CRITICA

In this issue’s theme—Deadness and Aliveness–it caught my attention that “deadness” comes first. This placement led to thoughts of Sabina Spielrein’s 1912 essay, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being, in which she argued that destruction and creativity/vitality are not merely contradictory but, in fact, interdependent. Spielrein helps us consider how breakdowns and (things) falling apart are part of what makes creative transformation possible—not despite, but through, because of, out of.

Spielrein’s early psychoanalytic vision—long overlooked but prescient—encourages one to rethink the simplistic tendency to split vitality from what looks and feels like ruin. For her, the forces of deadness and aliveness are braided–even generative–in their tension and relation.¹ This aligns with many longstanding traditional wisdoms, whether they be indigenous, philosophical, religious, or simply observations of the natural world.

However, it must be said that such ideas about the poetry and imbrication of death/destruction and life/creation need to be balanced with considerations of scale and context. They mean one thing when considering “individual” psychic life or a “single” lifecycle, and wholly another when considering the actual deadliness of dominant and dominating power structures and systems that strip the many to enliven a few, or when considering humanity’s impact upon the natural world, and other 21st-century globalized cruelties. In the face of such matters, we often fall into overwhelm and are sometimes rendered hopeless.

Hope and despair is another dialectical tension (alongside deadness and aliveness) that all of us face. “Hope” is a fraught word/concept. Who has it, why, how, to what end, and for what? Some say that without it, psychical existence is nearly impossible. Yet, too often, hope is held too tightly or preciously as a kind of entitlement. Additionally, it may be treated as an “innocent,” uncomplicated necessity for going on being. But it depends on the type. If superficially imagined, hope can be fragile, (unconsciously) self-serving, and even weaponized. Think: “I hope because I want/need to feel good,” “I hope because I want to be seen as good,” or “I need my hope more than I need the object/person/issue that threatens it,” and so on. These kinds of hope, which I might consider transactional or conditional, run the risk of being easily shattered or soured (by discomfort, critique, or an extended timescale) or collapsing under conditions of disillusionment.

Recently, I’ve realized that I’ve come to think of “hope” less as an emotion or belief, and more as something within the body–below consciousness or control (perhaps below ideology, politics, training, but maybe not)–something almost cellular. Hope, for me, is the spark in the soma right before a movement is begun, the moment just before an act(tion). Not the act itself, nor a grand vision of how things should be, but the internal process that makes the next action actually possible. A kind of muscular flicker toward. An impulse. A cellular capacity for liveliness. Maybe linked to the way Eros moves—not necessarily toward satisfaction, but toward some kind of contact, to be responsive, to remain/be capable of response. Hope, in this (my) idiosyncratic framing, is the possibility of…and action toward.

It doesn’t promise anything. It is a form of responsiveness, which is, I guess, proof of life (aliveness).

Which brings me/us to another idiosyncratic reading of something familiar. I have a particular (but useful to me) misreading of Emmanuel Levinas’s koan-like sentiment: “In the face of the other, I am responsible.” I misread this to be, “In the face of the other, I am response-able.” Which leads me to, if I am capable of merely responding–of moving, of acting, in relation to the world/Other–then I am also responsible in some way to do so. That capacity—somatic and psychic—is a kind of ethical hope. It is not future-focused or idealistic. It is in the “almost present” right there just now².

This kind of thing might have been easier to manage at the scale of earlier human life. The global, 24/7, fear-funding machine exhausts many’s respons-ability and overrides or exploits that quiet, precious cellular impulse. May we each cultivate the capacity and state of mind to sense what, I think, our bodies know.

In times when much is breaking down and many are enacting violence that breaks others’ lives, bodies, minds, and hearts, I find small inspiration in the flicker of responsiveness that lives in and between us.

In Solidarity,
Elise Geltman, LCSW
PINC President

1 Spielrein’s concept resonates with psychoanalytic thinking about the dynamic interweaving of Eros and Thanatos (Freud, 1920).

2 To be clear, I have been told by a Levinasian scholar that my interpretation is not what Levinas meant or intended. Even so, I find it compelling and share it as my misreading or translation. See Levinas’ related works such as the essay, “Meaning and Sense” (in Collected Philosophical Papers, Levinas, 1987) and “From the One to the Other” (in Entre Nous, Levinas, 2000).

References

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18:1–64.
Levinas, E. (1987). Collected philosophical papers. Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (2000). Entre nous: Essays on thinking-of-the-other. Columbia University Press.
Spielrein, S. (1912; published in 1994). Destruction as the cause of coming into being. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39, 155–186.