PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD ATLAS
Someone finally was there: Ofra Eshel's "analysing one" and the existential theory of psychoanalysis.
PRESENCING / WITHNESSING / TRANSFORMATION IN O
FIELD NOTE
What's left of the psychoanalytic when the explanation doesn't reach the pain?
VISUAL FIELD / Unhuman
The analysis of figure 01 is not a two-person integration, but a temporary experience field: the transparency of two non-persons bends to the same dark centre but does not occupy each other.
The most fascinating commitment to psychoanalysis was "to make unconscious consciousness". Symptoms are not meaningless; they have history, desire, defence, repetition. A person who does not know why he or she is suffering, analyzes the hidden road to find it.
But...
The Emergence of Analytic Oneness
The questions raised were even deeper and more uncomfortable: how useful would an interpretation be if some suffering was not "ununderstood" at all, but "a disaster that has never really been experienced by a subject"?
The book is really about rewriting, not just a therapeutic problem, but the bottom image of the psychoanalytic.
It moves psychoanalysis from the discipline of "explaining hidden meaning" to the discipline of "leting the failure of experience finally take place".
In other words, Eshel is not talking about how analysts understand patients more intelligently, but about whether analysts can be real enough, affordable enough to be there where they are least available.
That's what she called it.
presencing
、
withnessing
and
analytic oneness
I don't know. These words seem abstract, but together they point to a very specific clinical reality: Some have not lacked an explanation, but have never had a psychological environment to live with them in critical suffering.
FIELD NOTE
Conclusion
CORE ARGUMENT / Conclusion
First, Eshel's "analysing one" is not a soft mutuality, but a shift in the theory of the existence of a psychoanalytic analysis: the core of the treatment goes from "know what pain means" to "make pain a living thing".
Secondly, she inherited Winnicott's idea of "early collapse", arguing that many of the deep wounds were not forgotten pasts, but disasters that had not yet been experienced; it kept returning because it had never really been past.
Third, she used Bion.
O
And understand the treatment as
transformation in O
Not to turn the unknown into knowledge, but to make the emotional reality that cannot be fully known and to acquire an acceptable form between two people.
Fourthly, the doctrine is the most powerful and dangerous. It can penetrate the clinical darkness of the failure of interpretation, and it can slide to the illusion of integration, the narcissism of the therapist, border failures and the veil of harm to reality. So reading Eshel must read her courage and her risk at the same time.
FIELD NOTE
At the end of the interpretation: when pain has not become "my experience"
VISUAL FIELD / Unhuman
Figure 02 states that "unexperienced collapse" is not a forgotten content, but rather a dark well that has not yet entered the body of experience. Images use black holes, acoustic waves and broken glass plates to demonstrate a past that has not yet become the past.
Traditional psychoanalysis is very good at asking a question: What does it mean?
Dreams, verbal errors, repetitive relationships, physical symptoms, silence, resistance are placed in meaning networks. The task of analysis is to translate slightly the desires, anxiety, defence and early relationships behind the symptoms. This tradition is extremely powerful because it rejects pain as an accidental, absurd and purely biological thing. It insists that human suffering is structural.
But Eshel's concerned with another kind of pain.
This pain is not invisible because it's too deep, but because when it happens, there's not a single person that can form enough to say, "This is what I'm going through". It is not repressed into unconsciousness, but has not yet entered into experience.
Not forgotten, but never in the form of "my past".
Winnicott said that a patient's fear of collapse had often occurred. Sounds contradictory: Why fear it if it happens? Eshel caught this contradiction. When the crash occurred, the subject had not yet had the capacity to experience it, so it had not become the past. It stands, like a future event, ahead of the lives of the sick, repeatedly approaching, threatening and demanding to be experienced.
This is the worst part of the deep trauma.
People don't think of anything, but they are being chased by something that has never been experienced.
It does not appear in memory, but in hollowness, silence, insomnia, decomposition of the body, wrong action, suicidal despair, incompetence and inability to be loved.
So Eshel says that psychoanalysis can't just ask, "What does that mean?" It must also ask: is it possible that this matter will finally be experienced? If a person did not have a psychological environment to bear it in that year, would treatment today provide a new environment in which, for the first time, that inexperienced disaster could be experienced?
FIELD NOTE
II. From interpretation to presence: providing not "accompaniment"
Eshel's first keyword
presencing
I don't know. The word is easily misinterpreted as "the therapist must be present" "to be with the patient" and "to be more consistent". But she said more than that.
presencing
Not posturing, not technology, not tenderness. It means that analysts place their psychological presence in the patient ' s experience world as an accessible care function in the treatment field.
Analysts not only hear the pain of the patient, but also understand the symbolism of the patient, but stay alive near the area where the patient suffers.
The "living" here is not emotional, it is not retreating. The patient brought the silence in and the analyst did not use the explanation to push it out
The patient brought in empty holes, and the analyst was not rushing to fill; the patient brought in a state of no thought, no sense, no trust in any relationship, where the analyst was still able to withstand the intrusion.
That's exactly what Eshel's rewriting of psychoanalysis neutrality.
The analyst is no longer an outside observer, nor is he a person who cuts through the heart of the patient with the means of interpretation. Analysts themselves become part of the treatment reality. Some of the patient ' s experience depends on whether the analyst actually entered that experience field and did not disappear there earlier.
This is very demanding for analysts. For a truly difficult clinical moment is often not when the patient speaks of complex material, but when the patient puts a meaningless, angry, hopeless, speechless state into a treatment room. Common explanations are often too fast here. It's like taking a stairwell in a place where there's no ground. It's got a nice structure, but it doesn't fall.
Eshel's radical is
In her view, the most profound treatment was not first to explain, but to leave a person no longer alone in a landless place.
FIELD NOTE
III. TRANSITION FROM VIEWING TO COMMON: WITNESSING
The second key word is...
withnessing
I don't know. It's obviously responding.
witnessing
And that's "witnesses."
Witness certainly matters. A pain is seen, admitted and proved not to be an illusion, which in itself has healing power. One of the most painful experiences of many trauma survivors is that no one believes, no one hears and no witnesses.
However, Eshel believes that in the deepest clinical areas, the witness still retains a distance. The witness stood in a position where he saw your pain and admitted it had happened.
withnessing
It drags analysts into a more dangerous position: not to see pain, but to be with it; not to testify for pain, but to bear it with the patient where it cannot be borne alone.
It is not pain for the patient, it is not pain for the patient. It is more like an analyst's psychology temporarily becoming an extra organ, allowing patients to be accommodated, felt and survived a little bit between two people with unprocessable experiences.
This idea is consistent with Bion's container theory, but Eshel pushed it deeper. Bion said that babies put indigestion beta elements to mothers, who converted them into thoughtable alpha elements and returned them to babies. Eshel went on to ask, "What if some experience is too early, too dead, too invisible, and not even as much as can be converted into ideas?"
At this point, analysts cannot simply understand the patient's projection. Analysts must allow themselves to be caught in the dark, which has not yet been thought out, where they can maintain a certain life.
withnessing
The meaning is here: analysts are not external processing machines, but shared presence.
FIELD NOTE
"Analysis One" is not a merger, but an ad hoc experience field
Eshel, the most controversial concept is...
analytic oneness
also known as
two-in-oneness
。
The term sounds dangerous because it can easily lead to the idea of border removal, the integration of subjects, the integration of therapists and patients. Eshel certainly knows this danger. In fact, her concept can be truly understood only by recognizing that danger.
analytic oneness
It is not a real merger, nor is it a therapist who crosses into patient life. It describes some extreme clinical moments: patients and analysts form an experience field that cannot be easily divided. It's not "your psychology plus mine" but a temporary common psychological unit. It makes it possible to analyse relationships after experience that could not have been done within patients.
It is understood that there is a "me" and a "you" in an ordinary two-person relationship, and two people respond to each other.
In the deeper part of Eshel's discussion, the question is not just "how I treat you," but the patient's "I" itself has not been established in some disaster. So the treatment must begin with a more original loading field, so that the "I'm going through" thing is possible.
That's why she's pushing psychoanalysis to the point of existence. The treatment does not have an entire subject, then the subject understands the content.
Treatment is sometimes a place where the subject is not yet complete and where experience can take place.
But it must be made clear that this "one-size-fits-all" becomes a disaster if borders are lost. It's not a mystical combination, it's not a healer's all-powerful fantasy, it's not the possession of "I know you better than you", and it's not a reason for any ethical cross-border. It can only be established within a rigorous analytical framework: time, cost, location, silence, interpretation, moderation, responsibility, supervision and self-doubt cannot be eliminated.
Real
analytic oneness
Rather than abolishing two individuals, a third field of experience would be allowed to emerge for a short time, provided that they remained responsible.
FIELD NOTE
V. O of Bion: Not knowing, but becoming
VISUAL FIELD / Unhuman
Figure 03 |Bion O is not a subject of knowledge, but changes the emotional reality of observers. The measurement lines in the images are curved around the black centre and the hint analysts are not outside the reality.
Eshel was able to organize these hazard concepts to a great extent by late Bion.
Bion Distinction
K
and
O
。
K
It's known. It's what we know, understand, express.
O
It's the ultimate emotional reality. It's a reality that cannot be captured in its entirety, not completely targeted. Face it.
O
Analysts cannot simply know it, but must become it in some way, bear it and be changed by it.
That's also Eshel.
transformation in O
Meaning.
The change in general treatment is often understood as
transformation in K
The patient never knows, from confusion to understanding, from symptoms to meaning. But Eshel believes that the deepest changes are not changes in knowledge, but changes in the state of existence. A collapse that has never been experienced is not automatically transformed by being interpreted as an "early mother-child failure". It must be relived in some way in treatment.
In other words, instead of getting a correct theory of trauma, patients are finally in that traumatic reality in the co-existence of analysts and are not once again completely isolated, completely collapsed and completely disappeared.
That's why Eshel put Winnicott and Bion together. Winnicott gave her the problem of "unexperienced collapse": some disasters occurred without the presence of the subject. Bion, give it to her.
O
Other Organiser
Treatment cannot stop at the level of interpretation in the face of emotional realities that cannot be intellectualized. Together, they form the core proposition of Eshel: the deepest change in psychoanalysis is that unexperienced things become experience in a co-exist.
FIELD NOTE
Black holes, sleep, error and dreams: clinical mapping of the whole book
Eshel's book is not abstract. She has repeatedly demonstrated her concept through extreme clinical material.
The black hole patient is one of the most important images.
The black hole is not an explanatory gap for the patient, but the whole relationship space is dead. Breathe.
I don't know. Patients do not bring in sharp conflicts, but rather a ingrained sense of lifelessness. Analysts often suck into ineffectiveness if they simply explain; if they rush to "react", they repeat early environmental abandonment.
The key to treatment is the ability of analysts to stay alive in the gravity of a black hole, so that the silence is no longer simply devoured but becomes something that can be felt together.
The section where analysts fall asleep in therapy is also sharp. Often, an analyst falls asleep and is considered to be a failure, a problem of inversion, a professional failure. Eshel did not excuse the situation, but she offered a deeper understanding that in some cases the patient ' s separation, breakdown of consciousness and psychological gaps would enter the analyst ' s body.
Analysts are not simply absent from their sleep, but may be physically present in the treatment field in some form of undignified experience.
The point is not that "sleeping is good."
It is the ability of analysts to acknowledge, think and re-take the matter when they wake up, and to bring isolation into common ground.
The seriously wrong chapter pushes the theory to the ethical edge. Eshel is opposed to looking at the opposite as a sexual deviation or an Oedipus problem. What she saw was...
A survival organization: When the inner sense of death is unbearable, people may use extreme bodyization, ritualization, sexualization and repetition to resist mental breakdown.
Wrong is not the secret of happiness, but perhaps the last device to avoid extinction.
But here's the most important alarm in the book. Eshel, in dealing with the materials of the sex offender, admitted that he had entered the darkness of the patient but did not at the same time fully feel the pain of the victim. This recognition is crucial. It says...
withnessing
It's not natural. Together, they bring understanding and can create blind spots; deep darkness can reach the patient ' s survival and may also obscure the location of the injured.
As for the chapter on telepathic dreams, it should be read more carefully. Whether or not the reader accepts the term telepathic, what really deserves to be captured is its clinical structure: Some patients suffer from "physical presence, psychological absence" care settings in their early years. Mother was there, but not really there. So when analysts are emotionally distant from treatment, the patient's early disaster is activated, and the dream is like a cross-border search mechanism that makes sure: Are you still there? Did you leave again?
This is not a call to believe in supernaturality, but a reminder that for some patients the psychological absence of others is not a minor matter, but a repetition of the collapse of the world.
FIELD NOTE
7. Mercy is not good, it is suffering together.
The last half of the Eshel book is getting closer to a word: compassion.
The Chinese language is often translated as compassion, compassion and compassion. But here in Eshel, it's not a gentle moral sentiment, but it's closer to suffer-with
And suffer with others.
Mercy can keep high. One man stood on the shore, saw the people in the water drowning, and said, "I understand how painful you are". It may be sincere, but it is still safe. Eshel's reference to Compassion is even more dangerous: analysts must allow the patient's pain to hit themselves and to some extent enter the pain field.
It's not martyrdom, it's not self-sacrifice. True shared suffering does not require analysts to lose judgement. Rather, it requires analysts to retain analytical functions after suffering from them. Analysts can neither interpret in cold blood nor indulge in communal self-momentation. She must maintain an extremely difficult tension between being involved and being able to think.
Eshel's most moving place is where she doesn't write treatment as a bright victory. In many cases, treatment begins with the ability to enter death with the patient. Not to explain the death, not to tell the patient that you really want to live, or to prove that the relationship can be repaired.
It's the dead, unattended, unheard part of it, for the first time in another mind.
And that's why her book is so heavy. She's not writing about how psychotherapy makes people better, but about
When a person has not really existed for too long, how another person recovers from his existence in treatment.
FIELD NOTE
The real danger of this book
The stronger the theory, the more it needs to be read.
Eshel's theoretical danger is at least four.
First, the fantasy of integration.
analytic oneness
It is easy to be misread as "the fewer borders the more real". This destroys the most basic ethical conditions for psychoanalysis. The true integration is not a cross-border but a temporary field of experience within the borders.
Second, the therapist narcissistic. Analysts may imagine themselves as the only person who can enter the darkness of the patient and even turn his pain into proof of his "deepness". Once again
withnessing
It would be a co-resort of degradation to self-sacrifice.
Thirdly, real harm is overshadowed. In particular, in materials of violence, sexual abuse, crime and abuse, analysts ' understanding of the internal breakdown of the perpetrator cannot be a substitute for recognition of the suffering and real responsibility of the victim. Understanding is not a pardon, but together it is not the withdrawal of ethics.
Fourth, the evidence is loose. Eshel's language is sometimes close to mystical experience and can easily be read as "the deeper the impossible". That is precisely what requires vigilance. Clinical depth cannot eliminate probabilities and theoretical imaginations cannot cross de facto boundaries.
So the right way to read Eshel is not to worship her radicals, but to keep her cracks. She's really important, not because she gave us a perfect answer, but because she pushed psychoanalysis to a question that could not be answered easily: What is left of treatment when there is not enough explanation, meaning, relationship and knowledge?
FIELD NOTE
IX. Inspired by public writing: not too quickly to explain a person ' s darkness
The book is also inspired by extraclinical writing, especially how we write about trauma, intimacy, art and human breakdown.
Many public writings have an incentive to explain: why is this person doing this? What was his childhood? What is his desire? What is his pathological structure? Where is the source of his trauma? This interpretation is sometimes necessary, but it is also easy to go too fast. It turns pain into a case, human beings into structures, and unbearable experiences into the meaning that readers can consume.
Eshel reminds us that some darkness cannot be translated quickly. When the author faces pain, the first duty is not necessarily to name, but to maintain a presence that does not steal pain. It is not the completion of meaning for the party, not the packaging of the wound, but the retention in the language of the state of "it has not been completed".
This is important for art reviews, psychoanalytic writing and intimate writing. The true depth of the article is not to explain every pain in order, but to make the reader feel that there is a place that has not yet been fully absorbed by experience. Writing does not light the darkness into knowledge, but lays a place next to it where it can stay, breathe and continue to look.
It's also the fundamental difference between Eshel and common psycho-chick soup. And the chicken soup said: Be understood, and be healed, and come forth. Eshel said: "Some people are not unable to walk out, but have never actually entered the disaster that should have been experienced. The treatment did not rush him out, but finally someone could go in with him and not leave him there.
FIELD NOTE
Conclusion: someone's finally there, but not there.
VISUAL FIELD / Unhuman
Figure 04 is not about annexing each other, but about sharing a little dark centre at the border: someone's finally there, but they can't have it.
Ofra Eshel's "Analysis of the emergence of one" is really the ultimate proposition for psychoanalysis
What is left of psychoanalysis when a person's suffering is so deep that he has no language, no memory, no subject, no hope?
Her answer was not a more subtle explanation, nor a more gentle consolation, but rather a form of existence: whether analysts could be there.
There, it is not bystanders; it is not a substitute; it is not salvation; it is not possession; it is not dragging the patient into the healing system. It means that where the patient is least able to become himself, another person still exists in a sober, restricted and responsible manner, leaving that inexperienced collapse with the possibility of finally being shared.
This is it.
presencing
The clinical weight, yes.
withnessing
The moral weight, too.
analytic oneness
The most moving, dangerous place.
So perhaps the best title of the book is not "analysing together", but: someone's finally there.
But finally, it is important to add an equally important phrase: someone is there, not to be able to occupy it.
The deepest power of psychoanalyst is not to merge two people into one, nor to make analysts heroes in the darkness of patients. Its deepest force is the formation of a common ground within a strict border that is capable of disaster, where what has not happened with experience finally begins to happen.
It is perhaps at this moment that a man has his own past for the first time. Not because he finally learned about the past, but because he was finally experienced with him.
Read about
The aesthetics of the event: The Power of Change for Performing Erica Fisher-Lisht
Closeness doesn't belong to two people.
From a body to a tablet: How did the early Chinese ancestors talk to the living?
The drama is written on the sand.
P4 Inputs from No People
Theatrical Lacanian theory in François Regnault's Audience
The Grammar of Events: Actor-Generated Topology (AGT) and the birth of a postmodern subject (up)
Theatre and Psychoanalysis
P4 Inputs to dental poetry: Preliminary interpretation of dark conceptual theory
P4 Theater, 10-year archive (partial)
The heterogeneity of Deleuze and contemporary art.
The politics of the screams of Deleuze and contemporary art.
Deleuze and Guattari and contemporary art
P4 Theater built a university, a crumbling maze, a hard drive engraving life.
Self-inflicted project "Tangshan Youth - The Artist's Final Book"
p4 Third subject of theoretical analysis: a comprehensive exploration of Thomas Ogden's "third presence" theory