The other psychoanalytical theorist I’m drawn to is Hans Loewald. I came across his work through the Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein, instantly being captivated by Loewald’s notion of turning ghosts into ancestors. From Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein pg 200-201:
The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote of transforming the ghosts that haunt patients into ancestors, through tasting what he called the “blood of recognition” in the relationship with the therapist. He asserted that the ghosts must be led out of the unconscious, reawakened through the intensity of the therapeutic relationship, and then laid to rest, relegated to history, thus allowing the person more flexibility and intensity in present relations.
I just read a lovely overview of Loewald’s thought by Stephen Mitchell in Psychoanalysis at Its Limits. He stresses the Heideggerian roots of Loewald’s thought, suggesting that this apparent continuity with classical Freudian theory belies a radical development of the core categories. At its root is a developmental account of the subject which distinguishes between a “developmental era when language, as sound, is embedded in a global, dense, undifferentiated experience, and a later era, when the semantic features of language have taken precedence over its sensual, affective features” (pg 179). Individuation expresses itself through the relationship which emerges towards this “original ‘primordial density’ in which feelings, perceptions, others, self are all parts of a seamless unity” (pg 178). It’s necessary to abstract from this primary experience in order to act meaningfully within the world but too much distance from this ‘affective density’ leads to a “functionally competent but affectively dead and empty life” (pg 180). It’s a distinction which roughly maps onto the Lacanian categories of the psychotic and the neurotic respectively.
The possibility for resonance exists in the linkage between the two. Loewald was concerned with the possibility of “deadening insulation from the unconscious where human life and language are no longer vibrant and warmed by its fire” (quoted on pg 181). This leads to “an adult reality that has been wholly separated from infantile fantasy” existing in “a desiccated, meaningless, passionless world” (pg 194). This conceives of language as the “life-enriching link between past and present, body and world, fantasy and reality” (pg 181). Following Heidegger Loewald sees language in terms of what Taylor calls world-disclosure, with the capacity to “generate and link domains of experience” (pg 185). The quality of this link is the “difference between a present that is haunted by the past and a present that is enriched by the past” (pg 194).
For Loewald we need “links to the affective density of the unconscious, without which ‘human life becomes sterile and an empty shell’” (pg 195). He conceives of transference as a resource for change in this respect, rather than an obstacle to analysis; in transference there is a “revitalization, a relinking of the past and the present, fantasy and reality, primary process and secondary process” (pg 195). To talk of ghosts becoming ancestors isn’t just a matter of making peace with the past, it’s working with the power of the past to enrich the present, as Mitchell quotes Loewald on pg 194:
In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects.
Such a ghost is, as Mitchell describes it, “a piece of the past filled with passionate intensity, that was split off, through repression, from her present experience” (pg 197). Repression for Loewald is a failure of this link, a rigidity in differentiation which collapses the space in which resonance is possible. It is when the ghosts “are allowed to taste blood”, as he puts it, that they are let lose in a way which brings them into the present, at which point they can become ancestors who support the resonance which the reality of the present situation can give rise to. Ghosts haunt us, ancestors make us who we are.
The next stage of this project is finding a comparison between Loewald’s conception of healing and Lacan’s notion of traversing the fantasy. (Increasingly trying to expunge the idea of doing a second PhD from my mind, as I realise that the project taking shape requires learning far more expansive than I can meaningfully teach myself)
Mark Carrigan 