A BRAZILIAN STORY – FOR
US ALL
by Bernard W. Bail,
M.D.
Preamble Sometimes
a patient presents with a character complaint. This
person is usually well-educated, seemingly very
interested in analysis and promises to be serious
about the work. Frequently there is an addiction
of some kind.
The
work begins and we are interested. The patient
seems to associate well and we begin to gather
our necessary information. There may be dreams
that are very welcome for we feel we have the method
and the experience to deal with them. Very
soon as we begin to attempt an interpretation and
look for one, somehow there is no pattern emerging
as we find in the usual neurotic or borderline
patient. We resolve to listen more carefully
and the same thing happens. We find ourselves
bewildered by the apparent lack of ability to make
inroads on the information gathered. The
work continues. We say something but never
feel we have quite hit it full on. The work
goes on; the patient comes willingly and we sometimes
comment on the difficulty that exists.
It
is this feeling of frustration that I want to convey
by the following essay. I feel sure that
in the range of the population there are people
living in this psychopathology everywhere. The
person under discussion below lived in Brazil. I
have met a few here in Los Angeles.
Not
only is there frustration, but it is unperceived
by the patient in the sense that he/she is not
consciously aware or maliciously attempting to
maneuver this as the outcome. Sometimes we
are fortunate and, in one brief instance, detect
that there is no affect in this person - none. The
dreams contain none. The associations contain
none. It is all intellectual and we may be
luckier still to have a dream in which we can definitely
locate the person within the uterus, though the
associations are quite loose. Sometimes,
as in this man's dream, he says point blank "It
would be madness to go out there," meaning
the real world. And, indeed, I have come
to call these individuals - for there is no diagnostic
term for them to my knowledge - "the living
unborn" and they may reside an entire lifetime
within the womb yet look as if they are living
a life.
If
one believes in the connectedness of all human
beings, sometimes called the mass unconscious,
then it would be apparent that these individuals
impact the mass unconscious with no sense of reality. They
are ghosts in the real world. There would
have to be an impact by these people (sic) in the
mass consciousness, which would be regressive in
direction.
It
would be foolish of us to ignore these people. Those
who do, recognize the madness of our time (really
like any other time), the deceptiveness of our
leaders everywhere bringing on chaos only for their
gain with the people having to pay the price.
After
all are we not still in a regressed state, civilization
wise, with war being the main agenda of every country
on earth, either planning for it, doing it, recovering
from it, or planning for it again. And further
it seems that every country spends a large percentage
of its gross national product planning to ward
off attacks. It seems this preoccupation
with violence has been with mankind forever.
One
wonders how long the mass consciousness of mankind
will give in to its regressive quality of life
- this madness.
Perhaps
it doesn't matter at all whether time is linear
or circular in the human mind. Is it a matter
of consequence that Dr. daS read me sessions out
of order - out of the actual order in which they
were conceived and brought to "life" by
both the patient and the doctor.
I
would not be so rude as to attempt the crudest
analysis of her but I do credit her intelligence
and I have a very high respect for her intuition. What
was "it" trying to tell me in the randomly
selected sessions which already had been culled
over by another supervisor in another continent,
indeed in another culture.
Frankly
I did not conceive of our meetings as supervisor
and student but rather two analysts attempting
yet another deeper (?) view, and all the while
recognizing the courage of Dr. daS to uproot herself
and husband and to settle in another city and country,
that is Los Angeles, America. This flat Los Angeles
basin houses, among other things, psychoanalysis,
a rather minuscule activity, and two institutes
both of which shudder not only over Mrs. Klein
but the presence of Wilfred Bion.
Now
this man - presented to me by Dr. daS - a man already
tired with previous analysis, group therapy, fat
with theories about his life, imprisoned in his
dark room, unable to work and tortured by the repleteness
of his knowledge - is in despair that there might
be nothing more to learn, doomed to crepuscular
light, endless time, endless life, endless pain
- for what person seeks analytic assistance or
maybe assurance if there were no pain in the endlessness
of twilight.
And
in fact the patient talks of time - was he late,
he asks - as he indeed was. Ten minutes worth
of lateness but what did that matter to someone
who wears no watch, who can hear the time anytime
on the radio, who is anguished by time and tide
yet at the same time says he feels bad that he
has begun smoking marijuana again. Is there
any solution for him except to become time itself?
The
family maid is pregnant. He is excited by
the prospect. What excites him? A potential
birth? Whose? Certainly not his
because he has become time itself, beyond birth,
beyond life and beyond death - a magnificent solution
if it works. He thinks it can, which is what
matters to him with all the time in the universe. Cronos
himself cannot do all that he schedules.
Becoming
time does not work. There are always the parents
to grouse about. Why can't they change? Why
can't they see how right he is about so many
things? And, of course, the problem for the
analyst is that he may just be right about them,
which in a sense is not the analyst’s problem
though it may show itself in the transfer. And
Dr. daS makes her comments about his fear of existing. To
whom is she speaking; the man who won't let
his parents change, who won't let them see
and so is held in a similar position? He
feels himself invisible to the point that on taking
off his clothes, should we say mental clothes,
he is entirely naked or invisible. It would
seem to me that the analytic situation might here
bring about an anxiety of nonexistence of such
invisibility as to never be able to be seen again. It
would appear that interpretations are to be used
to clothe his personality and not to disclose it. It
is all the same. The patient is the man of
a thousand faces or the invisible man. The
oscillation is between either extreme and his personality
abides in either extreme, anything else would be
catastrophic.
We
come to the house in the forest, the house without
a view and the older woman who he does not want. They
had their "moment". It is so pretty
a picture and the friends nearby. The associations
lend themselves so accurately to the Oedipal problem
except that the analysis does not reveal anywhere
a person capable of relating with anyone - or capable
of resistance - despite all the accoutrements of
life, for example a biological mother and father,
friends, both homo and heterosexual. There
is yet the fundamental darkness and the fundamental
pain of existence - if he dared (do I dare say “he”)
to begin it all. For I think what is central
in this man's personality is whether he - and
I am speaking metaphorically for I do not know
what to call the pre-stages of the mind in what
is to be the fetus - will let life come into being? This
is a troublesome question because it makes us wonder
what it is that prevents life from coming into
existence and again I am talking about mental life
whenever it is decided that it come into existence.
The
evidence here from the analysis is that it came
into existence at four months of inter uterine
life - a series of events which were then lived
over again in real life and in the analysis some
four months after it started with startling physical
symptoms demonstrably by x-ray which in due time
disappeared without a trace on placebo treatment.
Even
then the fetus needs a partner and we can say “of
course how natural”. But I think
what should be noted here is the need for a companion
even as a fetus - as long as there is consciousness
and even if the companion is a placenta or the
umbilical cord or the wall of the uterus. Man
seems to be born to twoness.
Where
is Gloria? The beautiful and handsome boy,
so mad an irruption causing shock and surprise
and fear but realizing the potential violence of
the boy looking for Gloria.
"Am
I not beautiful?", he asks, despite his bruised
hand, his agitation, his timidity, his seductiveness
which appears as madness. All this I should
consider as a dream and as eerie as a dream can
be depending on where the dreamer is identified
and from there locating the others. It would
be my impression, considering the basic problem,
that the mad boy in reality and to the patient
that betokens madness.
To
consider being or coming into being is madness. To
consider and to tolerate the pain is madness, yet
it's the ghost of the real person seeking Gloria,
which I take to mean birth, reality, and all we
know that to mean.
Finally
there is the session of commitment. The analyst
is going. The remarks of late feeding - bad
feeding - yes, but is it apropos to this patient? And
who is the friend who made the suicide attempt? Now
a bore? What job is it really that the patient
cannot make a commitment to since he thinks of
going away.
I
think the ghost is still looking for Gloria, the
way out, although the material is reasonable from
the point of view of the analyst leaving. It
is my conviction this is one of the faces the personality "wears" to
look like hatred, to look like depression, to look
like caring or rejection, to look like anxiety
and so on.
It
is my opinion that Dr. daS was telling me about
this fetal problem, this problem of whether to
come into consciousness, by the scattering of the
sessions she choose to talk over with me. Does
it matter then at this point whether time is linear
or circular?
One
of the things that we noted is that in my experience
the problem of fetuses passing themselves off as
humans is not rare. The evidence is there
in the analytic sessions and it is only by using
the analytic technique that this state can be revealed. We
as analysts must learn to hear it and to reveal
it.
It
is imperative to hear it! For all we know
the majority of mass consciousness is in this state
of mind feeling that to come into this reality
is madness, and it does not understand that to
be stuck in fetushood is also a kind of madness
for the personality and who or what it has to become
Ill
conceived, misbegotten, misinformed; who knows
how this indeterminate mass would vote on vital
issues of our time - the evidence favors their
being for charismatic leaders who would harm them
as something they already know, a state of mind
they have lived in whatever length of time.
Such
a mass of fetal consciousness could paralyze the
body politic and subject it (us) to endless, unvarying
bloodbaths, today differing from the past of thousands
of years only by the sophistication of weapons
and the exponential increase in the dead, the maimed
and the mentally maimed for life - all of which
trauma is passed on to future generations. I
believe we have to realize those of us living in
these times have inherited such calamities from
the past.
Sometime
- now is better - it has to be realized that only
in this time we are Catholics, Muslims, Jews, a
separation which betokens hostility, paranoia,
persecution and war. There is no other appellation "on
the other side" but that of soul. "I
am soul joined with all the other souls doing the
creators work.”
Copyright © Bernard
W. Bail, M.D. 2005
June 1979
(WB2005) |
