
 Psychic home and William Wordsworth 39

French Revolution, which of course had a personal significance as the war with
England made it impossible for him to see his daughter.
Wordsworth wrote a play, The Borderers, at this time, which Gill (1989, p. 101)
describes as ushering in a new period beginning the exploration of themes which
would absorb Wordsworth until his death. Gill asks how such a breakthrough
had occurred and answers that the reason for it is not clear. In Book Ten of The
Prelude, Wordsworth describes this time as one when he was torn by conflicting
emotions as the French Revolution took its chaotic course, betraying its original
ideas, and also by the increasing repression in England. He describes how he was
rescued from his crisis by the presence of his sister and also by turning to nature,
which revived in him feelings from his earlier life. There is no doubt that there
was some sort of deep transformation at Racedown, as he shared every part of his
life with Dorothy. He became more self-assured, and by 1797, Dorothy describes
him as ‘cheerful as any body can be . . . the life of the whole house’ (qtd. in Gill,
1989, p. 103). She in turn describes Racedown as the first home she had ever had
(1989, p. 104).
The Borderers itself begins ‘an exploration of human suffering and of the
nature of Nature in its widest sense which is to motivate his finest work in the
near future’ (Gill, 1989, p. 115). Interestingly, the play ends without a resolution
in what one could describe as the loss of a psychic home. The play’s main char-
acter, Rivers, states that

I will go forth a wanderer on the earth,

A shadowy thing, and as I wander on
No human ear shall hear my voice,
No human dwelling ever gives me food
Or sleep or rest . . .
(Wordsworth, 1977, lines 2312–16)

While it still may not be clear what led to Wordsworth’s breakthrough at this
time, it would seem pretty clear that his circumstances were crucial. Finally,
he and Dorothy were reunited. At last, he had stability, a place where he could
recover from the turmoil of the previous years, his wanderings, and the turbulent
period in France – and the key themes of his poetry emerged with more clarity
and substance. It would seem clear that it was not just domestic peace that led
to this transformation, as important as that was, but something deeper. As he
conveys in his poem The Prelude, Wordsworth, in retrospect, points to the impor-
tance to him then of the rediscovery of feelings and memories from his earlier
life that helped him recover his balance. While his feeling for nature had a part
to play in this process, it would seem that the recovery of a deep sense of home
and its significance, something that reached back to his early life, was equally
important. He found his role as a poet within the ‘life of the whole house’. This
psychic home provided him with a structure to manage his tortured feelings, so
40 Psychic home and William Wordsworth

that they could be represented in poetical form; he had found a home for his feel-
ings, a home for his soul, and of course his soul mate, Dorothy.
Subsequently one can see how home and the loss of home became central
themes, coincidentally with the emerging of his most creative period, one in
which he at last found his poetic voice. He later described this period as one
when he was liberated from some kind of bondage. Thus the opening of the 1805
Prelude begins

Oh welcome messenger! Oh welcome friend!

A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he has been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchised and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? In what vale
Shall be my harbour? Underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream
Shall with its murmurs lull me to my rest?
(J. Wordsworth, 1995, lines 5–14)

These were lines he composed in 1799 just as he found Dove Cottage, which
marked his permanent return to the Lake District, his childhood home.
While of course the themes of loss and guilt are important in Wordsworth’s life
and poetry, for example, the death of his parents, the guilt about his daughter, and
the loss of the parental home (Wu, 2002), the counter to these losses is at least
equally important. First of all there is the creation of a new home with Dorothy,
which was to be finally consummated in Dove Cottage. Then there is the intensity
of his friendship with Coleridge, with whom he would form a personal and poeti-
cal partnership, however strained it would become later. The final return home
to Grasmere enabled Wordsworth to look back and face his losses. Of course
much remained unresolved, but his conflicts seemed to become at this point the
source of creative tension, providing the motivation for his poetry and giving it
its intensity and power.
The return home to the Lake District and the creation of the new, permanent
home with Dorothy enabled William to look back at his life and development
and see a shape from his earliest days. ‘Deliberately distancing himself from the
political centre, from publishers, and the whole professional world of literature,
he had chosen his home, not as a negative retreat from the “real world” but as a
positive commitment to an austere and dedicated life amidst the elemental forms
of nature’ (Gill, 1989, p. 174).
By early 1800, Wordsworth was at work on his poem Home at Grasmere. This
was originally conceived as the opening of his great philosophical poem The
Recluse, which he and Coleridge had planned for the future. Home at Grasmere,
though a significant poem, remained unpublished, and The Recluse was never
 Psychic home and William Wordsworth 41

composed, except as fragments of different poems. Yet Home at Grasmere

reveals much about Wordsworth’s joy at finding a centre to his life.

’tis the sense

Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,
A blended holiness of earth and sky,
Something that makes this individual Spot,
This small abiding-place of many men,
A termination, and a last retreat,
A Centre. Come from wheresoe’er you will,
A Whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself, and happy in itself,
Perfect Contentment, Unity entire.
(Gill, 2004, lines 161–70)

In contrast to this discovery of a state of contentment, Wordsworth also

describes a situation in several of his poems, when a man has no resting place,
no stable psychic home. There are ruined cottages, various crumbling homes and
places laid waste, scattered all over his works. But for Wordsworth, Grasmere
became the centre, a true psychic home where his identity as a poet became
consolidated.
In this poem, however imperfectly executed at times, Wordsworth ‘draws on
what are to be the richest sources of all of his poetry: first, the strength of his
attachment to a particular place and his yearning for some localized home [my
italics] for his imaginative activity; second his conviction that his own feelings,
his experiences of friendship, loss, or desire, demanded exploration in poetry’
(Gill, 1989, p. 32).
The poem is also a joyous celebration of, and tribute to, Dorothy, who, sharing
the home, underpinned his sense of purpose and power as a poet.

Shall gratitude find rest? Mine eyes did ne’er

Rest on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either She whom now I have, who now
Divides with me this loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where’er my footsteps turned,
Her Voice was like a hidden Bird that sang;
The thought of her was like a flash of light
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Of fragrance independent of the wind . . .
(Gill, 2004, lines 104–13)

While Home at Grasmere celebrates the retrieval of home with Dorothy as

inspiration, the unpublished poem ‘Composed When a Probability Existed of
42 Psychic home and William Wordsworth

Our Being Obliged to Quit Mount Rydal as a Residence’ speaks about the fear of
collapse of home (Gill, 2012, personal communication) when Wordsworth pan-
icked as for a while it seemed a possibility that the lease would not be renewed.
The Wordsworths had moved to Rydal Mount in 1812 after the traumatic loss of
his daughter’s presence and then son and the breach with Coleridge. The move
marked the beginning of a new phase of domestic life when, in addition, money
worries were lessening. ‘Over the years both the place and the idea of Rydal
Mount attracted a powerful cluster of feelings in all of the family, who cherished
the house, the garden, and its atmosphere as a habitable domain . . . To lose Rydal
Mount would have been to lose not just a house but a spot entwined with the
reconstruction of their lives’ (Gill, 1989, p. 298).
The poem is an elegy to a spring near Rydal Mount, called Nab Well. The
intensity of his attachment to the well conveys his deep attachment to the place,
which had become a new psychic home.

Pellucid Spring! Unknown beyond the verge

Of a small Hamlet, there, from ancient time,
Not undistinguished; (for of Wells that ooze
Or founts that gurgle from the moss-grown side
And craggy forehead of this cloud-clapped hill.
Their common Sire, thou only bears’t his Name)
One of my last fond looks is fix’d on Thee . . .
(Wordsworth, unpublished, lines 1–7)

And later in the poem, he recalls his observations of the well.

And O how much of all that Love creates

Or beautifies like changes undergoes,
Suffers like loss when drawn out of the Soul,
Its silent laboratory. Words should say,
Could they but paint the wonders of thy cell,
How often I have mark’d a plumy fern,
Bending an apex towards its paler self,
Reflected all in perfect lineaments,
Shadow and substance kissing, point to point.
(lines 45–53)

Then, at the end of the poem, having extolled the well as a natural phenomenon,
which yet has provided him with inspiration and many associations, he takes his
leave.

The cloud of rooks descending from mid air

Softens its evening uproar towards a close
Near and more near, for this protracted strain
A warning not unwelcome – Fare thee well,
 Psychic home and William Wordsworth 43

Emblem of equanimity and truth,

Farewell – if thy composure be not ours,
Yet if thou still, when we are gone, will keep
Thy living chaplet of moist fern and flowers
Cherished in shade tho’ peeped at by the Sun,
So shall our bosoms feed a covert growth
Of grateful recollections, tribute due,
(Not less than to wide lake and foaming rill)
To thy obscure and modest attributes,
To thee, clear Spring! And all-sustaining Heaven.
(lines 88–101)

As powerful as is this elegy to a natural phenomenon, the poetry is tinged with

anxiety and fear of loss. As much as Wordsworth is the poet of homecomings, he
is also the poet of lives ruined and homes lost. But while there may be loss, he
also repeatedly creates a powerful vision of retrieval and renewal, embodied in
the mystery of words.

Visionary Power
Attends upon the motions of the winds
Embodied in the mystery of words.
There darkness makes abode, and all the host
Of shadowy things do work their changes there,
As in a mansion like their proper home . . .
(J. Wordsworth, 1995, 1805 Prelude, lines 619–24)

He faces the dark but dwells in the light, the light and dark together making
‘a sense sublime . . . whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’ (Tintern Abbey,
Wordsworth, 1977, p. 360, line 98). And he has another sublime gift,

that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
(lines 42–9)

The poem thus describes becoming a ‘living soul’ – through the power of love,
love of nature and of his sister, who underpinned his security. Particular places
become not only sources of wonder and inspiration, but often remind him of
attachments to loved people. The particularity of place is important, but not just
44 Psychic home and William Wordsworth

as a physical space; places become emblematic of a psychic space, interweaving

past and present, with a yearning for something that will last. Thus in the Poems
on the Naming of Places, a brook leads him to imagine nearby a cottage where he
and his sister (called Emma in the poem) might dwell and will become a lasting
memorial of their love.

–Soon did the spot become my other home,

My dwelling and my out-of-doors abide.
And, of the shepherds who have seen me there,
To whom I sometimes in my idle talk
Have told this fancy, two or three, perhaps,
Years after we are gone and in our graves,
When they have cause to speak of this wild place
May call it by the name of EMMA’S DELL.
(Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1805, lines 40–6)

And in another poem of this sequence, he describes an eminence:

’Tis in truth
The loneliest place we have among the clouds.
And she who dwells with me, whom I have loved
With such communion that no place on earth
Can ever be solitude to me,
Hath said, this lonesome peak shall bear my name.
(Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1805, lines 12–16).

A brief poem from 1842 points to almost everything that had been central to
Wordsworth’s imaginative engagement with words and things and seems to sum-
marize the central role of a psychic home in his creative life.

Glad sight wherever new with old

Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.
(qtd. in Gill, 2004, p. xvii)

Thus, the living soul, what Wordsworth also called ‘the spirit of life’ (qtd. in
Gill, 1989, p. 196) in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, depends upon the mys-
terious joining of old and new through a loving attachment to home.
Chapter 4

Towards the soul

The identity issue

Identity is a term used in many different ways and by a variety of disciplines.

It has become a central issue of concern in contemporary debates about politics,
ethics and culture, as can be seen for example in Kwame Appiah (2005), Amartya
Sen (2006), Kathryn Woodward (1997), Edward Said (1993), Stuart Hall (1990)
and Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (1996). Issues of identity also touch upon the
soul territory, that of each person’s unique sense of who they are. Appiah even
goes as far as to call ‘soul making’ the ‘project of intervening in the process of
interpretation through which each citizen develops an identity’ (2005, p. 164).
However, before specifically addressing the literature on the soul, I shall focus on
the issue of identity, which will form a backdrop to subsequent chapters, as well
as bring together issues already raised by the discussions of the centrality in our
lives of a psychic home.
Identity is a term that is of great relevance to issues of race, ethnicity, nation-
ality, gender and sexuality. Identity matters in very immediate ways, when it
becomes a question of belonging, of inclusion but also of exclusion. The issue
of identity has become a focus for various kinds of radical feminist literature,
much of it challenging traditional psychoanalytic thinking, though also deeply
influenced by it, even if in opposition, as with the work of Judith Butler (1990).
The phenomena of terrorism and fundamentalism mean also that we need to look
at how identities are formed, sustained and can be distorted. The existence of
the Internet and the place of globalization in addition mean that larger forces are
more and more eroding individual identities. It has become increasingly difficult
for people to assert their own local identities; there is a constant risk of people
becoming subservient to powerful interests.
Though identity has become a central issue of concern in the humanities, it
seems to have become of less interest to psychoanalysts, even though it was a
major topic of interest from the 1950s to the 1970s. Indeed, some of the ideas
generated then, particularly by Erik Erikson, have become central to current pre-
occupations in other disciplines.
I will argue that identity is a vitally important but complex and at times elusive
or indeterminate concept. There are various fixed or constant elements in the
development of identity, which can become the source of integration and of a
46 Towards the soul

sense of permanence, of achievement and coherence, whether that be as a person

and/or as a psychoanalyst; and there are still issues about the nature of identity
that challenge our thinking, such as its link with the processes of identification,
the question of whether or not unity is an illusion or a real possibility. De M’Uzan
has suggested that one can talk of a ‘spectrum of identity’ (2005, p. 18), that the
sense of I-ness is neither in the ego nor the other, but distributed along both, a
theme I shall return to later, and which matches my own picture of the human
subject as being organized between the individual and the network of others.
I would suggest that one of the constant elements is that of the psychic home
and that this provides a basis for a sense of identity, for crucial questions such as
‘Who am I?’ ‘Who do I look and act like?’ ‘Which religion and nationality am I?’
They indicate a search for a place in life, an identity which provides a relatively
stable sense of home and one that supplies the core of the elusive and precarious
notion of identity, whatever its complex vicissitudes, however much the human
subject is distributed between other subjects.

Psychic home and identity: Some general issues

While in psychoanalytic thinking identity has come to have specific uses,
particularly in understanding adolescent and earlier development, it has also
come to be used as a general term for weighing up a psychoanalyst’s stage in their
career development. The phrase ‘identity crisis’, first described in detail by
Erikson (1959, p. 56), is now very much in the public domain when referring to
adolescent turmoil and their search for themselves, but it is also now applied to
other stages of the life cycle, including middle and old age. That is, identity is a
lifelong process, a matter of becoming as well as of being.
For psychoanalysts, there is the specific issue of what it means to have a psy-
choanalytic identity: how one becomes an analyst and maintains one’s analytic
stance, and how past generations of analysts have contributed to contemporary
analytic identity, a topic I shall come to later in more detail.
Identity matters in immediate and indeed practical ways. For example, if
you wish to renew your UK passport, you now have to apply to the Identity
and Passport Office, which will authenticate your personal details and confirm
your identity as a UK citizen, or not. Having a home is vital to this. Without an
address, you cannot really be a citizen. This dilemma was especially poignant
after World War II. Tony Judt (2005) has charted in his groundbreaking book
Post War how there took place a massive movement of millions of people due to
the aftermath of the concentration camps and also the civil wars that soon took
place in what became communist Europe. Not only had there been, as a result of
Stalin and Hitler, the uprooting, transplanting and deportation of some 30 mil-
lion people between 1939 and 1944, but after the war Europe had to deal with
an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer. Untold
millions were displaced or were refugees. The distinction between displaced
persons, assumed to have somewhere, a home to go to, and refugees, who were
 Towards the soul 47

classified as homeless, was one of the many nuances that were introduced by the
authorities trying to deal with this trauma. Its legacy remains to this day, marking
the European identity.
The impact of these post- and indeed prewar migrations, of course, greatly
affected the history of British psychoanalysis. The fact that the controversial
discussions took place both at a time of war and with a number of those who had
been displaced from their homes must have had a considerable influence on both
the form and content of the discussions, focused around half-conscious notions
of whose home was the most suitable to house psychoanalytic truths. Feelings
about lost homes, about lost German or Austrian identities, idealized hopes for the
new home or inevitable disappointments about establishing a home in exile may
have crept into the apparently scientific arguments, and indeed, I suspect, remain
still in current concerns about the functioning of the British Psychoanalytical
Society.
Identity has always mattered, at least in Western society, certainly since the
ancient Greeks, even before passports and the Internet. There are a number of
famous examples in Homer’s Odyssey, which brings this to light, where one can
also see the resonances of the place of home and homecoming in the appearance
of identity issues, as I have already described in Chapter Two.
In contrast to Homer’s epic grandeur, if one were to capture the modern con-
cern with identity artistically, one could do no better than consider the troubling
pictures of Francis Bacon. He highlights in a disturbing way how our modern,
or indeed postmodern, notion of identity is precarious. There is a permanent
sense of unease in his pictures, marking the fragile sense of human identity.
Faces and whole bodies intermingle and merge, sometimes are transformed into
animal forms; mouths scream, bending figures cry out or are threatened, sexual
encounters are anxiety ridden, identities are uncertain. Home is no comforting
place here, rather the site of terror, cruelty, perversion and crude sexuality. In his
book Looking Back at Francis Bacon (2000), David Sylvester describes Bacon’s
Study for a Self-Portrait (1985–6), a brilliant triptych, depicting the artist from
three viewpoints. Bacon here seems to alternate between masculine and feminine
identities, in one panel with his legs tucked primly under the chair like a modest
lady, and in another panel more macho, emphasizing his massive arms and broad
shoulders. Sylvester quotes the critic Richard Dormant when he states that in our
‘struggle to achieve a separate and secure identity’ we have to learn ‘to distin-
guish between our own bodies and those of others, to work out that our bodies not
only have weight and mass, but also boundaries, limits, perimeters’. If the figures
in this triptych ‘are seen as embryonic shapes desperately trying – and failing – to
form a single, secure identity, then they speak of a universal human condition, the
aboriginal calamity with which we struggle all our lives – and this is the stuff of
the greatest art’ (qtd. in Sylvester, p. 223–4).
While Bacon’s triptych may reveal the struggle to form a single secure personal
identity, contemporary politics reveals a real danger when people claim a single
and overarching social and cultural identity rather than a looser sense of crossing
48 Towards the soul

a number of different identities. The fundamentalist dangerously owns a singular

identity, excluding the rest of humanity, with potentially hateful and explosive
results. They are no respecters of other peoples’ homes. Identity can be homicidal
when it becomes singular and disrespectful of differences. Much safer is to rec-
ognize that we belong to a variety of groupings, with a plurality of affiliations,
including language, gender, profession, religion, class, interest groups, political
associations and belief systems (Sen, 2006). Identity can then be humanizing
when it respects otherness. Thus, a ‘positive’ notion of identity, respect and rec-
ognition of difference go together, as do a ‘negative’ notion of identity, disrespect
and misrecognition of otherness.
Perhaps a psychoanalytic overview of this complex field can add something
useful to current debates about identity, even though it is now often stated that
psychoanalysis itself is in its own identity crisis, faced with the challenge of
alternative therapies and the constant pressure to provide convincing evidence of
its effectiveness. If it is any consolation, one could say that psychoanalysis is not
alone in being in a crisis – it seems to have become a way of life at the moment;
we are all in some kind of identity crisis, financial or otherwise. Perhaps identity
is the kind of concept to which one only pays particular attention at moments of
crisis, when fixed patterns of identity formation begin to break down, such as
during war situations, institutional change or personal trauma.

What is identity?
The dilemmas of personal identity were first put forward philosophically by John
Locke (1690, p. 331ff.), who remains the seminal influence in the field. He placed
his account of personal identity in the context of the general nature of identity.
The identity of a physical object depends on the identity if its constituent parts; if
one part is removed, the object is changed. But with a living thing, the parts may
change as in growth, but the living thing remains the same, so that identity in a
living thing consists in the organization of its parts, the capacity to remain the
same in the midst of change. The identity of a human being consists in the orga-
nization of their body. Personal identity consists in the unified consciousness of
the self’s present and past thoughts, and it is consciousness and memory that
ground personal identity. However, Locke also highlighted certain dilemmas
about such identity, including the periods when consciousness is disrupted and we
lose a sense of continuity. He even raised the possibility that one body could
house more than one consciousness.
Recent studies of ‘split brains’ involving severely epileptic patients, as well
as experimental monkeys and cats, who have had the connections cut across
the corpus callosum uniting right and left cerebral hemispheres, provide fur-
ther evidence of the complexity of how we view personal identity. In fact, each
hemisphere has the capacity to process information separately from the other
hemisphere, and conflict may arise between the sides of the brain. According to
 Towards the soul 49

Thomas Nagel (1979, pp. 163–4), these studies challenge the notion of a single
subject of consciousness.
Indeed, most recent studies on brain functioning highlight how much integra-
tion occurs both at the cellular level and in parallel pathways, challenging any
notion of an overall single integrating mind. For example, individual neurones
in the visual cortex respond to particular inputs, such as vertical or horizontal
movement. The cells do not care if the stimulus has, say, different colours; it just
responds to verticality or whatever orientation it is set to respond to. So already at
the cellular level there is abstraction (see Zeki, 2009). Evidence from work with
the visual cortex reveals that each different area of cortex is capable of consider-
able integration, such as areas involved with colour or movement (Zeki, 2004).
Different aspects of visual perception are integrated separately and indeed at
different time intervals. This has major implications for our understanding of
consciousness and hence of personal identity. There is no single, integrated visual
consciousness, but rather several different consciousnesses coexisting at the same
time (Zeki, 2004, p. 197).
How then do we have any unity of experience if there is no single place
where things come together, and when integration occurs in parallel at many
local levels? There are, of course, multiple and reciprocal connections between
areas of the brain; areas are not isolated from one another. But accounting for
the functioning of the whole is a major puzzle. Perhaps identity and some sense
of unity of the whole person consist in having the various areas available, not
coming together as such. When the brain is damaged severely, then particular
areas are no longer available, and integration is diminished. Severe damage to
the frontal lobes definitely alters identity; the individual, incapable of deep emo-
tional responses, appears to be another person, not themselves. Does this kind of
damage indicate that identity and the capacity for emotional responsiveness are
intimately linked? With a severe prefrontal brain lesion, the person cannot place
themselves in time and place; they have no sense of home. Perhaps one can say,
then, that the prefrontal cortex is the main site of the psychic home function. Of
course, this remains a speculative thought.
Paul Ricoeur (1990) distinguishes two basic forms of identity – identity as
sameness (Latin, idem) and identity as selfhood (Latin, ipse). Selfhood is not
sameness. This is illustrated in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. The plot of the
play, with the confusion between two sets of twins, master and servant, both sets
coming together after a period of exile for one of the sets, illustrates how human
identity is an elusive and precarious entity; nothing about it can be taken for
granted, and perhaps we rely too much on things being or looking the same for
reassurance about who we are. The plot of the play emphasizes how having an
identity and being identical is not the same thing. One twin looks like the other
but has a different role and personality. We may rely on things being the same
but identities can be easily transformed. It does not take much for despair to set
in, and with a sense that one has lost the ground for being certain about one’s
50 Towards the soul

own identity. One subject can easily turn into another subject, while appearing
to remain the same. The ‘plot’ of life, one might say, involves a constant play of
subjects.
Appiah (2005) links identity with J. S. Mill’s notion of an individual ‘plan
of life’. The life plan is an expression of individuality, who I am. As Frank
Sinatra put it – ‘I did it my way’. However, this needs to be complemented by
the realization that the idea of identity is linked to that of recognition by oth-
ers, that individuality and sociability are interlinked. Identity provides us with
a source of value, one that helps us make our way among options. To adopt an
identity is to make it mine, give it a home, and to see it as structuring my way
through life, as well as allowing myself to feel solidarity with other like-minded
people.
For Charles Taylor (1989), identity designates the ensemble of understandings
of what it is like to be a human agent, including the sense of inwardness, freedom,
individuality and being embedded in nature. The term is also defined ‘by the
commitments and identifications which provide the framework or horizon within
which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or variable, or what
ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon
within which I am capable of taking a stand’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 27). Thus, for him,
identity is linked with making choices. His use of horizon here would seem to
have similarities with that of a foundational psychic home.
Woodward (1997) discusses the tension between essentialist and nonessential-
ist perspectives on identity. The essentialist account suggests that there is one
clear, authentic set of characteristics which account for identity, such as where
one belongs culturally or ethnically. A nonessentialist definition, however, would
focus on differences as well as common and shared characteristics. She empha-
sizes how identities are not unified, and yet we need to examine how people take
up various fixed or flexible positions and identify with them in order to see our
way through tensions between people. This means having to explore the nature
of difference, as well as psychoanalytic understanding of how our subjectivity is
invested in various kinds of identity positions. Woodward’s overall view is that
we need to have a broad and inclusive, fluid and flexible, generous and respectful
notion of identity if we are to escape the dangers of sectarianism.
Flexible and fluid pictures of the self are common in much modernist litera-
ture, famously in James Joyce’s and Virginia Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’
narratives. There is a striking description of the diversity and unity of the self
in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Near the beginning of the novel, Clarissa
Dalloway has returned from her walk around central London and is preparing for
a party that night. She looks in the mirror.

How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same
imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass.
It was to give her face point. That was her self – pointed; dartlike; definite.
That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the
 Towards the soul 51

parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and com-
posed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat
in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some
dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young
people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never
showing the a sign of all the other sides of her – faults, jealousies, vanities,
suspicions . . . Now, where was her dress?
(Woolf, 1925, p. 35)

The writing, both in its content and in its form, expresses simultaneously the
flowing of the self and its coming together, into what Woolf describes as a dia-
mond, a multifaceted and precious object.
Bauman describes how finding identity comes along with ‘a bunch of problems
rather than a single-issue campaign’ (2004, p. 12), a feature he shares with most
people these days, living in what he calls the ‘liquid modern era’. By the latter,
he means that ‘in our liquid modern times the world around is sliced into poorly
coordinated fragments while our individual lives are cut into a succession of ill-
connected episodes’ (2004, p. 12–13). The modern dilemma is to be wholly, or
in part, out of place, or one might say, not quite at home. ‘Identities float in the
air, some of one’s own choice, but others inflated and launched by those around’
(2004, p. 13). One can ‘even begin to feel everywhere chez soi, “at home” – but
the price to be paid is to accept that nowhere will one be fully and truly at home’
(2004, p. 14).
We in the liquid modern world, ‘seek and construct and keep together the
communal references of our identities while on the move – struggling to match
the similarly mobile, fast moving groups we seek and construct and try to keep
alive for a moment, but not much longer’ (Bauman, 2004, p. 26). One is reminded
here of the suitably named mobile phone, to which we have become powerfully
addicted, and without which communication can only be slow and uncertain.
What did we do without it? Well, we obviously had slower communication, lon-
ger waiting times before knowing what others thought or wanted. We had to wait
hours or even days for messages to be answered. But there is a price to pay for
being in a liquid world; our identity is also liquid, and, like liquid, difficult to tie
down and shape, unless kept in a solid container.
On the one hand, we long for a secure identity, yet becoming ‘fixed’ and
identified gets an increasingly bad press (Bauman, 2004, p. 29). Yet having too
much flexibility is not conducive to ‘nest building’. But we live in a world where
it is increasingly difficult to feel one belongs to a workplace or neighbourhood,
or even family. There is instead an emphasis on being on the move, having a
‘network’ of connections, swapping identities. ‘We talk these days of nothing
with greater solemnity or more relish of “networks” of “connection” or “rela-
tionships”. Not only because the “real stuff” – the closely knit networks, firm
and secure connections, fully-fledged relationships – have all but fallen apart’
(Bauman, 2004, p. 93).
52 Towards the soul

While flexibility may be a useful capacity, ‘floating without support in a poorly

defined space, in a stubbornly, vexingly “betwixt and between” location, becomes
in the long run an unnerving and anxiety-prone condition. On the other hand,
a fixed position amidst the infinity of possibilities is not an attractive prospect
either’ (Bauman, 2004, p. 29).
While Bauman here does not offer solutions to the dilemmas he so clearly
defines, there is an underlying sense that these dilemmas are directly related to the
loss of ‘fully-fledged’ relationships, where there is a living attachment to home
and to the workplace.

Psychoanalysis and identity

Psychoanalytic thinking around the issues of identity first flourished in the 1950s
and 1960s, beginning with the work of Erikson, who was well aware of ambi-
guities and dilemmas in the very notion of identity. Perhaps the fact that he had
been adopted made him particularly sensitive to the identity issue – his mother
did not reveal that, having been abandoned by Erikson’s father when she was
pregnant, her husband adopted him. Erikson (1956) pointed out that Freud used
the term only once when trying to formulate his link to Judaism; he spoke of an
‘inner identity’ which links the individual with the unique values and history of
his people (Freud, 1941[1926], p. 274). It also refers to something in the indi-
vidual’s core which links up with the group’s inner coherence. ‘The term identity
expresses . . . a mutual relation in that it connotes both a persistent sameness
within oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential
character with others’ (Erikson, 1956, p. 56). In order to clarify the subject matter
of identity, Erikson approached it from a variety of angles, predominantly with a
developmental theoretical perspective, but also using literature, sociology and
clinical work. Identity, then, appears to refer to a conscious sense of individual
identity, an unconscious striving for continuity of personal character or as main-
tenance of an inner solidarity with a group’s ideals and values.
The adolescent is consciously striving for an identity, as one can see in their
various fads and enthusiasms, ways of dressing, kinds of music and so on.
This compares with the emerging and more unconscious identity of the mature
adult. Processes of identification and identity formation are intimately linked.
But identity formation involves the selective repudiation and mutual assimila-
tion of childhood identifications, and their absorption into a new configuration
(Erikson, 1956, p. 68), which also involves the processes by which a society
recognizes the young individual as somebody who had to become the way he
or she is, and who is accepted for being that person. Identity refers to knowing
where one is going, feeling at home with oneself and in one’s body, gaining
assuredness, respect and recognition from others who count.
While at the end of adolescence there is an overt identity ‘crisis’, identity
formation neither begins nor ends with adolescence, for it is a lifelong develop-
ment, largely unconscious to the individual and to his society. Its ‘roots go back to
 Towards the soul 53

the first self-recognition: in the baby’s earliest exchange of smiles there is some-
thing of a self-realization coupled with a mutual recognition’ (Erikson, 1956,
p. 69).
The process of identity formation ‘emerges as an evolving configuration – a
configuration which is gradually established by successive ego syntheses and
resyntheses throughout childhood; it is a configuration gradually integrating con-
stitutional givens, idiosyncratic libidinal needs, favoured capacities, significant
identifications, effective defences, successful sublimations, and consistent roles’
(Erikson, 1956, p. 71). Identity formation involves a gradual integration of self-
images. Phyllis Greenacre (1958) considered that the developing body image was
the core of self-image and hence of the sense of identity. Identity implies both a
being equal to and a being different from. The sense of identity comes into some
kind of preliminary working form in the phallic-oedipal period, when the child is
aware of himself existing in world of others, owns his or her own thoughts and
memories, has knowledge of sexual differences, knows the names of body parts
and is aware of himself or herself as a unit in a group. Although having a stable
core, identity is subject to change roughly approximating the stages of body
maturational achievement, with their accompanying emotional problems. Hence,
identity formation cannot be completed fully until adolescence is assimilated, and
indeed continues throughout life.
Edith Jacobson understood identity formation as a ‘process that builds up the
ability to preserve the whole psychic organization . . . as a highly individualized
but coherent entity which has direction and continuity at any stage of human
development. Normal identity formation . . . depends on the effectiveness of the
synthesizing, organizing functions of the ego; but . . . the processes of organiza-
tion are operative in all structure formations of the psychic apparatus, including
the superego’ (1964, p. 27). The notion of identity, with its focus on the individu-
al’s self realization, potentialities and role in society calls special attention to the
relations of identity to the ego and superego identifications and their final vicis-
situdes during and after adolescence. While she agrees with others that the early
mother–child relationship is crucial to the struggle for identity, she also highlights
the importance of considering the role of aggression in developmental processes,
where the assertion of the individual arises in the service of differentiation.
For Jacobson, the child’s discovery of their identity occurs around the age of
2 to 2-and-a-half, when with the ‘child’s ego maturation, his ability to walk and
to talk, the ever-widening scope of his perceptive and locomotor functions, his
increasing manual accomplishments, his weaning and cleanliness training, etc.,
have advanced enough to bring about the startling discovery of his own identity,
the experience of “I am I” ’ (1964, p. 59). But, of course, this discovery under-
goes many changes; there is an increasing sense of direction and continuity as
the psychic organization grows, becomes differentiated, structured, organized
and reorganized, via adolescence, until maturity is reached. The finding of one’s
sexual identity begins early on but is the task of adolescence and postadolescence.
For normal identity formation, the integration of the superego components for
54 Towards the soul

her is vital, providing safety and protecting the self from dangerous instinctual
stimuli. Identity problems arise when the different elements of the psyche fail to
integrate. Adolescence is a time when the self is particularly vulnerable due to
the fluidity of the psychic organization, which is both an opportunity for growth
and a danger to the self. How these processes are negotiated in adolescence will
in turn affect postadolescent identity formation, leading to a stable or pathological
psychic formation.
For Heinz Lichtenstein (1977), identity refers to the capacity to remain the
same in the midst of change, and emerges from the symbiotic relation to the
mother. The mother–child unit is the nucleus out of which identity emerges.
The mother releases the child’s identity. The specific reflection received from
the mother conveys to the child a primary identity. The thematic identity will
be developed in the course of a life as an infinite variety of identity transforma-
tions, as a simple musical theme is developed into a symphony. Thus, the mother
imprints upon the infant an identity theme, which is irreversible but capable of
variation. Clinically, one can tease out various identity themes in the patient.
What makes for success or failure of integration is the patient’s ability to confront
the identity theme, not as merely an imposed and passive part of the self, but as
something that can be open enough to lead to new developments and moments of
integration. That is, one could say that there can be rigid or more flexible identity
themes.
Winnicott was obviously concerned with what constitutes the sense of self and
how this comes into being. Identity seems to be linked to the capacity to be alone,
a stage of development where the individual is established as a unit, the ‘I am’,
so they can say ‘I am alone’ (Winnicott, 1965, p. 33). This capacity to be alone
is a sophisticated one, with many contributory factors, and is closely related to
emotional maturity. The basis for this capacity is the experience of being alone
in someone’s presence; that is, there has been good enough reliable ego support
from the early parent. For the establishment of unit status, the whole person has to
have a sense of an inside and an outside, living in the body, more or less bounded
by the skin; for this to happen there needs to have been a successful negotiation
of the stages of dependence. A crucial aspect of the establishing of unit status, and
hence identity, is the process of personalization. This describes the process when
the person of the baby starts to be linked with the body and the body functions
(Winnicott, 1965, p. 59), with the skin as the limiting membrane. The infant’s
psyche begins to dwell in the soma, or, one might say, feels at home in the soma,
with a sense of being self-centred inside the body, and this process depends
upon the mother’s handling, her ability to join up her emotional and physical
involvement. Here, then, one may see possible early roots of the sense of a psychic
home.
The core of the self emerges out of the early mother–child relationship and
implies body–mind integration. One could say that the merging of the mother’s
and infant’s identities is basic for subsequent differentiation. In addition, around
the various identifications, one could envisage a kind of containing membrane,
 Towards the soul 55

holding them together in some way, akin to the notion of the safeguarding struc-
ture of a psychic home.
Subsequently, adult life for Winnicott begins when the individual, climbing out
of dependency, has found a niche in society through work and is settled in some
pattern; here there is a compromise between copying the parents and defiantly
establishing a personal identity (Winnicott, 1965, p. 92).
The work of Lacan (1966), influential for feminist thinkers on identity, decon-
structs identity. The human subject for Lacan is not an entity with an identity as
such; instead, the subject is radically split, a fragmented subject with no sense
of unity, almost no sense of a psychic home. Any sense of unity in the subject
is an illusion. The unconscious for Lacan undermines any sense of certainty and
stability, making the subject precarious. The subject can be grasped in language,
but one cannot find from language any sense of a total unifying self; that is, the
ego’s role is that of giving an illusory sense of permanence and stability. Such
a view can be seen to arise from Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage, where the
young child sees a total reflection of themselves. This reflection, bringing with it
the appearance of wholeness, produces a feeling of jubilation and fascination, but
is the source of alienation, the illusion of wholeness and an imaginary relation-
ship with the body. The subject moves from fragmentation and insufficiency to
illusory unity; psychoanalysis challenges our identity as unified subjects. This
view contrasts with Winnicott’s view of the mirror experience with the mother,
or the mother’s face, which can provide a sense for the child of being recognized.
The mother gives back to the baby the baby’s own self, allowing the baby to begin
to feel real (Winnicott, 1971, p. 117). This is in complete contrast to Lacan, for
whom there is no possibility of anything except an imaginary sense of wholeness,
of a complete identity.
Thus, what is for Winnicott recognition is for Lacan misrecognition. For one
the mirror is restorative; for the other it is alienating.
Lacan’s theory was taken up by radical feminists challenging the hegemony of
the phallus in the account of sexual identity. However, it must be said that Lacan
himself was faithful to Freud’s account of the development of sexual identity,
where the presence or absence of the phallus has a pivotal role in the subject’s
insertion into the Symbolic Order and hence the assumption of sexual identity.
Butler, in her book Gender Trouble (1990) – with the telling subtitle, Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity – challenges the notion of a unifying feminine
identity, which she sees as too often based upon the establishment of a ‘heterosex-
ual matrix’. She challenges any fixed notion of identity, seeing feminine identity
as distorted by the dominance of masculine ways of seeing women. The aim of
her text was ‘. . . to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating
which kinds of possibility ought to be realized’ (1990, p. viii).
For Butler, psychoanalytic theory offers a story about gender acquisition,
which effects a narrative closure on gender experience and a false stabilization
of the category of women. Instead, gender identities emerge and sexual desires
shift and vary so that different identifications come into play, depending upon
56 Towards the soul

the availability of legitimizing cultural norms and opportunities. It is not always

possible to relate these shifts to a primary identification.
Much of this debate seems to hinge around the meaning of ‘difference’. Is
difference primary, as Juliet Mitchell maintains (1982), or something that comes
with culture?
I would suggest that, rather than be drawn into polarized positions around the
whole issue of sexual identity, these various debates highlight that identity has
two faces: the restorative one of Winnicott but also the alienating one of Lacan.
Identity is precarious; integration can occur but is also elusive. Thus, as Dana
Breen (1993, p. 28) points out, the boy is particularly vulnerable in terms of his
masculine identity, as he has an intense early involvement with the mother, whom
he has to turn away from during development. This situation contrasts with the
girl, whose identification with the mother helps her establish her feminine iden-
tity. There is in both a need for a positive identification with the pre-oedipal father
to help dis-identify with the mother. All these processes of identification and
dis-identification are potentially fragile and capable of going wrong. There is the
possibility of integration and the establishment of a satisfactory sexual identity,
but at the same time there are many different paths towards such an identity, with
potential disturbances along the way.
Of recent analytic thinkers, Rosine Perelberg (1999) tackles the distinction
between identity and identification. Identification is a process that takes place
in the unconscious and is the source of fantasies. As with Freud, identificatory
processes are fluid and shifting. Identity, in contrast, is, rather as in Lacan’s work,
an attempt that each individual makes to organize these conflicting identifications
in order to achieve an illusion of unity, which allows an individual to say they
are ‘this’ and not ‘that’. Perelberg’s paper then addresses how some violent male
patients, overwhelmed by the extreme fluidity between masculine and feminine
identifications, try to repudiate their feminine identification in order to establish
an identity.
Overall, one can see with various thinkers that the issue of unity as an illusion
or as something genuine becomes a crucial one. My own view is that is plainly
absurd to rule out any notion of unity or integration. The issue is where and
how the integration occurs and under what circumstances. I have mentioned the
evidence from brain research for integration at the micro level; even neuronal
cells are capable of generalization and abstraction. But how all the systems come
together in an overall unity, and whether or not they do, is another and more com-
plex issue. Here one comes up close to the area of the human soul as described in
religious and philosophical literature.
My own picture of the human subject is also relevant here (Kennedy, 1998,
2007). This is of a subject where multiple paths are possible, holding together in
some ways and not in others. Being able to tolerate the shifting and multiple ele-
ments of the psyche, bearing degrees of fragmentation, is crucial to the individu-
al’s subjectivity. I coined the notion of a subjective organization (Kennedy, 2007,
 Towards the soul 57

pp. 83–108) as the psychic organization that structures the subject, involving
individual and social elements, distributed along both, rather as in de M’Uzan’s
‘spectrum of identity’ (2005, p. 18). Such an organization can become patho-
logical in the sense of being defensive and held together by perverse forces, as
with the pathological organization. But under normal conditions, the subjective
organization remains the organizing structure involved in one’s sense of I-ness,
as well as that involved in the way that the subject is organized in the social
field (Kennedy, 1998, p. 193–4). One of the essential aspects of the subjective
organization is that it involves subjects in interaction with other subjects. The
subjective organization is a dual structure made up of individual and collective
elements in a complex interrelationship. I think that becoming a subject must inti-
mately involve having the stable sense of a psychic home as the basis for psychic
shifts. This situation could be understood by borrowing a musical metaphor, that
of the modulation between tonic and dominant, say in sonata form, or with the
resolution of dissonance when music returns to a home key from various musical
excursions in related keys.
Bob Hinshelwood emphasizes that the basic experience of having a mind and
sustaining its constituents is difficult, and the person remains vulnerable through-
out life to primitive mental mechanisms, such as splitting and projection. The
traditional unitary notion of personal identity is too static, not taking into account
the discontinuities as well as continuities within and between people. Identity for
Hinshelwood is what he calls a ‘locus of belonging’, that place within which men-
tal entities can be gathered as sets of possessions, as well as eliminated through
splitting and projection (1997, p. 195). This does not prevent us searching for
illusory completeness, coherence and permanence, or in perhaps a more realistic
way for the ‘thread of life’ as Richard Wollheim (1984, p. 10ff.) put it. The indi-
vidual creating narratives of their life can achieve such a thread. In this sense,
identity is a description of a particular kind of unified narrative that the subject
can create about themselves. The locus of belonging and the psychic home seem
to have a similar pattern.

Identification and identity

I mentioned in citing Perelberg that identity is concerned with uniting in some
way different identifications. In The Ego and the Id (1923, p. 34), Freud tackles
the issue of this unification of identifications in relation to the Oedipus complex.
He describes identifications as ambivalent from the beginning. This is an interest-
ing and complex idea, which can be interpreted in various ways. In The Ego and
the Id, the ambivalence is shown when the boy identifies with his father, wants to
become like him, and yet then displace him; thus love turns into hate. In Freud’s
book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921, pp. 105–10) identifi-
cation is partly seen as the earliest or primal form of the emotional tie with the
object or other. Thus, identification is in one sense of the term a primal way of
58 Towards the soul

relating to the other, involving both some kind of imitation yet also elimination
of the other. Identification in this sense behaves like a derivative of the oral can-
nibalistic phase of development.
The essential ambivalence of identification can also be seen in Freud’s earliest
published account of the nature of identification, The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900, pp. 146–51), when he describes the dream of a patient who affirmed that
she had dreamt a dream that went against his theory of dreams as wish fulfil-
ments, that is she wanted to put herself in place of Freud, or displace him.
In the dream, the patient wanted to give a dinner party but only had a little
smoked salmon. She was unable to find any since it was Sunday and the shops
were shut, and so she had to abandon the wish to have a party. Several themes
arose as a result of the dream analysis. The patient’s associations first of all cen-
tred on her husband, ‘an honest and capable wholesale butcher’ (Freud, 1900,
p. 147), who said he had wanted to lose some weight – so not having the dinner
would tie up with that. But then there were associations concerning the patient’s
friend, whom her husband had praised. Fortunately, that friend was skinny, and
the patient’s husband preferred more plump women, like the patient herself. That
friend had expressed a wish to put on more weight. So the dream was also saying
that there was no way that the patient would invite the friend around to a dinner
party so the friend could get fat and be sexually attractive to the patient’s husband.
Smoked salmon was in fact her friend’s favourite dish.
But Freud describes how there was also another and ‘more subtle’ interpreta-
tion. Her friend had wished to put on weight, and so it would not have been sur-
prising if the patient had dreamed that the friend’s wish was unfulfilled. However,
in fact, the patient dreamed that her own wish was unfulfilled. That is, she had
put herself in her friend’s place; that is, she had ‘identified’ with her. By doing
this, the patient appropriated the friend’s wish, and in a sense eliminated the wish,
nullified it and also the rival friend. Identification, then, is not merely imitation
but also what Freud calls ‘assimilation’. Through this means, she wins back her
husband, or makes sure that the husband still desires her – ‘my patient put herself
in her friend’s place in the dream because her friend was taking my patient’s place
with her husband and because she (my patient) wanted to take her friend’s place
in her husband’s high opinion’ (Freud, 1900, pp. 150–1). Freud does not make too
much of the fact that there was also a subtle relationship between the dreamer and
himself and why was she so triumphant about bringing a dream that was supposed
to counter Freud’s own theory of dreams. Nor did he make any comment about
a butcher’s wife dreaming about fish, which the butcher was not selling; nor that
the honest butcher wanted to be thin like the friend, thus expressing a feminine
identification. But, of course, we only have a small portion of the actual session
material.
In his later work, The Ego and the Id, Freud describes the various kinds of
identification grouped around the child’s mother and father at the time of the
Oedipus complex, involving complex feelings of love, hate and rivalry. The out-
come of the struggle with these two different identifications is that they form a
 Towards the soul 59

‘precipitate,’ or formation, in the child’s developing ego, ‘consisting of these two

identifications in some way united with each other’ (1923, p. 34).
It is not specified how this unification occurs, except that it happens ‘in some
way’. There is a similar description in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, when he tackles how the subject can gradually, through development,
organize the bodily drives. For Freud, this is a gradual process, which is only
complete after puberty. Freud describes how the drives in childhood are not
unified in any way, but consist of a number of different components or ‘partial
drives’, each with a special connection to an erotogenic zone, a part of the body
giving rise to a form of sexual excitation. Using evidence from, for example, the
perversions where the partial drives fall apart, Freud describes how the sexual
drive is normally put together from the various partial drives into what he calls
a firm ‘organization’. This only happens at puberty, where the primacy of the
genitals is finally beginning to be established. This new organization is a result
of the combination of the partial drives into a unity, though there is the constant
possibility that the sexual drive may be fragmented into its components. Once
again, it is not clear how this unification occurs and what it consists of, except in
terms of a somewhat precarious final sexual organization.
Hans Loewald (1971) did suggest one way that the drives can become uni-
fied. He saw the drives as psychic motivational forces which become orga-
nized developmentally through interactions within a field consisting originally
of the mother–child psychic unit. That is, the drives are organized through a
relationship.
I think that the point is that these considerations imply that there are different
ways that identifications may come together, or fail to come together, and that
will make for different character structures and different issues for the human
subject’s own sense of identity, including sexual identity. That is, there are all
kinds of ways that identifications can sit around in the psyche, lodge there, feel
alien, or feel more settled and at home, various ways that the identifications can
be bound together in some kind of containing membrane, various ways that the
identifications, within and between subjects, interact. For this reason, identity can
be fluid, stable or unstable, open to change or resistant to change, depending upon
the way that the identifications are organized.

The identity of the psychoanalyst

John Klauber tackled the complex issue of the analyst’s identity in an International
Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) symposium dedicated to the topic in 1976.
He comments on two other papers first, by Edward Joseph and Daniel Widlocher.
For Joseph, the identity of the analyst is marked internally by the capacity to
think, feel and react as an analyst. Years of training and practice allow the pre-
carious analytic identity to become autonomous, through continuous efforts of
self-analysis and education throughout life in order to maintain its autonomy.
The latter is buttressed by entry into a psychoanalytical society, where attacks
60 Towards the soul

and invasions from within the society and from the external world have to be
withstood.
For Widlocher, what lays the foundation for the analyst’s identity is the nature
of the psychic work, which is demanded from him or her with the unique and dif-
ficult practice of handling transference and countertransference. This identity is
linked to a narcissistic doubt as our practice is constantly being threatened, taking
us away from the essence of the Freudian experience. Widlocher discusses how
analytical societies not only have the purpose of training and scientific commu-
nication, but also a function of reassuring the group about their analytic identity
in the face of doubts.
Klauber points to two strains, which these papers underline. The first strain
is the quest for a new experience of truth and the location of the analyst’s posi-
tion in this search. Klauber, like Widlocher, stresses the centrality of the human
encounter in this search. ‘This is where the mystery takes place, in which one
human being understands another, and the sense of wonder is engendered at the
persistence of unconscious patterns without which no psychoanalyst can feel at
home in his profession’ (Klauber, 1981, p. 170). Thus identity is linked here to
feeling at home in one’s professional role, as well as finding a professional home
in a psychoanalytical society.
The second strain is that which responds to the pressure for therapy and even
cure, with all the pressure from the external world for results.
These two strains play a part in the ‘crisis’ of identity that psychoanalysts often
experience. For Klauber, the central problem of psychoanalytical identity forma-
tion seems to lie ‘in finding a balance between the years of training necessary
for a student often approaching mid-life or past it to master a highly exacting
conceptual system and technique and the stultification of originality by the weight
of authority’ (1981, p. 176).
For him, the sense of identity of the analyst depends upon an intense experi-
ence of the analytical process, which involves the analyst having ‘fire in his
belly’; it is a very personal process, involving the analyst as a person, their being
able to link up the personal with the technical aspects of psychoanalysis – some-
thing which may take years to accomplish. In this sense, it may take years to feel
at ‘home’ with practicing psychoanalysis.
For Michael Parsons, the identity of the analyst has a double meaning – ‘what
it means to be an analyst cannot be isolated from how an individual analyst’s
personal identity is achieved, through a process of becoming that is unique to that
analyst’ (2000, pp. 69–70). What most distinguishes the identity of the analyst
is the relationship that they develop with their own unconscious. A trust in the
unconscious is central to the analyst’s identity, even if the route we have come
to get where we are can be complex and follow many different paths. The sense
of authenticity, of being highly trained and yet able to use analytic concepts
and technique with appropriate freedom and flexibility, is central to Parson’s
approach.
 Towards the soul 61

Parsons highlights various polarities,

. . . between, on the one hand, spontaneity, the sense of mystery, openness to

the unexpected and trust in the unconscious processes, and on the other, ratio-
nality, adherence to fundamental principles, conceptual rigour and consistent,
disciplined technique. These two aspects of psychoanalysis pull in opposite
directions and psychoanalysts become the analysts they are by the ways they
find of sustaining a creative tension between them.
(Parsons, 2000, p. 4)

Thus one could say that a psychoanalytic identity involves both feeling at home
in one’s role, and, hopefully at one’s institution, but that there is a also a neces-
sary pull away from feeling too settled in one’s position; it does not pay creatively
to be too comfortable with one’s position. Indeed, it is not that uncommon for
the most creative analysts to feel, at times at least, rather on the margins of their
parent institution; they seem to have a need to pull away from a psychic home,
though of course there is also the need for the home, however frustrating, to be
there to pull away from.

Culture and identity

One cannot ignore the now massive literature on how culture affects one’s sense
of identity. Said’s work is pivotal to this field. In his classic Culture and
Imperialism, he defines culture as meaning two things. First, it means ‘all those
practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that
have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms, and
that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure’
(1993, p. xii).
Second, culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, the
best that is known and thought in each society. However, and this is one of the
main threads of his study, culture can be used aggressively by a nation state in
order to impose itself on others, differentiating ‘us’ from ‘them’. Culture in this
sense is a combative source of identity (Said, 1993, p. xiii).
His own approach in the book, through a detailed examination of the work of
various writers, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard
Kipling, Albert Camus and William Butler Yeats, is to challenge a static view of
identity which has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism
(Said, 1993, p. xxviii). Rather than see culture and identity as unitary, he pro-
poses throughout his book that all cultures are involved in one another: ‘none is
single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and
unmonolithic’ (1993, p. xxix). That is, he argues for a flexible, open-minded notion
of identity, which can embrace different cultures and not impose on them from
the outside. Such a view contrasts with that of imperialism, which was essentially
62 Towards the soul

about acquiring territory and imposing a particular way of life on other cultures,
that is about acquiring other homes. Imperialism is the attitude of a dominating
metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory. The attitude of those who ruled the
colonies, creating an imperial culture in these other homes, reflected the various
tensions and injustices in the home culture. There arose a complex relationship
between the home culture, which needed to be stable and prosperous, and the
overseas territories, which were greatly exploited. Thus Thomas Bertram’s slave
plantation in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is shown to be mysteriously necessary
to the poise and beauty of Mansfield Park.
Imperial possessions are usefully there, in some other space, with an unnamed
population, whose identity is scratched out, erased; such places become the site
for adventurers, disgraced younger sons and travellers who sow wild oats or
collect exotica. Said describes how in the great Victorian novels, ‘home’ and
‘abroad’ became crucial dimensions for analysing the nature of English society.
Abroad ‘was felt vaguely and ineptly to be out there, or exotic and strange, or
in some way or other “ours” to control, trade in “freely”, or suppress when the
natives were energized into overt military or political resistance. The novel
contributed significantly to these feelings, attitudes, and references and became
a main element in the consolidated vision, or departmental cultural view, of the
globe’ (1993, pp. 87–8).
Said shows how there was, in fact, considerably more resistance to the imperi-
alist impositions than was openly admitted. He also describes how in the course
of time, decolonization was very much about reclaiming homes which had been
usurped. In these acts of reclamation, all nationalist cultures become dependent
on the concept of a national identity. As necessary as this process is in the act of
liberation, there is of course a danger of mirroring the dominating culture from
which they wish to be liberated.
At the end of his book, Said argues for a new concept of identity, one which
respects different cultures, different homes, where connections are made between
cultures, other languages and geographies, where it is accepted that none today is
one thing (1993, pp. 407–8). Identity in this sense is about inclusion not exclusion.
Stuart Hall (1990) faces similar issues to those of Said in his exploration of
visual representations of Afro-Caribbean and Asian ‘blacks’ of the diasporas of
the West – the new postcolonial subjects. Such subjects have to face complex
identity issues. Historically displaced from their homes, they are not in a position
to reclaim their homes, as those living in the colonies could do; they are, to use
a term often associated with the history of the Jews, subjects of a diaspora, a dis-
persal. They have found other homes and yet still have fundamental connections,
through culture, history, myth, narrative, fantasy and transmitted memories, to
their origins. Dispersal and fragmentation is the history of all enforced diasporas,
and these clearly involve trauma and loss of identity. Such loss can only begin
to be healed when forgotten connections between past and present are
brought to light and once more set in place. That is not to say that there can be
a return to what was; people’s identities have moved on and have a life of their
 Towards the soul 63

own. There are similarities but also differences between then and now, which have
to be recognized. Hall rethinks the positionings and repositionings of Caribbean
cultural identities in relation to at least three ‘presences’ – the African presence,
the site of the repressed; the European presence, which is the site of exclusion
and expropriation; and the American presence, the beginning of diaspora, diver-
sity, hybridity and difference. There is no simple way that these presences can be
harmonized or unified in a comfortable identity. Rather, these presences, which
represent different discourses, meet at various junction points; they can become
the site of different subjective positions or sites of temporary attachment to dif-
ferent subject positions.
Yet, at some point, these attachments may become permanent. The Lebanese
author Amin Maalouf, who was born in Lebanon and lives in France, in his book
On Identity asks,

So am I half French and half Lebanese? Of course not. Identity can’t be

compartmentalized. You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other
separate segments. I haven’t got several identities; I’ve got just one, made up
of many components combined together in a mixture that is unique.
(1996, p. 3)

He points out that identity is certainly made up of a number of allegiances,

but that it is necessary to emphasize that identity is also singular, something that
we experience as a complete whole. ‘A person’s identity is not an assemblage of
separate affiliations, nor a kind of loose patchwork; it is like a pattern drawn on
a tightly stretched parchment’ (Maalouf, 1996, p. 22).
Maalouf is also realistic about how identities are not always positive; they can
be lethal, especially when ‘tribal’, based upon narrow and sectarian allegiances
which deny difference and diversity. Such a view matches the theme of Amartya
Sen’s recent book, Identity and Violence. Identities may become ‘reactive’ when,
for example, a country which has freed itself from foreign domination creates its
own identity as a reaction to what has been left behind, rather than seek or create
a different and more open form of identity. Reactive self-identities can lead to
dangerous fundamentalism. Instead, Sen talks of the need to pay attention to ‘our
common humanity’ (2006, p. 119), or what one might consider to be the soul
territory. Such an approach counters the tendency to neglect an economic and
social analysis of the influence of any sense of identity with others, and of what
we value and how we behave – what he calls ‘identity disregard’. And such an
approach also counters what he calls ‘singular affiliation’ (2006, pp. 1–17) – the
tendency to assume that the any person preeminently belongs to only one col-
lectively, thereby obliterating people’s natural multiple loyalties and affiliations.
It was one of Sen’s great achievements to show how an economic theory which
obliterated such differences, such as by merely focusing on a free market without
any notion of people’s capacities and welfare, cannot address modern economic
realities in the developing countries.
64 Towards the soul

In conclusion, I think that what has come out of considering the various
psychoanalytic and other contributions to identity is how identity as an issue is
complex and potentially precarious, involving steering a path between differ-
ent polarities, different sources of identification, but that in addition, charting a
course along this difficult path requires holding a creative tension between pos-
sible positions, not holding fast to just one single way. However, feeling at home
with a flexible notion of identity does not appeal to everyone. People vary as to
how much the psychic home remains for them the only true home, how much they
need to pull away from it.
What contemporary accounts of identity in other disciplines repeatedly focus
on is the notion of identity as plural, multiple, merging one with another rather
than as if it were facing each other from separate corners. In addition, though
identity involves individuals, their identity is formed under multiple influences.
Identities involve having a position within our society and in relation to a his-
tory, a lineage. Certain markers of identity may be visible or can appear through
inquiry – whether that is from a country of origin, racial, religious or ideological
standpoint.
One can see an identity as involving the taking up of a particular position,
depending upon different social roles or different histories. But taking up a posi-
tion requires a starting point, or a frame of reference or at least some scaffold-
ing. This is where I would suggest the notion of a psychic home comes in, as
the starting point for the complex and indeed lifelong task of forming an identity,
whether as a psychoanalyst or outside one’s professional life.
These considerations naturally lead on to more detailed discussion of how the
notion of a soul can enrich what we mean by our common humanity.
Chapter 5

The soul and its home

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect.
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Augur and the Carpenter –
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life –
A Past of Plank and Nail
And slowness – then the scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul –
(Emily Dickinson, ‘Poem 729’ in Vendler, 1995, p. 307)

I have so far touched upon the nature of the soul from time to time in a prelimi-
nary way, suggesting that whatever we mean by talking about our souls, the word
has powerful resonances. Although it is an abstract word, the word speaks to us;
it gives voice to something essentially human. In the words of Helen Vendler, the
literary critic, in her book Soul Says, the lyric poem is the home of the soul,
‘where the human being becomes a set of warring passions independent of
time and space’ (1995, p. 5). The title of her book is taken from a poem of the
same name by Jorie Graham that closes her collection, Region of Unlike (1991).
The soul seems an ‘abstracted voice of the whole person, body and mind, riven
by the feelings always coursing from the senses to the passions, struggling to say
what words, when formally arranged, can say as the experience of the inner life
makes itself articulate and available to others’ (Vendler, 1995, p. 8).
Vendler interprets the Emily Dickinson poem that prefaces this chapter in her
fascinating book of commentaries on Dickinson’s poems (2010, pp. 307–10). It
is a poem about spiritual growth, the way that the soul is formed, likening that
growth to the building of a house. The house needs props as it is being built, but
then when it can support itself, the house passes from instability to strength. Along
the way, it has to take account of the hammer and nails of suffering. By the
66 The soul and its home

‘ability to do without “Props,” the House affirms itself a Soul. The scaffolds
seem to know when the work is finished, and “drop” of their own accord as
soon as they perceive the presence of the perfected Soul, its suffering completed’
(Vendler, 2010, p. 310).
This chapter will look in more detail at the soul concept from different perspec-
tives, looking at some of the ‘props’ that make up the human soul.

Etymologies and histories

The word soul seems to be both abstract and yet also powerfully emotive. It can
be approached from a number of different angles, from philosophy, religion,
sociology, literature and neuroscience. No one discipline has the monopoly on
understanding the soul concept. It is also a word which even hardened material-
ists can be attracted to. Thus Francis Crick (1994) subtitled his book on the
materialist exploration of human consciousness, The Scientific Search for the
Soul.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘soul’ in a variety of ways, just to give
a selection – as the principle of life in humans and animals, or the principle of
thought and action in a person, regarded as distinct from the body, a person’s
spiritual as opposed to corporeal nature, the spiritual part of a person, the seat of
the emotions, deep feeling and sensitivity. These definitions merge with those of
‘spirit’, which is also the life-giving principle of humans and animals, the imma-
terial part of a corporeal being, a disembodied and separate entity surviving after
death, a soul, the active power of an emotion, the seat of action or feeling. Then
we also have ‘psyche’, which is breath, life, soul, mind and the spirit. And ‘mind’,
which is defined in many ways, including as the faculty of reasoning, thinking,
intending, remembering, a way of feeling, the seat of awareness and even the
spiritual as opposed to the corporeal part of a person.
All these words, then, cover similar territory, reflecting both subtleties and
confusions. Soul and mind are derived from Old English with Germanic origins,
spirit ultimately from Latin and psyche from Greek, reflecting the complex
history of the English language. We are now faced with the ‘debris of centuries of
reflection accumulated between the ancient Greeks and ourselves’ (Padel, 1992,
p. 32).
Ours is not the only language to have such overlapping words for such elemen-
tal concepts. Ancient Greek itself, which still provides us with so many of the
basic tools for thinking, also spreads meanings over several words – thumos,
phren, psyche and nous, for example (Padel, 1992). Thumos and nous can be
translated as ‘spirit’ and ‘mind’. Thumos derives from thuo, ‘I seethe’. It is a site
of feeling, of spirited emotion, of righteous anger, of desire, of heart. Psyche can
mean life, the sensual, emotional self, the essential ‘you’ or the soul (Heraclitus),
which is potentially immortal, as well as spirit or ghost as in Homer. Psyche
is derived from the word psychein, ‘to breathe’. It came to stand not just for
breath but for that which generates life. Nous, usually translated as ‘mind’, is an
 The soul and its home 67

essentially perceiving element, intellect and intelligence. Phren is the heart or

mind; the phrenes are around the heart and contain emotion, practical ideas and
knowledge. This is just to scratch the surface of the many different and shifting
meanings of these words used to account for human action and emotion in ancient
Greece.
Furthermore, when one examines many ancient accounts involving descrip-
tions of the soul, we find them embedded in an examination of human life in
its complexity, not isolated from the human context. Such explorations are tied
to human values, the nature of a good life, virtue and justice, not split off from
human endeavours. That is, considerations of the soul in ancient thought tend to
be embedded in looking at the citizen’s life as a whole, not at the soul in isolation,
as is the tendency of modern thought.
It is not my intention to provide a detailed history of the soul concept; that is
provided elsewhere, such as in the book A Brief History of the Soul (Goetz and
Taliaferro, 2011) and the collection of papers The Soul Hypothesis (Baker and
Goetz, 2011). These are books that start with the view that there is no agreement
about how we can explain human beings without taking account of the soul.
I will, however, emphasize three crucial ‘moments’ in the history of the soul:
(1) Plato’s foundational picture of the soul in his metaphor of the cave, in addi-
tion to his tripartite division of the soul linking up the soul with both the pursuit
of knowledge and an ethical pursuit of the good; (2) the place of the soul in
Hellenistic and then Christian thought and its linking with spiritual transforma-
tion, or transformation of the soul; and (3) the gradual disconnection of the soul
from spiritual transformation with the scientific revolution, the development of a
mercantile culture and the thought of Descartes. The latter, what Michel Foucault
called for convenience the ‘Cartesian moment’ (2001, p. 68), has had profound
effects on how we picture the soul. Until that point, philosophy and spiritual
transformation, knowledge and human value, tended to be linked. From then on,
there develops a radical split between knowledge and spiritual transformation,
between the world of the spirit and the material world, a split which I would sug-
gest needs some sort of attention.
1. There is no way one can avoid the overwhelming influence of Plato, whose
explorations are basic to any consideration of the nature and place of the soul in
our lives. Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, explores the nature of the soul
in a number of dialogues. Foucault (1994, pp. 93–6) highlights one particular
theme of particular relevance to my narrative, that of epimeleia sautou, or the
care of the self or soul. He traces this notion through much of ancient Greek and
Roman thought. He chooses Plato’s early dialogue Alcibiades (Plato, 1927) as a
natural starting point for his exploration. The phrase epimelesthai sautou, taking
care of one’s self, or taking pains over one’s self, first appears in line 127d of the
dialogue, when Socrates is trying to guide the young Alcibiades in a favourable
direction while he is still young and before age makes it more difficult.
Socrates makes various, almost ‘clinical’ observations of Alcibiades at the
beginning of the dialogue. The young man cannot keep a lover; they keep
68 The soul and its home

running away from him, due to his excessive spirit, or phrenes. The good-looking
Alcibiades justifies himself by his self-regard, but this is not an attitude that can
lead to a successful public life, where one has to pay attention to the care of oth-
ers. Before attending to others, one must take care of one’s own soul. Knowledge
of the soul (psyche) is the way to achieve this sort of care. That knowledge is
found by looking at that part of the soul in which virtue (arete) occurs – wis-
dom (sophia) (133b). Wise attention to one’s own soul is a lifetime’s activity.
It consists of a turning towards the divine, which in later Plato will become the
eternal forms; this movement of the soul will also become the basis for Christian
spirituality.
In Plato’s Apology (1914), he has Socrates criticize the Athenians in his speech
for his defence. Socrates says (29D) that Athens is the greatest city, the most
famous for wisdom and power, not ashamed to care for the acquisition of wealth,
for reputation and honour, but not for mindfulness, truth and the best care of
the soul.
Foucault points out that subsequent thinkers, such as Seneca, Plutarch and
Epictetus, urge a similar process of the soul turning to itself, while also being
drawn aloft towards the divine. The ultimate purpose is for the person to settle
into themselves, ‘to take up residence in oneself’ and to remain there (Foucault,
1994, p. 96). This is a therapeutic or healing process, a kind of therapy of the
soul. Yet this can only happen with the aid of a teacher, or another soul who can
give direction, as shown in the Platonic dialogue. Philosophy is, then, involved
with the healing of souls. This becomes very much the theme of later Hellenistic
philosophy (Nussbaum, 1994) and profoundly influenced Christian thinkers.
Plato himself, of course, had a complex picture of the human soul, most fully
developed in his later dialogues such as The Republic, the Phaedo and Phaedrus.
His picture of the soul remains pivotal for all subsequent philosophical and reli-
gious thinkers; it provides much of what will become the essential language of
the soul.
The metaphor of the cave in The Republic remains central to his thought. Plato
uses the cave to describe the soul’s ascent to the intelligible realm, where it ulti-
mately sees the idea of the good. The men in the cave can only see the shadows of
things as they are and not the true light of reality, though they at least can huddle
together and keep each other from being too lonely. They have had their legs and
necks fettered since childhood, remaining in the same spot, unable to turn their
heads, so that they can only look in front. They have been thus bound and unfree
since childhood. Plato then imagines one of them obtaining a release (lusis) from
the bonds, enabling them to leave the cave and come into the light, where gradu-
ally he accustoms himself to things as they really are.
Plato uses these images to conceive of how such men may be produced by the
city-state (polis) and how they may be led upwards to the light by a sort of trans-
formation of the soul from darkness to light, from the shadow world of becoming
to the bright world of being, of that which is to the idea of the good. Essential
to this process of transformation is the freeing of the prisoner’s bonds so that he
 The soul and its home 69

can move from the prison into the free world of thought and light. Thus Plato
intermingles in his imagery a process of the soul’s transformation from bond-
age to some sort of freedom, a process of rational understanding and an ethical
pursuit – of the ‘good’.
One could say that in psychoanalysis there is a similar sort of transforming
process, a freeing of the neurotic bonds, in which the soul is led out of darkness,
or rather, paradoxically, it is led into the darkness of the ‘unconscious cave’ in
order to come out again enlightened.
Plato’s tripartite division of the soul adds to the richness of his thinking about
the soul’s transformation. By recognizing that there are conflicting elements in
the soul, he raises a question that remains relevant concerning the soul’s organiza-
tion. While considering whether or not the soul contains different forms in itself,
he writes that this is a hard question:

Do we do these things with the same part of ourselves, or do we do them

with three different parts? Do we learn with one part, get angry with another,
and with some third part desire the pleasures of food, drink, sex, and the
others that are closely akin to them? Or, when we set out after something,
do we act with the whole of our soul, in each case? This is what is hard to
determine.
(Republic, 1992, 436b)

That is to say, is there a unity in the soul, or are there separate parts, or are
there separately functioning parts which can act as a unit? Such questions remain
of contemporary relevance, for example with regard to our understanding of
brain function. Does it make sense to talk of isolated parts of the brain with spe-
cific functions without referring simultaneously to the workings of the brain as
a whole? The Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria tackles this issue by
looking at the brain as a ‘complex functioning system’, embracing different levels
and different components, each making its own contribution to the final structure
of the ‘working’ brain (1973, p. 43ff.). Based on years of working with patients
suffering from traumatic local brain lesions from times of war and peace, Luria
puts together a complex picture of how what he calls the three components of
the working brain – the unit for regulating tone or waking; the unit for obtaining,
processing and storing information; and the unit for programming, regulating and
verifying mental activity – are in dynamic interaction. However, we still do not
know how the organization creates a unified experience.
Plato has the notion of the soul (psyche) having different functioning parts,
related to some extent but each with its own separate tasks, and each located in
different parts of the body. There is the rational part, the logistikon, located in the
head which contemplates the forms, the realm of higher being, as with the man
who escapes the cave; the part which loves, hungers and desires – the illogical,
appetitive alogistikon, located in the midriff, which makes up the bulk of the
soul; and the third part, the thumos, located between the midriff and neck, or the
70 The soul and its home

principle of high spirit – this is the part with which we feel anger, but it can also
help the rational part, unless corrupted by evil.
Aristotle will base his own influential picture of the soul on that of Plato.
For him, the soul is the principle of life, the vital principle in living things. The
soul is the ‘form’ of the body; it configures the body into a unifying organiza-
tion, composed of soul and body in a close relationship. Indeed, soul and body
seem to form one substance. This contrasts with the Platonic separation of body
and soul. In the Platonic view, as mentioned in the opening chapter, the body is
generally the prison house of the soul. There would seem to be one exception to
this view in Plato’s works, in his dialogue Cratylus, which is concerned with the
origin of words. In that dialogue, he contrasts the notion of the body as the tomb
of the soul with the Orphic or Pythagorean view of the body as an enclosure for
the soul, where it is kept safe. In the Aristotelian view, the soul welcomes the
body, provides more of a home for the soul. These two views of body and soul –
prison and home – become highly influential for all subsequent thought, which
alternates between them.
Psychoanalysis cannot escape the influence of Greek thought any more than
can other Western disciplines. The tripartite division of the soul resembles the
tripartite division of consciousness, preconscious and unconscious as well as ego,
superego and id. Psychoanalysis also restored to Western thought the primacy of
dialogue, and one could say that there is something of the Platonic spirit in the
psychoanalytic enquiry after the human subject’s truth.
When all the parts of the Platonic soul are fulfilling their own functions, then
they are each in their own way acting with virtue (arete). Virtue is then about
some kind of harmonious working of the parts of the soul, although how they
work together is still hard to figure out. That is, on the one hand, the Platonic soul
has parts, but on the other Plato talks about the whole soul acting together, and
this ambiguity is never fully resolved, nor has it been since. Plato does, however,
talk about there being some kind of convergence of perceptions into some kind
of unified perceiving centre.

It would be a very strange thing, I must say if there were a number of senses
sitting inside us as if we were Wooden Horses, and there were not some single
form, soul, or whatever one ought to call it, to which all these converge –
something with which, through the senses, as if they were instruments, we
perceive all that is perceptible.
(Theaetetus, 1990, 184c–d)

Taking our cue from Plato, one can say that the soul is the image of conver-
gence; it is what coheres, it is our name for what makes for the sense of inner
unity, the ‘form’ of convergence, to borrow from Aristotle, even though we do
not understand how this occurs, even though we still do not understand the link
between the inner unity and the brain processes occurring simultaneously or in
parallel. We are aware of this sense of unity from time to time, particularly when
 The soul and its home 71

we feel at home in our body and our selves, when the sense of who we are ‘takes
residence’; for this reason, one might talk of a human being providing a home
for the soul. But the sense of unity is an elusive experience, difficult to tie down,
capable of fleeing from us. It is in part linked to the unified stream of conscious-
ness, but at least since Freud we know that consciousness is only a fraction of the
soul’s activity and indeed of the brain’s activities. Traditionally, one could sense
this inner unity when looking into a man’s eyes, the eyes being the ‘mirror’ of
the soul. I suggested in the opening chapter that, from the experience of death,
what is essentially human, the link with others, as revealed by the nature of the
fading gaze, dies with the body. I suggested there that from a psychological point
of view, we call that which links with others the human soul. The live gaze, that
which reflects back to the other, reveals the essence of a person, their charac-
ter, their depth, their value, the ‘weight’ of their soul, to use a rather medieval
image.
2. The latter metaphor leads onto Christian thought. Saint Augustine, in his
book The Greatness of the Soul, asks, ‘What is the soul’s home?’ (1949, p. 14).
One may disagree with his answer – that the soul’s true home is with God – but
it is still an important question. One could say that much of Augustine’s complex
thought turns round the question of the nature of the soul, which continued to
trouble him throughout his life. The questions he posed about the soul and its
relation to the body, and some of the answers he provided, are still relevant today.
As with Plato, questions about the soul are linked to matters of value and mean-
ing, with Augustine the nature of true happiness. For him, the study of philosophy
treats two problems – one regarding the soul and the other regarding God. The
goal of the first is to know ourselves; the goal of the second is to know our origin.
The former is more pleasing to us; the latter, more valuable. The former makes us
fit for a happy life; the latter gives us happiness.
Philosophers after Plato were already concerned with how a virtuous life
may be acquired through attention to the soul. Thus, the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius describes how the soul may be enlarged through a disciplined inward
examination of the objects of the world. ‘Look within. Do not let the quality or
value of anything escape you’ (Book 6, 3). The Neo-Platonist Plotinus described
how the soul turns inward in order to see the inner world of the Forms and thereby
has access to what he describes as the One, the highest unity possible. And we
have looked at what Foucault has emphasized as the care of the self in ancient
thought. But it is with Augustine that the inward turn takes on its most radical
and modern shape. Through turning inward, we find a vast inner world, from
where eventually we may look upwards towards God, and in the process the soul
becomes transformed. The soul’s turning inward and then upwards to God in
this process of transformation is crucial in the development of subjectivity. For
the first time, we have an alive sense of a complex inner world of memory and
imagination. This shift is documented in Taylor’s book Sources of the Self (1989).
The principal route to God is not through external objects but in ourselves. We
find truth inwardly.
72 The soul and its home

So the light of God is not just ‘out there’, illuminating the order of being, as it
is for Plato; it is also an ‘inner’ light. It is the light ‘which lighteth every man
that cometh into the world’ (John 1:9). It is the light in the soul.
(p. 129)

Such an inward turn is a radical shift, providing a new language of inwardness.

The inner light is the one which shines in our presence to ourselves, illuminating
the space where I am present to myself (Taylor, 1989, p. 131). It is my view that
this inner light is also detectable in relation to others, as I have described in the
introduction.
Augustine describes how the soul has a different reality from the body: mental
vision has distinct properties, and the soul occupies a different kind of space
from that of the body. Thus, the soul has enormous amplitude, when for example
we reproduce within us memories of a city or an expanse of countryside. The
memory’s amplitude cannot be measured like the bodily dimensions. The soul
has a certain greatness, but not that of bodily bulk. It can grow through learning,
through the use of reason, but again this growth has a different quality from that
of bodily growth. Augustine describes seven levels of the soul’s greatness. Each
level takes the soul nearer to God, with the last level being described as home,
where there is true happiness, where we can fully be ourselves while in relation
to God. However, Augustine is not clear in the end quite how the soul and body
are related, even resorting to the interaction as miraculous and beyond human
comprehension (City of God, XX1.10). The soul uses the body as a kind of relay
of messages, but the precise relationship between the two remains uncertain – a
problem that was taken up by Descartes but remains uncertain to this day.
3. In some ways, René Descartes’s thought about the soul is close to that of
Augustine. Like Augustine, for him, inwardness is the key to discovering truth.
However, while Augustine looked inward in order then to look upwards to God,
Descartes’s inwardness is a self-sufficient kind of inward looking; modern man
becomes his own master, as it were. Descartes believed in God and in the impor-
tance of the soul; he even thought, mistakenly, that the soul was detectable and
was centrally located in the brain, in the pineal gland, rather than, say, within the
whole human being. But the grounds for his investigation of the soul are radi-
cally different from those of previous thinkers. Instead of looking at the relation
between others in an ethical community, Descartes turned to the solitary thinker’s
search for certainty, his ‘I’, as the ground for understanding the nature of the
soul. The context for his inquiry is also, of course, the new world of science and
mercantilism. The world had become one to which the laws of mechanics could
be applied with great success. Such laws could be applied to the body, but what
about the soul? Descartes, like Augustine, considered soul and body to have dif-
ferent properties. In that sense they were both ‘dualists’, believing in the separate
nature of soul and body. But, for Descartes, what was new was that the essence
of soul was its capacity to think. The soul became a thinking rather than a relat-
ing substance. Soul soon then becomes redescribed as ‘Mind’, as opposed to the
 The soul and its home 73

‘Matter’ of the body. Descartes can be seen to invent the mind (Rorty, 1980).
Subsequent thought tended to become polarized between Idealism, which took
Mind as primary, and Materialism, which saw all mental phenomena as deriving
from the body. Descartes, also like Augustine, struggled with understanding the
relation between soul–mind and body. Early on Descartes seemed to make a sharp
distinction between them, but later, as in some of his letters, he seems to indicate
a much closer union between them.
While Descartes himself clearly considered the soul to have an important place
in the human being, his thought inevitably led to polarization across the mental–
physical continuum, with the result that the notion of an alive human soul gradu-
ally seems to die out as a vital force, with materialism increasingly dominating
the intellectual scene, with the soul only having an almost ghost-like presence.
Glimpses of a human soul occasionally surface, even in what might appear to
be materialist literature. Thus with Defoe’s Moll Flanders, which appears to be
a celebration of self-interested materialism, the pursuit of money and marriage
of convenience, there are moments when some other world is touched. This can
be seen when Moll takes advantage of a fire to invade a gentlewoman’s house in
order to steal her jewellery, gold and other valuables. As Moll puts it,

This was the greatest and the worst prize that ever I was concerned in; for
indeed, though, as I have said above, I was hardened now beyond the power
of all reflection in other cases, yet it really touched me to the very soul when I
looked into this treasure, to think of the poor disconsolate gentlewoman who
had lost so much in the fire besides . . . I say, I confess the inhumanity of this
action moved me very much.
(1722, p. 202)

Of course, her reflection soon wore off, and she soon began to forget the circum-
stances that led to her robbery.
It was perhaps David Hume who appeared to finally kill off the soul, when he
stated that ‘what we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different
perceptions, united together by certain relations, and suppos’d, tho’ falsely, to be
endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity’ (Treatise, 1740, Book 1, Part 4,
Section 2). And, further, that,

for my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other . . . I never can catch myself
observe anything but the perception . . . I may venture to affirm of . . . man-
kind, that they are nothing but a bundle of different perceptions.
(Treatise, 1740, Book 1, Part 4, Section 6)

Thus, Hume disposes of any idea of a unity of the self, or of the existence of
a self at all. However, Barrett criticizes this view as missing the point about the
nature of a person to describe that nature as just involving sensory information.
74 The soul and its home

‘Hume is like a man who goes outside his house and looks through the window
to see if he is at home. It is (an) error: the philosopher’s temptation to take a
purely spectator’s view of the mind, forgetting that he himself is a participant’
(1987, p. 46).
Despite the limitations of Hume’s view, it had a profound influence on sub-
sequent thinkers, and the soul as an alive notion received a blow from which it
has yet to recover. Even Immanuel Kant, who tried to address Hume’s scepticism
by emphasizing that we always have to come back to the active and organizing
human mind when trying to understand the world, could not rescue the soul. It
is true that Kant showed that the self could not just be a heap of impressions, for
how else could it organize what it perceived? This is similar to what has been
called the ‘binding problem’, that is, how consciousness has any sense of unity.
If consciousness just consisted of a series of perceptions, how can we experience
any sense of continuity? There must be something that binds perceptions together
enough to provide that continuity.
Kant also placed the moral law within us, so that there must be some internal
structure that can take effective decisions about moral issues. But Kant wanted
to devise a ‘rational science of the soul’ (Kant, 1781, p. 318); the soul for Kant is
essentially a rational, thinking soul, the thinking I, rather cut off from the body.
As I have indicated, it was not my intention to give an encyclopaedic history
of the soul, but merely to sketch some basic trends in Western thought, which still
underpin much of contemporary thinking, or nonthinking, about the soul. These
trends are also relevant when considering what contribution neuroscience may
have to this field.

Neuroscience of the soul

The previous chapter touched on two basic and related problems: how the unity
of the person is maintained, and how the physical functions of nerves and brain
cells make for a unified thinking, feeling person. There may be some connection
between these two problems. Thus the evidence from neurology and neuroscience
(Ramachandran, 2011, p. 247) is that the self is not a single monolithic entity that
it can believe itself to be; instead, there are many components that go to making
up the self, and with no necessary way that they all come together into a unitary
organization. But there remains a gap in our understanding of these two problems:
the so-called hard problem of the connection between the mental and the physical.
As Nagel (1986, pp. 47–8) has put it, mental events have both physical and men-
tal properties, both of which are essential; yet there remains an inability to over-
come the apparent contingency between them. Nagel’s view in this text is that
mental phenomena are the subjective phenomena that can also be described
physically; that is, he has a ‘dual aspect’ approach, similar in fact to that of
Spinoza.
In his earlier classic paper, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ (1979), Nagel was
deeply sceptical of understanding consciousness by physical means. Being a
 The soul and its home 75

human being, like being a bat, implies a particular, subjective point of view
from which each experiences the world. We have yet to make a sensible physical
description of what this means. The whole point about a subjective experience
is that it is precisely that: subjective. Once you try to describe the experience
objectively in physical terms, the experience gets lost. There is no way to bridge
the gap, at least not yet, for Nagel.
John Searle (1997) argues with characteristic clarity that creating rigidly
separate categories of the mental and physical has created considerable problems.
The materialist tends to deny the obvious fact that we have inner, qualitative
subjective states such as pain, joys, memories, feelings and so on. Instead, we
need to accept that consciousness with its subjective properties is a natural bio-
logical phenomenon. We will understand consciousness when we understand in
biological detail how the brain does it. I have already argued in Chapter One that
this latter point may well be true, but that it gives limited understanding about
the lives of human beings. For example, we do not find it particularly interest-
ing to know what parts of the brain are firing when we appreciate a Rembrandt
portrait; we just want to understand the portrait and how it impacts on us. Such
knowledge may be useful if we experience neurological symptoms while look-
ing at the Rembrandt picture. If we start to fit, or experience the sudden onset of
right-sided weakness and a loss of speech while at the National Gallery, then such
knowledge may make all the difference to how we are going to be treated medi-
cally once we are rushed to hospital. At that point, the significance of the portrait
may seem of less importance.
Thus, I do not think we can completely abandon paying attention to the find-
ings of neuroscience, which will have some bearing on our lives, particularly
when we try to understand illness and pathology and when researching into some
of the more primitive elements of psychological functioning. For that reason, I
would suggest it is important to keep all options open. In addition, certain facts
about the brain may shed light on how we think and feel. For example, what
is striking about the organization of the cerebral cortex is how uniform is its
organization (Zeki, 2009, pp. 9–11). Basic patterns are duplicated throughout
the cortex, with only relatively minor variations in cell types. Cells in different
cortical areas derive their differences largely from different anatomical connec-
tion. Thus, connectivity is made a crucial property of the brain thanks to its basic
anatomy. Making connections is also a fundamental human activity, essential to
creative thought, and also probably to how we relate thinking to feeling, even
if we do not know if the anatomy of the brain and the psychology of the person
connect up.
Donald Davidson argues for the necessary contingency between the two realms
of the mental and physical – that the two realms of explanation for human activ-
ity, mental and physical events, each have their own set of justifications, and each
is irreducible to the other. Furthermore, he maintains that ‘detailed knowledge
of the physics or physiology of the brain, indeed of the whole man, would not
provide a shortcut to the kind of interpretation required for the application of
76 The soul and its home

sophisticated psychological concepts . . . Past discoveries about the nature of the

brain, and even more, the discoveries we can expect from workers in this field,
throw a flood of light on human perception, learning and behaviour. But with
respect to the higher cognitive functions, the illumination must, if I am right, be
indirect. There is no important sense in which psychology can be reduced to the
physical sciences’ (1980, pp. 258–9).
There is no doubt that in the absence of a functioning brain, there are no mental
activities. However, as the anatomist J. Z. Young pointed out, this does not imply
that events in the brain cause mental events. ‘The complexity and adaptability of
the brain means that precise forecasting of correlations between mental events
and physical processes is never possible . . . The fundamental point is that all
mental events are associated with events in the brain; and it is a continuing task
for neuroscientists of all sorts to follow the cerebral events, especially those that
accompany our more interesting and emotional activities’ (1987, p. 15).
Thus the neuroscientist can try to ‘follow’ cerebral events, can look at ‘correla-
tions’ between cerebral and mental events and can look at ‘associations’ between
cerebral and mental events and what physical events ‘accompany’ mental events,
but cannot actually see how cerebral events cause mental events. Similarly, the
nineteenth-century neurologist Hughlings Jackson described the doctrine of ‘con-
comitance’ when speaking of the relation between consciousness and nervous
states:

The doctrine I hold is: first, that states of consciousness (or, synonymously,
states of mind) are utterly different from nervous states; second, that the
two things occur together – that for every mental state there is a correlative
nervous state; third, that, although the two things occur in parallelism, there
is no interference of one with the other.
(1958, p. 72)

Such a view about the parallel worlds of the mental and the physical in some
kind of dependent correlation very much influenced Freud’s thinking about the
mind and the nervous system, from early on in his thinking, as shown in his
early work on aphasia, quoted in the Standard Edition of his works (S.E. 14,
pp. 206–8). Ernest Jones (1954, pp. 403–4), in his biography of Freud, writes that
though Freud took this view of the relation between mind and brain, he certainly
also took the view that there was no evidence of psychical processes occurring
apart from physiological ones; that no mind could exist apart from a brain. Freud
also considered that physical processes must precede mental events; however,
the essential nature of mind and matter were unknown, and so different in kind
that it would be a logical error to translate a description of processes in the one
into the terms of the other, even though there might be similarities in the way that
both worked.
There are various ways of dealing with this ‘hard’ dilemma. One may come
down on one side of the divide – the mental or the physical – and propose either
 The soul and its home 77

an idealist or a materialist solution; or accept a dualist position, where both the

mental and physical are relevant in different ways; or propose a solution where
some merger of the mental and physical is posited, some synthesis of both; or
propose a solution that we are made of one kind of material, but that we per-
ceive this in two different ways, appearing material from the outside but mental
from the inside; or propose a solution common to religious thought where there
exists another entity, such as the immortal soul, which is independent of physical
properties; or propose yet another way of thinking which does not close off any
solution but which holds the tension between different proposals without making
a final decision. I personally favour the latter approach in a field where there is
so much that is still puzzling. If we still cannot even bridge the gap between the
nerve impulse and the feeling, how on earth can we be too dogmatic about the
nature of mental events? And, in the end, all these considerations only give us
a partial view of the human world, which has more to do with the meaning and
value of human stories. In the meantime, we need to turn to a variety of disci-
plines if we are to find some clarity in this complex field.
Ron Britton (2009) deals with this tension by putting physical and mental
events at opposite ends of a continuum, which as yet does not meet in the middle.
At present the neurosciences are approaching from one end and psychoanalysis
from the other end. Freud began by trying to create a psychology for neurologists,
in his Project for a Scientific Psychology but then abandoned this for a new focus
on subjective experience. Britton makes the important point that, though analysts
occupy the subjective position, we should be facing towards the other end, not
turning our backs on it. Indeed, the temptation at either end of the axis is for each
to turn their back on the other. As our patients live in the middle, this would seem
to be most unfortunate.
By holding the tension between different ways of viewing events, one is
effectively allowing for different stories about how events can be described. The
philosopher Peter Strawson asks us to imagine two different ways of describ-
ing the history of a human being. On the one hand, it would seem reasonable to
assume that ‘there is a system of physical law, such that all bodily movements of
human beings . . . are the causal outcome of the stimulation of sensory surfaces
together with the internal physical constitution of the organism, those movements
being causally mediated by electro-chemical events within the organism, and the
constitution of the latter being itself constantly modified by events in its own his-
tory’ (1985, pp. 55–6). Seen from this limited view, one could then tell the whole
history of a person. However, that history would ‘leave out almost everything that
was humanly interesting, either to the subject of it or to anyone else. We have
another and more familiar style of talking about ourselves and others, in which
we speak of action and behaviour . . . rather than simply limbs moving, and in
which we freely use the language of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, memories,
assertions, beliefs, desires and intentions; in short, mentalistic or personalistic
language . . . the terms employed by such simple folk as Shakespeare, Tolstoy,
Proust and Henry James’ (1985, p. 56).
78 The soul and its home

There is not any practical possibility of a complete mapping of a personal story

onto a corresponding physical story; they are just different stories.
Barrett (1987, p. 20) makes the point that in practice the body we know is
rarely sharply distinguished from the soul or the mind, and that in our moods
and feelings we are often not sure what part is physical and what not; there is
no sharp dividing line between them; that is, as Britton suggests, there is a con-
tinuum between the mental and physical. One could also say that the different
stories often intermingle. This certainly corresponds with psychoanalytic experi-
ence. I have already described (see Chapter Four) the process when the person
of the baby starts to be linked with the body, and the body functions (Winnicott,
1965, p. 59) with the skin as the limiting membrane. The infant’s psyche begins
to dwell in the soma, or, one might say, feels ‘at home’ in the soma, with a sense
of being self-centred inside his body, and this process depends upon the mother’s
handling, her ability to join up her emotional and physical involvement. Thus,
from early on, there is a joining up in some way of psyche and soma, or soul and
body. If this developmental process is interfered with, then psychosomatic condi-
tions may result, where communication goes through the body instead of through
psychological means.
Freud’s early work with hysterical patients revealed a very strange relationship
between the body and the soul. His patients complained of various bodily symp-
toms which bore little relation to anatomical reality. Thus, one can see how the
soul is both attached to the body and yet moves across body boundaries – once
more we have a sense of psyche and soma, soul and body, having different, if
interconnected, realities.
It is difficult to define quite how the body and soul become linked up in
development, and it is difficult to find the right words to describe what naturally
takes place without any explanation needed. One could describe the joining up
in terms of illusion. While one meaning of illusion involves deception, holding
to a false belief, another meaning is more positive, allowing for the simultaneous
holding of different positions, with some ‘play’ between them. One can see this
psychoanalytically in the transference relationship, where a patient may see the
analyst as both a fantasy object and as something different, a real person. I have
described this (Kennedy, 1984) as the ‘dual aspect’ of the transference, which
some patients struggle to understand. Indeed, some people never grasp the nature
of illusion and are tied down to living in a concrete material world. Working
with the transference illusion is potentially therapeutic, enabling the patient
to work through different aspects of the past and the present. What makes the
transference therapeutic is not specifically resolving the illusion but accepting its
paradoxical reality; this can be hard for some people.
Similarly, one might say that illusion has a place in allowing soul and body,
psyche and soma, to be linked up. One can see the constitutive role of illusion in
Lacan’s view of the mirror stage in young child’s life, as mentioned in the previ-
ous chapter. At about 6 months, the infant becomes aware, through seeing their
image in the mirror, of their own body as a totality; they see a total reflection of
 The soul and its home 79

themselves. This reflection, bringing with it the appearance of wholeness, creates

a feeling of jubilation and fascination, but, for Lacan, this is the source of alien-
ation, the illusion of wholeness, and an imaginary relationship with the body. The
subject moves from fragmentation and insufficiency to illusory unity. As I sug-
gested, this view contrasts with Winnicott’s view of the mirror experience with
the mother, or the mother’s face, which can provide a sense for the child of being
recognized. The mother gives back to the baby the baby’s own self, allowing the
baby to begin to feel real.
Whether or not one sees illusion being the source of alienation or of integra-
tion, the point is that illusion has an important place in the way that the body
becomes part of the human world, and in the constitution of the human subject.
Furthermore, the body is the aspect of ourselves nearest to material reality. We
have to have some kind of comfortable relationship with that physical reality,
across the divide between it and the soul, across the different probably contingent
realms.
Humphrey (2011) argues that illusion has powerful evolutionary value or force.
The illusion of having a soul, an area of magical interiority had great evolution-
ary value; such an illusion improves our lives, allows us to endure hardships
and gives us an ability to keep going in the face of difficult circumstances, all of
which has immense evolutionary force.
Allan Schore (2003, 2012) has argued persuasively that attachment theory
provides a way of linking mental phenomena with brain processes. He describes
how the emotional interactions of early life directly influence the organization of
the brain systems responsible for processing affect and cognition. He proposes
that the attachment experiences of early infancy are stored in implicit memory
in the early maturing right hemisphere of the brain (2003, p. 257). He has an
essentially sociobiological model, emphasizing the intimate relationship between
the brain and social experiences. Thus the emotion-processing limbic circuits of
the infant’s developing right brain hemisphere are influenced by implicit inter-
subjective interactions embedded in the attachment relationship between mother
and child (2012, p. 34).
Schore proposes that the right orbito-frontal region of the cortex is essential
for self-regulation. The right brain has detailed maps of the body state (Damasio,
1994, 2010), which makes it suitable for regulating subjective emotional expe-
riences. It is the right brain, for Schore, that plays a fundamental role in the
maintenance of a coherent, continuous and unified sense of self; it is the primary
place where subjective emotional processing takes place. The right brain here
almost becomes a soul, the seat of emotions. By looking at the neurobiology of
attachment, he aims to find scientific conformation of psychoanalytic thinking,
and even for the mechanisms of psychotherapy. However, the basic issues about
how attachment influences brain circuits remain; Schore has not solved the ‘hard’
problem, even though he has added to the complexity of the story.
I have mentioned in the introduction that in neuroscience, minds are said
to ‘emerge’ from the dynamic interplay of nerve circuits. In some way, mind
80 The soul and its home

emerges from the brain. An emergent property in a system is caused by the ele-
ments of the system acting together. It is not a property of any of the individual
elements of the system. The classic example often cited is the liquid state of
water. Water is made up of many individual molecules that in themselves are not
water, but they become water when added together.
Emergence is a property of so-called complex systems. A complex system con-
sists of diverse and often interdependent entities that interact in time and space,
such as a city or an ecosystem or a large group of children on a playground.
Complex systems are often unpredictable and can produce novel formations.
Emergence occurs when the macro organization differs from the micro organiza-
tion; the emergent phenomena arise from the bottom up, from micro to macro,
with no superimposition from above, that is, with no central planner. A common
form of emergence is self-organization, such as when fish swim in a pattern. A
system self-organizes when the aggregate of individual actions produced a pattern
at the macro level. There may be a ‘tipping point’ when suddenly the individual
interactions become organized into a recognizable pattern.
These days considerable attention is being paid in a variety of disciplines to
‘networks’ and their properties, from social networks to the World Wide Web,
to networks of neurones in the brain. Structure emerges out of the interaction
between the different elements of the network. Even if neural networks basically
run in parallel to the soul organization, they are still of great interest and signifi-
cance in the life of human beings, as can be seen by the increasing number of
popular books published these days on aspects of neuroscience. Stories about the
brain remain compelling.
One can see why understanding complexity, emergence and networks may well
add to our understanding of brain processes, possibly even psychological self-
organization. We do not know how the brain is organized to function as a whole,
though we know it appears to do this quite well, in fact remarkably well, mostly
at an unconscious level. The many individual elements just do work, both together
and in parallel, making sensation, movement and other functions run smoothly.
Can it be that consciousness is just the emergent property of networks of neurones
firing until a tipping point is reached and a person has a conscious experience? It
sounds like an interesting idea, though as yet there is no evidence that conscious-
ness works like this. Indeed, it is still possible that the firing of neurones and hav-
ing a conscious experience are different and incommensurable phenomena. This
is certainly a position held by a number of thinkers, as I have already described.
If consciousness were just an emergent property of large networks of neurones,
as many animals have large networks of neurones, this would imply that many
animals also have consciousness. This indeed may well be true, though it is hard
to prove. But this does leave the problem of human consciousness, and what other
element is required to distinguish human from animal consciousness. Presumably,
language would be a strong candidate for such an element.
One can see that there still remains a problem about how something that
is made up of matter, body parts, neurones, and so on can experience human
 The soul and its home 81

emotions. Some just say well, that’s what emotions are, the firing of the neurones.
Others say that feelings and so on emerge from the firing of the neurones. At a
certain point the resonance, or whatever, of all the parts of the brain firing up
produces the experience; the experience emerges as a different and new quality.
Others consider that you need something else, an extra something for humans
to experience subjective emotions – from God, from spirit, from a nonmaterial
world, or, let us just say, from X.
Trying to understand how human emotions and values arise from a physical
brain might possibly be similar to understanding how a Rembrandt painting
speaks to us so powerfully. After all, the picture is made up of physical brush
strokes placed on a material canvas. Yet almost magically a human being is
portrayed, and something more than mere physical marks on a canvas emerges,
though it must be said that it is a human hand that put the marks there in the first
place, not the hand of some unseen God. And when it comes to trying to under-
stand human realities, we are dealing with complex systems that come together
to produce meaning (Cassirer, 1955, p. 95).

Encore: psychoanalysis and the soul – becoming

a subject
There is considerable overlap between the realm of subjectivity and that of the
soul territory. If human beings have a soul, then that implies a subject with a soul,
the soul’s owner. It is difficult to say I have a subject, but not that I have a soul.
In ordinary language, one might talk of someone having soul, meaning that they
are capable of deep feeling and responsiveness to others. A lack of soul implies a
lack of humanity, callousness or superficiality. The soul thus seems emblematic
of deep subjective experience, which goes along with some ownership of that
experience, and being marked by experience, allowing experience to impact us in
an alive way, so that the experience takes root.
In certain kinds of religious thought, the soul is what makes us who we are and
also binds us to God. Yet the soul is our own and bears the mark of our experi-
ences. Traditionally, we are to be judged by those marks after death. The weigh-
ing of souls at the point of death and having to give an account of ourselves are
telling images of how life impacts on the human soul, and this imagery goes back
to at least the ancient Egyptians. One may indeed use these images to look at how
life itself impacts on the soul, and how giving an account of ourselves throughout
life plays an important part in our existence as subjects.
The word ‘subject’ captures a basic dual aspect of the human condition, that
we are both subject of experiences and subject to various phenomena. That is, the
term refers both to our I-ness, who we are, our very soul, the root of our being. It
implies that we can be authors of our actions and our history; at the same time, it
also indicates that we are subject to various forces outside the orbit of the ‘I’ who
speaks, forces arising both from within the individual and from the environment.
Subject is a term that has many resonances, comprising a mixture of conscious
82 The soul and its home

and unconscious elements. For example, it refers to the conscious or unconscious

subject of discourse, the one who speaks, the subject of a story or narrative; and it
can imply a relationship to an object. It seems to include the idea of agency, being
the subject of actions, and also, as Jessica Benjamin (1988, 1998) has described,
that of authorship, ‘the condition of ownership that reflects intentionality and
bestows awareness of others’ states, feelings and intentions’ (1998, p. 39). The
term has both philosophical and political resonances. In one line of philosophical
thinking, still dominant in much academic philosophy in the United Kingdom and
North America, the subject refers to the conscious, thinking subject, the subject of
conscious reason. While the political subject is a citizen with certain fundamental
rights, such as that of belonging to civil society and having the right to vote, the
term implies being subject to a higher authority.
The Freudian subject, a unique construct, incorporates ambiguity, uncertainty
and paradox, which follows from the existence of an unconscious. At the heart
of our subjectivity, as seen through the psychoanalytic perspective, is an obvi-
ous and fundamental paradox: psychoanalysis has shown that many of our most
human aspects, which make us passionate, vulnerable and problematic beings,
reside in our unconscious and often appear to us as if they came from somewhere
else, from an ‘It’, Freud’s das Es. We may experience this core of our being – as
Freud described the unconscious wishful impulses embedded in the unconscious
(1900, p. 603) – as a place outside ourselves in some way, in some objective
place, certainly in some other location. Even when we begin to discuss in a formal
way the nature of this subjectivity, something always gets lost; we too readily fall
into an objective way of thinking, where we may lose the heart of who we are. At
the same time, this dilemma highlights what Edmund Husserl called the ‘paradox’
of human subjectivity (1954, p. 178), the fact that the human being is both a sub-
ject for the world and at the same time an object in the world.
A further issue, which underpins much of psychoanalytic thought, is the ques-
tion of the location of human subjectivity. On the one hand, there is the notion,
following Descartes, that the essence of human subjectivity is located inside the
person, in the ‘I think’. On the other hand, there is the counterargument that there
is no privileged place where unity is found, as I have already discussed. Indeed,
Freud himself, in The Interpretation of Dreams, came up with an image of the
mental apparatus that highlighted this very issue. In order to capture the way in
which the mental apparatus functioned, he disregarded any notion of anatomical
locality; instead, he pictured the apparatus as a compound microscope or a pho-
tographic instrument.

On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the appara-
tus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. In
the microscope and telescope, as we know, these occur in part at idea points,
regions in which no tangible component of the apparatus is situated.
(Freud, 1900, p. 536)
 The soul and its home 83

Freud’s metaphor of the virtual nature of the psychic apparatus suggests that
there is something essentially elusive about our subjective life that makes it dif-
ficult to capture. The quest for the human ‘centre’, where one can capture the
origin of the person, is reminiscent of the search for the locus of the soul, or for
the place where consciousness resides, or where memory or language is centrally
organized by the brain. Such quests proved fruitless, as we have already seen,
until the search for the centre was abandoned in favour of an ‘interactional’
model, where a function is produced as a result of interaction between many ele-
ments or pathways, both within the subject and in relations between subjects, with
no one place where everything comes together. Such an approach to the nature
of the person is fundamentally different from that which starts out from the indi-
vidual mind, isolated from other minds, as with Descartes. The latter produced
a form of subjectivity that is free floating, in the sense of being cut off from the
social world, for only that kind of knowledge formed by the solitary Cartesian
ego is certain. Freud’s thought at times adheres to this form of thinking, yet there
often seems to be a pull towards another kind of thinking, which takes account of
the fleeting and ambiguous nature of our subjective life as it exists in relation to
a world of other subjects, and which cannot be tied down to the centralized and
solitary ego.
There is thus an ambiguity about the nature of psychic locality and hence of
subjectivity – whether or not it makes sense to locate the subject in the individual,
in the social field, somewhere between, or, as I would now suggest, in some shift-
ing position involving both individual and social fields.
Benjamin (1998) has also tackled this kind of issue from a psycho-
analytical viewpoint. She points to the need to use a model of the mind that
incorporates both intrapsychic and intersubjective positions without privileging
either. Furthermore, she suggests that ‘the analytic relationship provides some
experience with the kind of intersubjective space that allows us to hold multiple
positions’ (1998, p. 90).
Peter Fonagy and Mary Target have approached these issues from a develop-
mental perspective. They maintain that ‘our understanding of the mental world
is not a given, is radically different in the young child and crucially depends for
its healthy development on interaction with other people who are sufficiently
benign and reflective’ (1996, p. 217) as providing the philosophical demonstra-
tion of this basic position. Thinking for them is inherently intersubjective, requir-
ing relationships between subjects for the individual to develop a capacity for
self-reflection.
Lacan offered a more radical view of the human subject, who for him was
essentially alienated, ‘lacking’ and ‘fading’ (see Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986).
There is no place in his theory for a unified sense of who we are: subject and other
are inextricably linked; when the subject appears in one place, he disappears in
another. For Lacan, the unconscious appears through a split in the subject, so that
the subject is always surprised by what then appears.
84 The soul and its home

I would suggest, then, that subjectivity incorporates both intrapsychic and

intersubjective positions, both phenomena within the subject and in the network
between subjects in the social field. This notion connects with what I have sug-
gested in Chapter One about the soul being an experience of essential connected-
ness between people, an intersubjective entity, that which links with others. That
is, the soul can be seen to go beyond the individual’s inner world, reaching out to
the other. This reaching out was striking in the recent exhibition of Lucian Freud
portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Freud would spend many hours with his
subjects, trying as it were to distil their essence onto the canvas. Faced by a whole
room of portraits, one seemed to feel the unique souls of each of these people,
all connected in some way by the artist’s vision. Here, one can sense our com-
mon humanity, what links us to one another. The material reality of the canvases
conveys, or is the carrier of, another reality to that of physical marks of paint.
Of course, Freud was deeply influenced by Rembrandt; one might even say that
Rembrandt is the only artist to rival Freud’s ability use of paint to capture human
flesh and the essence of people.
Interestingly, in this context, Lambros Malafouris (2008), an archaeological
thinker, points out that the human condition demands that selfhood cannot be char-
acterized and understood according to some internal, fixed and biologically deter-
mined bodily properties. Instead, the archaeological record shows how a great deal
of cultural parameters operate ‘beyond the skin’, beyond the boundary of the ‘I’.
The boundary of this ‘I’ is changeable and extendable in the outside world, the
world of material objects. He uses the example of a gold Mycenaean signet ring,
embedded in the social life of the ancient Greeks, to explore how a piece of inani-
mate matter can be seen as a constitutive part of the human self-system.
I would see the task in psychoanalytic treatment very much concerned with
helping the patient become a subject, which requires both intrapsychic and
intersubjective understanding, understanding of what lies within and beyond the
individual. To understand what this means, one may begin with Sigmund Freud’s
discoveries, which one could describe as being very much about bringing back
elements of the mind, such as dreams and fantasies, into the realm of the human
subject when these, before his work, had often been devalued as either mere
fancies of no consequence, or as inhabiting some kind of objective knowledge.
Hence, becoming a subject would entail a process of recovery, or discovery, of
unconscious subjective elements. It would also involve a complex mixture of
conscious and unconscious elements. Furthermore, the analytic setting itself, with
the analyst sitting behind the patient, out of sight and reach, demonstrates liter-
ally that the analytic relationship is not an object relationship in the usual sense.
With the analyst not being directly available, the analytic setting sets in motion a
complex search for the human subject.
What I mean by this is that the patient brings to us all sorts of different sto-
ries, fixed patterns of relating or symptoms, hopes, expectation and resistances.
Patients often come with a sense of isolation, of either being alone with suffering
or suffering from being alone. And they come to analysis subject to various forces
 The soul and its home 85

in their life, past and present. If the analysis works, then there is the possibility of
their becoming the subject of their experiences and ultimately of their lives, with
a sense of being no longer isolated and more in contact with others; they may
become more part of a network of other subjects.
Becoming a subject, then, involves a shift towards a subjective position. This
refers to how being a subject involves some capacity to take up different posi-
tions without becoming fixed in a kind of frozen state of being. (This is similar to
Benjamin’s attention to multiple positions referred to earlier.) Being the subject
of actions and thoughts is different from being subject to them, or being in an
‘objective position’ where actions and thoughts and so on are not felt to be part
of the subject’s life. In order to be fully in touch with another person, in a truly
subjective position, one must begin to grasp the other’s point of view; the other
is seen as other, a person or a subject, in a context, orientated to others and being
affected by others in the social world.
A subjective position involves allowing experiences of the other, at many
levels, conscious and unconscious, to interpenetrate oneself so that they make an
impact. In the analytic encounter, the analyst may have to bear being in a number
of different subjective positions in the session rather than allowing himself or
herself to become fixed in one place, although at any moment the analyst may
become ‘moored’ in one place more favoured than another. I would suggest that
the analyst’s free-floating attention consists of a subjective oscillation between
different positions or moorings. This means having to tolerate a considerable
amount of ambiguity, uncertainty and paradox. Moments when the patient
experiences the impact of the analyst’s presence or subjectivity can become key
experiences in the process of becoming a subject (Kennedy, 2007, p. 180).
Recently in the psychoanalytic literature, and influenced by the French school,
the term subjectivication has come to be used (Wainrib, 2012) as a description
for the process of becoming a subject. Foucault originally used this term as a key
concept in distinguishing how the subject can become objectified, for example
a mere object of power, as opposed to coming together with oneself in a ‘prac-
tice and exercise of oneself on oneself’ (2001, p. 333). Such a practice involves
the relationship between master and student. Subjectivication involves becom-
ing the subject of truth, being able to speak the truth about oneself. It ‘begins
with listening to the true discourses proposed’ (2001, p. 365) in the relationship
between student and master, as in the Socratic dialogue. It involves an open way
of speaking, a free way of speaking. While Foucault based these notions on his
reading of ancient thought, it is difficult not to imagine that he was also influ-
enced by psychoanalytic thinking, with its emphasis on the relationship between
psychoanalyst and patient, the expectation of free association and the search for
the subject’s psychic truth. Equally, it would seem that psychoanalysis has been
deeply influenced at some level by those past ways in which the subject’s truth
has been under scrutiny.
Subjectivication in the psychoanalytic sense refers to a process of becoming
a subject through linking up with others, underpinned by a process of mutual
86 The soul and its home

recognition. But this also means facing processes where subjectivication can
be undermined, for example, when the subject may fall back into a narcissistic
position (Wainrib, 2012) and, one might say, loses something of their human
essence.

Spirituality: Religion and the soul

In many people’s minds, religion is the true home for the soul. There is, indeed,
a religious longing for human beings to worship something beyond themselves,
to find a home for that deep longing, which can be described in terms of the needs
of the human soul to reach out to God. I have presented the notion of the human
subject reaching beyond the individual, not being confined within physical
boundaries. Religion makes the leap from this notion of the subject to that of a
realm beyond physical reality, an immaterial reality, which becomes the true
nature of the human soul. The soul looks beyond the material world for its true
fulfilment; it is both a spiritual and an embodied reality. As Ward puts it,

It is not a ghost behind the scenes, and it is not just the physical brain, in its
publicly described properties. It is not an object or event or set of events in
the world. It is a point of subjectivity and transcendence, of rational under-
standing and responsible action, which comes to be at a particular stage of the
emergent interactions of spatial, material substances. Once it is generated, it
continues to have a place in those physical interactions, to respond to them
and realize itself in them . . . [I]n its understanding the soul relates itself also
to that realm of truth and value that transcends the physical, in its interior life
of feeling, and perhaps of prayer and contemplation, it expresses a capacity
and natural tendency to relate to a purely spiritual realm.
(1998, pp. 148–9)

Thus for Ward, the soul is not some disembodied spirit floating somewhere;
it is firmly embodied in the world and yet remains a spiritual subject, which for
him means that it is not observable or scientifically definable. The soul can grasp
and understand truth and act responsibly, but ‘the unique dignity of the soul lies
in its freedom to determine itself by such understanding or not’ (1998, p. 125).
Of course, materialists would argue that one can still value life without a belief
in God. The counterargument is that without some belief in a nonmaterial world,
it is increasingly likely that respect for human life and all that we value, our free-
dom, dignity and sense of justice, will be lost or diluted.
Rowan Williams, in his book Grace and Necessity, reflects on art and love,
and makes the point that the realm of art opens up the dimension in which ‘things
are more than they are’ (2005, p. 37). This notion, originally put forward by the
Roman Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain, points out that art is vital as it points to
an ‘excess’ of the material environment (2005, p. 37). We are then in touch with
a realm beyond the ordinary material environment, with something outside the
 The soul and its home 87

scope of everyday representation. This is the realm of the sacred; it is what we feel
when in a great cathedral or before great works of art. Thus, standing before the
Rembrandt self-portrait in the National Gallery, we encounter an excess of mean-
ing, something that reaches beyond the everyday. Williams would link this area
of experience to the realm of the sacred and to the role of God. I have described
how Rembrandt’s eyes seem to take you into the picture, into the depths. Unlike
a mirror, which reflects your own image back to you, the Rembrandt urges you to
reflect into yourself in the act of being drawn into his image. Repeated visits are
like drawing from some primal source of light and intensity, leaving you changed
in some way, both uplifted and more melancholy. Repeated visits do not exhaust
the depths of the experience; in this sense, the portrait is always ‘more’ than it
appears. Perhaps here one is touching what religious thought would see as the
sacred element of the soul.
Judaism and Islam both emphasize the ascent of the soul towards God, that is,
a process of transformation from lower to upper levels until the soul dwells in
a higher state of being. With the Jewish Kabbalah, the soul can move from the
lowest and most basic aspect of the soul, the Nefesh, which animates existence
and gives the human body its ability to move, towards higher levels involved in
creation, ideas and then the spiritual world. The Koran describes five stages for
the life of the soul: preworldly existence, earthly life, the grave, the day of judge-
ment and its final home either in paradise or hell. Running through these and
most other religions is the notion of a movement, a process in which the soul is
transformed when the person becomes renewed, or spiritually alive, or at peace
with themselves through struggle. Often, a path towards such transformation has
to be taken by means of some guidance, from a spiritual leader or from a reli-
gious community, and it may involve commitment, some faith, following some
guidelines or laws and a process of enrichment as a result of personal encounter
and interchange. Spiritual transformation may occur in isolation, but that is usu-
ally only possible with great religious leaders, who may be able to bear the pain
of solitary struggle.
Personally, I think one can have spiritual experiences without a belief in God,
that, for example, an encounter with the Rembrandt self-portrait is as spiritual
an experience as one can get; it is like William’s ‘excess’, a realm beyond the
ordinary material environment. It was Augustine, as I have described, who
emphasized that by turning inward, we find a vast inner world, from where even-
tually we may look upwards towards God, and in the process the soul becomes
transformed. The soul’s turning inward and then upwards to God in this process
of transformation is crucial in the development of subjectivity. We may still turn
inwards and upwards, though God as such may or may not be present as a living
reality. Yet, as George Steiner has put it (1989, p. 3), our very understanding of
language and how we think, and even the human capacity to communicate feel-
ing and meaning, is underwritten by the possibility of a transcendent presence,
Otherness. This notion is near to that of Lacan’s distinction between the other
and the Other in psychoanalytic and human discourse in general (Benvenuto and
88 The soul and its home

Kennedy, 1986, pp. 86–8). The speech which takes its orders from the ego is
addressed to what Lacan calls the ‘other’, with a little o, the subject’s imaginary
counterpart. This is ‘empty speech’. On the other hand, Lacan described ‘full
speech’, addressed to the Other, with a capital O, which is beyond the language
ordered by the ego. The subject of this speech is the subject of the unconscious,
which speaks most clearly in dreams and jokes and can be encountered in various
symptoms. This is why Lacan called the unconscious the discourse of the Other,
to whom true speech is addressed. In order to help the patient discover their psy-
chic truth, the analyst needs to speak from the position of the Other rather than
the other. However, there is a constant dialectic between other and Other in the
analytic discourse; becoming a subject means, one might say, having to face both
full and empty speech and their interrelationship, how just as one approaches full
speech and the Other, one is drawn away towards empty speech and the other,
and vice versa. Lacan was heavily influenced by Christian thought, however far
he strayed from actual religious belief, and this notion of the Other seems to
provide a secular description of experiences which merge with the spiritual, or
anyway share similar territory. This scheme also provides a psychological model
for spiritual struggle, emphasizing the constant pull towards an alienating other
when trying to approach the subject of truth, the Other.
Chapter 6

Loneliness and solitude

Introduction: Loneliness–solitude dimension

In Plato’s metaphor of the cave, the prisoners remain shackled and cut off from
the light, but they are at least huddled together so as to mitigate their loneliness.
Once one of them is freed from their shackles and reaches the bright light of true
being, they are transformed into a new state, no longer cut off from the light, and
in touch with a higher region; their souls have reached a higher stage of develop-
ment, reminiscent of the religious grades of the soul’s upwards ascent. I would
suggest that this latter state is less like loneliness and more like solitude; the move
from one state to the other is one theme of this chapter.
The transformation described by Plato involves a move of territory, from the
restricted world of the cave to the open and dazzling world of light. Yet the cave
has been the prisoners’ home, where they have felt safe, even if in a state of igno-
rance. Plato infers that this is a false kind of home, not a true home for the soul,
which needs the bright light of true being to be fully alive. I think that one can
infer from this that life without an alive sense of one’s own soul is deeply lonely.
The prisoners in the cave are not happy in their ignorance, even if they are only
really aware of this ignorance once they have left the cave. Going along with that
sense of aliveness is the sense that there is a depth to one’s soul, and that some-
thing alive comes up, as it were, from those depths to reach outwards to the world
outside the cave. One could also describe this movement from inside to outside
in terms of becoming a subject, where one relates to other subjects in the social
world and has a full sense of having a psychic home; the opposite pole to this is
loneliness, where one is bereft of a psychic home. In this chapter, I aim to define
more clearly what we mean by terms such as loneliness and solitude, which on the
surface appear ordinary words, yet which convey considerable complexity; such
considerations will also add to the picture of the soul territory.
There is a difference between loneliness and solitude, though with some
overlap. Loneliness is about being cut off from others, even in their presence. In
solitude, one often requires being alone, yet I am by myself with myself in some
kind of internal dialogue – very much part of the soul territory. Since loneliness
90 Loneliness and solitude

and solitude are so much a part of the psychoanalyst’s work, I shall use the psy-
choanalytic experience to explore the loneliness–solitude dimension.
Much of the psychoanalyst’s development has to take place in solitude, which
though rarely absolute is certainly relative. We may seek support and supervision,
continue our own analysis or go back for a while into analysis, discuss cases with
colleagues or turn to writing as a way of dealing with the confusion of the work,
but in the end we are on our own with patient after patient in the solitude of the
consulting room. This solitude can turn into loneliness. While being lonely and
having to tolerate loneliness is part of the human condition, there are aspects
of the analyst’s loneliness that are particular to the analytic setting and to the
analyst’s identity formation. There are also clinical situations where the patient’s
own particular problems with bearing loneliness may well challenge the analyst’s
capacities.
The chapter will discuss some of the consequences of considering these
difficult issues both for the formation of the analyst’s identity and for how they
perform their clinical work, and how such considerations have wider ramifica-
tions beyond psychoanalysis.
Various psychoanalytic and other thinkers have tried to make some distinc-
tions between different states of being alone, sometimes between loneliness and
solitude or between different forms of either loneliness or solitude. Though some
of these distinctions may be helpful, and I shall emphasize a particular difference
between creative solitude and a more passive loneliness, I think it is in reality
difficult to refine these differences because there is quite an overlap. For example,
in the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘loneliness’, with its Middle English origins,
refers to the condition of being alone, while ‘solitude’, with its Latin origins, is the
state of being alone, being accustomed to aloneness (soleo, I am accustomed) –
hardly a distinctive difference, except, as so often in English, between a word’s
roots. What might make for a meaningful distinction is to combine the state of the
experiencing subject with the quality of their relationship to the other – with, that
is, the degree of isolation of the subject. The degree of their solitude may indicate
something about their sense of loneliness. The symbolization of absence makes
solitude bearable; merely feeling absence without the capacity to speak about it
plunges the subject into loneliness.
Overall, loneliness is more like the feeling state of the subject cut off from oth-
ers, solitude more the general state of being alone, but with a more secure sense
of oneself. As so often in English, the Early English word is closer to basic feel-
ing than the Latin word, which is associated with the more patrician language of
invasion – Romans and then Normans. But this may be stretching the difference
between the words too much.

Literature on loneliness and solitude

Many writers offer descriptions of loneliness, but there are relatively few who
tackle the meaning of the term and its various distinctive properties. I have picked
 Loneliness and solitude 91

out a few who seem to offer particularly valuable insights into the way that dif-
ferent states of loneliness and/or solitude can be distinguished.
Beginning with the psychoanalytic literature, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
(1990), in her posthumously published late essay on loneliness, describes the
word as containing a basket of terms – culturally determined loneliness, creative
loneliness, self-imposed aloneness, compulsory isolation and real loneliness as
seen, for example, in the psychotic patients she treated. She focuses on the severe
form of loneliness where there is a deep threat of incommunicable, private emo-
tional experience. This is a disintegrative form of loneliness, which reveals itself
in psychotic states, where intimacy is not possible. It renders people who suffer it
emotionally paralysed and helpless; it is associated with extreme states of anxiety.
She offers vivid descriptions of psychotic patients’ experiences of loneliness, with
the implication that an important aspect of therapeutic work with such patients is
to help them feel less alone and less ashamed of their loneliness. But, of course,
such work is massively demanding of the therapist, requiring them to withstand
powerful projections and extreme states of anxiety. Indeed, taking on psychotic
patients is greatly assisted by being in a regular support group of other analysts.
This was certainly my experience of working at the Brent Adolescent Centre in
the 1980s when a research programme for the treatment of psychotic adolescents
was undertaken (Laufer and Laufer, 1989). In order to make this difficult work
feasible, it was necessary to set up weekly small-group clinical discussions where
detailed clinical material could be presented and discussed. In that sense, each
analyst felt that, though they might be alone with the patient, they carried the
support group with them into the session.
Melanie Klein’s last paper was ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’ (1963). She
refers to the inner sense of loneliness that can be there even in company.
She suggests that this state is the result of a ubiquitous yearning for an unattain-
able perfect internal state, linked to the infant’s early psychotic anxieties. She links
loneliness and the incapacity to sufficiently integrate the good internal object.
Loneliness can be diminished by various external factors, such as the relation
to the parents and appreciation by others, but loneliness can never be eliminated
because the processes which lead to integration are never complete and always
involve pain.
Winnicott (1958) writes of a sophisticated phenomenon involved in the capac-
ity to be alone, a sign of maturity in emotional development. Instead of focusing
on the fear of being alone or the wish to be alone, where the subject withdraws
from others, he discussed the positive aspects of the capacity to be alone. The
basis for this latter capacity is a secure foundation in early childhood, when the
child can enjoy solitary activity such as playing and exploring, knowing that the
mother is available as a support, which he describes as being alone in the pres-
ence of someone. Once that form of aloneness has been internalized, then there is
the possibility of a relaxed form of aloneness. This contrasts with, for example,
the hectic and desperate behaviour of the deprived child who is unable to settle
to quiet play.
92 Loneliness and solitude

This latter paper can be fruitfully set beside the ‘use of an object’ (Winnicott,
1969). ‘Object-relating’ is described there when the subject is an isolate, function-
ing at an omnipotent level. Winnicott describes a more mature level of function-
ing when the subject can use the object or other. The change from relating to
using involves a particular process in which the subject destroys the object, but
the object survives the destruction. Once the object has survived, the subject can
move into a new kind of position where he or she can start to live a life in a world
of alive objects – that is, they are no longer alone and cut off from others, but in
live contact with others.
Jean-Michel Quinodoz (1993, 1996) describes how the analyst needs to acquire
a well-developed sense of solitude, which involves being able to work through
anxieties about object loss and separation, in order to ‘tame’ the deep anxieties
associated with solitude.
Françoise Dolto (1994) also emphasizes the importance for the young child of
periods of secure solitude, where they can explore for themselves, supported by
a lively mother who talks to the child. This positive form of solitude is different
from isolation, where a child withdraws and may have experienced little positive
communication. The former is structuring, peopled by constructive memories; the
latter is destructuring, without symbolization.
Sandra Buechler (1998) is one of the few analysts who specifically tackles
the analyst’s experience of loneliness. For her, the analyst’s loneliness with the
patient is affected by (1) the patient’s loneliness and potential for collaboration;
(2) the patient’s diagnostic type; (3) the analyst’s stance about countertransfer-
ence; and (4) the other emotions evoked in the analyst by their patient.
She gives vivid clinical descriptions of the analysis of different kinds of patient
and how loneliness came into the analysis in various ways, sometimes giving the
analyst challenging personal and human dilemmas. She also emphasizes the need
for the analyst to bring into the consulting room an ‘internal chorus’ of identifica-
tions to help deal with these challenges. This is similar to what I have described
as the need to take into account the ‘many voices of psychoanalysis’ (Kennedy,
2007, p. 1), the many roles and approaches a psychoanalyst may take, while
adhering to the established ideas of psychoanalysis.
There are many literary descriptions of the lonely state of mind, though rela-
tively few which look at the meaning of loneliness. The philosopher and theolo-
gian Paul Tillich (1963, p. 5) distinguishes between loneliness as an expression
of the pain of being alone, and solitude, which expresses the glory of being alone.
The pain of loneliness can be overcome by facing solitude, which for him, like
Jesus alone in the desert, means facing the daemonic forces.
In Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘On Solitude’ (1580, pp. 211–22), man is
described as both sociable and unsociable. While we should have a wife, children,
goods and health, that is, a home, we must not bind ourselves to them so much
that our happiness depends on them. We must ‘reserve a back shop all our own,
entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and
 Loneliness and solitude 93

solitude’ (1580, p. 214). Thus the home, though important, needs to have a special
space to which one can retreat, but in a creative way.
Solitude is thus the source of strength, provided we know how to use it well.
There are dangers in retreating to an ivory tower, but without a safe place to
retreat to, we are too dependent upon others. One could add that the analyst’s con-
sulting room is a place which provides a mixture of the back shop and the ‘front
shop’. There is the retreat from the social world, for both analyst and patient, and
yet it is at the same time an intense setting for working out dependency issues.
A number of writers have expressed the need for what one could call a creative
solitude, where thoughts can be crystallized, even if the experience can involve
much pain and frustration. As Thomas Wolfe describes in his essay on ‘God’s
Lonely Man’, ‘if a man is to know the triumphant labor of creation, he must for
long periods resign himself to loneliness, and suffer loneliness to rob him of the
health confidence, the belief and joy which are essential to creative work’ (1941,
p. 146). Wolfe cites the book of Job as the ‘most tragic, sublime, and beautiful
expression of human loneliness’ (1941, p. 149). And as with Job, the joyfulness of
love destroys loneliness, providing Wolfe with some comfort against the ‘tragic
web of life’ (1941, p. 150).
The theme of creative solitude as a necessary feature of the creative process
runs implicitly through many writers, from Rousseau’s solitary walks and dis-
courses with nature, through the Romantic poets’ confrontation with the solitude
of landscapes as sources of joy, to modern preoccupations with states of isolation
as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Kurtz confronts his truth in the ‘great
solitude’ of the jungle.
Paul Auster describes the way, familiar to many authors, that the writer requires
essential solitude in order to write, but he links this to the work required of the
reader.

Every book is an image of solitude, the outcome of a great deal of time spent
alone in a room. Literature is at once the product of an author’s solitude and
a means by which a reader reaches through his own and the author’s solitude.
In reading, an isolated individual becomes absorbed in something beyond his
own preoccupations and communes with another mind.
(1982, p. 136)

One might add that the writer needs to have a sense of the reader while he is
writing, so that while he is solitary, he needs to reach out to the reader. There is
thus a complex intersubjective process at work between the solitary writer and the
solitary reader, which provides a point of contact for both of them. As Maurice
Blanchot put it, ‘The work is solitary: this does not mean that it remains uncom-
municable, that it has no reader. But whoever reads it enters into the affirmation
of the work’s solitude, just as he who writes it belongs to the risk of this solitude’
(1955, p. 22).
94 Loneliness and solitude

With the literature in mind, I turn now to the specifics of the analytic relation-
ship. I shall develop the distinction between solitude and loneliness but will also
explore more of the essential dilemmas about being an analyst in the loneliness
of the consulting room.

Loneliness and solitude for the psychoanalyst

While on the one hand the psychoanalytic encounter can be intensely engaging
for both patient and analyst, can tap into deep, often long-suppressed emotions,
can become a source of creativity and can even on occasions become both life
changing and life saving, the encounter can also be very challenging with regard
to what has to be endured by both parties for long periods of time. I will here tend
to focus on the more challenging aspects of being an analyst, but I do not wish to
give the impression that analytic work is predominantly painful and difficult;
there are, of course, many times when it is deeply satisfying, and indeed it is also
a privilege to be in contact with another’s world in such an intimate and engaging
way.
One of the most challenging aspects for the analyst is how to come to terms
with the psychoanalytic way of life, which imposes certain restraints. Like the
writer, we have to work on our own, but the analyst has particular pressures to
bear. Long periods of necessary isolation have to be tolerated so that the patient’s
inner life can be given special and focused attention, in a space and setting which
is protected from external intrusions. While such protection is necessary for the
development of the transference, the concentrated restraint required by the analyst
does impact on their own well-being. Indeed, one might say that the analyst has
only limited protection from all sorts of ‘internal’ intrusion into their own mental
equilibrium. That is, we cannot leave unscathed from our analytic encounters;
there is a price we have to pay for doing our work. The increasing focus on using
our countertransference, on making creative use of many of these intrusions, adds
to the richness of the analytic work, but it also adds to the stresses and strains of
maintaining the analytic relationship. Tolerating and understanding projections
and disturbance, keeping quiet when tempted to speak out, maintaining an ana-
lytic stance under the most difficult clinical situations, not to mention standing
up for psychoanalysis and for thinking about the unconscious inner life outside
the clinical setting when all around us may be avoiding any such thing, all pres-
ent challenges to our precious and hard-won sense of equilibrium and analytic
identity. We may, for example, have stirred up in ourselves powerful memories
as a result of listening to the patient, but we have to keep such memories to our-
selves. We have to forego the pleasure of sharing many such intimate experiences
evoked by the intensity of analytic listening. In our social life, we often need to
refrain from using our analytic techniques to intervene in ordinary relationships,
however tempting, otherwise we may undermine defences and create unnecessary
antagonism. Yet sometimes the temptation to do a bit of ‘wild analysis’ is just too
much to resist. While occasional use of our skills can be helpful in situations of
 Loneliness and solitude 95

difficulty or crisis, the temptation to ‘show off’ our analytic understanding may
be driven more by a desperate desire to share our experience rather than maintain
our difficult, unusual and lonely stance.
In order to bear this situation, we have to have a capacity to be alone
(Winnicott, 1958), but under rather particular circumstances. But that does not
take away the reality of the struggle when the analyst has to bear the often acute
sense of solitude which accompanies analytic work. A certain amount of detach-
ment is necessary in order to be able to establish and maintain the analytic setting
and to make effective decisions about how to intervene, yet that does not elimi-
nate our basic wish for attachment, for relatedness, which we may have to modify
considerably.
In order to bear the loneliness of being an analyst, it does seem important for
the analyst to be able to have a significant and sustaining life outside the analytic
work, even though such work is the core of the analyst’s creative life. One can see
the dangers of not having a life outside analysis with those analysts who engage
in sexual misconduct with one patient. Andrea Celenza and Glen Gabbard (2003),
in their account of different kinds of boundary violation, point out that this kind of
violation typically occurs when the analyst is in the midst of a life crisis such as
divorce, illness or death in the family, when they are cut off from, or cannot use,
their usual support networks; they are more lonely than usual. The psychopathol-
ogy of such analysts varies, but typically they are people who look primarily or
even exclusively to professional relationships and activities for sustenance and
affirmation of self-worth. Their analytic identity is too much dependent on their
professional life. It is as if they cannot bear, at moments of crisis, the pain of
being alone with their problems and not having a suitable network to turn to, and
unfortunately use their patient as their comforter. Celenza and Gabbard make the
point that this situation is much more humanly understandable than the bound-
ary violations involving the psychopathic analyst who has no empathy with the
patient and shows no remorse for their actions.
Whatever the precise definitions of the terms, the loneliness–solitude dimen-
sion is an inevitable accompaniment of the psychoanalytic setting, with the patient
on the couch, turned away from the analyst. It is also a feature of those times when
we struggle to formulate interpretations, particularly if under pressure from the
patient to make sense of some difficult conflict before we are ready. The periods
of contact with the patient can be satisfying for both parties, but there are many in-
betweens, of silences, uncertainties, periods of desperation and intense moments
of loneliness that have to be tolerated, especially with the more ill patients.
Indeed, we may be tempted to interpret too much in order to defend ourselves
against feeling lonely. Listening in silence until one is ready to interpret may be
just too much to bear. One of my main points is that being able to deal with these
kinds of pressures in a good enough way is related to the gradual development of
an analytic identity. The analyst’s own rootedness in their identity mitigates the
trauma of the necessary and inevitable periods of loneliness while doing analysis.
One may add that the evidence from Celenza and Gabbard is also that having a
96 Loneliness and solitude

secure internal analytic identity is aided by having effective external supports,

both from within the analytic community but also from elsewhere.
A psychoanalytic identity takes several years to acquire, and involves a gradual
process of development, as a result of repeated and extensive listening to patients
analytically over several years. In some ways, this development in the analyst
requires something like a ‘spiritual’ growth, something that goes increasingly
inwards and in more depth, and involves an inward transformation (cf. Parsons,
2006). One might add that there is something about the special quality of loneli-
ness in the analytic position which matches what Kierkegaard (1846) captures so
well – how to express the subject’s inwardness, which can be communicated, but
indirectly.
Adequate training and analysis is, of course, the basis for the development of
an analytic identity. But so is a commitment to undertaking a reasonable amount
of analytic work, not that easy these days with all the economic pressures on
young analysts. Personally, I am not that convinced by such economic reasons for
not developing an analytic practice, as those pressures have always been there,
certainly since the 1980s. I suspect that the fear of working alone for hours at a
time with disturbed patients – common in the early years of one’s practice – may
have more to do with the reluctance to do a substantial amount of analytic work.
I mentioned my own experience of working analytically with disturbed adoles-
cents. I should add that this took place soon after I qualified. But I had the great
privilege of being aided and supported by a wide range of other analysts, several
of whom were senior colleagues, who could provide encouragement and support
for undertaking analytic work. I am not sure how easy it would have been to
develop an analytic practice without their input.
There may also, of course, be institutional reasons that interfere with analytic
identity, for example when an institution can demand too much conformity, or on
the contrary is too chaotic or split between warring parties. That kind of atmo-
sphere is hardly encouraging to the new analyst.
Whatever the decision about setting up an analytic practice, the path towards
a firm analytic identity is never smooth. There are usually a number of fits and
starts, with disappointments, knocks to one’s narcissism, surprises, traumas and
failures. One has to get used to this lonely kind of work, and sometimes the strain
involved in taking so much onto oneself can have the effect on many analysts of
being overly concerned with their own contributions and importance. The narcis-
sism of the analyst is, I find, a significant feature of the analyst’s social presenta-
tion. I suspect that this is also a reaction to a number of narcissistic wounds we
regularly have to withstand, denigration from the patient being perhaps the easiest
to bear. Others less easy to manage include the fallout from unhelpful analytic
rivalries within analytic institutions that can at time be very hurtful, as well as
the fairly frequent scepticism towards our work shown to us by psychiatric col-
leagues and the wider public. While Freud often cautioned us to expect resistance
to psychoanalysis, reading constant attacks on our work does not exactly help us
with our precarious and hard-won sense of analytic identity. But I would suggest
 Loneliness and solitude 97

that the loneliness of the analyst’s work can have an unfortunate side effect, in
that there may develop as a reaction formation a tendency to wall oneself off from
others in a form of narcissistic character formation, which may manifest itself as
an inflated sense of self importance.
Much of the analyst’s development has to take place in solitude, which though
rarely absolute is certainly relative. As Dolto put it, in her evocative book on
solitude, psychoanalysis is a profession where one is alone. ‘Everyone is alone,
but the psychoanalyst more so, and there is no one else to whom he can refer
because no one else can feel what the analysand subjects him to, even if he can
be understood’ (1994, p. 151).
While, of course, loneliness and its effects are part of the human condition,
the analyst has to bear a special kind of loneliness due to their analytic function
and the special nature of the analytic relationship. The analytic setting, with the
analyst sitting behind the patient, or not providing ordinary social cues in face-to-
face meetings, demonstrates literally that the analytic relationship is not an object
relationship in the usual sense. That is, on the one hand, the analyst has to hold the
patient in mind while being unable to express their feelings towards the patient
freely; on the other hand, for the patient, the analyst is enigmatic and frustrating
in a way that would be unacceptable in social relationships. With the analyst not
being available as a direct object of relationship, then the analytic setting sets in
motion a complex search for the human subject, predominantly through contact
with the unconscious of both parties. As I have already suggested earlier in the
chapter, one could describe the human subject as essentially elusive (Kennedy,
1998), appearing and disappearing as one tries to tie down human subjectivity.
One may try to ‘capture’ the human subject in the analytic encounter, and of
course there are moments when this is possible, but then something vital always
escapes. This coming and going is what makes for human subjectivity. But it also
means that being an analyst, whose function is, as it were, to help the patient
‘become a subject’ is a difficult, paradoxical and demanding business, certainly
at times ‘impossible’. One has to tolerate a good deal of uncertainty, paradox and
puzzlement, in addition to the more obvious times when one has to withstand
aggression and projections. And one has to deal with the patient’s intense long-
ings for more than an analytic relationship, which may unfortunately, as I have
mentioned, lead the vulnerable analyst to act out a boundary violation.
In addition, it is clear the analyst has a deep need for the patient in order to
crystallize their thoughts and to fulfil their own creativity. As I indicated above,
there are dangers when this need becomes exclusive. But I also think that we
need the patient in other more private ways, even when one has a good support
network outside the analytic framework. I think that the use of what I would call
our private area of suffering is a vital and therapeutic element of the analytic
relationship, a helpful aspect of our countertransference. It is what is inevitably
missing in accounts of an analysis because it will remain silent. I feel that we need
to tap into this suffering, a particular area of our subjective experience, the area of
the soul. Sometimes, perhaps often, patients are in touch with this area and use it
98 Loneliness and solitude

for their own purposes, to avoid conflict, to get us to collude with them or simply
to share their suffering. Thus, our private and lonely sufferings are not only a
nuisance, something we hoped our own analysis would have dealt with, but also
an inevitable part of the analytic work, which, if used wisely, can be the source
of creativity. I think we need to listen to the patient’s conscious and unconscious
assessment of our private areas of pain and suffering. They may not know what
they are reacting to, nor do we have to tell them exactly, but we will hopefully
know, provided we do not retain a God-like stance. Our patients reflect back to
us our own suffering; they may even wish to protect us from ourselves, which is
perhaps particularly seductive and dangerous for the analysis.
It is possible that what I am proposing is related to the function of the area that
Winnicott described as the central or ‘core self,’ which seems to resemble what I
have been describing as the human soul. This core self can only come into being,
paradoxically, in an authentic way if protected and allowed to remain isolated.
As Winnicott wrote,

The central self could be said to be the inherited potential which is experienc-
ing a continuity of being, and acquiring in its own way and at its own speed
a personal psychic reality and a personal body-scheme. It seems necessary to
allow for the concept of the isolation of this central self as a characteristic of
health. Any threat to this isolation of the true self constitutes a major anxiety
at this early stage . . .
(1960, p. 46)

In another paper, ‘Communicating and Not Communicating’, Winnicott devel-

ops this argument further, emphasizing that there is a kind of silence and lack of
communication at the core of the individual which needs to be respected and,
indeed, preserved in order to facilitate the formation of identity. ‘This preserva-
tion of personal isolation is part of the search for identity, and for the establish-
ment of a personal technique for communicating which does not lead to violation
of the central self’ (Winnicott, 1963, p. 190). He does also go on to ask how one
may remain isolated in this special sense without having to be insulated. But
essentially, this notion of necessary isolation, or essential aloneness, is really
quite a radical and paradoxical one, though it does bear some similarities with
certain religious and spiritual traditions, where silence has an essential place, at
least during moments of deep contemplation. It may also be linked to the positive
use of solitude in creative activity. It certainly seems that this state of being in
touch with some deep inner self or soul is a special state of being, which requires
discipline, quiet, and special focus.
It was Klauber who first asked serious questions about the possible long-term
vicissitudes on the analyst of the patient’s longings (1976), as well as how ana-
lysts deal with the effects of forming relationship after relationship of the deepest
and most intimate kind with patient after patient, and the mourning which at some
level must be involved for each of them before and after an ending. He asked how
 Loneliness and solitude 99

the analyst can accommodate themselves to being without the basic cue of human
expression, face-to-face contact, for so many hours of the day, and whether or
not it imposes a strain on the analyst, and if so, how this strain can be alleviated.
Klauber pointed out that the newly qualified analyst is confronted by object loss
on several fronts, losing a variety of supports, and how traumatic this may be,
particularly as it will take so long for their analytic role to become integrated into
a sustaining sense of analytic identity. Here, one may add that such experience
points to a fundamental issue that, as Quinodoz pointed out, what makes the ana-
lytic work bearable is being able to tolerate object loss, or, one might add, that
absence can be symbolized.
I think one could also add that there are different pressures at various stages of
the psychoanalyst’s life cycle. The relief and excitement of qualification may help
mitigate the early strains of building up an analytic practice. The period between
qualifying and becoming an ‘experienced’ analyst may be particularly difficult,
when the reality of having to bear hours of analytic listening in the solitude of
the consulting room finally hits home. And most difficult of all perhaps is the
relinquishing of an analytic practice at the end of one’s career, when another
form of loneliness hits home with the loss of the setting and the fear of loss
of identity.
The issue of what we mean by identity, let alone a psychoanalytic identity, is a
complex one, as I have discussed before. Having an analytic identity refers to a
sense of solidity in one’s core identification with psychoanalysis as a theory and
practice, an increasing sense of confidence in knowing what one is doing, even
when not knowing what is going on in the session. It is probably about finding
one’s own voice as an analyst, being able to develop a particular quality of lis-
tening – both listening to the patient’s unconscious communications, but also to
oneself, with a complex interaction between the two sides. The analytic voice is
not only shaped by the clinical encounter, but also, of course, by other influences –
from training, personal analysis, colleagues, reading and life.

Clinical example
There are many times that loneliness may feature in an analysis, but one example
may illustrate some of the dilemmas I have touched upon. I shall focus mostly on
the transference and countertransference movements.
I am thinking of a man in his thirties who came into analysis with an acute
sense of feeling out of things, not part of the group, cut off from others in a deep
way, though able to have his own family. One of the main facts about his present-
ing history was that he had no recollection before the age of 5, when his parents
split up. Indeed, much of his early history is still very vague. The mother left
his father, taking him and his younger siblings. Before the analysis, my patient
had never been told why the mother had left, but on asking his mother recently,
he had reluctantly been told this it was because of ‘mental cruelty’ – though my
patient did not find this very convincing. There then began a life of wandering
100 Loneliness and solitude

around, and he went to boarding school from an early age, which he found very
difficult. He always felt an outsider, on the margins of the group. It was a very
lonely time. He would often walk around the school on his own. This period
of time, the period of extreme loneliness, is remembered by him, and perhaps
can be said to have covered over the earlier and even more painful memories
of loss.
In analysis, the patient is not that forthcoming with his associations. There are
quite a lot of almost ‘Harold Pinter-like’ pauses. He will say a few lines, wait,
and expect me to say something, which I may or may not, depending on whether
I have anything to say. He may wait for a long time for me to speak, and I know
now that he then begins to feel more and more detached and in a world of his
own. So there is a dilemma about letting the silences go on for too long; it may
become counterproductive as he falls into an extreme sense of loneliness. At the
same time, I do not wish to intrude or to be controlled into engaging in a way
that means I have all the life. So there is an issue of the timing of what I say. In
the past, I have tried to understand this interaction in various ways. Some relief
came from thinking in terms of my becoming in the transference a withholding
mother, which seemed to have some link to his own picture of his mother, who
has never been particularly warm. However, that relief was short lived, and the
familiar pattern of communication persisted, from time to time leaving both of
us in some despair.
At these times, his loneliness can get to me. I feel a mixture of empathy for
his plight and irritation at his passivity, which can sometimes leave me feeling
cut adrift from my sense of confidence in the analytic process. I then feel really
lonely, helpless and disconnected. This is quite different from a more organized
sense of solitude, where I can still have an internal dialogue about what is happen-
ing. Instead, I don’t know what to say, and this can feel quite dismaying. I begin
to doubt my analytic identity.
There are times when the atmosphere in the session is particularly detached,
flat and even dead. The issue of deadness and aliveness has often been around –
how much he can bear having live contact with me, how much he longs for it and
yet also avoids it. Some understanding of this feeling in terms of Andre Green’s
dead mother complex (1983) has been helpful, with the sense of the patient being
in the presence in the transference of a depressed or cut off mother, who had once
been more alive. This became clearer as I began to understand what was happen-
ing as the session was reaching towards its close.
In order to get to that point, I had to reexamine how I had felt intermittently
frustrated, controlled and irritated by his withholding. At these times, I was
also aware of his deprivation, the emptiness he has had to cope with since early
childhood. He has that mixture common to those with such a childhood – of being
like an abandoned child craving for love but unable to make the kind of live con-
tact which would satisfy him.
What seems to have begun to make a difference to him is trying to differenti-
ate different states of loneliness, and how he feels I am available for him at the
 Loneliness and solitude 101

beginning of a session and now for about three-quarters of the session – the
length of time he can trust in my being available within the session has gradually
increased over time. But then, suddenly, I seem to disappear. He will imagine I am
elsewhere, particularly if I do not speak much. This can suddenly produce a ter-
rible sense of despair and futility, which may last until the next session. My own
experience of these moments in the session itself can be somewhat disorienting.
I can feel I am doing my job reasonably well, and then suddenly I doubt myself;
I feel alone in the presence of the other, but not in a healthy way. I just feel lonely
and cut off. Using this countertransference emotion in order to name the sudden
loss of confidence in my presence as the repetition of an early catastrophic loss
seems to have made some impact. We are beginning finally to piece together the
unbearable depression of his early years when he lost the security of his home
life. In addition, one could understand this sense of my being available and then
disappearing to him as the repetition of Green’s dead mother, the mother who was
once available and then no longer. Whatever the precise nature of the transference
constellation, what seemed to bring most relief to the patient was to understand
the timing in the session of the sudden states of lonely despair; even to see that
these moments had meaning was a relief, that he was not just being abandoned
by me but was in the grip of some unconscious process that we could begin to
work out together. He was not totally alone in the presence of an abandoning
other.
Such early losses with my patient remind one of Freud’s fort/da observation,
which in some ways is about a little child coping with the threat of loneliness
while their mother is absent. One could even describe the fort/da as a pivotal
organizing framework around which one can understand fundamental develop-
mental processes. It is obviously an observation of a child who has to hold a
situation in time until the mother returns. Winnicott (1958, pp. 222–3) describes
how the child can deal with the mother’s absence when there is active adaptation
to the child’s needs, so that the child can wait in a state of undisturbed isolation.
But when the environment has failed and impinges on the child, the child falls
into a state of restless isolation, and I think that captures something about my
patient’s emotions towards the end of a session, when he has lost confidence in
my presence, just as he has to face the prospect of leaving the session and facing
my actual absence.

The fort/da observation and the loneliness–solitude

relationship
One could see the fort/da game as a kind of description of what takes place regu-
larly in an analysis. With the neurotic patient, there is in the transference a regular
kind of coming and going; the analyst is both present and absent for the patient,
appears and disappears. Such transference movements do not create massive
anxiety or a great deal of loneliness. However, traumatised and borderline
patients bring in an intense way the issue of a going away which feels at times
102 Loneliness and solitude

total, with no hope of a return, and a traumatic sense of loneliness. And yet they
keep coming back to their analysis in the hope that the analytic setting can pro-
vide some resolution to their despair.
In order, ultimately, to make sense of these kinds of clinical situations, I shall
consider a few analytic thinkers for whom the fort/da either appears particularly
crucial or relevant, or whose thought can shed particular light on the observa-
tion’s significance. Fundamental once more is Winnicott’s approach to early
development, with his focus on the play area between the child and mother, and
how physical objects, whether they be teddy bears, pieces of string or indeed the
cotton reel of Freud’s observation, can become important to the child as objects
transitional between the subjective and what is objectively perceived. Referring
to the early development of the reality sense in the child, Winnicott suggests
that ‘it is assumed that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner
and outer reality’ (1958, p. 240). For Winnicott, the relief from this ‘strain’ for
the young child comes from an unchallenged intermediate area of experience,
which is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child lost in play.
Transitional phenomena are allowable to the infant only when the parents intui-
tively recognize the strain inherent in objective perception, and so ‘do not chal-
lenge the infant in regard to subjectivity or objectivity just here where there is a
transitional object’ (1958, p. 241). Excessive strain will thus come into this area
of experience when there is not good enough environmental provision, with, for
example, a poorly adaptive mother or excessive environmental impingements.
But however good the parenting, there is always some degree of strain inherent in
the task of linking inner and outer realities; the strain of linking is universal, and
needs to be recognized by the parent, and, indeed, by the analyst. Furthermore,
as Green has emphasized, the transitional space is not just ‘in between’; it is a
space ‘where the future subject is in transit; a transit in which he takes possession
of a created object in the vicinity of a real external one, before he has reached it’
(1997, p. 173). Thus, in the transitional area, the human subject is in the process
of becoming rather than merely being.
Winnicott also highlights the relationship between the transitional object and
symbolism. When symbolism is employed, the infant is already making a distinc-
tion between fantasy and fact and between inner and outer. One could see the
fort/da game as a pivotal step in the process of the child’s making sense of time,
through finding a symbolic means of coming to terms with the mother’s comings
and goings. As I suggested before, the symbolization of absence makes solitude
bearable; merely feeling absence without the capacity to symbolize it plunges the
subject into loneliness.
If, as I have suggested before, subjectivity is essentially elusive, with the
subject appearing and disappearing, coming and going, one is then, of course,
reminded of the fort/da observation, of the child’s making the cotton reel come
and go. In this sense, the fort/da reminds us not only of the elusive comings and
goings of the mother but also of the precarious way that human subjectivity arises
out of the child‘s shifts between different states.
 Loneliness and solitude 103

Green’s concept of the ‘work of the negative’ (1993) and his notion of the dead
mother complex (1983) are also pivotal reference points for understanding the
nature of the role of the mother’s absence in the fort/da observation. The mother
does not have to be literally dead, but instead is emotionally dead, unavailable
to the child. Then, the dead mother complex is observed in the transference of
certain subjects suffering from a particular kind of depression. Green highlights
how one characteristic of this depression is that it takes place in the presence of
the parental object, which is itself absorbed by a bereavement. Instead of being
an animated source of liveliness for the child, the preoccupied mother becomes
psychically dead in the child’s eyes; her absence is deadly.
Relevant, too is Lacan’s focus on the fort/da as an illustration of how the child
can enter the symbolic order through coming up with binary phonemes to struc-
ture his play of presence and absence (1975, pp. 173–4). The physical object, the
cotton reel, becomes transformed into an object with a symbolic function while
the child is confronted with the mother’s absence and the child’s own desire
for her to be present. The fort/da is an early manifestation of the child’s use of
language. In the phonematic opposition, the child transcends the phenomenon of
presence and absence by bringing it onto the symbolic plane.
Putting together some of these approaches, I would suggest that there is always
a tension, or strain, between the mother as mere physical object and the mother
as an elusive human presence, capable of appearing and disappearing when she
wants to, or needs to, whether it is to go to the father or elsewhere, the mother
who stirs up the child’s yearnings and desires. In the fort/da one can see the
working out of the difference between mother as material object and the mother
as elusive human presence; out of this difference one can see human subjectiv-
ity, with all its dilemmas and possibilities, beginning to emerge. The task of the
developing child, as well as that of the analytic patient, is, in a sense, to come
to the realization that the mother is not a mere physical object, or at least not an
object under the child’s omnipotent control, but a subject with a mysterious life
of her own, relating to other subjects, the father and others. The dawning of this
realization is never easy; there is always a certain amount of strain involved in
the process of coming to terms with the mother’s elusiveness, more so when the
mother’s absence is prolonged, or her return highly problematic.
Yet before considering the theoretical and clinical relevance of the fort/da
in further detail, it is hard to forget the context of the observation, aspects of
which haunt it and give it particular and poignant significance. It is placed early
in Freud’s book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920, pp. 14–17), following on
what Freud describes as the ‘dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis’
(1920, p. 14). From the terrors of the repetition of war memories, he moves to
the apparently lighter topic of children’s play, but which reveals a young child
coming to terms with the mother’s temporary absence. And yet within a short
time, as a footnote tells us, as if in passing, we learn that this mother (in fact
Freud’s beloved daughter Sophie) died some four years after the observation,
before Freud wrote his book. One can thus see the observation in a more primeval
104 Loneliness and solitude

light: a mother dies and is then resurrected in the text. Furthermore, though we
are also told that Freud’s grandson had been jealous of a younger brother, we are
not told that this brother, Heinz, also died from ‘TB’ some time after his mother.
This child’s death, according to Jones, produced ‘the only occasion in his life
when Freud was known to shed tears’ (1961, p. 550). The loss, no doubt coming
after his daughter’s death and the emergence of his cancer of the jaw, was almost
unbearable and produced in him symptoms of depression.
There are also other personal references surrounding Freud’s focus on this
grandchild of a year and a half, for this was about the age he was when his
younger brother, Julius, died (Jones, 1961, p. 36). This death was to haunt Freud;
he admitted that the evil wishes he had against this early arrival of his younger
brother had aroused self-reproaches which continued to affect his personal rela-
tionships. For example, Freud would link his fainting fits around the time of the
increasing tensions with Jung to the effect on him of his younger brother’s death.
One may finally note that around the age of 18 months was the time when the
Wolf man was likely to have witnessed the primal scene, the scene of sexual
intercourse between the parents, which the child observes or infers on the basis
of fantasy and inference (Freud, 1918, p. 37). Thus the significance of the fort/da
observation is mutlidetermined, linking the personal and the theoretical, the real
traumas in Freud’s life to general considerations of the nature of trauma.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud notes how dreams in traumatic neu-
rosis bring the patient back into the situation of the accident or ‘fright’, a situ-
ation from which the patient wakes up in ‘another fright’ (1920, p. 13). From
the appearance and reappearance of the traumatic situation in the dream, Freud
leads onto the appearance and reappearance of the mother in the world of the
young child, a situation which, though apparently lighter, is fraught, as we have
seen, with dark resonances of traumatic elements in Freud’s personal life. From
the fort/da, Freud moves onto the analytic patient and then to how the mental
apparatus tries to protect itself from traumatic stimuli by means of a protective
shield. One might add here that the repetition of the fort/da game is itself a shield
against the pain of the mother’s loss. Freud then moves onto his new drive theory,
with the death drives leading the individual one way, towards certain extinction,
and the life drives prolonging the inevitable as long as possible. The life of the
individual is described as moving with a ‘vacillating rhythm’ (Freud, 1920, p. 41),
‘ein Zauder-rhythmus’, something which lingers or delays.

One group of drives rushes forwards so as to reach the final aim of life as
swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been
reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and
so prolong the journey.
(1920, p. 41)

Could one say, then, that the fort/da prefigures not only the introduction into
Freud’s text of the tragic fate of the individual desperately trying to prolong the
 Loneliness and solitude 105

inevitable journey towards death, but also that it represents a pivotal, ‘transi-
tional’ moment in the development of the human subject, poised between the
processes of coming and going, presence and absence, the past and the present,
loneliness and solitude, life and death?
There are many ways of viewing the fort/da observation. While the fort/da
could be seen as a relatively sophisticated example of the linking of separa-
tion and absence by means of early language, it has resonances with earlier
experiences of separation, as well as anticipating subsequent developmental
moves.

Holding over time

One could describe the fort/da as a pivotal organizing framework, around which
one can understand fundamental developmental processes. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines ‘process’, in its main meaning, as a thing that goes on or is
carried on, a continuous series of actions, events or changes; and especially a
continuous and regular action or succession of actions occurring or performed in
a definite manner. Time is thus integral to the nature of a process, and time haunts
the fort/da.
The fort/da is obviously an observation of a child without its mother, a child
who has to hold a situation in time until the mother returns. Presumably, an
image of the mother sustains the child through this period of waiting. But after a
certain, critical time, this image will begin to fade, and the strain of holding the
situation in time will become unbearable. One can see how this image fades in
different ways, from a gradual loss of representation due to lack of reinforcement,
to its more active and aggressive elimination. Or else, as Green suggests (1997,
p. 1081), there may be a destructive negative hallucination of the object; the nega-
tive of the object is created and subsequently sought.
Earlier experiences of separation will, of course, be crucial to how the child
manages the waiting time. Winnicott (1971, p. 97) describes how the inner repre-
sentation of the mother is kept alive in the baby by the reinforcement given from
the mother and her technique of devoted childcare. The baby may be distressed
by the mother’s absence, but if she returns within a reasonable time, this distress
is soon mended. Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a break in life’s
continuity, so that primitive defences come into place to defend against the
repetition of unbearable, or unthinkable, anxiety, with attendant confusion and
disintegration of ego structure.
Winnicott (1958, pp. 418–19) also describes how the young child can deal with
environmental disturbances, such as the mother’s absence, when there is active
adaptation to the child’s needs. The child can then be in a state of undisturbed
isolation. In this state, the child can make a spontaneous movement, and the
environment is discovered without any loss of the sense of self. There is a respect
for processes, a sense of continuity, that one experience will follow another;
when something occurs in the environment, there is an appropriate reaction.
106 Loneliness and solitude

Thus an absence, a ‘fort’, produces or is followed by a return. The child can

build up memories of a mother who is both actively present and returns when
absent.
But when there has been a failure of good enough adaptation, with envi-
ronmental impingement, the child returns to a state of restless isolation. The
absence produces no return, or there is such a long wait for the return that there
is a loss of the sense of self, and the child is in a state of solitary and anxious
waiting. In extreme cases, with persistent and repeated absences, this situation
may lead to various forms of psychosis, where, instead of the persistence of an
internal image of the mother, there is merely a gap, an absence of representa-
tion. The gap itself takes possession of the mind, erasing the representations
of the object that preceded its absence. The adult patient with such psychopa-
thology will often present with a negative therapeutic reaction (Green, 1997,
p. 1081).
Such early experiences can help us understand the psychic situation in adult
patients. The neurotic can stand absence without loss of the sense of self. The
borderline patient goes in and out of states of unthinkable anxiety, but there is still
some sense of a return of the mother. But, with the psychotic patient, there is no
return, and a sense of utter desolation and emptiness remains. With the treatment
of these latter patients, analysis may only repair such fundamental damage by
means of the real relationship with the analyst, as the hole in maternal representa-
tion will persist.
Winnicott also draws attention to the importance for the young baby of drop-
ping things, a precursor, one might say, of the more organized fort/da experience,
to which Winnicott refers in the context of giving a personal account of Klein’s
depressive position (Winnicott, 1958, pp. 414–17). The stage of the baby play-
ing at dropping things is seen as a crucial stage, around the time of weaning,
and when there is the beginning of the capacity to master loss. For constructive
play to be possible, the loved person needs to have been near the baby in the
first place, in order to survive the baby’s various anxieties and projections, as
well as offer holding-over time through their adaptive responses and their safe
return.
In fact, Winnicott noted (1941, p. 68) that the fort/da stimulated him to make
detailed observations of infant’s play between about 5 to 13 months of age. In
a paper on the observation of infants in a ‘set situation’, he describes a way to
observe infants and diagnose some of their difficulties by presenting them, while
their mother is present, with a shiny tongue depressor, or spatula. There are usu-
ally three possible stages to be observed. In the first stage, the child begins, ten-
tatively, to show a spontaneous interest in the spatula. In the second stage, after
a period of hesitation, the child accepts the reality of the spatula and soon puts it
in his mouth. He or she now feels the spatula is in their possession and may bang
it on the table or hold it to the observer’s mouth, playing at feeding. In the third
stage, which Winnicott links with the fort/da game, the baby
 Loneliness and solitude 107

. . . first of all drops the spatula as if by mistake. If it is restored he is pleased,

plays with it again, and drops it once more, but this time less by mistake.
On its being restored again, he drops it on purpose, and thoroughly enjoys
aggressively getting rid of it. The end of this phase comes when the baby
either wishes to get down on the floor with the spatula, where he starts mouth-
ing it and playing with it again, or else when he is bored with it and reaches
out to any other objects that lie at hand.
(Winnicott, 1941, p. 54)

There are thus three main elements of the whole spatula observation; incorpora-
tion, retention and riddance.
The third phase, when the infant practices ridding himself of the spatula, can be
related, according to Winnicott, to the fort/da game, when the child is mastering
his feelings about the mother’s departure. He considers that his own observation
could be seen as an extension backwards of Freud’s observation, and corresponds
to the third stage, that of ridding the child of the object.
‘I think the cotton reel, standing for the child’s mother, is thrown away to indi-
cate a getting rid of the mother because the reel in his possession had represented
the mother in his possession. When the mother goes away, this is not only a loss
for him of the externally real mother, but also a test of the child’s relation to his
inside mother’ (Winnicott, 1941, p. 68).
The game of riddance of the object reassures the child about the fate of the
internal mother, that she has not vanished, that her image is still alive, that she is
going to return and to play with the child again. There is thus a need for the child
to be able to throw the mother away symbolically in order to keep her alive. But,
of course, this presupposes that the successful negotiation of the earlier phases of
incorporation and retention has taken place so that there is a sense of continuity
over time.
Those patients who have had such an experience of continuity are more able
to do psychic work; there is an adequate level of symbolic functioning, what
goes away can return and they can cope with being on their own. However, in
those patients with disruptions in the early holding environment there may be a
retreat from the reality of the social world into a private time, or into a state of
almost psychotic timelessness; there is little hope that what goes away can ever
return, so better to create a state of timelessness where comings and goings are
irrelevant. With some traumatised, and often abused, patients, there are also
pathological states in which lived time is avoided by a whirlwind of activity, and
they may experience rapid changes between extremes in their mental state. The
whirlwind of confusion, with so many comings and goings that it is impossible to
register any coherent pattern, may be both a defence against experiencing chaos,
and a way of re-creating an excited mental state. They may need the whirlwind
in order to feel alive, for they have not had the sense of time kept going by the
mother.
108 Loneliness and solitude

Different kinds of absence

The absence of the mother haunts the fort/da game. This may be a physical
absence, but an emotional absence, both before she goes and when she returns, is
just as significant. That is, the quality of the contact between mother and child is
crucial to how the child will deal with her absence. There are a number of differ-
ent kinds of absence. Green’s dead mother complex refers to a pervasive and
catastrophic absence, with a bereaved and preoccupied mother unable to be alive
to the child. There is a void, an emptiness, between mother and child, which leads
to a loss of meaning and desperate attempts to patch the hole between them. The
shadow of her absence, even when physically present, pervades the child and the
analytic patient. This results in a fundamental fantasy: to nourish the dead moth-
er, to maintain her perpetually embalmed. She is never ‘thrown away’ symboli-
cally as in the fort/da game.
When the dead mother complex is touched in the transference, ‘the subject
feels himself to be empty, blank, as though he were deprived of a stop-gap object,
and a guard against madness’ (Green, 1983, p. 162).
There is a difficult task for the patient, who eventually has to mourn the dead
mother rather than keep her embalmed, that of letting her go, getting rid of rather
than holding onto her. This task means having to face intense feelings of empti-
ness, for the mother has filled the patient’s psychic life as a dead presence. Letting
her go, that is, bringing to her life and then mourning her loss, means having to
face the paradoxical situation of two losses: presence in death and absence in life.
Other patients may not have the dead mother complex, but the quality of
the mother’s absence may also be an intense issue. For example, at the more
psychotic end of the spectrum, there is the non presence of the object; there is
a void, a nothingness, an emptiness and blankness. Even if the object returns, it
is not enough to heal the disastrous consequences of its too long absence. The
nothingness of this experience is eloquent, communicating a sense of disaster.
As one approaches this area in the patient, there may be a futile absence, which
may be experienced by the analyst as depression, and brought by the patient
through enactments. One might say that with these patients, the ‘fort’, the ‘gone’,
predominates; with them, there is no ‘da’, no ‘there’. This entails the intense
presence of a sense of nothingness, a nonexistent or cancelled subject, with little
sense of human agency. The hope is that analytic work can provide a framework
for the linking of presence to absence, and with it the possibility of becoming a
subject.
Wilfred Bion makes a distinction between nothing and no-thing. Knowledge
of loss, of the thought as a no-thing, with a realization of the absent object, can
lead to freedom; or else, the patient may be unable to tolerate frustration, and
the no-thing may be used as the foundation for hallucination (1970, pp. 16–17):
Green calls the latter negative hallucination, and he cites the female patient who
said to Winnicott that the negative of him was more real than the positive of him.
Parsons also develops this theme when he distinguishes between a constructive
 Loneliness and solitude 109

and a destructive role for negativity in psychic life. The constructive role of the
negative requires a certain psychic mobility, a capacity to shift between negating
and affirming, separation and connection (Parsons, 2000, p. 185). One may see
this shift between presence and absence in the pattern of the patient’s movements
of engagement and disengagement in the transference relationship.
I have described (Kennedy, 1984) what I called the ‘dual aspect’ of the
transference, which refers to the analyst as simultaneously the receiver of
the patient’s projections, or the analyst as fantasy object, and as different from
these projections. This dual aspect of the transference refers to the way that the
more neurotic patient can oscillate from being identical, in the patient’s eyes, to
archaic fantasies, and being something else, different. I described how to begin
with the patient who revealed a repetitive transference pattern, in which some
analytic work was possible but was then thrown away, so that looking back at
what had happened one seemed to be left with a series of fragmented weeks and
months. But this was not a helpful throwing away, in that nothing came back,
and she was left with a feeling of futility. However, after a considerable amount
of work, the transference began to have a more dynamic and less rigid feel. I
became less merged with her primitive fantasies, and she was able to see me
both as a fantasy figure and as different. This coincided with an ability to hold
onto analytic work rather than merely throw it away. One is reminded here of
Winnicott’s observation of a boy’s use of string (1971, pp. 15–20) as a means
both to communicate and to deny separation. The mother of this 7-year-old was
a depressive who had been hospitalised for depression. As a result, there were
several extended occasions when the child was separated from the mother. He
developed a number of symptoms, including compulsions and retention of faeces.
When he was seen for a consultation, he showed a preoccupation with string; at
home he would join up the furniture with string, and had also tied string round
his younger sister’s neck. The function of the string was seen as a way of trying
to communicate the child’s fear of separation by desperately joining up objects. It
was as if he were trying to ‘rope her in.’ It was not just the mother’s going away
which was traumatic for the child, but also her lack of contact with him when
she returned, due to her preoccupation with herself and other matters, her lack of
focus on the child. The string both communicated his wish to join up objects, but
also his denial of a painful separation, with an anxious form of attachment. As
Green (1997, p. 1074) put it, the string was a positive materialisation of an absent,
negative bond.
One can see a variety of disorganized attachments with those children who
have been subjected not just to emotional detachment but also to physical and/or
sexual abuse. My own experience of working with such children and their fami-
lies at the Cassel Hospital (Kennedy, 1997) revealed that the children are often
haunted by their abuse and unable, without considerable help, to free themselves
from its consequences. They often cannot concentrate on a task for long, as if
there has been a massive disruption in their capacity to link experiences over
time. They appear overstimulated with poor impulse control, and they may have
110 Loneliness and solitude

a haunted, driven quality to their relating, and a tendency to be aggressive and

test boundaries. Sometimes they may show inappropriate sexual behaviour; they
may go in and out of confusional states when they become very anxious, par-
ticularly about being abandoned, and they have great difficulty in trusting adults.
The parent–child relationships are usually pathological, with varying degrees of
disorganized attachment patterns. There is often role reversal, in which the child
tries to control the parents’ comings and goings, while the parents have prob-
lems in maintaining ordinary child–adult boundaries. These parents often have
difficulty in being emotionally attached to their children, with inhibition of the
capacity to play. In the child, and probably also in the parent, there is a loss of,
or failure to develop the capacity to use meaningful symbols, so that, as it were,
no fort/da interchange is possible. The parents are often inconsistent, at times cut
off and self-absorbed. The children themselves seem to make a particular kind
of powerful emotional impact on their parents and other caretakers, as if they are
desperately trying to get the parents to acknowledge their needs and accept the
trauma that they have experienced.
My own experience of the abused adult is that they can recreate the emo-
tionally absent parent at some point. This is the parent who could not bear the
child’s pain and vulnerability, and who has left the child with a sense that the
environment has fundamentally failed them, and that there is a kind of breach, or
unbearable gap, in the parenting experience. An unbridgeable gap may suddenly
appear between patient and analyst, which either party may be tempted to deal
with by some kind of precipitous action, such as termination. Bearing unbearable
emotional pain is an issue in any analysis, but with the abused adult it becomes
acutely relevant (see Kennedy, 2007, p. 165ff.).

Different kinds of psychic space

One may ask what happens to the child between the mother’s coming and going.
Of course, the effect of prolonged separations on the child is well documented in
the attachment literature. Anxiety, ultimately leading to despair and depression,
has long been known to occur with, for example, hospitalised children left with-
out a caretaker. Such situations, though originally described by James Robertson
(1958) in the 1950s, are, unfortunately, still common throughout the world as a
result of war and famine, or poor services for abandoned children left unattended
in institutions. The space between the child and the mother will become so vast
as to be unrepresentable. No cotton reel play can ever bring the mother back, and
the play is soon abandoned, leaving the child in a despairing and depressed state
of listlessness.
One can see, in less globally damaged children and adults, various kinds of
ways of dealing with the psychic space between parent and child. Michael Balint
describes two characteristic modes of relating which act as defences against
primitive anxieties of psychotic intensity, and which refer to the quality of space
between parent and child, as well as a way of trying to understand various kinds
 Loneliness and solitude 111

of patients who are difficult to reach. In one attitude, the ‘oncophilic’ attitude,
the maternal object is felt to be a vitally important support, but to such a degree
that there is no separation from the child. The oncophilic clings to objects, try-
ing to control them. The ‘philobat’ on the other hand, prefers objectless expanses
and the safety in the empty spaces. Objects are considered indifferent or even
deceitful and untrustworthy hazards, better to be avoided (Balint, 1968, p. 70).
No doubt there are mixtures of the different attitudes, with varying amounts of
clinging to the object and avoidance of it. In patients who are too close to their
object, treatment may enable them to develop a sense of psychic space; with those
who avoid objects, treatment may enable them to begin to relate without exces-
sive anxiety about the object.
Anxiety about the mother’s return, and the state when she returns, may become
organized in the adult patient through perverse functioning, when, for example,
there is an attempt to control the other. For example, a narcissistic man came
into analysis as he was having difficulty sustaining relationships. He showed
little empathy for others and was exploitative and often emotionally sadistic.
He sought my admiration to boost his fragile sense of self-worth, while he was
dismissive about my capacities. I was treated like a servant, there to attend to his
needs. Women were seen as mere objects to be entered. He would gain pleasure
from teasing them, keeping them waiting, stirring them up with desire and then
dropping them. However, he also at times, after some analysis, experienced an
increasing sense of futility about his lifestyle, with how much he needed to fill
himself up with sexual excitement and destructiveness, in order to avoid feeling
empty. What soon became clearer was an all-pervading fear of psychical collapse,
and a terror of being submerged by me in the transference. The picture of his
mother was of a cold, puritanical and panicky figure, brittle and unresponsive. He
was left with her because his father was often away from home, and she turned
to him for comfort. She became depressed, and he felt he had to bolster her up,
a situation which he greatly resented. His sadistic use of women could clearly be
related to this early mother–child interaction, in which there was an excessive
turning to the child for comfort, intrusion into his psychic space, and a fusion of
her needs with his.
Use of the transitional space clearly represents a more satisfactory way of deal-
ing with the mother–child relationship, based on ‘good enough’ environmental
provision rather than excessive anxiety and retreat from active engagement. One
has a sense of the playful interaction between mother and child, which can allow
her to come and go without excessive anxiety, but also allows the child to play
alone in her presence and without her intruding.
However, there are anxious situations, repeated in an analysis of, for example,
borderline patients, where there is an issue about the space between coming and
going when the subject may feel they can never find their way back to the maternal
object. Instead, they may feel lost in the space between coming and going. There is
little prospect of becoming a subject as there is little hope of re-finding the object.
There is neither ‘fort’ nor ‘da’, but a refusal, or absence, of either ‘fort’ or ‘da’.
112 Loneliness and solitude

In Freud’s original observation, one can see the fort/da game as a positive use
of repetition. The game helped the child cope with the mother’s comings and
goings, as well as provided a means, according to Lacan, of becoming inserted
into the Symbolic Order and into language. In the space between these comings
and goings, the child was able to find a place to play; there was a space for repre-
sentation. The child could let go of the mother once he had found a repetitive but
symbolic means of representing her leaving him. This positive use of repetition
contrasts with a more compulsive and insistent quality of repetition also described
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which has a more mindless, or ‘daemonic’,
quality, related to the power of the unconscious repressed. One could imagine a
delicate balance between these two kinds of repetition, depending on the time for
waiting for the mother’s return, what state she was in when she left, what state
the child was in when she left and what state both are in on her return. Of course,
the fort/da game occurs without the mother, and yet there are many occasions
when something similar takes place in the presence of the mother. Various kinds
of comings and goings occur in the complex interactions between mother and
child. The mirroring role between mother and child is of particular significance
in this context. For Lacan, the mirror stage plays a pivotal role in his theory as
a moment of alienation preceding the fort/da moment of entering the Symbolic
Order. The child sees himself as a whole in the mirror, but it is as an imaginary
unity that he sees himself. This contrasts with the reality of his helplessness and
his lack of bodily mastery. For Lacan, the formation of the ego begins at this
point of alienation in the mirror, with the fascination with one’s own image (see
Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, p. 55ff.).
Clearly, this view of the place of the mirror image is quite different from that
of Winnicott, and subsequent child and infant researchers, who focus on the
role of parental mirroring as structuring the child’s affects. For Winnicott (1971,
p. 111ff.), how the mother looks at the baby, and what the baby sees when he or
she looks at the mother, are crucial to the development of the child’s sense of self.
The mother has a fundamental role here in giving back to the baby the baby’s
own self. If, for example, the mother’s face is unresponsive, then ‘a mirror is a
thing to be looked at but not to be looked into’ (1971, p. 113). There is, then, no
depth to the mother’s mirroring role; the child may be left puzzled about what
the other’s look may bring; they may be left without much experience of ever
getting back what they give. With the mirroring and responsive mother, there is a
constant process of flexible interchange between her and the baby, so that a kind
of primitive fort/da game is already taking place between mother and child, but
with her present. If she is unresponsive, then she becomes emotionally absent
while present, a traumatic situation for the baby.

Further thoughts on loneliness and solitude

Both Klein and Fromm-Reichmann approached the topic of loneliness at the end
of their careers; indeed, in both cases these papers on this topic were their last.
For Klein, loneliness was an inevitable state of mind, indicative of the fact that
 Loneliness and solitude 113

integration is never fully achievable. While one may mitigate the feeling of lone-
liness, it is not something that we can avoid. There is certainly a sense in this
paper of an analyst at the end of life looking into the void, of having to face the
pathos and pain of approaching death. There is something of that quality in the
late work of great artists. Said (2006), in his poignantly last and unfinished book,
approaches the issue of ‘late style’ in such artists. For example, he suggests that
there is something in late Beethoven, as in his late quartets, that remains unrec-
onciled and fragmentary; these quartets acutely express a sense of abandonment,
in contrast to the relentless quality of his second period works, such as the Fifth
Symphony. Indeed, one might add that in his last works, he pushes harmony and
form to the limit, moving away from the ‘home’ key at times so that one may
wonder if home will ever be reached; there are even moments, as in his last piano
sonata, when time itself seems suspended (see Rosen, 2002). The prerogative of
such late style is that it ‘. . . has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure
without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as
equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity,
stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the mod-
est assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile’ (Said, 2006, p. 148).
Anthony Storr (1988, p. 174), in his book Solitude, also discusses late
Beethoven as an exemplar of the late or third period in an artist’s development.
The last quartets, for example, are less concerned with communication, are
unconventional in form, display an absence of rhetoric and explore remote areas
of experience. Such work is deeply expressive of deep inward experience, very
much the theme of last works.
One may suppose that as a result of the artist achieving a point in their life
where their identity is firm enough to be able to face their own dissolution, these
last works convey in their form and expression what is unattainable; that human
happiness, while achievable in brief moments, cannot last, though the yearn-
ing for it may persist. Faced by approaching death, the artist, or indeed analyst,
becomes ever aware that happiness and integration are transient, loneliness in
some form inevitable.
One may infer from these considerations that solitude as an active state of
mind, as opposed to the more passive experience of experiencing loneliness,
can be creative under certain conditions. The kind of creativity shown in the
last works referred to represent some of the highest human achievements, where
solitude before death becomes the source of illumination. But even long before
death, solitude, as Storr (1988, p. 28) points out, can be facilitated by encourag-
ing deep contact with one’s inner world, or what I would describe as the depths
of the soul. This contrasts with much of contemporary Western culture, with its
constant bombardment of the senses, the continuous call of the mobile phone and
the ever-present text message, which at times appear as manic defences against
any possibility of imagining oneself alone. Storr (1988, p. 106ff.) also points out
how solitude can encourage the growth of the imagination, so long as it is not too
extreme. Indeed, it does seem that imaginative capacity tends to become particu-
larly highly developed in gifted individuals who, for one reason or another, have
114 Loneliness and solitude

passed rather solitary childhoods. The point made is that, provided the childhood
circumstances are not so severe as to cause lasting and profound damage, a cer-
tain amount of solitariness can encourage the imagination to flourish. Though,
of course, one may add that with a number of creative artists who have expe-
rienced childhood loneliness, their subsequent personal relationships may well
have suffered. Storr cites as examples of these kinds of artist Kipling, Saki and
P. G. Wodehouse, all of whom had the experience of being ‘farmed out’ as chil-
dren, without the experience of a secure childhood home. As a result all three
suffered from difficulties in forming close relationships.
In the analytic setting, one may tend to focus more on the relationship difficul-
ties than on the creative imagination. Yet we also touch on at least the roots of
imagination, or when it can become blocked. Bearing loneliness seems to me an
essential aspect of being an analyst, but also of some analytic work, particularly
with patients who have spent periods of their childhood in extreme states of isola-
tion. Helping them to manage their isolation and reach a point of creative solitude
may be very important for them. In the main clinical example, the patient reached
a point where there was some confidence that he could face the prospect of facing
my absence.
Having confidence in a return of a loved one seems essential to the capac-
ity to bear loneliness, even in adversity. I want to finish with a quotation from
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s last letter from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge before
Bonhoeffer was taken to a concentration camp, as an example of how even under
extreme situations, such love can be sustaining.

These will be quiet days in our homes. But I have had the experience over
and over again that the quieter it is around me, the clearer do I feel a con-
nection to you. It as though in solitude the soul develops senses we hardly
know in everyday life. Therefore I have not felt lonely or abandoned for one
moment. You, the parents, all of you, the friends and students of mine at the
front, all are constantly present to me . . . Therefore you must not think that I
am unhappy. What is happiness and unhappiness? It depends so little on the
circumstances; it depends really only on that which happens inside a person.
(1970, p. 419)

The next chapter takes up Bonhoeffer’s question about the nature of happiness
and unhappiness, from both a general and psychoanalytical point of view.
Chapter 7

Happiness and misery

There is considerable interest these days in issues of happiness and well-being.

It would seem that happiness has become a fundamental need for the modern
soul. I am not sure that this has always been the case. For example, in Simone
Weil’s account of the needs of the soul, written in 1943, happiness does not
appear; instead, there is a focus on needs such as liberty, order, responsibility,
equality, security and truth (Weil, 1986). Perhaps this is unsurprising given the
context for her essay. At other times, authenticity may have more of a pivotal
place in the needs of the soul. Indeed, as Bernard Williams put it, ‘Men do, as a
matter of fact, find value in such things as submission, trust, uncertainty, risk,
even despair and suffering, and these values can scarcely all be related to a central
idea of happiness’ (1972, p. 80).
Bernard Williams also criticizes a simplistic Utilitarian notion of happiness
as being essentially about facilitating the happiness of the greatest number. This
was based upon Jeremy Bentham’s notion that happiness was the basic human
condition. Such an account misses out on crucial human values, such as integrity,
spontaneity, freedom, self-expression and love, by merging all values into one
common currency. Also, Utilitarianism cannot cope with the fact of human trag-
edy. For example, in ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, we are brought
face to face with horrors which challenge our beliefs and our values. The tragic
space is one where virtue can still shine through such challenges, but the charac-
ters, like the spectators, are not impervious or invulnerable. There is not a happy
outcome, but we are still uplifted, and see the world with new eyes.
However, it is accepted that not to be happy for long periods can entail serious
consequences for the individual, with the risk of developing depression. In the
UK, Lord Layard, using Utilitarian arguments, has shown that unhappiness has
considerable and serious consequences for the economy, being a major cause of
time off work and inefficiency. His arguments have been so persuasive that the
last government put in millions of pounds to provide talking therapies rather than
rely on medication for the treatment of mild to moderate depression.
While the latter programme is to be commended and is preferable to hav-
ing patients unduly rely on antidepressants, as useful as they can be in severe
depression, the concept of happiness being put forward here is very simple, and
116 Happiness and misery

does need considerable modification if it is to have any resemblance to what is a

complex human issue. Layard’s answer to the age-old problem of human happi-
ness is simple – by happiness he means feeling good, enjoying life and feeling it
is wonderful. And by unhappiness he means feeling bad and wishing things were
different. He also recommends an extensive programme of cognitive behaviour
therapy (CBT) as the solution to many depressive episodes, bar the most severe
and those with the most complex problems. As a result of his influence, such
programmes have been rolled out extensively. The jury is still out about whether
such programmes are in fact as effective in the long term as he and other advo-
cates of CBT maintain. CBT is undoubtedly effective for some conditions, and
I personally recommend its use when I see children and families, for example,
where it is appropriate, for a variety of anxiety conditions when short-term work
is adequate. But my experience is that it is of doubtful value in more complex
situations, where a more subtle understanding of ambiguities of the human situa-
tion is required. Just as not every problem requires intensive psychoanalysis, not
every problem can be cured by CBT.
The notion that there is a simple cure for human unhappiness, while seductive,
is hardly convincing. We are, unfortunately, difficult creatures to please, and are
easily led into contradictory and self-destructive paths. Even the notion of a per-
son wanting a good experience is fraught with tensions and conflicts; they may
want a good experience, but they may equally find ways of not receiving it, or
of spoiling it or of turning it into something bad. There is thus a major dilemma
if one ties happiness too closely to goodness. Goodness is a fragile concept (see
Nussbaum, 1986).
Furthermore, a happy mood, feeling that everything about life is good, may
cover up what is really going on with the subject; they may be denying the real-
ity of a situation. One would thus have to look beyond a short-lasting happy
mood to really capture happiness; the latter would seem to require something
longer lasting, perhaps involving some sort of richness and depth of experience,
a life ‘well lived,’ which does not deny whatever uncomfortable reality may be
present. Indeed, happiness may involve the sense of achievement in overcoming
difficult and painful situations. One can see already that happiness may involve
a number of different and contradictory states of mind and that it will not easily
be pinned down. For this reason, any investigation into human happiness needs
to take account of our complex psychology, in particular how we constantly trip
ourselves up, and that something often gets in the way of our feeling happy. In
addition, we need to retain a certain amount of caution when looking at the place
of happiness in our lives. Oedipus was no doubt very happy to be married to
Jocasta, but his happiness was beside the point; other little problems like incest
and parricide were just under the surface.
Freud tackled the complexities of the problem of happiness and unhappiness in
his Civilization and Its Discontents, where he wrote that ‘here are . . . many paths
that may lead to such happiness as is attainable by men, but there is none which
 Happiness and misery 117

does so for certain’ (1930, p. 85). While Freud may veer a bit too far towards the
pessimistic pole, nonetheless his examination of the happiness issue is pivotal in
trying to grasp the subtleties of the human soul, its twists and turns. This is not
to rule out the important place that a reduction in suffering has in facilitating an
individual’s happiness.
In an earlier paper, ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’
(1908), he had argued that civilization is built up on the suppression of instincts.
The renunciation of the fulfilment of sexual instincts has been a progressive one,
from the free exercise of sexuality to its more legitimate and ordered form. The
price of having to renounce the sexual instincts in the name of civilization can be
considerable; suppression of the instincts is seen as a significant cause of mental
illness and suffering, hence of personal unhappiness. However, by the time of
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud had a much more complex view
of the causes of our unhappiness. Our inherent bisexuality, which can usually
not be fulfilled, and the innate presence of our aggressiveness, means that our
sexual life is inevitably full of conflict and a sense of guilt; any search for human
love and lasting human happiness has to take account of these basic facts of our
psychic life.
This chapter will start with Freud’s detailed breakdown of the notion of happi-
ness, and then consider a variety of other thinkers, in order to explore happiness
from different angles, so as ultimately to come up with what I would suggest is
an understanding of happiness that more accurately reflects the complexities of
the human soul. I think that such a method of exploring the happiness dimension,
using a number of different sources, is the most effective way of allowing some-
thing significant about a complex and elusive topic to emerge with more clarity
than would otherwise be possible.

Freud and happiness

The original title for Freud’s book was Das Ungluck in der Kultur, or Unhappiness
in Civilization, and indeed the text contains a subtle and extensive examination of
the ways that humankind strives to gain happiness and keep suffering or misery
away. Of course, as I have said, he was something of a pessimist. Rather like
Arthur Schopenhauer, Freud seemed to see the world as a source of suffering, with
life inherently unhappy. Such happiness as was attainable was elusive or even an
illusion. This vision is very much the inheritance of the Romantic Movement,
with its overturning of the Enlightenment’s Layard-like optimistic dominance of
the life of reason in determining our state of mind and place in society.

Happiness is not an ideal, said Holderlin, happiness is ‘tepid water on the

tongue’; Nietzsche said ‘Man does not desire happiness only the Englishman
does.’
(Berlin, 1999, pp. 141–2)
118 Happiness and misery

So quotes Isaiah Berlin in his book The Roots of Romanticism, where he shows
how Romanticism transformed the Enlightenment optimism about the power of
human reason to achieve answers about life into something more like our own
more tentative view of the limits of human reason. Indeed, one could say that
the Romantics, poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, created new
forms of despair, linking happiness and misery inextricably. They created pic-
tures of the dark delights of suffering, which certainly has Christian echoes, but
invokes a new form of feeling, one to which we are heirs.
Freud and Breuer also famously stated in Studies in Hysteria that ‘much will
be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common
unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be bet-
ter armed against that unhappiness’ (1895, p. 305). Of course one may wonder
what exactly is hysterical as opposed to ordinary misery, let alone what is mental
health, an issue which will be discussed later. But clearly here there is some
notion of unhappiness being a normal state, as opposed to Bentham’s view that
happiness was the normal state, and that the task of therapy is to help the patient
move from being stuck with abnormal amounts of misery into a position of being
able to bear the essentially unhappy human condition.
Not the most uplifting vision, or is it? Could one say that there is something
noble in this rather stoical, or even tragic, view of the world? Or is it just realis-
tic, facing squarely the fact that happiness is an ideal more to be aimed at than
achieved, and its fulfilment a utopian ideal, rather like that envisaged in the
Garden of Eden, where humankind is perpetually happy because ignorant.
The image of a lost paradise, or a sense of unalloyed happiness irretrievably
lost in experience, still haunts certain kinds of experience, as Stuart Hampshire
points out. ‘Attending to some perfect achievement in art, such as Mozart’s
Figaro or Casal’s playing of Bach or a painting by Vermeer, very great pleasure
may often be combined with an elegiac feeling, of sadness that perfect happi-
ness is lost – that it is nowhere to be found in the unimagined world and that it
exists only in the perfect achievements of art’ (1989, pp. 152–3). Beauty in art,
he adds, has sometimes been interpreted as a promise of happiness, or as a lost
happiness.
A similar kind of happiness can also be seen in Marcel Proust’s work, where
he equates happiness with the recovered reality of a life, found at particular
times – moments bienheureux, or ‘blessed moments’. At the end of Proust’s great
novel Time Regained, he describes intense states of being in which the subject
can capture lost time, or capture fragments of existence withdrawn from time
(1927, p. 229). Thus, while the narrator returns to the Guermantes’ mansion after
some twenty years, several times in succession there is reborn in him an intense
and veritable moment of the past – the taste of the madeleine cake, the clink of
a spoon on a plate, the uneven paving stones under his feet and the stiffness of a
starched napkin on his lips. Such moments – these moments bienheureux – invoke
the illusion of simultaneity, in which past and present merge into one, or past
and present sensations flash back and forth. There is something analogous in the
 Happiness and misery 119

psychoanalytic session when analyst and patient are constantly finding moments
of being in which past and present scenes and situations interact, merge or shift
backwards and forwards, which can then create the possibility of some new con-
nections emerging, or when repressions are lifted. This can be seen in the first
clinical example below.
Semir Zeki (2009) goes so far as to propose that brain functioning itself creates
misery for us. One of the main functions of the brain is to create meaning, but the
brain finds this difficult as it is often confronted with several meanings of equal
validity. The brain tries to cope with this by creating unity, seeing wholes where
they may or may not be. Love is just such a wish for unity. But such wishes are
doomed to fail, and this causes us misery. ‘The “unity-in-love” is a brain concept
that involves the splendors of heaven. That heaven can never be permanently
attained on earth; it is against reality’ (Zeki, 2009, p. 133). This does not stop
the brain from looking for such illusory wholeness, and the result is human mis-
ery as we always fail to achieve this unity. At the same time, the wish for unity
and wholeness drives both love relations and the greatest human endeavours in
the arts – hence the title of his book, The Splendors and Miseries of the Human
Brain.
Such general considerations lead one to ask whether or not there is a place
in the psychoanalytic encounter for consideration of the ‘larger’ issues such as
the place of happiness in one’s life. I would suggest that it is important now and
then at least to think about such matters, even if the day-to-day work of analysis
is usually concerned with the minutiae of a life and of the analytic encounter
itself. However, it is not always easy to find the place of these general issues in
the analytic context, and other disciplines often need to be enlisted in support of
searching for an analytic approach to broader and at times philosophical issues,
which metapsychological concepts may not adequately grasp. Freud himself was
exemplary in such undertakings and can provide a model of how to think psycho-
analytically about broad human issues.
I would also add that there is currently a great deal of literature, much of it
popular, concerned with the topic of happiness, some of it providing some sort
of self-help approach to human living which only focuses on ‘positive’ or ‘life
coach’ thinking, with the avoidance of ‘negative’ thoughts.
But this linkage between happiness and misery is much too simplistic, elimi-
nating all the complexities of the human psyche, let alone some two thousand
years of philosophical thinking about the nature of happiness (see, for example,
McMahon, 2006). Furthermore, our experience of those coming for an analysis
is that often they are not merely looking for a way out of their suffering, but are
also looking for ‘deep’ meaning and purpose, something that cannot be found in
a few sessions.
Freud’s arguments in Civilization and Its Discontents about the place of human
happiness and misery depend upon certain complex assumptions about what
makes us happy, which can provide the basis for such a deep psychoanalytic
contribution to the understanding of the nature of happiness. Freud’s earliest
120 Happiness and misery

reference to happiness occurs in the Freud–Fliess letters, where he describes

happiness as the belated fulfilment of a childhood wish (Freud, 1985, pp. 294,
353). As I mentioned, in his paper ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern
Nervous Illness’ (1908, pp. 179–204), Freud displayed an optimistic notion about
the possibilities of achieving human happiness. He maintained that civilization
represses sexuality and this makes us unhappy, leading to neurosis or perversion.
Potentially healthy and socially viable sexual drives are transformed by civilized
morality, such as the demands of a poor marriage or of sexual abstinence, into
culturally useless nervous illness. Sex here is seen as essentially beneficial, and
freeing it up would make us happier. But in Civilization and Its Discontents,
sexuality itself, as for example necessarily incorporating aggression, is the cause
of unhappiness. Thus, one can already see what a complex field one touches once
the topic of happiness is approached.
Indeed, Civilization and Its Discontents is, as Darrin McMahon describes
(McMahon, 2006, p. 448), a remarkable synthesis of almost the whole history
of the philosophy of happiness. One can piece together eleven ways by which
individuals strive to gain happiness and keep suffering away (Freud, 1930,
pp. 77–85). These in summary are as follows:
The most enticing method of doing this is to conduct one’s life by aiming for
unrestricted satisfaction of every need, a kind of pure hedonism. But this means
putting enjoyment before caution and soon brings its own punishment.
Other methods involve the avoidance of unpleasure and are differentiated
according to the source. Some of these methods ‘are extreme and some moderate;
some are one-sided and some attack the problem simultaneously at several points’
(Freud, 1930, p. 77).
Against the suffering which may come from human relationships, one may turn
away from the external world into a quiet isolation. But a better way is to become
a member of the human community, and try to work for the good of all.
The crudest but most effective method of influence is the chemical one of
intoxication, but of course such drugs are also responsible for ‘a waste of a large
quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the
human lot’ (Freud, 1930, p. 78).
Another way to avoid suffering is by influencing the drives. The most extreme
way of doing this is brought about by ‘killing off the drives’ (Freud, 1930, p. 79)
through practices such as yoga. Alternatively, one may try to control the drive
life through the higher psychical agencies, which have subjected themselves to
the reality principle, thus gaining a certain amount of protection against suffering
(1930, p. 79). However, ‘the feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of
a wild drive impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that
derived from a drive that has been tamed’ (1930, p. 79). Hence, the irresistible
attraction of perverse impulses and forbidden things finds an economic explana-
tion here.
Another method Freud outlines is by means of the displacement of libido,
where the drives are shifted in such a way that they avoid frustration from
 Happiness and misery 121

the external world. This can be seen in sublimation, gaining most if one can
sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and
intellectual work (Freud, 1930, p. 79). Freud emphasizes the special quality of
satisfaction that comes from the artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies
body, and the scientist’s joy in solving problems or discovering truths. However,
such satisfactions do not ‘convulse our physical being’ (1930, p. 80), and are only
accessible to the few. ‘And even to the few who do possess them, this method
cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no impenetrable
armour against the arrows of fortune, and it habitually fails when the source of
suffering is the person’s own body’ (1930, p. 80).
Contemplation of works of art, based on the satisfaction of illusion and the
power of the imagination, can give us temporary solace, but for Freud, ‘the mild
narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient with-
drawal from the pressures of vital needs, and it is not strong enough to make us
forget real misery’ (Freud, 1930, p. 81).
A powerful but dangerous technique for avoiding suffering is to turn away
from reality altogether, such as with the hermit. However, reality is so strong
that this method can lead to madness. Looking for a certainty of happiness would
require a delusional remoulding of reality, which Freud mentions in passing
belongs to religions, which he sees as mass delusions.
One of the most powerful ways of gaining happiness and keeping suffering
away is through a special kind of ‘technique of living’ (Lebenstechnik), involving
love relations. The satisfactions of loving relations and also that of sexual love
have given us our most intense experiences of pleasure, and have ‘thus furnished
us with a pattern for our search for happiness’ (Freud, 1930, p. 82). The ‘weak’
side of this technique of living is that ‘we are never so defenceless against suffer-
ing as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved
object or its love’ (1930, p. 82).
One would add here that the pattern of object relationships and how they are
repeated in the transference gives us a clue as to the pattern by which we may seek
happiness or constantly fail to achieve any. As an extreme example of this, one
can see how those with a deprived history, whose early objects have been deeply
unsatisfying and directly rejecting, may well repeat this pattern in their adult
relationships, constantly avoiding the possibility of a lasting and satisfying close
relationship, either with their partners or with their children. Another example
can be seen with the narcissistic patient who cannot achieve lasting and fulfilling
relationships, as they are impervious to the needs and wishes of the other.
Finally, one may turn to seek happiness in the enjoyment of beauty, through
‘the beauty of human forms or gestures, of natural objects and landscapes and of
artistic and even scientific creations’ (Freud, 1930, p. 82). This aesthetic attitude
‘offers little against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal.
The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling.
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet
civilization could not do without it’ (1930, p. 82).
122 Happiness and misery

Freud concludes this section by suggesting that though we cannot fulfil the
programme of becoming happy, imposed on us by the pleasure principle, we
cannot give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means or other
(Freud, 1930, p. 83). There are many different paths by which we try to do this,
some involving the negative path of avoiding unpleasure, others involving the
positive path of gaining pleasure. But by none of these paths can we attain all that
we desire, so that we can only find a reduced kind of happiness.
All kinds of different factors will go into directing an individual’s choice of
path towards seeking happiness. These include ‘how much satisfaction he can
expect from the external world, how far he is led to make himself independent of
it, and, finally, how much strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit
his wishes’ (Freud, 1930, p. 83). The individual’s own psychical constitution, or
character, will place a decisive role in how he goes about looking for happiness.
Freud makes the interesting point that any choice of path that is pushed to an
extreme will ‘penalize the individual to the dangers which arise if a technique of
living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove inadequate’ (1930,
p. 84). Thus one might say that a flexible or elastic technique for living is the least
susceptible to constant disappointment.
Much of the rest of Civilization and Its Discontents examines the sources of
suffering, in particular those caused by the demands of civilization on the individ-
ual, who must give up a certain amount of individual freedom for the sake of the
wider community. Civilized man (Kulturmensch) has exchanged a portion of his
possibilities of happiness for a portion of security (Freud, 1930, p. 105). The need
for such a ‘social contract’ comes from the fact that man is inherently aggressive,
and that this aggression needs to be inhibited if people are to live with one another
in a reasonable fashion. Neurosis is the price we pay for having to curb our drives
in the service of cultural ideals. While sexuality has to be curbed and hence its
importance as a source of happiness reduced by the demands of civilization, as
indeed Freud argued in his earlier work on civilized sexual morality, what he adds
here is that sexuality itself, with its innate bisexuality and also the coexistence of
aggression, adds to the sources of frustration and suffering. Our innate bisexual-
ity means that we cannot generally satisfy both male and female wishes, and our
innate aggression affects the quality of our love relationships, introducing, for
example, sadistic elements.
But is also the quality of our object relationships that in itself creates dilemmas:
in the process of civilization we internalize aggression. ‘Civilization, therefore,
obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weak-
ening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him [the super-ego]
to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city’ (Freud, 1930, pp. 123–4).
The sense of guilt produced once the superego has formed is what Freud calls
‘the most important problem in the development of civilization’ (1930, p. 134).
It is the price we pay for our advance in culture and is responsible for a loss of
happiness.
 Happiness and misery 123

One could add that much psychoanalytic treatment is focused on dealing with
the effects of an overly harsh superego, both by tackling its effects within the
transference and also its effects on external relationships, as I will illustrate later
with my first clinical example. In this sense, psychoanalysis aims to reduce suf-
fering by tackling one of its most consistent sources.
Freud ends his account by pointing out the dilemmas produced by the inevi-
table tensions between the needs of the individual and those of the community.
There is a struggle between two urges within each of us – the one towards the
individual’s personal happiness, and the other towards union with other human
beings (1930, p. 141). The aim of happiness remains but is pushed into the back-
ground. One may observe that this view is in contrast to that of Charles Darwin
(see McMahon, 2006, pp. 410–24), who put greater emphasis on the survival
value of group cohesion. For him, natural selection favoured altruism. The social
instinct of animals was a precursor of the moral instinct in man; altruism, sym-
pathy and affection are favoured by evolution for group survival. While each
generation has to struggle for life and against the forces of destruction, there
was a kind of ‘survival of the happiest’. Thus, as he writes in On the Origin of
Species,

When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full
belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that generally
death is prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and
multiply.
(1859, p. 129)

Freud, in contrast, tended to see the situation with humans as involving an

elemental tension between the forces of destruction, deriving from the death
drive, and the life-enhancing forces of Eros, the life drive. He left it open at the
end of his book which drive would be predominant in the future.
These eleven ways described by Freud through which individuals strive to
attain happiness and keep suffering at bay give us a rich and complex basis for
examining the nature of human happiness, both in the clinical setting and in the
wider social context.
One overall theme which arises from reading Freud when he tackles the theme
of happiness is its elusiveness and precariousness; just when one may attain
a happy state, something may come up to snatch it away. This is illustrated in
Freud’s open letter to Romain Rolland on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth
birthday (Freud, 1936, pp. 238–48). Freud describes a disturbance of memory
while visiting the Acropolis with his younger brother, when a symptom replaces
or displaces a potentially happy experience. Freud describes how the two of them
managed to arrive in Athens after various delays and doubts, as well as a strange
period of depression when faced by the real possibility of achieving their aim.
When they finally arrive, Freud describes how when
124 Happiness and misery

I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a
surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: ‘So all this really does exist,
just as we learnt at school!’ To describe the situation more accurately, the
person who gave expression to this remark was divided, far more sharply
than was usually noticeable, from another person who took cognizance of
the remark.
(1936, p. 241)

Freud connects the earlier depression with the idea of incredulity on the
Acropolis, when he was unable to feel the kind of happiness and delight he
would have expected to experience on achieving a long-cherished ambition.
He asks why such incredulity should arise in something which promises such
a high degree of personal pleasure. The answer is complex and involves an
internal conflict going back to the past, to earlier times when he had already
doubted that he would ever see the Acropolis, and had even doubted the reality
of the place itself. Furthermore, he became aware of a sense of guilt attached
to the fact that he had achieved something never felt to be possible, that he had
been able to see something which his father would never had achieved. Thus the
potential experience of happiness was prevented in part by some sort of Oedipal
conflict.
By implication, one might expect that tackling such conflicts may help to
address issues concerned with the experiencing of happiness. The following clini-
cal material from the case of a young man in analysis several years ago illustrates
how addressing the experience of happiness may encapsulate complex issues
from the past and present in an analysis around Oedipal and other issues.
This involves a dream from the patient, who was caught up in a difficult sado-
masochistic relationship with his girl friend, and saw at first no way out of the
dilemma. The dream seemed to represent a turning point in this man’s life, in that
it seemed to reveal some kind of solution to his dilemma. It was also a turning
point in the analysis, which ultimately helped him leave the relationship. I had the
chance to follow him up at a point seven years later, and he referred to this dream
and the session as a pivotal moment.
The man, in his late twenties, had experienced two weeks of extreme fatigue
coupled with anger and irritability, which left him on waking from the dream.
The latter took place on a wide and uncrowded beach. A man, who resembled
his father, but with wild red eyes, was beating up a little girl. He then threw her
into the sea. The dreamer swam with difficulty because there were large waves,
but managed to rescue the child. He brought her back to the beach, where he
cared for her and attended her injuries. Then the dreamer was making love beau-
tifully to a nurse in a hospital.
The patient woke up feeling happy, with a sense of relief and as if a burden
had been lifted. He noted that the dream began with extreme violence but ended
on a hopeful note. This was a welcome contrast to the general feeling of persecu-
tion and perplexity which had dogged him for some time. He felt as if a veil of
 Happiness and misery 125

oppression had been lifted. The girl who was being beaten reminded him that a
baby sister had died soon after birth and her death had preceded his own birth
by a year or two – for the dream girl was beaten to a pulp and could not possibly
have survived. Although his father had not been excessively violent toward him
as a child, the patient was aware of considerable anger with his father, which he
also experienced towards me on occasions. As a young child he was probably
very confused about what had happened to his sister. His mother mentioned her
death to him on the anniversary of the child’s death, but did not reveal the details
as this was too upsetting for her. As a child, the patient had had the fantasy that
the father had in reality killed the baby.
The beach seemed to be a large and secure place in the dream, as it had been in
his childhood. The family’s brief holidays were the only time that it was united.
In the dream, the father wore swimming trunks. The patient recalled that his
father was proud of the fact that he had a muscular body, which he kept fit, and
was obsessed by his physique. His father‘s explanation for this attitude was that
as a child he had been bullied by his elder brother (who beat him to a pulp) who,
unlike him, later became a great success. When the patient’s father came of age,
he spent hours building up his strength until the day when he had his revenge
by beating up his brother. The patient thought that his father could not stand the
competition with his brother for he certainly experienced similar feelings coming
his way – the father displayed quite openly a childish rivalry with his son, his
eldest child.
The dream seems to represent the patient’s struggle with aggressiveness and
with a sadistic or harsh superego, represented by the father figure. But despite
the father’s violence, there was a rescue. The patient had swum against the tide,
in spite of a powerful undercurrent pulling him out to sea. The patient (a well-
read person) was reminded in the session of Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf, in which
the child Eyolf was drowned, pulled under the sea by the strong undertow. Eyolf
had been abandoned by his parents who had a loveless marriage, and when the
patient thought of his parents’ marriage, he could not recall them displaying
genuine affection. He said that they had thrown away affection for one another,
as the battered child had been thrown away and discarded like so much dross. The
patient himself had replaced the dead sister. From the analysis, it seemed that his
mother had attached much hope to him to save the marriage and make up for the
death. These hopes and expectations made him furious, as if he had to carry an
unnecessary burden. He felt that, overall, the dream represented his new wish not
to have a dead or beaten child, so that he did not have to go round with a burden
of death and hate on his shoulders. He began to see that he did not have to take
his dead sister’s place, nor did he have to pretend she did not exist and so fight
for his mother’s attention.
Finally, there seemed to be something perverse in the dream, in that the beating
of the child represented a sadomasochistic element, linked to his then difficult
relationship. But the dream ended with a symbolically good intercourse which
was, like the rescue, evidence of reparation.
126 Happiness and misery

The dream seemed to be a ‘nodal’ point in this man’s analysis, in that he was
not the same after it. It brought him a sense of relief, as if a burden had been
lifted, and was felt to be important. On the one hand it was, like many dreams,
quite unexpected on the other hand, it was produced as a result of previous work.
The patient had begun to throw off his neurotic ties to the past and his compli-
ance with a false notion of himself as a damaged man capable only of turbulent
relationships with women; that is, there was some basic shift in his object rela-
tionships.
Of course, the feeling of happiness went, and soon other more negative emo-
tions returned to plague him and had to be confronted, particularly when he
actually began to separate from his troubled girl friend, but the memory of the
session and the accompanying feelings of happiness, with all their associations
and links to his past, helped him emerge from his conflictual situation. There was
some kind of significant change. Happiness here was something about recogniz-
ing the emergence of positive material at a moment bienheureux, where past and
present conflicts came together, but not in some idealized version of possibilities.
One can begin to see from this material the basis of a psychoanalytic notion of
happiness.

Other thinkers
One may continue to explore this question by first of all by starting with the roots
of the word happiness itself. Happ in Old Norse and in Middle English means
‘chance’ or ‘fortune’, and gehaep in Old English means ‘fitting’, ‘convenient’ or
‘orderly’. These roots give us what happens, a fortunate encounter, giving us also
words such as ‘happenstance’, ‘haphazard’ and ‘perhaps’. The roots of the word
thus lead us to link happiness with fortune. Indeed, ‘happiness has deep roots in
the soil of chance’ (McMahon, 2006, p. 11). Other languages also reflect this
conjunction. Thus in French bonheur comes from bon, ‘good’, and old French
heur, ‘fortune’ or ‘luck’; Italian, Spanish and Portuguese take their versions
( felicita, felicidad and felicidade) from the Latin Felix, ‘luck’ or ‘fate’. The
German Glück is the word both for happiness and fortune. The Greek word eudai-
monia comprises eu, ‘well’ or ‘good’, and daimon, ‘god’, ‘spirit’ or ‘demon’. So
happiness involves having a good daimon or a favourable occult power watching
over us. Yet of course such happiness may well be reversed by fate or chance or
a bad encounter, by trauma one might add. For the Greeks, what happens to a
person by luck – Tuche – is what does not happen through their own agency. The
realm of tuche is what just happens; it is the element of human existence not
controlled by humans (Nussbaum, 1986, p. 89 ftn.), and what makes human life
fragile and vulnerable. It is what Lacan called the potentially traumatic encounter
with the real (1973b, p. 55).
Incidentally, Schopenhauer (1851, p. 333) points out that as the external
sources of happiness are by their nature exceedingly uncertain, precarious, fleet-
ing and subject to chance, and can thus easily come to an end, happiness belongs
 Happiness and misery 127

to those who are naturally cheerful. Thus, as Freud also emphasized (1930,
pp. 76–7), our possibilities of happiness are restricted by our constitution. There
are undoubtedly some people who are just more capable of being consistently
and lastingly happy, who feel happy in their core being, maybe even despite dif-
ficult early experiences. These are resilient personalities. There are those who
are happy in circumstances where others are unhappy, and vice versa, so that one
may say that two people in the same external situation need not be equally happy
or unhappy. Happiness and misery, then, would depend more upon some internal
disposition.
For Aristotle, eudaimonia is not found through a life of short-term pleasure,
but has to be seen in the context of a whole life. ‘For one swallow does not make
a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make
a man blessed and happy’ (Aristotle, 1925, p. 14). Indeed, rather than happiness,
eudaimonia may be better translated as human flourishing, living well, and would
seem to refer to taking an active part in life, being an active ‘subject’, even if
human life is subject ‘to’ various hazards. Happiness for Aristotle does remain a
somewhat precarious state – luck or fate may intervene at any moment to spoil
things.
While one may talk of being happy one day and not the next, eudaimonia has
more to do with the ‘shape of one’s whole life’ (B. Williams, 1985, p. 34). It is
for this reason that Aristotle based his ethical inquiry on looking at the nature of
well-being and a life worth living in order to see what living a good life means.
For Aristotle, to be a happy human being was about goodness; happiness is
an activity of the soul expressing virtue. Virtue, or excellence, refers to a kind of
good or harmonious ordering of the soul. I shall return to Aristotle and some more
general points about happiness, but is worth nothing that one can see here links to
certain psychoanalytic views about happiness, such as those of Helene Deutsch
(1989), for whom feelings of happiness were to be connected with the whole
personality, assuming the harmonious cooperation of all the components of the
ego. This is to be contrasted with transient feelings of pleasure and unpleasure,
or moods. There is thus here again some notion of a happy disposition, which
involves the capacity to achieve harmonious functioning.
Jean Parat distinguishes between ‘moments of happiness’ which are limited in
time from more lasting ‘periods of happiness’ (1974, p. 564). The former refer to
certain transitory, fragile yet intense experiences which may have rich associa-
tions with memory and fantasy, such as that described by Freud on the Acropolis,
or when one is before a certain work of art or a landscape. The latter refers more
to those experiences of happiness linked to a specifically invested object relation-
ship. The object has both an ‘object value’ and a ‘narcissistic value’ (1974, p. 572),
that is one is dealing with a couple relationship between two subjects who can
value one another to various degrees.
Parat also cites the early maternal bond as providing such periods of happi-
ness, and here one should add Winnicott’s primary maternal preoccupation as an
example of a special state of being in which a woman is happily devoted to her
128 Happiness and misery

infant through a process of identification (Winnicott, 1956). Such a state would

be described as an illness were it not for the fact of the pregnancy, as it appears
in some ways such an abnormal period of sustained and overwhelming happiness.
Edith Jacobson (1957) gives a very detailed account of the nature of moods.
For her they seem to represent a cross-section through the entire structure of the
ego, lending a particular, uniform colouring to its manifestations for a longer or
shorter time. They do not relate to a specific object, and in this sense are similar
to Parat’s moments of happiness, though moods for her can also be relatively long
lasting. Moods can be distinguished from affective states, which are attached to
specific drives, with libidinous or aggressive investments, and particular objects.
However, affective states can be transformed into moods. Thus anger with some-
one specific can turn into an unhappy mood.
Self Psychology places particular emphasis on the need of the self for sus-
taining experiences, or ‘selfobject experiences’, which are necessary for the
emergence, maintenance and completion of the self (Wolf, 1988, p. 14). That is,
a person needs something from the environment around him or her, a positive
response of particular kind in order to experience well-being or, one might add,
sustained happiness. One can add the importance of a positive self and body
image to the capacity to feel happy.
Attachment studies (Schore, 2003) emphasize the role of caregivers in facili-
tating the well-being of the child. A securely attached child has a mental repre-
sentation of the caregiver as responsive in times of trouble. Such children feel
confident and happy, are capable of empathy and of forming good attachments.
Insecure attachments develop when the infants do not have a mental representa-
tion of a responsive caregiver in times of need, such as when they feel fearful or
helpless, and they have to develop various abnormal strategies in order to elicit
care. Deprived of good enough caretaking, such children have an impaired sense
of their own emotional states, and their emotional regulation becomes distorted.
The loss of the ability to regulate the intensity of their emotions may be the most
far-reaching effect of early trauma and neglect.
Erich Fromm considered that happiness and unhappiness were more than states
of mind and also were not to be confused with short periods of pleasure; instead,
they were expressions of the whole organism, the total personality. ‘Happiness is
conjunctive with an increase of vitality, intensity of feeling and thinking, and pro-
ductiveness; unhappiness is conjunctive with the decrease of these capacities and
functions. Happiness and unhappiness are so much a state of our total personality
that bodily reactions are frequently more expressive of them than our conscious
feeling’ (1949, pp. 181–2).
Helene Silberman, rather like Deutsch, links periods of sustained happiness to
harmonious ego functioning. These are limited moments when various specific
conditions come together:

When such feelings of happiness overwhelm us, we find ourselves close to

the recapture of narcissistic bliss of early childhood, now combined with the
 Happiness and misery 129

wisdom of maturity. The ego shows maximum plasticity and mobility, swing-
ing freely between past and present and fearlessly looking into the future.
There is a deep sense of mastery, of achievement with minimal tension and
maximal contentment and heightened pleasure – pleasure of an unusual illu-
minating quality . . . These feelings of happiness, although very personal and
subjective, are not self-centred or constricted in narrow ego boundaries, but
expansive, beyond one’s transitional spheres.
(1985, p. 466)

Central to any psychoanalytic consideration of the nature of happiness must

surely be the developmental perspective, the notion that how one experiences
happiness may be different at different stages of life. There is thus clearly a dif-
ference between a baby’s experience of happiness, and how one thinks about
what this may mean, and the happiness experienced by a mature adult. One might
indeed ask what it means for a baby to be happy, rather than, say, contented,
satiated or at peace. However, it would seem reasonable to assume that the basis
for subsequent potential happiness is at least laid down in the early years. All
kinds of patterns in the way that happiness is expressed may occur. For example,
if there are unhappy or depressed parents, then the baby may grow into a child
who may feel they have to cheer up their parents, or be sort of an antidepressant
for them. This would be a kind of neurotic ‘false’ happiness, perhaps related to a
more severe form of false happiness as seen in mania, with the denial of depres-
sion. Older children can be seen to be more clearly happy or unhappy, depending
upon their family and life experiences. Developmental achievements in children
can produce intense moments of happiness. Adolescents are, of course, famously
plagued by mood swings, alternating between happy and despairing states. It is
only with early adulthood that one can see a more stable integration of moods and
emotional states. Attitudes towards happiness vary enormously in middle and old
age. There are those who approach ageing more serenely, seizing each moment as
precious, and others who curse the onset of age and the approach of death, thus
increasing their misery.
Putting a number of these contributions together, one could see more last-
ing periods of happiness as concerned with moments of integration, when
various elements of the soul come together in some kind of harmonious way, or
where the soul feels more at home. This can be seen to some extent in the next
clinical example, which concerns a man in his forties nearing the end of a long
analysis.
He had come into analysis because of a sense of emptiness and futility in per-
sonal and work relationships, as well as periods of depression. He had a traumatic
early history, in that his ill manic-depressive mother was subject to repeated hos-
pital admissions for quite florid, manic behaviour, followed by deep and disabling
depressions. His father, a more stable but somewhat emotionally distant figure,
spent periods away from the family home on various kinds of business. My
patient, in fact, found some stability in attending a male boarding school, together
130 Happiness and misery

with his younger brother to whom he was not that close; he learned there to hide
his emotions and also to turn to academic achievement as a way of finding some
self-regard. Despite these early difficulties he had managed to marry and have a
successful career, but was always haunted by the ill mother.
The period of ending the analysis was, not surprisingly, emotionally difficult,
yet also productive, as can be seen in this excerpt from a session a few months
before the end.
He was worried about how he got entangled in relationships, muddled up and
confused. He described some situations at work when he felt he was being drawn
into behaving like a rival for his mother’s attention, and linked this to his feel-
ings about his younger brother, whom he felt was favoured by his mother. His
mother had, in fact, had her first major breakdown after my patient’s birth, and
the theme of feeling responsible for her madness had been a major element of the
analysis.
My patient then said that what he had gotten from the analysis was a way of
fighting through all these problems without losing the thread any more. But he
was fearful about how he was going to do this without coming to see me. I linked
this fear to one we had frequently talked about before, about how to separate from
a mad mother. He replied by suddenly remembering a fragment of a dream. This
was that he had pain in the soles of his feet.
He said that this was a bit weird, and wondered what it meant. Something
about pain, he added. I replied that maybe it was something about another kind
of ‘soul’, and about a painful soul, and how he was going to deal with that kind
of pain.
This led to him thinking about how he dealt with emotional pain, tending in the
past to distance himself, although now he was more able to face conflicts, as he
had described at his work. He said he needed to find a space to feel pain ‘without
disintegration and madness’. He was thinking about the next phase of his life.
He mentioned a book he was reading about William Wordsworth and his sister,
Dorothy, who were ‘fused’ with one another. That led onto more thoughts about
him and his mother, what he had had to deal with, with her bizarre behaviour, how
he had to defend himself against her intrusion, and also his fear of being ‘fused’
with her. However, he did feel that he could lead a life of his own. He could now
feel he could be happy with his family, but he was also afraid of how the ending
of the therapy was going to be, what kind of life he was going to live. He ended
the session by wondering what the next phase of his life was going to be like.
While of course there was considerably more work to be done around the
ending of the analysis, the patient was much more able to deal with conflicting
emotions. As he put it, he now had a way of fighting through his problems with-
out losing the thread, or one might say without being taken over by his mother’s
madness. As so often the case with such patients, one of the main tasks of the
analysis is to sort out how much a patient is muddled up with the parent’s mad-
ness, which becomes an alien presence, as it were. This work concerns separating
the patient’s own disturbance from that of their parent’s disturbance, or of trying
 Happiness and misery 131

to diminish the unhappiness that gets passed down the generations. The patient
was able to have more lasting periods of happiness with his family because, as he
put it, he had begun to find a space to experience emotional pain; his dream was
indicating that his soul could bear the pain.
Thus one can see that a psychoanalytic concept of happiness includes moments
when there is an ability to experience happiness but linked to an ability to toler-
ate psychic pain; these would be genuine moments of integration, where the soul
feels more at home. Here also, one reaches a psychoanalytic notion of mental
health, which does not necessarily equate with freedom from symptoms. As
Heinz Hartmann pointed out, it is ‘often a difficult matter to decide whether
the pedantry or ambition of an individual or the nature of his object choice are
symptoms in a neurotic sense or character traits possessing a positive value for
health’ (1964, p. 5).
Health as understood by psychoanalysis consists of more than merely loss of
symptoms, especially as it may be difficult to decide whether a given mental
manifestation is in the nature of a symptom, or whether it is an achievement. For
Hartmann, a healthy person in a psychoanalytic sense must have the capacity to
suffer and to be depressed (1964, p. 6). Indeed, it would be unhealthy to be unable
to admit to oneself the possibility of illness and suffering.
Winnicott (1986, pp. 71–9) also had the view that depression has value, even
though depressed people suffer and may kill themselves. Depression as a nor-
mal phenomenon relates to mourning, to the capacity to feel guilt, and so to the
maturational processes. Indeed, a person may come out of a depression stronger,
wiser and more humble than before – provided, of course, that the depression
has not been overwhelmingly damaging. As Winnicott emphasized, depression
has within it the germ of recovery; it can be progress for a patient to experience
depression rather than deny it, or project it. Clearly, this view is also linked to
Klein’s notion of the pivotal role of the depressive position in achieving whole-
object relationships (Klein, 1952).
Jonathan Lear discusses the nature of happiness from both a psychoanalyti-
cal and a philosophical perspective, basing his argument on a close reading of
Aristotle’s Ethics, which provides a source of many essential arguments about
the nature of happiness. Lear points out that happiness in Aristotle is ‘systemati-
cally inconstant. People use it to designate what they don’t yet have, what they
are longing for, that which they have just lost and would like again. People tend
to fantasize that if they just had this missing thing, it would make them happy.
Thus, as Aristotle points out, the sick man longs for health and thinks that if only
he can be healthy again he would be happy. In his sickness, he is oblivious to the
thought that it would be a sign of his regaining health that he turns his attention
to something else that is missing and begins to fantasize that it would give him
happiness’ (2000, p. 23).
Lear suggests that happiness for Aristotle is a perfect transference concept,
a blank which holds a place for that which would satisfy our deepest longings,
whatever they happen to be (2000, p. 24).
132 Happiness and misery

Lear offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of Aristotle’s ethical enterprise by

revealing underlying disruptive and disturbing elements in Aristotle’s Ethics.
He shows that Aristotle points out that most people are not and never will be
happy; that happiness, as in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, is by and
large an elusive condition, and that though happiness is human flourishing,
it largely eludes people. Aristotle offers an ideal of the happy, contemplative
life of the philosopher as a model for the few who are able to achieve it, yet
this remains something of a ploy to eliminate the fundamental impossibil-
ity of achieving happiness, the basic ‘discontent’ at the heart of the attempt to
find happiness. Yet despite these paradoxes, Aristotle’s virtues as a thinker are
great; his was a serious attempt to ground ethical life in a realistic understand-
ing of human psychology, and he affirmed that ethical life cannot be based on a
rule book.
Despite the kind of paradoxes revealed in Lear’s account, happiness would
appear to be a candidate for giving our lives some structure and justification, but
the problem is that people disagree about what counts as happiness. Just consider-
ing personal happiness, the well-being of the individual, immediately leads one to
think of the happiness of the other. After all, it is generally agreed that being on
one’s own – except for those few who strive for the solitary life – is not a happy
experience, as Freud pointed out in his list of the ways of avoiding suffering. The
solitary contemplative life of the philosopher does not seem all that convincing as
an ideal of a happy man. On the contrary, being happy has something to do with
being with others in a particular way. It is through certain kinds of relationship
that one can begin to be happy, or at least to register one is happy, and in particu-
lar through the transference relationship that one can try to work this issue out in
analysis. In this sense, analysis remains an essentially ethical activity, concerned
with the quality of relationships, their impact on the other.
If being happy involves a certain kind of connectedness, one is then immedi-
ately faced by the issue of having to take the other’s happiness into account when
considering one’s own happiness. If otherness comes in here, then so does con-
cern for the other, and hence one is already dealing with ethical and moral issues,
for example, how cruelty can undermine well-being.
This is also a field where one cannot avoid tackling difficult moral dilemmas.
For example, one could ask if a Nazi could be happy at home while being cruel at
work. As Robert Jay Lifton (1986) described in his masterly account of Nazi doc-
tors, these men showed that this was indeed possible. He illustrates how through
a process of ‘doubling’ the doctors were able to divide their selves into two func-
tioning wholes, which did not necessarily connect. The kind paterfamilias could
become the unfeeling sadist. This is different from splitting, where a part of the
self is unavailable. These men made a sort of Faustian bargain, receiving ben-
efits in exchange for their being caught up in the killing machine. Lifton shows
how doubling enables an ordinary or even generally decent person to become
actively involved in a murderous project. Thus, one can see that it is possible to
pursue personal happiness through evil means. But is this then a kind of negative
 Happiness and misery 133

happiness, one which we would not really recognize as essentially human or

humane? The latter, more positive kind of happiness must surely extend into the
content of the person’s thoughts and include their decent behaviour. Thus, already
one is involved with complex human dilemmas such as the relationship between
happiness and human good.
In general, the issue of happiness is of great concern to psychoanalysts, for
people come to us suffering from all kinds of human distress and misery, and
rightly expect us to help them with this distress. But as Lacan (1973) has pointed
out, the analytic situation with regard to the demand for happiness and the relief
of suffering is complex. The analyst offers a place of refuge, in which the patient
hopes to be freed not only from his ignorance but also from his suffering. In this
sense, happiness appears to be offered as a goal of our striving. But it would be
wrong to imagine that happiness as such is actually offered or guaranteed, or
that psychoanalysis can easily contribute directly to human happiness. Indeed,
as Lacan put it,

To make oneself the guarantor of the possibility that a subject will in some
way be able to find happiness even in analysis is a form of fraud.
(Lacan, 1973, p. 303)

That is, the demand for happiness is something to be analysed rather than
gratified. As Lacan pointed out, Oedipus was happy to be married to Jocasta, but
‘he doesn’t know that in achieving happiness, both conjugal happiness and that
of his job as king, of being the guide to the happiness of the state, he is sleeping
with his mother . . . In fact, he has been duped, tricked by reason of the fact that
he achieved happiness . . . [H]e enters the zone in which he pursues his desire’
(1973, p. 304).
Desires disrupt the possibility for achieving lasting happiness. Yet the term
happiness, as can be seen here, can be used to signify what can satisfy our deep-
est longings, even if, as with Lear’s account, it eludes us. In this sense, the word
‘happiness’ itself can represent the unattainable. Furthermore, the possibility of
masochism points to the fact that we can be happy being unhappy; we can desire
suffering. In psychoanalysis we can also see by means of the transference rela-
tionship how often the deprived patient bites the hand that feeds, or else how any
possibility of happiness can be undermined by powerful and destructive forces
within the soul, or how an unrealistic desire for happiness can cause misery – that
is, one may see how a search for happiness can cause suffering as much as suffer-
ing can be a constraint on happiness. I have argued that a capacity for experienc-
ing some kind of happiness, however briefly, depends upon a capacity to suffer,
to experience painful feelings. But there must be a point where that pain becomes
so overwhelming that one is pushed into the territory of sheer misery.
It is through articulating the complex place of desires in the human condition
that Lacan places the role of ethics in psychoanalysis, giving psychoanalysis its
basic ethical position. ‘Know your desire’ is the kind of ethical aim, if there is
134 Happiness and misery

one, in psychoanalysis rather than ‘make me happy’. Put another way, the demand
for happiness may arise from the superego, and so be full of guilt or else primitive
and remorseless demands for satisfaction. Lacan distinguishes this from the truly
ethical dimension of psychoanalysis, which can be captured in Freud’s phrase,
‘Wo es war, soll Ich werden’. In Strachey’s version, this is translated as, ‘Where
id was, there ego shall be’ (Freud, 1933, p. 80). Lacan emphasizes instead a more
subtle meaning in the phrase, one which means something like ‘So there where
“it” was, “I” shall become, or shall come into being’ (Lacan, 1973b, p. 44). That
is, if there is an authentic analytic imperative, it is to talk, to face one’s truth,
to become whatever one is. This is not to be confused with the morality of the
superego, with its restless and ruthless demands for happiness or misery. Perhaps
one could say that one of the main aims of psychoanalysis is to help the patient
disentangle the ethical imperative, or the ethics of truth, from moral or moralistic
demands.
I have argued that happiness is not merely a passing mood but involves some-
thing more lasting, or what the ancient Greeks in particular would see as referring
to something about the refined craftsmanship of living, and involving issues of
character and its link with virtue or excellence, and the quality of the soul. There
is a need to add the developmental perspective, the way that time influences the
way one deals with the issue of happiness. If there is an enduring state of hap-
piness, how is this to be sustained? Is there only what one could call ‘negative’
happiness, that is, freedom from misery, pain and suffering? Or is there some kind
of ‘positive’ happiness, a definite vision of what it is to be happy? If there is some
positive vision of happiness, how is it related to religious happiness and ecstasy,
what William James (1902, p. 48) defined as the most absolute and everlasting
form of happiness?
But let me give an example, just for argument’s sake, of what might well be
clearly a happy experience, at least if all goes well, and that is of course the
point – the joyful experience of the birth of a baby. Surely here we have a good
example of personal happiness, what one could truly call ‘deep’ happiness (see
Foot, 2001). Depth is a difficult concept to define in this context. The dictionary
definition includes intensity of a feeling, its moral quality or state, and something
about layers, going from a surface to a depth.
There is a complex mixture of anxiety, pleasure, risk, expectation and, finally,
bliss when the baby is successfully born, which is the ultimately integrative
moment, where the couple’s endeavours have a clear and favourable outcome, the
arrival of a new soul. In this sense the experience has many layers, and includes
very intense feelings. The experience has intense meaning for the parents, even if
it may well include all sorts of anxious and negative feelings. The risk of disas-
ter only adds to the quality of happiness if the birth is successful. The parents’
primary preoccupation with the child focuses their attention on the needs of the
baby, which may well have biological, or evolutionary, roots. There is probably
an evolutionary advantage in having happy parents who can focus on the care of
 Happiness and misery 135

the baby and are happy with the positive outcome. Perhaps this is a major source
of altruism, which would favour family, and indeed social, cohesion.
The depth of the happiness at a successful birth can, of course, be ruined by
the depth of grief over the loss of a child. It is difficult to define what we mean
by the depth of happy or miserable experiences, but maybe it has something to
do with the quality and meaning of the relationships surrounding the experiences,
experiences which often involve the most basic human situations, life, birth,
death, family and work. Depth here would seem to involve what one could call
caring and passionate attachments, attachments about people for whom we care,
whom we would deeply miss if they were not there, whom we value as separate
yet connected people, whom we see as ‘subjects’ with a life of their own. Sexual
fulfilment would also seem to have a place here, in so far as it is involved in a
passionate attachment. It is a commonplace that sexual fulfilment without such
an attachment leads to emptiness. Thus sexual enjoyment as such is not a lasting
cause of happiness, however pleasurable in the moment.
All these considerations make it clear, I think, that happiness is not merely an
inner state, but requires otherness for its achievement or expression. Such other-
ness involves having caring responses, which necessarily involve the risks of loss
and unhappiness, splendor and misery.
But one may ask if there is a place for aesthetic experience, such as enjoyment
of works of art or music, in achieving human happiness, when these experiences
often do not directly involve a personal relationship. It was the great pessimist
Schopenhauer who considered that we could find at least some temporary respite
from the remorseless world of pain and unhappiness through contemplating great
works of art. Before a great painting, or while listening to great music or while
being within a great building one could find release from the storms of passion
and the pressures of desire, or of the will. Freud also emphasized that we can-
not do without such experiences. Indeed, a life deprived of artistic and musical
experiences would be unhappy and unfulfilled. We need such experiences to feel
complete. They not only take us out of ourselves, they help us to connect up with
what is authentic. But they do this in a complex way, involving the joining up
of different or conflicting elements. One way to understand this is through the
representation of both positive and negative themes. James discusses this in the
context of his descriptions of the variety of religious experience. He shows how
an identification of religion with every form of happiness leaves out the essen-
tial peculiarities of religious happiness. In its most characteristic embodiments,
James maintains that religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. Genuine
religious experience confronts the negative, whether it is in death, the devil or
annihilation. He tries to illustrate this with an example from art:

In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot
on Satan’s neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s
figure being there. The richness of allegorical meaning also is due to his being
136 Happiness and misery

there – that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, as long as
we keep our foot upon his neck. In the religious consciousness, that is just
the position in which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found;
and for that reason the religious consciousness is so rich from an emotional
point of view.
(1902, pp. 49–50)

That is, one can see the importance of keeping our foot on the devil, not allow-
ing the negative to dominate, but accepting it has a place, indeed that it gives
depth to our responses, and that happiness without its negative would be superfi-
cial and indeed illusory.
This makes a deep happy experience not merely a recreation of some childhood
fantasy, as Freud originally proposed, such as the fantasy of a return to a situa-
tion of early maternal care, which has in it the notion of a perfect kind of unity of
mother and baby, a blissfulness oneness. In the adult such wished-for happiness
is more often than not associated with perverse gratification, enjoyment which
excludes otherness.
Finally, there is the issue of how creativity and happiness may be related. As
Winnicott (1971, pp. 65–85) emphasized, living creatively seems to be about
living a worthwhile life, feeling enriched and not doubting life’s possibilities.
Klein (1952) emphasized reparation and restitution following the recognition of
destructive impulses. It would certainly seem to be the case that there is often a
fine line between creativity and destructiveness in producing works of art or sci-
ence. In this sense, it is probably accurate to say that such creative achievements
involve mixtures of happiness and misery; there may be joy in having a finished
product, but considerable pain along the way that has to be surmounted.

***
In conclusion, one can now say that it would seem clear that happiness is not
merely a mood, though a cheerful mood may be a component of a happy disposi-
tion. It is easier to define happiness ‘negatively’ as freedom from excessive suf-
fering than it is to get hold of a ‘positive’ view of happiness. Happiness is an
elusive concept; it can become an ideal for which we strive, and that very striving
may cause us untold disappointment and loss. Such striving may even be hard-
wired into our brains. But if one were pushed to put forward a positive view, it
would include techniques of living, or ways of life, that include lasting and pas-
sionate attachments, interspersed with various kinds of relatively brief but satisfy-
ing aesthetic experiences. The intensity of such experiences can make up for their
brevity. Deep happiness also includes the risk of suffering. Too much suffering
can lead to prolonged misery, but a certain amount of suffering can give ‘shape’
to happiness. Psychoanalytic treatment cannot promise happiness, but may enable
the patient to be relieved of excessive misery. The excessive demands of the
superego will need to be tackled, but what the patient then does with a freer psy-
chic life is up them.
 Happiness and misery 137

Happiness, then, consists of something more than just pleasurable experiences;

as can be seen at crucial life events such as at the birth of a baby, it includes
authentic attachments, the shape of a whole life, and is a kind of mixed state,
which includes a certain amount of suffering. The expression of happiness may
vary at different stages of the life cycle.
One could also say that happiness involves some lasting capacity to experi-
ence happy states, even if they may come and go; these states can emerge when
past and present converge, and involve moments of integration of the soul, when
the soul feels more at home, when psychic pain is more able to be tolerated. In
addition, being happy is not just feeling good but involves caring responses in
relation to others.
While an inquiry such as this may not be exhausting, and may fail to com-
pletely capture the nature of happiness, there is some consolation in the fact
that, though, as Freud put it (1930, p. 76), it may not have been the intention of
creation to make us happy; we are generally not always unhappy, and are even, at
certain key moments in our life, particularly happy.
Chapter 8

Summary

I have proposed that when we talk about a person’s soul, we are touching on
something elemental, their essence, something irreducible, what makes them
human, their sense of being a subject of experience, their unique voice, what goes
deep within the person, much, of course, unconsciously. I have argued that to do
without the notion of a soul, even if at the very least it is kept as a metaphorical
expression for being alive, would be to lose too much that is precious about being
human. Without something like souls, what are we? According to Wittgenstein,
we could be automata; but he wonders, how do we then feel pain? (Wittgenstein,
1992) For those of us who deal with the extremes of human mental suffering, it
is difficult to understand how people split off areas of their experience, can main-
tain often very strange states of mind or can behave in what appears to be com-
pletely against their best interests, unless one looks for explanations beyond
physical events in the brain.
I have also explored how having a home implies both having a physical entity,
the physical structure of the dwelling, the house, but also something that goes
beyond the building blocks into the area of the interior of the soul. Having an idea
of a psychic home, or ‘soul home’, is just as vital for a person as having a physical
shelter; it is one of the most basic human needs. We need to feel at home in the
world: it makes us feel secure, it provides the base from which we can explore.
The loss of a sense of home is deeply traumatic, as is, of course, the loss of a
house. Yet we need to leave home in order to find ourselves, in order to mature
and have a firm sense of identity.
This sense of home as the ground of our being, the place we need in order
to feel secure, is fundamental. Yet we often feel to a greater or lesser extent
incomplete, divided and lacking a sense of the whole. There is a yearning for
wholeness, for a home where we can feel truly ourselves, but this can also cause
us considerable unhappiness, as I explored in the last chapter. Some carry a firm
sense of home within, others need something external, yet others need a being
that transcends daily life such as a God in order to feel complete. Whatever the
nature of the home we seek, the fear of homelessness is never far from that of the
sense of being at home.
 Summary 139

I discussed how the word ‘home’ is a world for the poet Burnside and is both
suffused by the commonplace, the world of everyday, yet also determined by the
‘spirit’, which the participants bring together to make a home. It provides a place
in which to dwell and yet is fraught with hazards. Burnside points out that unless
one takes account of the hazards, one may lose oneself or be wrecked; home,
then, can become a catalogue of wrecks. Hence the need to retain a certain flex-
ibility; home may provide a settlement for the spirit, or the soul, but also be too
comfortable, too settled or cause you to risk losing what you are searching for.
In Chapter Three, I discussed, with illustrations, one of the most persistent
themes in William Wordsworth’s poetry, particularly in his early work and dur-
ing the years he wrote his greatest poetry (between about 1795 and 1805) – that
of home. He writes of yearnings for home, loss of home, intense homecomings,
homes that are ruined and may become a shelter for the homeless, characters who
have lost homes or who are homeless. Coincidentally, his life began to change
significantly when, in 1794, he and his sister, Dorothy, set up home together for
a few weeks, sealing their coming together after years apart, with her having led
a life of drudgery in other peoples’ homes, and he having led an itinerant life in
England and France. It was not long before they were living in a permanent home,
eventually settling back into the Lake District, their childhood home, where
Wordsworth wrote his most intense poetry, including Tintern Abbey and the early
versions of The Prelude.
I used Wordsworth’s finding of a secure home after his years of wandering to
illustrate the concept of a psychic home.
I have proposed that the notion of a psychic home consists of a number of
different and interacting elements, including the physical interior of a home but
internalized as a psychic interior. The notion of ‘personal identity’ refers to the
development and then maintenance of a person’s character, how they put together
in some way their various multiple identifications, as well as including wider
issues concerning a person’s cultural and social influences. I suggest that the
basic elements of the psychic home can be seen to provide a way of organizing
the person’s identity, or can be seen as intrinsic to any notion of identity, a theme
developed in more detail in Chapter Four on identity.
Identity is a term used in many different ways and by a variety of disciplines.
It has become a central issue of concern in contemporary debates about politics,
ethics and culture. Issues of identity also touch upon the soul territory, that of
each person’s unique sense of who they are. Appiah even goes as far as to call
‘soul making’ the ‘project of intervening in the process of interpretation through
which each citizen develops an identity’ (2005, p. 164).
Identity is a vitally important but complex and at times elusive or indeterminate
concept. There are various fixed or constant elements in the development of our
identity, which can become the source of integration and of a sense of perma-
nence, of achievement and coherence, whether that be as a person and/or as a
psychoanalyst; and there are still issues about the nature of identity that challenge
140 Summary

our thinking, such as its link with the processes of identification, the question of
whether or not unity is an illusion or a real possibility. De M’Uzan has suggested
that one can talk of a ‘spectrum of identity’ (2005, p. 18), that the sense of I-ness
is neither in the ego nor the other, but distributed along both, which matches my
own picture of the human subject as being organized between the individual and
the network of others.
I have proposed that one of the constant elements is that of the psychic home
and that this provides a basis for a sense of identity, for crucial questions such as
‘Who am I?’ ‘Who do I look and act like?’ ‘Which religion and nationality am I?’
They indicate a search for a place in life, an identity which provides a relatively
stable sense of home, and that provides the core of the elusive and precarious
notion of identity, whatever its complex vicissitudes, however much the human
subject is distributed between other subjects.
I have discussed that there are different ways that identifications may come
together, or fail to come together, and that will make for different character
structures, and different issues for the human subject’s own sense of identity,
including their sexual identity. That is, there are all kinds of ways that identifica-
tions can sit around in the soul, lodge there, feel alien or feel more settled and at
home; various ways that the identifications can be bound together in some kind of
containing membrane; various ways that the identifications, within and between
subjects, interact. For this reason, identity can be fluid, stable or unstable, open
to change or resistant to change, depending upon the way that the identifications
are organized.
I concluded that what has came out of considering the various psychoanalytic
and other contributions to identity is how identity as an issue is complex and
potentially precarious, involving steering a path between different polarities,
different sources of identification, but that in addition, charting a course along
this difficult path requires holding a creative tension between possible positions,
not holding fast to just one single way. However, feeling at home with a flexible
notion of identity does not appeal to everyone. People vary as to how much the
psychic home remains for them the only true home, and how much they need to
pull away from it.
What contemporary accounts of identity in other disciplines repeatedly focus
on is the notion of identity as plural, multiple, merging one with another, rather
than, as it were, facing each other from separate corners. In addition, though
identity involves individuals, their identity is formed under multiple influences.
Identities involve having a position within our society and in relation to a his-
tory, a lineage. Certain markers of identity may be visible or can appear through
inquiry – whether that is from a country of origin, race, religion or ideological
standpoint.
One can see an identity as involving the taking up of a particular position,
depending upon different social roles or different histories. But taking up a posi-
tion requires a starting point, or a frame of reference or at least some scaffolding.
This is where I have suggested that the notion of a psychic home comes in, as
 Summary 141

the starting point for the complex and indeed lifelong task of forming an identity,
whether as a psychoanalyst or outside one’s professional life.
In reconsidering the soul concept in Chapter Five, I suggested that the
word ‘soul’ seems to be both abstract and yet also powerfully emotive. It can
be approached from a number of different angles, from philosophy, religion,
sociology, literature and neuroscience. No one discipline has the monopoly on
understanding the soul concept, hence the need for a multidisciplinary approach
to the soul territory. This applies to psychoanalysis as much as other disciplines.
In trying to describe and define such an elusive and complex issue as the human
soul, too much focus on metapsychology can divert us from reaching the heart
of the issue.
While not undertaking an encyclopaedic history of the soul concept, I did
emphasize three crucial ‘moments’ in the history of the soul: (1) Plato’s founda-
tional picture of the soul in his metaphor of the cave, in addition to his tripartite
division of the soul linking up the soul with both the pursuit of knowledge and
an ethical pursuit of the good; (2) the place of the soul in Hellenistic and then
Christian thought and its linking with spiritual transformation, or transformation
of the soul; and (3) the gradual disconnection of the soul from spiritual transfor-
mation with the scientific revolution, the development of a mercantile culture
and the thought of Descartes. The latter, what Foucault called for convenience
the ‘Cartesian moment’ (2001, p. 68) has had profound effects on how we picture
the soul. Until that point, philosophy and spiritual transformation, knowledge and
human value, tended to be linked. From then on, there develops a radical split
between knowledge and spiritual transformation, between the world of the spirit
and the material world, a split which I have suggested needs some sort of atten-
tion in our overly materialist society.
I discussed how, taking our cue from Plato, one can say that the soul is the
image of convergence; it is what coheres, it is our name for what makes for the
sense of inner unity, the ‘form’ of convergence, to borrow from Aristotle, even
though we do not understand how this occurs, even though we still do not under-
stand the link between the inner unity and the brain processes occurring simul-
taneously or in parallel. We are aware of this sense of unity from time to time,
particularly when we feel at home in our body and our selves, when the sense of
who we are ‘takes residence’ and gives us a firmer sense of identity; for this rea-
son, one might talk of a human being providing a home for the soul. But the sense
of unity is an elusive experience, difficult to tie down, capable of fleeing from us.
It is in part linked to the unified stream of consciousness, but at least since Freud
we know that consciousness is only a fraction of the soul’s activity and indeed of
the brain’s activities. Traditionally, one could sense this inner unity when look-
ing into a man’s eyes, the eyes being the ‘mirror’ of the soul. I suggested in the
opening chapter that, from the experience of death, what is essentially human, the
link with others, as revealed by the nature of the fading gaze, dies with the body.
I suggested there that from a psychological point of view, we call that which links
with others the human soul. The live gaze, that which reflects back to the other,
142 Summary

reveals the essence of a man, their character, their depth, their value, the ‘weight’
of their soul, to use a rather medieval image.
In considering the so-called hard problem about how one leaps from nerve
impulses to human emotions, I argued that there are various ways of dealing
with this dilemma. One may come down on one side of the divide, the mental
or the physical, proposing either an idealist or a materialist solution; or accept
a dualist position, where both the mental and physical are relevant in different
ways; or propose a solution where some merger of the mental and physical is
posited, some synthesis of both; or propose a solution that we are made of one
kind of material, but that we perceive this in two different ways, appearing mate-
rial from the outside but mental from the inside; or propose a solution common
to religious thought where there exists another entity, such as the immortal soul,
which is independent of physical properties; or advance yet another way of think-
ing which does not close off any solution, but which holds the tension between
different proposals without making a final decision. I personally favour the lat-
ter approach in a field where there is so much that is still puzzling. If we still
cannot even bridge the gap between the nerve impulse and the feeling, how on
earth can we be too dogmatic about the nature of mental events? And, in the end,
all these considerations only give us a partial view of the human world, which
has more to do with the meaning and value of human stories. In the meantime,
we need to turn to a variety of disciplines if we are to find some clarity in this
complex field.
I discussed how one can see why understanding complexity, emergence and
networks may well add to our understanding of brain processes, possibly even
psychological self-organization. We do not know how the brain is organized
to function as a whole, though we know it appears to do this quite well, in fact
remarkably well, mostly at an unconscious level. The many individual elements
just do work, both together and in parallel, making sensation, movement and so
on run smoothly. One could see that consciousness might just be the emergent
property of networks of neurones firing, until a tipping point is reached and a
person has a conscious experience. It sounds like an interesting idea, though as
yet there is no evidence that consciousness works like this. Indeed, it is still pos-
sible that the firing of neurones and having a conscious experience are different
and incommensurable phenomena.
In Plato’s metaphor of the cave, the prisoners remain shackled and cut off from
the light, but they are at least huddled together so as to mitigate their loneliness.
Once one of them is freed from their shackles and reaches the bright light of true
being, they are transformed into a new state, no longer cut off from the light, and
in touch with a higher region; their souls have reached a higher stage of develop-
ment, reminiscent of the religious grades of the soul’s upward ascent. I suggested
that this latter state is less like loneliness and more like solitude; the move from
one state to the other was a main theme of Chapter Six.
There is a difference between loneliness and solitude, though with some
overlap. Loneliness is about being cut off from others, even in their presence. In
 Summary 143

solitude, one often requires being alone, yet I am by myself with myself in some
kind of internal dialogue, very much part of the soul territory. Since loneliness
and solitude are so much a part of the psychoanalyst’s work, I used the psycho-
analytic experience to explore the loneliness–solitude dimension. In addition, I
used Freud’s fort/da observation to explore different aspects of the way that the
child deals with maternal absence.
I suggested that there is always a tension, or strain, between the mother as
mere physical object and the mother as an elusive human presence, capable of
appearing and disappearing when she wants to, or needs to, whether it is to go to
the father or elsewhere, the mother who stirs up the child’s yearnings and desires.
In the fort/da one can see the working out of the difference between mother as
material object and the mother as elusive human presence; out of this difference
one can see human subjectivity, with all its dilemmas and possibilities, beginning
to emerge. The task of the developing child, as well as that of the analytic patient,
is, in a sense, to come to the realization that the mother is not a mere physical
object, or at least not an object under the child’s omnipotent control, but a subject
with a mysterious life of her own, relating to other subjects, the father and others.
The dawning of this realization is never easy; there is always a certain amount of
strain involved in the process of coming to terms with the mother’s elusiveness,
more so when the mother’s absence is prolonged, or her return highly problem-
atic. Prolonged absences may result in a deep sense of loneliness. The symbol-
ization of absence makes solitude bearable; merely feeling absence, without the
capacity to symbolize it, plunges the subject into loneliness.
Storr (1988, p. 174), in his book on solitude, also discusses late Beethoven as
an exemplar of the late or third period in an artist’s development. The last quar-
tets, for example, are less concerned with communication, are unconventional
in form, display an absence of rhetoric and explore remote areas of experience.
Such work is expressive of deep inward experience, very much the theme of last
works.
One may suppose that as a result of the artist achieving a point in their life
where their identity is firm enough to be able to face their own dissolution, these
last works convey in their form and expression what is unattainable; that human
happiness, while achievable in brief moments, cannot last, though the yearn-
ing for it may persist. Faced by approaching death, the artist, or indeed analyst,
becomes ever aware that happiness and integration are transient, loneliness in
some form inevitable.
This then led onto considering more specifically the complex issue of human
happiness in Chapter Seven. Happiness is an elusive concept. It may be easier to
define ‘negative’ happiness as an absence of suffering. It can become an ideal for
which we strive, and that very striving may cause us untold disappointment and
loss. Such striving may even hardwired into our brains. But if one were pushed
to put forward a positive view, it would include techniques of living, or ways of
life, that include lasting and passionate attachments, interspersed with various
kinds of relatively brief but satisfying aesthetic experiences. The intensity of
144 Summary

such experiences can make up for their brevity. Deep happiness also includes the
risk of suffering. Too much suffering can lead to prolonged misery, but a certain
amount of suffering can give ‘shape’ to happiness, and seems to reach into the
depths of the human soul. Psychoanalytic treatment cannot promise happiness,
but may enable the patient to be relieved of excessive misery. The excessive
demands of the superego will need to be tackled, but what the patient then does
with a freer psychic life is up to them.
I have described at various points in the text the experience of contemplating
a Rembrandt self-portrait in order to grasp the essence of the human soul trying
to communicate to another soul. I have described how Rembrandt’s eyes seem to
take you into the picture, into the depths. Unlike a mirror, which reflects your own
image back to you, the Rembrandt urges you to reflect into yourself in the act of
being drawn into his image. Repeated visits are like drawing from some primal
source of light and intensity, leaving you changed in some way, both uplifted and
more melancholy. Repeated visits do not exhaust the depths of the experience; in
this sense, the portrait is always ‘more’ than it appears. Perhaps here one is touch-
ing what religious thought would see as the sacred element of the soul.
It was certainly easier to talk of the soul when religious belief was virtually
taken for granted. The context for talking about the soul has, of course, signifi-
cantly changed, though some of the language may still be shared with religious
thought.
Perhaps music is a more appropriate medium to capture what I have been trying
to convey, though of course I am limited here to words. It is generally accepted
that music does touch the inner depths, though there is no agreement about how
this occurs and what precisely is touched. Malcolm Budd takes to pieces a num-
ber of musical theories, which purport to show how music communicates emo-
tions, though he does agree in the end that music ‘reaches as far as the inner world
of emotion itself’ (1985, p. 176). He also quotes Elgar’s dedication on the score
of his violin concerto, ‘Herein is enshrined the soul of …’ This secret dedication
was likely to be to the ‘soul-mate’ of his later years, Alice Stuart-Wortley. If the
soul can be given a voice, then surely this violin concerto would be a candidate.
As would the plainsong chant of Hildegard of Bingen – ‘Columba aspexit’. The
chant creates a sense of sublime serenity and spirituality.
Roger Scruton points out himself that he uses the word ‘soul’ on several occa-
sions to try to capture the essence of Mozart’s music. Mozart’s is not a simple
soul; his music ‘explores every mood, every character, every turn of the human
spirit’ (2009, p. 88).
It would be both simplistic and untrue to propose that music always evokes
particular feelings. A sad-sounding piece of music may in fact produce a feeling
of great satisfaction. Very occasionally a piece of music dominated by one sort of
feeling may evoke a similar feeling in the listener. Perhaps the last movement of
Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony is just one of those pieces.
But the response in the listener to music is a complex affair, involving cogni-
tive and emotional aspects. The music will tend to evoke some feelings in the
 Summary 145

listener, usually of a general kind, often pleasurable, sometimes linked to memo-

ries, or even past memories of previous performances of the piece. There may be
recognition of a pattern conveyed by the music, or surprise at a new pattern that
emerges from the music, or there may be a sense of a journey, with the music tak-
ing the listener along. That journey may be a long one, as with Wagner, and may
involve a trip through the darker recesses of the soul or otherworldliness, as with
Mahler, but can be uplifting of the human spirit, food for the soul.
As Martha Nussbaum (2001, p. 266) has pointed out in her discussion of music
and emotion, Proust connects the sense of otherworldliness with music. Perhaps
he alone of writers is capable of grasping the essence of music in words. As he
put it in his novel, during the break in a concert, when people were talking, in a
passage which provides a suitable place to end my own explorations of the soul
territory,

But what was I to make of their words, which like all spoken human words
seemed so meaningless in comparison with the heavenly musical phrase
that has just been occupying me? I was really like an angel fallen from the
delights of Paradise into the most insignificant reality. And just as certain
creatures are the last examples of a form of life which nature has abandoned, I
wondered whether music were not the sole example of the form which might
have served – had language, the forms of words, the possibility of analysing
ideas, never been invented – for the communication of souls.
(Proust, 1923, p. 237)
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Index

Acropolis 123–4, 127 body 4, 6, 7, 11, 17, 28, 29, 39, 43, 48, 52,
adolescence 27, 52, 53, 54 53, 54, 55, 59, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72,
adoption 1, 27, 52 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 87, 98, 121, 125,
Akhtar, S. 27 128, 141; and soul 70, 72, 78
anger 31, 32, 37, 66, 70, 124, 125, 128 Bohnhoeffer, D. 114
Appiah, K. 45, 50, 139 Bowlby, J. 14
Arendt, H. 18 brain 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 48, 49, 56, 69, 70,
Aristotle 70, 127, 131, 132, 141; and soul 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 119, 138,
70, 127, 141 141, 142
artist 2, 3, 4, 7, 84, 114, 115, 143 Breen, D. 56
attachment 14, 41, 42, 44, 52, 63, 69, 79, Brentano, F. 5
95, 109, 110, 128, 135 Britton, R. 77
Augustine, St. 71, 72, 73, 87; and soul 71, Budd, M. 144
72, 73 Burnside, J. 16–17, 139
Aurelius, M. 71 Butler, J. 45, 55
Austen, J. 61, 62
Camus, A. 61
baby 30, 54, 55, 78, 79, 105, 106, 107, care of the self 67, 71
112, 125, 129, 134, 135, 136, 137 Cartesian moment 67, 141
Bachelard, G. 14 Cassel Hospital 32–3
Bacon, F. 47–8 Cassirer, E. 5, 81
Baker, M. 67 Charcot, J. 23
Barrett, W. 5, 18, 78 Christian thought 67, 68, 71, 88, 118, 141
Baudelaire, C. 23, 25 civilization 116, 117, 119–22, 132
Baumann, Z. 4, 51, 52 cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) 116
Beethoven, L. 113, 143 Coleridge, S. T. 38
being 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 15, 134 communication 4, 9, 51, 60, 61, 78, 92,
Bellow, S. 4 98, 100, 113, 143, 145
Benjamin, J. 82, 83, 85 Community Housing and Therapy (CHT)
Bentham, J. 118 15
Benvenuto, B. 26, 83, 87, 112 complex systems 80, 81
Berkeley, G. 10–11 Conrad, J. 61
Berlin, I. 117–18 consciousness 3, 5, 9, 10, 20, 24, 48, 49,
Bethge, E. 114 50, 66, 70, 74, 75, 76, 80, 83, 136, 141,
Bettleheim, B. 5 142
binding problem 74 consulting room 14, 21, 24, 25, 27, 29, 91,
Bion, W. 108 92, 93, 99
156 Index

Corbin, A. 22, 23 father 52, 56, 57, 58, 98, 99, 103, 111,
countertransference 60, 92, 94, 97, 99, 124, 125, 129, 143
102 feminism 55
creativity 34, 94, 97, 98, 114, 136 Fonagy, P. 83
Crick, F. 66 Foot, P. 135
culture 61, 62, 67, 114, 122, 139, 141 fort/da 103–8, 112, 143
Foucault, M. 67, 68, 71, 85, 141
Damasio, A. 9, 10, 79 freedom 19, 50, 60, 69, 86, 108, 115, 122,
Darwin, C. 123 131, 134, 136
Davidson, D. 10, 75 French revolution 19, 21, 22, 34, 39
death 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, Freud, L. 84
40, 66, 71, 81, 95, 104, 105, 108, 113, Freud, S. 3, 5, 14, 18, 19, 23, 24, 52, 56,
123, 125, 129, 135, 141, 143 57, 58, 59, 71, 76, 77, 82, 96, 104, 116,
Defoe, D. 73 117–24, 127, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137,
Dennett, D. 8, 30 141; and happiness 117–24, 127,
depression 101, 103, 104, 108, 109, 115, 132–7; and soul 78, 81
123, 124, 129, 131 Fromm, E. 128
Descartes, R. 67, 72, 73, 82, 83, 141; and Fromm-Reichmann, F. 113
soul 67, 72–3, 141 frontal cortex 7, 49, 79
Deutsch, H. 127 Fuss, D. 14, 24, 25
development 3, 11, 14, 19, 20, 24, 27, 28,
30, 35, 40, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, Gale, J. 15
58, 59, 67, 71, 78, 83, 87, 89, 90, 91, Gay, P. du 45
94, 95, 96, 97, 102, 103, 112, 114, 122, gaze 6, 7, 44, 71, 141
139, 141, 142, 143, 149, 150 gender 45, 48, 55
dialogue 67, 68, 70, 85, 89, 100, 143 Gill, S. 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42,
Dickens, C. 32, 61 44
Dickenson, E. 65 God 15, 17, 71, 72, 81, 86, 87, 98, 126,
dreams 3, 4, 23, 24, 58, 82, 84, 88, 104, 138
124, 125, 126, 130, 131 Goetz, S. 67
drives 18, 59, 104, 105, 120, 122, 128 Graham, J. 65
Durkheim, E. 7 Greenacre, P. 53

ego 46, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 70, 83, 88, 105, Hacker, I. 8
112, 120, 127, 128, 129, 134, 140, 148 Hall, C. 21, 22
Elgar, E. 144 Hall, S. 45, 62, 63
Ellis, D. 37 Hampshire, S. 118
Eliot, T. S. 14 happiness 6, 11, 17, 71, 72, 92, 115–44
emergence 80, 128, 142 hard problem 74, 79, 142
emotions 4, 6, 7, 30, 32, 39, 66, 79, 81, Hartmann, H. 131
92, 94, 102, 126, 128, 130, 142, 144 hearth 13, 26
Engelman, E. 24–5 Heidegger, M. 15, 16, 18, 19
Epictetus 68 Heraclitus 66
Erikson, E. 45, 46, 52, 53 Hildegard of Bingen 144
ethics 45, 131, 132, 133, 134 Hinshelwood, R. 57
evolution 123 History 5, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 47, 52,
exile 13, 47, 49, 113 62, 66, 67, 74, 77, 81, 99, 120, 121,
existentialism 18 129, 140, 141
Hollander, M. 21
family 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, home 1, 2, 8, 10, 12–33, 34–44, 45, 46–8,
42, 51, 95, 99, 129, 130, 131, 135 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62,
fantasy 62, 78, 102, 104, 108, 109, 125, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78, 86, 87, 89,
127, 136 92, 93, 101, 109, 111, 113, 114, 129,
 Index 157

131, 132, 137, 138, 139, 140; and body Judaism 52, 87
(soma) 28, 54, 78, 141; and culture 62; Judt, T. 46
and soul 65, 70, 131, 137, 138; and W.
Wordsworth 34–44; domestic 19–25; Kant, I. 17, 74
home 60–1; home, professional 60–1; Keats, J. 118
home base 14, 25, 138; homecoming Kierkegaard, S. 18, 96
12, 13, 15, 34, 43, 47, 139; home for the Kipling, R. 61, 114
soul 2, 11, 40, 65, 70, 71, 86, 89, 141; Klauber, J. 59–60
home key 57, 113; homelessness 12–15, Klein, M. 113, 131, 136
18, 19, 34, 40, 47, 138, 139; psychic
home 2, 11, 13, 15, 24, 25–33, 34–44, Lacan, J. 26, 55, 56, 79, 83, 88, 112, 126,
45, 46–8, 49, 50, 55, 57, 61, 64, 89, 133, 134
138, 139, 140 language 3, 15, 26, 48, 55, 66, 68, 72, 77,
Homer 13, 47, 66 81, 83, 87, 88, 91, 103, 105, 112, 144, 145
house 11, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 26, Lear, J. 131
27, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 65, Levi-Strauss, C. 26
66, 71, 138 Leyard, R. 115, 116, 117
Hume, D. 73, 74, 75 Lichtenstein, H. 54
Humphrey, N. vii, 3, 10, 79 Lifton, B. 27
Hunt, L. 22 Lifton, R. J. 132
Husserl, E. 82 liquid modernity 4
hysteria 23, 118 Locke, J. 48
Loewald, H. 59
Ibsen, H. 125 loneliness 3, 11, 23, 25, 89–135
id 57, 58, 70, 134 love 2, 6, 10, 14, 25, 42, 43, 44, 57, 58,
identification 37, 46, 52, 56, 57, 58, 64, 86, 93, 101, 114, 115, 117, 119, 121,
99, 128, 135, 141 122, 124
identity 7, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 22, 25–8, 35, Luria, A. 69
41, 45–64, 73, 90–9, 100, 113, 138,
139, 140, 141, 143; analytic identity Maalouf, A. 63
90–9, 141 McGilchrist, I. 7
imagination 8, 18, 22, 23, 34, 71, 114, McMahon, D. 123, 126
121 Mahler, G. 145
immortal soul 8, 11, 77, 142 Malafouris, L. 84
imperialism 61, 62 Malcolm, N. 8, 146
infant 54, 78, 102, 107, 112, 128 Mallett, S. 17
integration 45, 49, 53, 54, 56, 79, 91, 113, Maritain, J. 86
129, 131, 137, 139, 143 Mare, H. de 21
interiority 3, 7, 14, 23, 79 materialism 4, 73
interpretation 45, 58, 75, 82, 132, 139 May, S. 14
intersubjectivity 7, 25, 26, 79, 83, 84, 93 mental events 10, 74, 76, 77, 142
inwardness 2, 3, 50, 72, 96 Mill, J. S. 50
Islam 87 mind 10, 14, 16, 17, 18, 27, 29, 35, 41, 49,
isolation 4, 67, 84, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 54, 57, 65, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78,
96, 101, 106, 114, 120 79, 83, 84, 92, 93, 106, 113, 148, 149
mirror 3, 50, 55, 71, 78, 79, 87, 112, 141,
Jackson, H. 76 144
Jacobson, E. 53–4, 128 misery 6, 11, 115–36
James, H. 77 Mitchell, J. 56
James, W. 7–8, 134 mobile phone 4, 51, 113
Jones, E. 76 moods 78, 127, 128, 129
Joseph, E. 59–60 mother-child relationship 53, 54, 55, 56,
Joyce, J. 50 58, 59, 79, 91, 92, 100–12, 143
158 Index

music 4, 52, 57, 135, 144–5; music and Rolland, R. 123

soul 144–5 Rorty, R. 73
M’Uzan, M. de 19, 46, 140 Rosen, C. 113
Rybczynski, W. 20–1
Nagel, T. 49, 74, 75 Ryle, G. 8, 10
narrative 10, 26, 27, 55, 57, 62, 67, 82
National Gallery 2, 75, 87 Said, E. 45, 61, 62, 113
Neimann, S. 17–18 Saki 114
neuronal networks 80, 142 Schopenhauer, A. 117, 126–7
neuroscience 2, 8, 9, 66, 74, 75, 79, 81, Schore, A. 79
141; and soul 74–81 science 3, 5, 9, 72, 74, 136
neurosis 22, 104, 120, 122 Scruton, R. 144
Niebuhr, R. 18 Searle, J. 75
Nietzsche, F. 18, 117 self 10, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 27, 51, 52,
Nussbaum, N. 68, 116, 126, 145 53, 54, 55, 66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79,
80, 81, 84, 98, 106, 128
object relationships 121, 122, 126 Sen, A. 45, 48, 63
Odyssey 13, 47 Seneca 68
Oedipus complex 57, 58, 59 sexuality 22, 23, 45, 47, 59, 118, 121, 122
Shakespeare, W. 15, 16, 49, 77
Padel, R. 66 Shelley, P. 117
Page, J. 34, 35 Sherrington, C. 10
Papadopoulos, R. 12 Silberman, H. 128–9
Parat, J. 127–8 Sinatra, F. 50
Parsons, M. vii, 60–1, 96, 109 Socrates 11, 68, 69
Perelberg, R. 56, 57 solitude 11, 23, 44, 89–135
Perrot, M. 21, 22 soma 28, 54, 78
personalization 54 soul 1–12, 14, 16–19, 23, 24, 26, 40, 42,
Pigeaud, J. 6 43, 44, 45, 56, 63–74, 81, 83–8, 89, 97,
Plato 11, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 89, 141; 98, 113, 114, 115, 117, 127, 129, 130,
and soul 11, 67, 68–70, 89 131, 133, 134, 137–45; and home 65,
Plotinus 71 70, 131, 137, 138; and religion 71, 72,
Plutarch 68 73, 77, 81, 86, 141, 142, 144
private life 21–5 spectrum of identity 46, 57, 108, 140
Proust, M. 77, 141 Spinoza, B. 74
psyche 5, 18, 24, 28, 54, 56, 59, 66, 68, split brain 48
69, 78, 109 spirit 2, 5, 16, 17, 18, 44, 66, 67, 68, 70,
psychic home 2, 11, 13, 15, 24, 25–33, 81, 86, 126, 139, 141, 144, 145
34–44, 45, 46–8, 49, 50, 55, 57, 61, 64, spirituality 68, 86, 144
89, 138, 139, 140; and identity 46–8, Steedman, C. 24
51, 139, 140 Steiner, G. 15, 87
psychic retreat 27–8 Steiner, J. 27
psychoanalysis and soul 83–8 Storr, A. 113, 114
psychoanalytic setting 28, 29, 84, 90, 95, Strachey, J. 134
97, 102, 114 Strawson, P. 77
psychoanalytic treatment 28–32, 84, 123, subject (human) 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14,
136, 144 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53,
55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83,
Ramachandran, V. 74 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97,
Rembrandt, H. 2, 3, 7, 9, 21, 75, 81, 84, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 112, 116, 118,
87, 144 126, 127, 129, 133, 135, 138, 140, 143
Rice, C. 23, 24 subjective organization 56–7
Ricoeur, P. 49 subjective position 85
 Index 159

subjectivication 85, 86 Wagner, R. 145

subjectivity 3, 5, 11, 14, 23, 24, 25, 50, 56, Wainrib, S. 85, 86
71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 97, 102, Ward, K. 3, 86
104, 113, 143 Weil, S. 115
superego 53, 70, 122, 123, 125, 134, 136, Widlocher, D. 59–60
144 Wiiliams, B. 115, 127
Sylvester, D. 47–48 Williams, R. 86, 87
symbolic order 26, 55, 103, 112 Wilson, A. 26
symbols 2, 6, 26, 55, 103, 110, 112 Winnicott, D. 14, 28, 54, 55, 56, 78,
91, 92, 95, 98, 101, 102, 105,
Talafiore, C. 67 106, 107, 109, 112, 128, 131,
Target, M. 83 136
Taylor, C. 50, 72 Wittgenstein, L. 8, 9, 138
Tchaikovsky, P. 144 Wodehouse, P. G. 114
Tolstoy, L. 77 Wolf, E. 128
transference 31, 60, 78, 94, 99, 100, 101, Wollheim, R. 57
102, 103, 108, 109, 111, 121, 123, 131, Woodward, K. 45, 51
132, 133 Woolf, V. 50–1
transformation 39, 67, 68, 69, 71, 87, 89, Wordsworth, D. 22, 23, 33–41, 130,
96, 141 139
trauma 13, 36, 47, 48, 62, 95, 104, 105, Wordsworth, J. 35, 36, 37, 41
110, 126, 128 Wordsworth, W. 11, 22, 34–44, 130, 139;
Home at Grasmere 35, 40, 41; Prelude
uncanny 18, 19, 25 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 139;
unconscious 3, 8, 24, 26, 52, 55, 56, 60, Rydal Mount 41–3; Salisbury Plain 38;
61, 69, 71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 94, The Borderers 39; Tintern Abbey 34, 43,
97, 98, 99, 101, 112, 142 139; Vale of Esthwaite 36
unity 5, 7, 46, 49, 50, 55, 56, 59, 69, 70, Wu, D. 36, 40
71, 73, 74, 79, 82, 112, 119, 141
Yeats, W. B. 61
Vendler, H. 65–6 Young, J. Z. 75
Vickers, N. vii
Vidler, A. 19 Zeki, S. 49, 75, 119