Arnaldo Chuster*, Aldo Luiz Duarte**, Anete Blaya Luz**, Beatriz Saldini Behs***, Carmen Keidann**, Gustavo Soares**, Jussara Dal Zot**, Regina Klarmann**
Who will believe my verse in time to come.
If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?
William Shakespeare, Sonnets XVII
What is intimacy? An apparently simple question that everybody seems able to answer. After all, intimacy is present in all human activity. In everything that is said, in everything that is done, things are always felt to come from some intimacy, including the superficial, and it certainly is related to all and any human development, as much in the creative sense as in the destructive. One can certainly say that since the beginning of any human life intimacy and development are linked. We were at the breast, being fed and comforted, thus guaranteeing our survival, but we also suffered failure there. We entered a family, we grew up among people who were very close to each other, but there we also suffered rejection. And so, when we think of intimacy, a mental picture of someone soon appears: mother, father, brothers and sisters, spouses, lovers, friends, colleagues. We are dealing with an original¹ experience, so powerful and so rich that it has been bestowed on all human creations. However, on trying to answer the question we have answers that range from the most concrete to the most subjective. In such universe one speak of various intimacies: physical, psychic, affective, sexual, etc. However, our purpose as psychoanalysts can only be to indicate, in some steps of this paper, for the validity of psychoanalytical intimacy, in far as it captures the other forms that are presented to our scrutiny of the transferential impact.
* Associação Psicanalítica do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Rio-4); ** Sociedade Psicanalítica de Porto Alegre; *** Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de Porto Alegre.
1 Chuster, A. “Um Resgate da Originalidade- as questões essenciais da psicanálise em W.R.Bion”, Degrau Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, 1989: “original is something that does not have a definitive answer”.
Donald Meltzer (1994), one of the authors who studied the subject, on thinking about the extensive polarization between the concreteness and subjectivity of the definitions, tried to delineate his field with more precision, laying bare the element’s expression that he considered most influential in producing this polarization: the emotional implications. Thus he established that intimacy would be treated as a measure of “social distance”. Such a parameter, in reality, not so concrete or so subjective, suggests the existence of a spectrum that would have an extreme point of social isolation and, at the other extreme, fusional indifferentiation. However, he himself considered that such polarities are more for a measure of theoretical guidance (analogical to what geographical direction would be) than for opposing points on a spectrum of possibilities. For it is certain that fusional indifferentiation imposes social isolation and vice versa. Both descriptions portray aspects of the same phenomenon, that is, narcissism.
It seems to us that Meltzer, in taking the problem to the social parameter, based his ideas on Bion’s description of the spectrum: narcissism ⇔ social-ism, understanding that the social distance increased in the narcissistic direction and was reduced in the social-istic direction. However, an understanding of this nature is incomplete if we do not consider that Bion proposed a double signalization for this spectrum, relating it to more or to less development (±Y)². This binocular vision emphasizes the complementary element that must exist between the narcissism of life and that of death, as well as between the social-ism of life and that of death. For example, narcissism can protect life, preserving the intimacy of internal objects against certain destructive invasions, in the same way that a social-ism can exist which leads the individual to annul himself completely (even to kill himself) in the name of his group.
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2 The development, whether it is negative or positive, is part of Bion’s psychoanalytical object, whose formula is {Ψ(ξ) ±Y M}. The preconception Ψ(ξ) is realized in the spectrum narcissism ⇔ social-ism (±U), generating conceptions that produce a development that can be negative or positive, influenced by the complexity (M) inherent to the functioning of the whole biological body.
Meltzer’s clinical inquiry suggests that the situation in which the necessity of intimacy tends to extinguish itself is very strongly present in the psychotic diseases, as schizophrenia, and we can add that in some levels it is always a consequence of the presence of the psychotic part of the personality. Frequently, the need to extinguish intimacy may be represented by a place like hell, or through the image of a person from hell (the devil); the place where negative development is maintained for eternity, while the positive is detained forever.
Later, Meltzer worked with a more simplified approach, dividing relations into intimate and social-adaptative. He included psychoanalysis in the first category, to signify that the practice of psychoanalysis (transference) refers to intimacy, and shows that very often the two forms of link are in conflict because of the singularity of individuals. What is good for intimacy may not be good for the social group, and vice versa.
In our understanding, the conception of the spectral psychoanalytical model constructs a clinical differential, and permits a vision of the amplitude of forms of intimacy, including the different personal and cultural conceptions, always taking into account that intimacy is a fundamental human need related to development.
Meltzer also suggests that it can be investigated through expressions of sincerity. It is understood that the term is an important quality in social contact, but should not be examined as a moral value. It is not clear if Meltzer separates the moral and the ethics, to deal only with the ethics in social relations. Everything indicates that this is so, but he does not make the intention clear. In this way, leaving to one side that sincerity is a virtue, Meltzer seeks to treat it as a momentary phenomenon, an unstable situation, a synonym of a social contact in which intimacy is experienced. Again, it is difficult to accept that he is not referring to the ethics of psychoanalysis, which is the ethics of the subject in movement³.
Whatever the case, despite the imprecision of term (4), Meltzer describes conditions inherent to the existence of intimacy/sincerity:
(3) internal knowledge as it grows amplifies ethical vision, and as it can never be completed is always moving forward. (4) Imprecision that has its positive aspect, as we will try to show.
1- It is necessary to share an unconscious fantasy;
2- It is necessary to share feelings;
3- It is necessary to stay outside the habitual sphere of relation;
4- It is necessary to accept the pain of the depressive position.
It is noted that Meltzer considers sincerity as “social quality” while Freud already called it the fundamental exercise necessary to analytical practice, in which resides all the didactic value of the analysis. In Freud, the ethical question is clear and, a conceptual study of his work regarding the possibility of a theory of intimacy shows, from early on, a close relation with the theory of the development of the libido. In the Three Essays (1905) it is easy to understand that the quality of intimacy changes with sexual development, but not necessarily its intensity. The relation between the libido and development establishes levels of qualitative evolution, and for us to include the quantitative question we suggest the term sensitivity is made use of.
Sensitivity is also a basic human reference. We are a very sensitive race, much more than we would like to be. Frequently, we use expressions like: wounded feelings, sensitive feelings, play with feelings, extremely sensitive.
Bion, in Making the best of a bad job (1979), when saying that every human encounter generates emotional turbulence, to the point of being considered a bad job, implicitly emphasizes that every encounter is an inevitable confrontation of sensitivities. In this vertex, the qualitative definition of intimacy may be the ability to tolerate emotional turbulence generated by sensitivities and, secondly, the type of decision that is taken in relation to it (to maintain it or diminish it). Bion says: “I can recall an experience in which a patient was anxious that I should conform to his mental state, but I did not want to. He was anxious to arouse powerful emotions in me, so that I would feel, angry, frustrated, disappointed, so that I would not be able to think clearly. I therefore had to choose between “appearing” to be a benevolent person or “appearing” to be calm and clear-thinking. But acting a part is incompatible with being sincere. In such a situation, the analyst is attempting to bring to bear a state of mind and indeed an inspiration of a kind that would in his opinion be beneficial to the development of the state already existing in the patient. That interference can be resented by the patient whose retort can be arouse powerful feelings in the analyst and to make it difficult for the analyst to think clearly”.(5)
The links between quality of intimacy, psychic development and analytical ability emphasize: first, feelings; second, anticipatory thinking; third, feelings plus thinking plus Thinking, the latter is synonymous with prudence in action or foresight⇒action. They are the three principles of living, described by Bion (1979), suggesting that, on the one hand, an analytical relationship is quite more intimate the more life it contains and, on the other hand, warning not to try to treat pains inherent to life.
Before proceeding with this theoretical articulation, it is convenient to mention some clinical material regarding the steps we are taking.
A 35-year-old woman, divorced, without children, a successful liberal professional, sought analysis because of constant episodes of depression, apparently unleashed by a treatment of a serious physical illness. Even knowing that she was cured, the patient continued to experience fantasies of death, with consequent high levels of anxiety. An important question, which it was possible to face her in the beginning of analysis, would suggest that thinking so much of death was equivalent to turn present an absent person, like to give life to a kind of a ghost. In other words, could this illness be a representation of someone from whom she could not separate, but at the same time someone that was deeply feared? She related that she had had a sick relationship with her ex-husband, because she feared being beaten by him, which effectively occurred on several occasions. Was she now “ beating” in herself with such fear? But in her history as a child also included a mother who died from the same illness she had. Could she be feeding a common destiny with her mother as a way to remain united forever? Could the illness have had symptoms that were significant as very similar to the conduct, for example, of her husband? And weren’t these situations occurring in analysis, in the sense that she could avoid the intimacy of her fantasies with the analyst?
The patient listened to these questions attentively, but it appeared that she would prefer to maintain her own interpretations regarding her fatal destiny.
(5) The passage shows the confrontation between analytical intimacy, sincerity, and the intimacy of the analysand seeking an intimacy in which both are equal in anxiety, fear frustration.
In other words, she respected the analyst’s interpretations, but simple left them to one side, not developing any association with them. She simply continued to talk without any change. The analyst suggested that this was a way for the patient to demonstrate, through action, how she felt organized by being pushed to one side or on a secondary level. The patient agreed with this interpretation. She pointed out that many of her complaints referred to this problem. She told that since her childhood, after the birth of a brother, who was preferred by her parents because he was male, her life was a useless reclamation, with a lot of hate and resentment, against “the attention she was robbed of”.
The discovery of this point of sensitivity (we can also say that she was dealing here with castration anxieties, in Freudian sense) organized around the personal myth of a “traumatic” situation – the birth of a brother – suggested, as a primary hypothesis, that the concepts of intimacy of this patient were compromised by a fantasy of exclusion: intimacy is a relationship in which one person excludes (castrates) the other. On the other hand, the painful complaints of inability to establish a new affectionate relationship, gave rise to another object, characterized by a marked possessiveness. Her conception that to be intimate it was necessary to be possessive demanded the same attitude in the persons with whom she related. The concept can be interpreted in the following form: intimacy is a state in which people depend upon the exclusion of everything around them (a primitive mental state, in which any frustration produces furious reaction, destroying the links). For this reason, her ability to love was inhibited, unless this was taken into account. She said that she was “ill” (depressed and seeking isolation) after these bouts of fury, which showed the organization of her sensibility imprisoned in a relationship that oscillated between only two possible objectives: the intimacy with the figure of a possessive father or with the figure of a sick-absent mother. One can note here this remarkable splitting, which is very close to her normal life, as one significant part of her existence is busy with work and sacrifice, and when all the demands are fulfilled, her feelings come to light, her intimacy can be seen taking her to the origin of her symptoms: the mother. She had to be sure that her mother was still there feeding in a wrong way nevertheless.
It is clear that we can understand possessiveness as a term, which brings together the feelings of voracity and envy, but we prefer to emphasize the possibilities of using it in a non-saturated form as Language of Achievement (Bion, 1970) in the access to transference. We also emphasize how the conceptions of intimacy are decided by the predominance of a sentiment. That is, it is not just a question of sharing the feeling, as Meltzer emphasizes, but of the predominance of a feeling. In addition to this, we inquire how determined conceptions of intimacy, derived from specific feelings, can make psychic development difficult, a fact that we try to illustrate in the case mentioned.
In many patients, the concept of intimacy, paradoxically, does not include privacy (another non-saturated concept). In their personal histories it is possible to detect that the family functioned in a promiscuous way for the child, without clear notions of ownership or of authority (father’s alpha function failure). Various episodes told about someone in the family arbitrarily deciding to dispose of an object that belongs to another member, without asking for authorization. When the individual feels aggrieved and complains, they face a logic on the part of the other, which justifies the fact, a logic, which can be called dissimulation. There is no recognition of error, and the logic can be pursued ad infinitum.
In more serious cases, as in “borderline” personalities, the concept of psychoanalytical intimacy is frequently attacked, and the analysis can be used as an alibi to attack and destroy all existing good links of intimacy: family, work, affective relationships. For these patients, psychic intimacy has to disappear and give place to a somato-psychotic intimacy, where communication is about “things” that happen in the body, expressed in a delirious system that the patient guards so as not to reveal it as it is. It is presented as beliefs that should be respected, as if an intention to disrespect those beliefs were present in the analyst. Therefore, they present what can be considered in their minds the rivals of psychoanalysis: esoteric, orientalism, self-help, politically correct speech, astral map, tarology - no matter what; everything serves to demand that the analyst adopt a non-interpretative attitude. They are persons who become tiresome by being able to talk endlessly about their physical symptoms or their beliefs, as was the case with a 40-year-old patient, an actor, divorced four times who, despite all cardiac examination, which included the realization of catheterism, continued insisting that he was having a heart attack. Very worried about his heart attack (a representation of a breakdown) he telephoned the analyst asking for help, as no doctor believed in him. The telephone call, asking for the help of an analyst, indicated that he himself recognized that he was dealing with a psychic problem. The analyst’s hypothesis sought a way to speak about these sensations of “chest pain”, which at certain times became irreducible, that in general are situations of weakness and loss, were part of a delirious dominion: the patient felt that he was tormented by “devils” who entered and left his body without any respect and without leaving him the least privacy. They were figures that tortured him, against which he tried to pray, carry out rituals, use drugs and alcohol and, when this did not function, sought the help of an analyst, his last resource on earth against the devils. The “hell” that the patient lived could be interpreted as his desire that the intimacy with the devils come to a solution, and at the same time could be the expression of how he conceived his family environment in childhood. To placate or extinguish the devils he tried to drown them with drink and drugs, frightening from them in sexual rituals, to which he was accustomed to invite his lovers, which inevitably resulted in the destruction of the relationship.
In another patient, 55 years old, a civil servant, this torturing figure was evident in the intense suffering he fought against, seeking all possible ways to attack links with health, family, work and so on. A concept of intimacy that was of one person torturing the other prevails. The relationship he had with his wife was of this nature. She submitted him to every type of moral humiliation, many times beating on him with objects from the house, sometimes using bad language against him in public places as restaurants. He allowed her to take all his assets as a kind of mechanism to placate the devil. When she divorced from him, she alleged that the principal reason was his preference for transvestites. Through a private eye she proved that fact, documented with photographs annexed to the judicial action. That created a scandal with his work colleagues who had access to this information. He went to live in an apartment ceded by his father, but his ex-wife sent his eldest son for him to look after. However, the eldest son, a homosexual and drug user, began to beat him and assault him with extreme violence. In spite of knowing what should be done and that he could react, the concept of intimacy that he had with his ex-wife was simply transferred to the son. This patient came to the sessions with attire that clearly revealed that someone was injuring him. At times, the number of bruises was impressive, against which he appeared to adopt an attitude that can be described as “belle indifference”. Due to all these actions, which he followed blindly, other colleagues solicited his exclusion and professional interdiction. But his system of transformation in hallucination (Bion, 1965) prevented him from presenting any reaction, because in his internal world this form of relating constituted true intimacy, the type of relationship that he understood as true love that would triumph because of its moral grandiosity.
The analyst perceived that the interpretations were accepted as one more kind of moral suffering. Thus, they were innocuous in the sense of helping the patient to modify its repetition. It was important for the progress of analysis to understand how his moral and religious superiority (although he declared himself an atheist) triumphed over everything. It was a question to show how he praised his personal logic as kind of a God or a religion that could not be disobeyed. He satisfied himself in being a morally superior victim of implacable attacks from those misconceptions, but he could only see other persons in the place of those. Moreover, in the role of a victim, his life remained static. A crossroads in development presented itself here, offering the option between modifying reality or fleeing from it: either the patient understand the impasse promoted by his rivalry with “O” or it will be impossible to proceed. The elucidation of this context brought some trace of reaction on the part of the patient, allowing him to hinder the process of his professional interdiction. In a dream, in this period, he showed a new and healthy part, represented by a recently born baby being rescued by him from beneath an enormous heap of excrement. At the back of the scene were two cows, observing, furious; one of them was green and the other was piebald. He associated the “green cow” with “uniformed cow”, a declaration made by a general of the dictatorship, would suggest that you should not worry about the order you would obey: “it was like a physiological function, unpleasant to see, but indispensable”. Another interpretation showed an acceptance of his feminine part, capable of creating babies.
Bion says, in Making the best of a bad job (1979):
“When we are engaged in Psychoanalysis, in which observation must play an extremely important part (as has always been recognized in a scientific inquiry) we should not be restricting our observation to too narrow a sphere. So, what then are we observing? The best answer that I know is provided by the formulation of Milton in the introduction to the 3rd book of Paradise Lost:
So much the rather thou Celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
The patient himself related that his concept of intimacy had a sado-masochistic quality, but would utilize this and, at the same time, tries to deceive him that it was not this. He learned to lie very, very well and, above all, to value lies as being superior to the truth. How could he be helped by the analyst if he was imprisoned in the belief that the analyst was only interested in humiliating him with interpretations whose intention were to demonstrate the “superiority” of psychoanalysis over his logic. The analyst was one more despicable object to make him suffer, another bad object, morally inferior. That is, the patient obtained enormous satisfaction in his moral superiority and hidden religious greatness. What he was not seeing was what personality and what social context he was representing: A cruel military dictator, murderer and scoffer (6).
Bion says: “We can be in a universe of thought, a culture or even a temporary culture of such a kind where we are sure to suffer the pain of feeling that our world is not conducive to our welfare. To dare to be aware of the facts of the universe in which we are existing calls for courage.
(6) Everything that is employed falsely as substitute for what is real is transformed, in consequence, into a poison for the mind.
That universe may not be pleasing and we may be disposed to get out of it.
If we can’t do this, if for any reason our musculature is not working or it is not convenient to flee or withdraw, then we appeal to other forms of evasion such as sleep, becoming unconscious of the unwanted world, remaining ignorant or idealizing”.
The idea of a Negative Grid, suggested by Bion and developed by Chuster and Conte (2003), can be useful for the hypotheses necessary in a case such as this. The Negative Grid is established in function of a quality that is empirically almost universal in human society. It deals, in the first place, with the apparent inability of a society to construct itself really as itself without excluding others.
In the second place, deals with the apparent inability to exclude others without devaluating them, and from there to begin to hate them and, finally, trying to destroy them. We have, then, a sequence of negative links, -L, -H, and –K, where we can examine how the individuals caught in this type of difficulty develop socially, treating the facts in the form of hypocrisy (-H), Puritanism (-L), or farisianism (-K). It is in the visualization of these negative forms of treatment of the social tendency of the facts, that the possibility of moving the vertex of interpretation is installed, focalizing on what we can call consequences of the failure of the alpha-function of Self. This means, as Meltzer showed, that it is necessary to introduce into the interpretation the symbols acquired in the culture, heteronymous symbols, more easily visible in the schizo-paranoid position. In this situation, interpretations using autonomous symbols, generated by the alpha-function of the internal objects, are innocuous. The patient simply does not tolerate the depressive position, characteristic of this type of symbol.
The thought represented by the Grid, whether original or negative, always follows two tendencies:
1) the tendency of the social imaginary instituting imaginary meanings and also the institutions created by them (which constitutes the vertical axis). In the negative development is the way to death, in the positive is the way to think. 2) The tendency of singular mental functioning, determined by the use the individual makes of the imaginary meanings and also of what this mental functioning imposes as the obligatory rules on the institution of society, handling, simultaneously, impositions coming from society. It is the syntactic horizontal axis, combining possibilities.
In other words, every social group institutes itself creating its own world and its forms of conceiving concepts of intimacy. This means conceptions generated by preconceptions, that is, representations, values, etc., by which a style of representation is created, a categorization of the world, esthetics and ethics (that determine the way of looking at the world), thus, as a way of valorizing and, without doubt, a way more and more private to the sensibility of the individual. Without interpreting these esthetics and ethics, without facing them with the possibilities that analytical esthetics and ethics offer, through its principals of observation and through the exercise of sincerity, it is not possible to change the repetition that such patients produce. In reality, all patients need to be confronted with the esthetics and ethics of their intimacy that creates the world, in one form or another conceiving the existence of other human beings and other societies. Although the aim of psychoanalysis may be defined in many ways, one can say with Bion’ s theory of preconceptions and learning from experience, that it is to help the patient understand, and to overcome, emotional impediments to his discovering what he innately already knows.
The last patient after some years of hard working managed to perceive that the aim of analysis consisted in taking him out from what could be named, introducing a new private myth in analytical communication, the two suffocating circles: The circle of madness and the circle of moral, ethical and financial bankruptcy. The first, more internal, represents the psychotic mother, whose first outbreak, when the patient was three years old, followed the bankruptcy of his father to manage the company inherited from his grandmother. Thus, the second circle is that of a father who failed, who conducted the mother to a psychological and financial bankruptcy. Throughout his life the patient repeated this history with other people. The two circles presented a personal esthetic, that of failure and moral bankruptcy, and a specific ethics, that of untruthfulness (lying), both with the same essence: the cruelty of the primitive super-ego.
The concepts of intimacy, being derived from these two circles (or two objects) impede the adequate development of the patient. Throughout his life, aims were always conducted with much suffering and plenty of lies. At the beginning of analysis, he adopted a blasé attitude, communicating as if analysis was just a game. He felt pleasure in placing the analysis at risk, making a mockery of it: a subtle form of cruelty towards the analyst, also meaning that he played with serious things, reflecting attitudes that placed himself at risk, including risking his life. Appearing to agree with this interpretation, he remembered that when he was a child he used to run in amongst the cars in a busy avenue, zigzagging, and risking being run over. Asthmatic, he smoked intensively. Dislipidemic, he only ate fatty food. A little while before he began analysis he discovered that he had a policeman as a neighbor who had been dismissed in an inquiry regarding culpable homicide. As the sub-administrator, he considered it immoral to have the presence of a dangerous policeman in the building, and he led a movement to expel him in a humiliating way. The policeman twice pointed a gun at him threatening to kill him. He registered a complaint with the Police Internal Affairs Department, after recording the threats on a tape. This worsened that position of the policeman considerably who, in the end, moved from the building. However, after this fact, he began to feel that he was being followed, thinking that he was being ambushed and would be murdered at any moment. In this state of terror of imminent annihilation he sought analysis.
Some brief clinical considerations
It is necessary to make a reservation. The cases related represent very ill personalities whose appearance in clinical psychoanalysis, although more and more common and challenging to analytical work, may not be representative of common intimacy. All of them present, in common, material referring to the inevitability of a “catastrophic change” (Bion, 1965), expressing itself as a fantasy that a “collapse” will occur in the course of analysis. It is necessary to distinguish the type of gradual and inexorable “collapse” of all analysis – the transformation in O (Bion, 1965), that annihilates the false and inadequate to install the way of truth for the subject – from the “collapse” that may occur when breaks the precarious equilibrium between the psychotic part and the non-psychotic part. In these points of extreme sensitivity, exposed by kind of intimacy reached in analysis, the psychic pain (wounded sensitivity) can generate the massive use of projective identification with a consequent state of psychic confusion having, then, the possibility of the occurrence of a “breakdown” (predominance of the psychotic part) instead of a “breakthrough” (predominance of the non-psychotic part).
In the case of the first patient, the feeling of possessivity led her to the edge of a psychotic experience (breakdown) throughout their life, making her seek a state of extinction of intimacy, which was achieved by the “break-up” of a hostile and destructive attitude against the people who most approached them affectionately. Making, in her own words, “life is a hell” or “ life is a bitch”.
In the case of the second patient, the “break-up” would occur because of very primitive beliefs and through intimacy of the exhibitionism-voyeurism type, continue failing and losing representation until it generated a body screen, which showed the somatic-psychotic film of their drama: to be a member of a demoniac family without the least respect for privacy.
The third patient, much more serious, clearly tried to use the analysis to produce a more profound illness. Synonymous with a concept of intimacy based on personal experiences, the analysis guaranteed him the transformation of psychoanalysis into a personal symptom, in which form he could deceive the analyst, causing an interminable analysis or an unsatisfactory conclusion.
From another vertex, we can say that it wasn’t that the patient didn’t solve his problems, he simple didn’t touch them. His mechanisms avoided the genital intimacy that could lead him to the oedipical crossroads of development. He remains within pre-genital intimacy. In this manner, he cannot use the alpha-function of internal objects that are responsible for the creation of autonomous symbols, characteristic of the depressive position. Without the alpha-function of internal objects it was not possible for him to reach true privacy with the analyst. His habitual discourse was exclusively concerned with external factors, replete with heteronymous symbols.
This constantly transformed the psychoanalytical relationship into a social-adaptive relationship, in which you converse about various matters relative to third parties.
Some reflections
Intimacy organizes itself from elementary conceptions common to the whole human beings. It has its limits of possibilities according with the work of the alpha-function. Such common conceptions are present in all cultures. A fact that is not so obvious when you consider the superficial differences between the various cultures. Some don’t recognize conceptions that are evident to others.
A trivial example is the social kiss widespread in Brazil, but which, in other cultures, would be a clear and unequivocal appeal to sexual intimacy. Another example is courteous behavior. For people of cultures where behavior is very formal and distant, when they go to other more effusive and affectionate cultures, such as the Latin cultures, courtesy could be confused with seduction.
But if we leave the small differences to one side, it is easy to recognize that common conceptions realizes in all cultures that are ethics, and as Freud’s theory shows, all of them originally referred to the body as seen by the mind, that is, to the development of sexuality, which began with the intimacy of the breast.
But even from a concrete anatomical point of view, it is easy to see that we are animals of an erect posture. Thus, groups of humans are not constituted of people that remain with their heads downwards (and if they do so, as in a Yoga class, they don’t succeed in doing it for very long; it is tiring and can be torturing). We also have notions of laterality, right and left, notions of being stationary and of moving, of standing on our feet or lying down, crawling and leaping, of wakefulness and of sleep. The list of corporeal impressions (oral, anal, genital) is practically endless. But it is certain that a very important base in the constitution of psychic intimacy is to eat and expel, which are frequently associated with seeing and hearing. Bion developed the model of psychic functioning having as a base the idea of digestion, widening the application to the link between eating, digesting, and expelling, describing the maternal reverie and its epistemological extension, the alpha-function
In relation to the breast and, very probably already in the inter-uterine environment, we acquire conceptions that populate our intimacy. We know very early on what it means to feel pleasure, fear, pain, to perceive and receive signals that express these states. Even connected to the basic corporeal needs, our sensibility organizes itself around the conceptions concerning satisfaction, pain and constraint, all of which are able to be produced not only by others around us, but by perceptions and by restrictions inherent to life itself.
Without doubt, universal conceptions exist regarding constraint of intimacy, they arise by virtue of the natural limits of the biological body, identical in every culture. Thus, in any place on earth, we suffer if someone segregates us, strikes us, injures us or subjects us to physical and psychological torture. Because of this what Umberto Eco calls the “rights of the body”*, that need to be respected, arise naturally: it is here that ethics arise. If our ancestors had always respected these “rights of the body”, we would not have had the pyre for heretics, the extermination camps, the bloody dictators, the rapes, the kidnappings and other endless examples. It is appropriate to emphasize here that, in human beings, a natural ethic exists, which outlines these rights and which can be visualized in an ethic of intimacy, whether sexual, physical or psychic.
The cases presented in this work are emblematic of the violation of these rights of the body, whether they are real or generated by unconscious fantasies. The conceptions of intimacy, regulators of psychic development, become a repetition of relationships that, throughout the social-historical process, in some way show the violation of these rights. Because of this it is necessary to investigate, describing in the interpretative process how it is that from the original family groups, representative in the first instance of the space where the oedipical pre-conception is realized, these deviations occur. It is only in this way that it is possible the rescue an ethic of another nature, to know that which Freud showed when he suggested that the brothers of the tribe needed to make a social pact of renunciation of violence in the corporeal dimension.
* Cinque Scritti Morali, RCS libri, Milan, 1997.
Every law, moral or juridical, regulates inter-personal relations, including those with the authority who imposes them. The fundamental condition of psychoanalysis is found here: in the relationship we have with the Unconscious. This deals with the alpha function generated in a link that shows who we are and how we are formed. We cannot understand who we are without this function. Lacking this recognition, the newly born does not humanize, and we can die or go mad if the community in which we live not to observe us or behaves as if we don’t exist. This was found in some way in all three patients. For the first patient their parents, in her fantasy, only had eyes for the brother. The patriarchal culture emphasized the fantasy, and the competitiveness in a consumerist world helped to crystallize this fantasy.
In the two other patients, the painful experience of not being recognized by the father in infancy, nor by the family, as a valuable person, and to have always been fobbed off as the black sheep of the family, caused great suffering in adult life due to not recognizing themselves as a person when they began to present physical limitations because of an eventual illness
If we extrapolate these examples, it is not difficult to think about the brutal maddening of the growing population on the streets who ravage many capitals around the world, crazily begging at traffic lights or abandoned as garbage on the pavements. The people and the authorities, insulated by a pellicle of dark film, either in their cars or in their eyes, pass by them trying to pretend they are not there.
At this point, it is necessary to add, it is not only in the streets and slums that “invisible” people exist. The non-persons are also present in organized societies, including psychoanalytical societies. Even in this latter there are people that does not tolerate someone simply because he has “different” things like, for example, theory and ethics. Such prejudice is a symptom of people, which frequently live in accordance with rules that they themselves created to the detriment of the social reality. We know that in certain cultures, in the course of the XXI century, the differences are still the motivation for massacre, cannibalism, the humiliation of another person’s body, etc. These cultures restrict the concept of “others” to the tribal community (or to the ethnic group, or to the “school” of psychoanalysis) and consider those outside as non-human beings. In a certain way, this is the basis of the ethics and esthetics of intimacy of the other two patients.
It is important to emphasize that there is nothing that by itself could stop in absolute form this process of exclusion. A degree of failure of the alpha-function will always exist. No awareness of it is absolute, because, as we show, there always exists a psychotic part of the personality in some degree creating this exclusion. The only thing that can oppose the constant process of exclusion is constant development, through analysis, developing the only thing that makes a philosopher philosophize, an analyst analyze, a writer write, a painter paint, a sculptor sculpt: to create a thinking that can leave a message in the bottle of life, so that, in some way, those who come in the future can believe in and think well of or beautiful that which the philosopher, the writer, the painter, the sculptor, or any one, of an endless multitude of anonymous people believe was good and beautiful, and wager on the challenge of what should be preserved of the life form – respect for life.
Psychoanalysis also, as a memoir of the future, should be like a bottle with a message of life launched on the sea of Uncertainty, because we as analysts who survive the torments; we believe that something good and beauty deserves to be preserved for those who come after us. Whether in a dream, where you reveal the unconscious, whether in the past presented which gives the transferential clash, or whether in the dawn of oblivion where the transformation in O begins, psychoanalysis is always, in any culture and in any place, a citadel of psychological intimacy.
Future development of this work needs to be undertaken. The experience of discussing the issue demonstrates the instability of the conclusions, the constant movement of ideas, the circumvolution of the issues, and the proliferation of them. It is as if we have thrown a pebble into the water and we are accompanying the waves it provoked. In reality, many of the words used, such as the word intimacy, immediately awaken an internal need to mould, to find a meaning. However, a constant meaning is never reached, and it is not possible to arrive at a single conclusion. Perhaps a word that is very close to that we call unconscious has exactly this characteristic, becoming more non-specific, more universal, more fluid, and without an antonym. A satisfactory antonym for intimacy doesn’t exist, there is more (+) intimacy or less (-) intimacy with someone or something. The word superficiality, which can be invoked, does not satisfy us as an antonym. In another sense, perhaps we are dealing with experiences that cannot be wholly contained in words. Experience itself moves all the time.
References
Bion, W.R. (1965) Transformations
_________ (1967) Notes on Memory and Desire
_________ (1970) Caesura
_________ (1979) Making the best of a bad Job
Chuster, A (1989) Um resgate da originalidade- as questões essenciais da psicanálise em W.R.Bion, Degrau Cultural, Rio de Janeiro.
_________ (1996) Diálogos Psicanalíticos sobre W.R.Bion, Tipo & Grafia, Rio de Janeiro.
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