Month: July 2024

Our Ancestors. The Architects of Our Story.

The idea that our ancestors have been architects of our story alludes to a deep relationship between the past and the present. Just as architects plan and build structures, defining their shape and purpose, so too did our ancestors lay the groundwork for our existence. Their choices, life events, and genetic composition have shaped who we are now. We could better appreciate the complexity of human existence and the interconnectedness of all people by learning more about our ancestry. 

The ancestors are those who have gone before, all the life that has ever been, leaving behind the traces of kinship. Relics belonging to ancestors are carefully conserved throughout the world. fragments of natural soil, objects used in rituals, or personal items. These artefacts help lessen the pain of death’s separation between the living and the cherished dead. In addition to exhibiting immateriality, a response, and introspective serenity that imply they exist in timeless dimensions, ancestors appear to possess a certain kind of materiality and elevated awareness. We imagine the ancestors reside in the Night Sky, Underworld, and Land of the Dead, those are our mythic conceptions of the sacred places of origin. 

How would we have survived if we had not been carried on the shoulders of our ancestors? The ancestors enter the realm of dreams and imagination, stepping through the threshold of consciousness to pose inquiries, share wisdom, and reveal the many facets of our identities. They ‘visit’ us in familiar patterns of behaviour as well as inexplicable phenomena, inviting curiosity and engagement. 

However, ancestors are not only felt as benevolent. They can act on our psyches as ‘malignant ghosts’, critical and shaming. They ‘haunt’ us if neglected, imposing themselves as fixed beliefs and fear of change or reinterpretation. For some, they represent the way to liberation, in others, they represent endless rebirth. 

What “haunts” are not the spirits of our ancestors in the literal sense. Sometimes, an intergenerational message is present with no way towards verbalisation, creating a sort of gap that can be painfully felt. A psychoanalyst, Galit Atlas, in her book „Emotional Inheritance,” talks about intergenerational secrets and unprocessed experiences that often don’t have a specific voice or image in our minds but still come rushing at us. We may carry within us the losses and traumas of our grandparents or parents that they never had the opportunity to fully articulate. We can feel these traumas, even if we are not consciously aware of them. Traumas that generations of our relatives have gone through can turn into nameless horrors, and untold stories are re-enacted again and again. Psychoanalysts Torok and Nichols call this phenomenon the buried speech of a parent, “a memory that was buried without a legal burial place.” This unknown phantom returns from the unconscious to ‘haunt’ its ‘host’ and may lead to phobias, compulsions, obsessions, or other similar issues specific to the individual. Its effect can persist through several generations and sometimes determine the fate of an entire family line. This segment of Reality is untellable and therefore inaccessible to gradual assimilative psychoanalytic work. This, in turn, creates a space in the ego where ‘workings’ through and mourning are not happening. Instead, the person may go through periodic states of mania or depression and create a ‘fantasmic’ identity to mask real suffering. 

Does leaving your country to start a new life elsewhere mean abandoning the legacy of your ancestors? Not necessarily. A psychoanalyst and linguist, Julia Kristeva, engages with the topic of being a foreigner in her work “Strangers to Ourselves.” Her own experience of displacement and adaptation, as a Bulgarian immigrant in France, informs her work on the complexities of belonging and otherness. Kristeva explores the figure of the foreigner as both a source of fear and fascination. She argues that foreigners disrupt societal norms and can reveal hidden anxieties within a culture. She writes: “The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamable to bonds and communities.” Kristeva emphasises the constant negation between belonging and alienation. She writes: “Not belonging to any place, any time, any love. A lost origin, the impossibility of taking root, a rummaging memory, the present in abeyance. The space of the foreigner is a moving train, a plane in flight, the very transition that precludes stopping.” Kristeva describes the human condition as specific to a foreigner but also a human being as such. We exist as a split subject that is incoherently divided and fractured. This split is not a psychological flaw but a fundamental condition of human beings. The notion that we can achieve balance and consistency in our lives or discover our true selves is an illusion propagated mainly by the self-help industry and much of the Holywood productions.

Language connects us to our ancestors through its development, the preservation of cultural heritage, and genetic links. All languages return to earlier languages and adapt over time through sound changes, borrowing, and cultural exchange. Our ancestors passed on stories, songs, and customs through spoken language, thus preserving their knowledge and values. Family names, regional dialects, and even heritage can provide clues to the origins and migrations of our ancestors. Although many ancient languages have been lost, studying language families and historical linguistics helps us understand how we are connected to those who came before us. Psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein wondered about the origin of language, reminding us that apart from verbal language, humans have rhythmic and melodic language, gestural language, and the language of the act. The languages based on sound predominate as means of communication and tend to be considered social languages. Spielrein emphasises that people become social beings primarily by using verbal language; however, genetically, verbal language is preceded by other forms of language. Initially, a child expresses their state through the different rhythms, tones, and intensities of their cries through a primitive melodic language. Spielrein wonders if it was an adult who invented a language or a child. She says: “The ancestor sleeps within the child and the child within the ancestor. If the adult really invented the language, he created it in its earliest origins out of the childlike stage of his psyche.” According to Spielrein, this could mean that the language is created in the subconscious, which would take us back to the experiences and processes of the infantile thoughts, which, in turn, would refer to the experience of our ancestors. It is worth remembering that language is complex, making it challenging to pinpoint a single origin of development, as it is in most things in this world.

More than just physical containers, our bodies serve as both the basis for who we are and the main lens through which we view the outside world. Our bodies affect how we perceive and engage with everything around us, from delicate touch sensations to intense emotional power. Psychoanalysis offers an additional layer of understanding by demonstrating how our unconscious mind can physically leave marks on our bodies that have a significant impact on our thoughts and behaviours. This essay will explore, implicitly and ambiguously, the complex relationship that exists between the body, perception, and psychoanalysis.

The brain is mysterious. We know only a portion of what there is to know about the brain, or the cosmos, for that matter. Perhaps, for that reason, we keep producing original and amusing ideas about both. 

The brain itself is a soft, jelly-like mass of billions of cells and their connections. It weighs 2.15 to 3.15 pounds. The human brain regulates, through electrochemical energy, conscious and unconscious sensation, perception, and behaviour, as well as sympathetic and autonomic activities of the internal organs. In the brain stem and the limbic system, we experience our commonality with animal ancestors and relatives. As the base of the crown chakra, the brain contains our fantasies of a ‘higher’ universal mind. 

The ancients thought of the locus of consciousness as the abode of thought and feeling located in the heart, chest, or liver. Only recently has the brain been thought to be the locus of consciousness. Nevertheless, the brain was imagined to be potent. The Irish mixed the brains of the fallen warrior with earth, fashioning a ball to be used as a projectile weapon. Many of our ancestors ate the brains of their enemies to assimilate powerful mana and assume dominance. For others, the brain was holy; in Crete, horns were thought to grow out of the brain as a sign of procreative life force. Our fascination with the brain speaks to its symbolic function as an imaginal container for a timeless and unbounded process that resolves opposites and divisions. 

When one considers the brain from the perspective of the psyche, one is left with mental maps and images of geography, as well as emotional and memory centres, distinct intelligence areas, specialisations, localisations, and divisions between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. More recently, postmodern images of networks and fields, neural ecosystems, plasticity, and mirroring have also been observed. The advantages of specialisation and holistic functioning bring together the long-standing opposites found in psychological experience: undesirable fragmentation and idealised wholeness, within our conceptual framework of the brain. Scientific and technological developments have an equal impact on our understanding of the brain, as do our imaginations about the basic nourishment we receive from brainstorming and brainwashing. As we look deeply into images of both the brain and space, we also see the psyche imagining itself. 

Skin is a responsive tactile boundary between self and other and the inside and outside of the individual. Skin is vital to survival, it is the place where two can meet. We often refer to the quality of skin’s symbolic containment or permeability: one is thinskinned or thickskinned. The irritating facts of life go “under one’s skin”; one does the essential or compromising thing to “save one’s skin”. 

The skin is the largest organ of the body, it has a protective and cushioning function and is waterproof, elastic, breathable, and washable. The skin develops from the same foetal tissue as the brain and works actively with the hormonal, vascular, immune, and nervous systems. The skin enables us to perceive via pressure, temperature, and pain. Touch is a remarkable source of sensation, it is one of the first senses to activate in neonates and one of the last to subside in the elderly. Infants of many species appear to thrive on tactile contact, including human children. Such touch can foster greater connectedness and self-containment. Because skin is so nuanced in its reaction to the environment, it acts as a barometer for physical and psychological well-being. While health and relative balance often register in the bloom of the skin, illness, undesirable contact, or psychic conflict may manifest in blushing, rashes, inflammation, or allergy. 

The skin serves as a canvas for the symbolic representation of one’s social standing and individual identity. Skin colour, determined by the amount of melanin or brown pigment produced by the individual, has been the primary source of ethnic and racial distinction. Our perceptions of ourselves and others have been profoundly impacted by psychological projections surrounding skin tone. What “only” penetrates the skin is multi-layered and not at all superficial.

The eye receives and emits light, looks in and out, and is a window to the soul and the world. It can see too much or nothing at all. The eye illuminates, stares, understands, expresses, and protects. We can truly feel known by the way another’s eyes take us in, we can feel despair and sorrow at being “unseen.” 

Losing one’s sight or an eye can inspire truly creative work. The possibility of changing from one form of consciousness—seeing—into another is symbolised by missing or lost eyes. It can be used to describe awareness and sight that respond more to an inner vision than to sensory inputs. While light, insight, intelligence, reason, and spiritual awareness are traditionally associated with the eye, the inner eye sees with a night vision and dark awareness into the wisdom of dreams and all the unconscious and emotional elements that also make up full human understanding. 

The play of opposites, which includes the two eyes of inner/outer, blind/sighted, solar/lunar, illuminating/deadening, and open/closed, opens up one-dimensional vision and ultimately resolves into a more advanced form of unified vision. 

Sounds, the movement of waves and wind noise in nature, and the sounds of a city travel inward through the complex labyrinth of the human ear. It is a direct reversal of Plato’s theory of sight as a projection of fire outward. The ear collects these waves in its cartilaginous pinna, directs them along spiral coils formed by the shape of the vibrating sound, and stimulates the eardrum to send the waves through three of the hardest and tiniest bones in the body – the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. These bones amplify air pressure in the Eustachian tube, which exerts pressure on the fluid in the innermost chamber, the snail-shaped cochlea. Sound perception is then transmitted to the auditory cortex via acoustic nerves in tiny hairs suspended in the fluid. Each hair corresponds to a different frequency. Because the inner chamber is only filled with fluid as animals evolved from aquatic to land animals, we can better understand the ear’s other vital function, which was to maintain our sense of balance after we lost the support of seawater.

The psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, who once claimed that the invisible and intangible can still be audible, suggested that we can truly hear through greater use of our intuition. 

From grand castles to cosy cottages, the image of a house has captivated humanity for centuries. But a house is more than just a physical structure; it’s a potent symbol that transcends cultures and time. This blog will delve into the rich symbolism of the house and home, exploring how it reflects our deepest desires for security, belonging, and self-discovery.

One of the oldest representations of a house is a little ceramic Chinese house from around 2000 years ago (ca.25-220 C.E). Its rudimentary windows and door convey the essence of a house as containment and shelter. A house is one embodiment of home; “home is where the heart is”. A feeling state of belonging, contentment and safety. Physically, our earliest home is the maternal womb in which we are gestated. Animals instinctively make their homes in nests, burrows in the earth, the hollows of trees, caves and clefts; many first homes of humans were intimate, encompassing, womb-like structures. All over the world cave drawings attest to our primordial presence. 

Mud huts in Africa are still fashioned in the form of a female-like torso. The teepee of the Great Plains Indians, the triangular tents of the nomads, are circular at the base, suggesting the alpha and omega existence that begins in the womb and the eternal cycles of nature. To be unhoused does not necessarily mean to be homeless. Home could be projected onto a particular city, a beloved friend, a ship at sea, or a set of circumstances. These correspond to the experience of both fixity and freedom. In dreams, the psyche is often depicted as a house. Sometimes there are different levels representing a continuum of time. There may be familiar rooms, other unknown, hidden, revealing multivalenced potentialities. 

Home has to be idealised. In mythology, our first home is a paradise of oneness, a time before consciousness and its conflicting discriminations. Home can be also a prison or a haven of avoidance. Home can represent the nurturing of the self or its violation. We escape home, seek home, outgrow home, return home. Home is the goal of epic odysseys, spiritual quests and psychic transformations. 

An essential part of a home is a window. It is a transparent threshold. It is an opening in a wall that lets in air, moonlight, sunlight, the colours of the world, and the dark of the night. The window is where inside and outside meet bringing together two worlds and their elements. Eyes have been called the windows of the soul. The word window is derived from the old Icelandic “vindr” wind and “auga” eye. The wind-eye was originally a hole in the wall protected by branches or a curtain exposed to the wind. Over the centuries the hole in the wall was screen by a rice paper, marble or thin panes of mica as a substitute for a glass. Eventually, being able to open and close, windows contributed to regulating heat and light and acquired the meaning of an interval of time in which something can occur. 

Doors can stand between here and there, between known and unknown. At the psychological level, gates are found between the inner and outer worlds, between sleeping and waking. So gates are the point of transition from one world to another. A mother’s body is the gateway opening to this world, the tomb, the gateway to what comes after death. In ancient Egipt, a doorway in the tomb was built to allow free passage- in and out to the soul. In our everyday life gates and doors are there to protect the house and the life of the family. The gate-doorway can be a numinous and dangerous place, rich in rituals and superstitions. Offerings and prayers are made, and shoes are removed before entering. One must step carefully over a threshold, usually right foot first, and should not sneeze, linger, or sit. On the other hand, sometimes doors and gates must be opened to release what is too confined inside. For example in folklore of the British Isles, house doors must be opened when someone dies to ease the passage of the soul. 

A stairway leads one up or down. The etymology of the word drawing on Old English words “stigan”- to climb and  “staeger”- riser, suggests that stairs are primarily perceived as going up rather than both directions. This furnishes a symbol for ascents in slow stages and transitions through difficult steps. We see this externally in the stepped pyramids of ancient Egipt whose stairways provided a transitional zone between life and death. But staircases not only ascend, they also go down. In myths and fairytales or dreams the staircases descend into realms of mystery, magic, treasure, and imagination. Psychoanalysis taught us to search for our own descents for meaning. Freud used the French phrase ‘esprit d’escalier’ (wit of the staircase) to refer to repartee(*1)that occurs to us as we depart after an argument. The gain of creative wit by reclaiming our lower nature through psychoanalysis led Freud to reject what he considers the pretences of sublimation(*2).

Notes:

(*1) Sigmund Freud didn’t originate the term “esprit d’escalier,” but he did discuss this phenomenon. It’s a French expression that literally translates to “staircase wit,” referring to the feeling of thinking of the perfect comeback or response only after the conversation or situation is over. Freud believed this experience stemmed from the unconscious mind, with witty retorts being blocked in the moment due to social inhibitions or anxieties.

(*2) In psychoanalysis, sublimation is a mature defence mechanism where unacceptable urges or desires are channelled into socially acceptable and often productive outlets. It’s a way of transforming negative or undesirable impulses into something positive and beneficial.

For example, an aggressive urge might be channelled into competitive sports or debate. Or, someone experiencing heartbreak might pour their emotions into creative writing or music.

Imagination built fantasies on developing the science of colour. From Aristotle’s mixing of elemental hues to Newton’s prismatic splitting of a sunbeam into a spectrum of seven primary colours which in turn correlates with seven planets and the heptatonic musical scale. Goethe emphasised human perception and subjective experience of colour and influenced artists and thinkers with his focus on colour psychology and aesthetics. The retina of the eye has millions of light-sensitive cells with different colour sensitivities. Colours convey feelings, relationships and contrasts, dramas and tensions, the nature of matter, its processes and transmutations.

The Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski used colours in his film trilogy not only as a visual element but as a key to the soul of the film. The trilogy is made up of three films: Blue, White and Red. There is another layer to Kieslowski’s film symbolism. It is the French national flag. Aside from the enigmatic colour symbolism, Kieslowski explores the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, an embodiment of French revolutionary ideals, through the lens of personal loss and the characters’ resilience.

The first movie was “Blue”. Let’s look at the meanings that are ascribed to the colour blue. It is the rarest colour in nature although the sea and sky are quite vast. Blue is linked with eternity, the beyond, the spiritual and mental as contrasted with the emotional and physical as detached from the earthly. In everyday language, it points to the special, highest; for example: blue-chip stocks are those of the most value, blue ribbon for the first prize, blue-ribbon as in elite committee. In evolution, the human eye was able to perceive the warm colours first before the cool ones. For example, Homer had no word for blue and referred to the sea colour as dark. Blue does feel cold. Blue is the colour of the moonlight. Blue light slows the heart rate, lowers blood pressure and affects the growth of plants. It is the colour of bruises, melancholy, isolation, “the blues”. The atmosphere of the movie “Blue” could not be closer to this description. It is cold, drenched in melancholy and moves slowly. The main character Julie (Juliette Binoche) is devastated after the death of her husband and daughter in a car accident. She withdraws from the world and moves ceaselessly through her grief and hopelessness.

White evokes pristine, monotone landscapes. The polar whiteout erases even shadows, eliminates the horizons and deceives our perception of depth and scale. White also plays between the opposites. It is a merging of fire and ice, heat and frigid cold. The Snow Queen of the North is captivatingly beautiful and wintry, the pallid vampire bloodless in its passion. White receives the projection of all or nothing. The psychologist Rudolf Arnheim observed that white is a symbol of integration without presenting to the eye the variety of vital forces that it integrates and thus is as complete as a circle. For Melville’s Captain Ahab, however, the greatest White Whale Moby-Dick conveys the indefiniteness and impersonal vastness of the universe and human fears of annihilation. Where fantasy identifies white reductively with light, white can be forced into polarising opposition with black. Here, white becomes purity, virtue and innocence versus black as turbid and evil. The temptation for this kind of simplistic contrast was given in the movie “White”. It follows the story of Valentine (Julie Delpy), a young woman who is forced to marry a man she does not love in order to save her father from financial ruin. Eventually, she finds her freedom through her love for a young man named Dominique (Benoît Magimel). But as always, freedom has a complex meaning, as we learn in the final scenes of the movie.

If red is the music to eyes then red would be the sound of trumpets. Red is evoked in humans by radiating energy of specific wavelengths which increase muscle tone, blood pressure and breath rate. These effects occur also in blind humans and animals, so red is not purely an experience of the eye but something more like a bath. Symbolically, red is the colour of life. Its meaning relates to the human experience of blood and fire. In primitive thinking, blood was life. If blood left the body it took life with it. At the same time, the red flow of blood was a danger signal. The red fire was our comfort and protection, but, out of control, a threat of annihilation. Red attracts us conveying vitality, warmth and comfort but also warns of danger, calls for attention, and says ‘stop’. Red tells the story of a judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who becomes embroiled in a love triangle with a woman (Irène Jacob) and a man (Daniel Olbrychski). He is forced to confront his own prejudices and tries to find acceptance from people from other social classes. The characters in this movie forge bonds even though they have little in common. The plot tells stories of people who are connected in the most random and surprising ways.

The Three Colours trilogy is a powerful exploration of the human psyche. The films are beautifully shot and depict complex characters struggling to find their place in the world. It is also a mediation on the nature of love, loss and redemption.