THE CONVERSATION IS THE OBJECT OF STUDY

 

Mindfulness in Psychoanalysis is a community-based practice that emphasizes the value of intimacy and conversation. Group gatherings and individual conversations are the backbone of the endeavor, With a nod to professional ethics, & confidentially, Mindfulness in Psychoanalysis offers a safe place to evaluate and reevaluate the thoughts & feelings involved in the decisions we make all our lives.

Psycho-Analysis is not an aspect of psychology. It is a more convenient fit with philosophy and literature and medicine.  It practices the art and science of conversation and intimacy. Words and the ever-popular, “turn-of-a-phrase,” metaphors and punctuation, free-association and resistances, and the unconscious, these are the tools for progressive conversation.

In modern psychoanalysis, we aim for authentic encounters, from which we can research the data– words and the collection of words used to describe and understand each other. The conversation is the object of study.

Our methods are not traditional diagnoses like would be found in the Diagnostic Manuals of Mental Disorders. Our aim is to discover what developmental sequences might be uncovered by listening for patterns in the free-association. The models discovered often are a metaphor for the resistance to better health that unconsciously prevents the patient from not being able to get out of his own way.

As a trained practitioner of psychoanalysis, my job is to facilitate conversation based on the contact that the client makes with me. Emotional communication is primarily a method of response to the patient that involves acknowledging the patients feeling and mood, but NOT confronting the defense; rather, mildly acknowledging the defense in a manner that might get the patient interested in the new information.

I want my patients to become very interested in themselves and to share with me what they are finding.  Judgment suspended, the negative energy escapes, leaving room for desires and satisfactions to take on a mental shape.  It is using the energy of the dysfunction to throw light upon awakenings that are stirred and stimulated in the deep, meta-language process used through psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis: breath & balance

 

Breath and balance are, as important as anything can be moving us toward self-guided health care, and ever evolving toward emotional maturity, a goal post that moves every now and then.  The mental gymnastics that the ego or conscious mind puts us through is counter-stabilized  with breath and balance. Many people change shift between Urgency and Calm as frequrntly as they change their socks. 

The instincts do not remain in the shadow of the object when the body is consulted for sensations. But that only works from a position of calmness. Getting to still point with mantra and breath is a fundamental aspect of getting to health. Of course, life also happens between sessions in any practice. It is the balance we learn before hand that steadies us in a moment of body-pain. Sometime our own body pain, or even the body pain of others can activate the lack of balance (mental, emotional & physical).

The return of the repressed and the return of the repetition compulsion activates and ignites fear which then takes our breath out of balance and everything feels wrong. We have shut down the light in the inner landscape because we are afraid of what we might see in ourselves that would reveal an aspect of ourseves that we rather not see.

With the crown of your head high, your shoulders relaxed and a deep breath filling all of your lungs, slowly let out more breath than you took in. Breath like you are conducting the figure 8. Do this a couple of times before continuing to read.

Why?  

Because a well analyzed life includes a connection with the body-unconscious where our ancestry, experiences and memories are stored like in frozen ground until some heat, some return of the repressed ignites the muscles, cells, and bones of sensation. Now our fear of doing the next right thing that we need to do for ourselves demands that we pay attention.  The psychic pain will employ the body in order to get the crisis across.  The needle on the gage reads low energy.  Going too much further without replenishing and we risk running out of gas only half way to our destination. We used to call this a Nervous Breakdown. I still do.

 

Below is an example of a meditation–it is constructed of non-mentated gestures and lines that I filled in with color and mood.  Well-being is a state of no effort because it takes as its starting point a moment of stillness. Therefore,  a better chance of leading to clarity than if we attempt to move through chaos….

Granted, when to comes to free-floating creativity some of us find it nearly unnecessary. but, creativity like compassion is not just a definition of who we are, not just a part of us we can ignore. It is invcolved in day to day decision making. The extent to which we feel it is necessary to be right will go to the furthers right position that a psyche can take–sabotage or suicide.

Given the gravity of clarity in determining what we want for ourselves and our loved ones, it is no wonder that folks find themselves with a therapist or a Sharman, people who are devoted to healing as an art as well as practicing out of a body of knowledge that builds in protection for the client. A protection that they simply do not have the desire or the capacity to apply to their own needs.

A characteristic exists, repressed to the deeper unconscious because knowing this part would require facing a condition that appears helpless to render a solutiuon that meets both the needs of the self and of its multitude of fragmented parts.

Helplessness is at the root of all trauma. And we get there by not paying attention to our body. Our only way back to the light is to look at all the parts we have been tripping over in the dark and begin to wonder, not about getting rid of these parts, but about rearranging them so that or mind and body can begin to search for balance.

Thoughts on Christopher Bollas’s, “Generational Consciousness”*

My grandmother left Canada with hope. The potato famine and poverty of Canadian farming pushed them south at the end of the 19th century. Her generation came here with opportunities to cultivate, and with full knowledge that she was leaving the previous generation behind, a loss taken to ensure survival. There must have been great strength garnered from the courage it took to migrate, leaving family, home, and all that is familiar behind for better prospects.

They arrived in America at a time of great innovation and rapid advances. There were no airplanes, no cars; electricity was a new technology when they got here in the late 1800s.

My parents, on the other hand, arrived in their 20’s and, saw the failure of that generation to be able to sustain the progress. They arrived at their generational subculture at a world of a Great Depression, soup lines, stock market crash, and a most devastating world war, culminating by the dropping of two atomic bombs.

My folks inherited the failed dreams of their immediate past. I was born in a time of prosperity. Though my family was poor, the world felt promising. We were the generation that could have its cake and eat it too. We inherited the hope of peace, but just as Boomer generation arrived in the world, our radical peace movement and hippie communes failed to sustain itself, and the cycle started over again, born into a generational failed dream. Generations are defining,  we shape the generation and the generation shapes us.  We bring individual goals and ambitions to the world but in addition to our individual view of our times, the times that we live in have a kind of sociological perspective that becomes a part of our psychic experience.

Bollas points out that it is not until young people are in their 20’s that they begin to identify with the cultural norms of their generation. At about this age, children begin to see themselves as belonging to the future generation. They are accomplishing a transition between where they came from and where they are going in the outside world and in the subjective world of the self.
Christopher Bollas says this:  “The sense of isolation can be severe, but solace may be found through recognizing that he or she is part of a mass sub-culture, a new adolescent subculture forming out of the abyss between generations.” When you are exit-ing your family of origin; and at the same time emerging into adulthood, the process is almost entirely an unconscious one.  The experience is as much about loss as it is about the forwarding movement.

The norms of the New Generation must be incorporated or the child becoming an adult fails the transition process and begins to doubt their ability to become capable participants in the New World Order.  When the anxiety to separate from one generation is difficult to tolerate, the individuation of the child suffers. This process then settles itself into consciousness as a lack of confidence and low self-esteem.

The massive difference between generations is not perceived except in retrospect. In hindsight we radically recognize the difference between the 1950s and the 1960s; yet, 1958 at the time did not look all that different from 1962.  Likewise, if you were born in the 60’s you have a memory of your parents generation and a sense of belonging and remembering first- hand the 70’s and the 80’s.

Christopher Bollas seems to be saying that there is a collective consciousness that assigns us to the generation that we belong too.  If a child assigns himself to the wrong (previous) generation because of fear of separation, success in the new generation becomes more difficult.

To this difficult and natural set of complexes, we can add the generation that you came from makes it difficult for the transition to run smoothly. A consciousness of differences between generational norms allows a parent to assist rather than hamper the transitional process.  On the other hand, jealousy of youth, or fear of separating in the parent can retard the child’s development. The child may fear reprisal and abandonment from the parent’s generation and then attempts to remain the child of the previous generation rather than an adult in his or her own generation.

The consequences of not moving forward, of not letting go, obscure the possibilities of the future. Security and a false sense of safety are sought to mitigate the effects of fear and loneliness.

Christopher Bollas has written a bold new sociological take on the psychoanalytic process of separation and individuation.  His essay goes on to describe, in beautifully written language, the multitude of facts, fictions, and symbols that enter the consciousness of a human during this delicate, but at times violent attempt to become a self.

From readings in, On Being a Character, 1992, “Generational Consciousness”.

poetry in motion

Leonard Cohen has a way of summing things up for me.  Not much more to be said about a life well lived, albeit, very heavy at times; and often, more mindless than mindful.

First there was the meditation involved with creating the template–totally mindless.  I was absorbed in the quality of the feel, as the pen and ink dug into the paper and at times seems to effortlessly glide over the page so that a single stroke felt like it went clear across the pad and down the center to the very bottom of the page.

Then there were those comments when what to write went blank.  It went blank for months.  Gibberish. Then one day the journal was open to this unfinished page and Cohen’s meditation looked like it would barely fit on the page but it did. I thought it might sit well as an edited image.  It comes together as text-and-image and combines a number of moods while fulfilling its mission to be published.

Serenity is the outcome, but it seems too far away when I am carrying a grand-piano down a mountain of theory.  I am sitting with a young girl, fair and beautiful as she crawls to the couch.  I almost do not want to let her go there; but I do, and she emerges walking, maybe a half-inch taller than when she arrived; but how much growth can we really expect in an hour.  I hope she waters a few of the seeds awakened while we sat by the sea, chatting and untangling backlashes from yesterday’s fishing lines.  The wind seems to blow westerly in every season, and to every season we attach a new moment adding them up with an abacus left dusty besides the slide-rule, made of wood and brass. But here, I am the instrument of research.

Her life opened like a book on our laps.  I don’t count the way I use to. I don’t count on things and other objects–no, I think on myself now. And, I  thank myself graciously for the compassionate care that I often find capable of giving to myself.

I settle into that place of relative silence and slowly she enters, tentative at first, willing, ambivalent and scared.  But, she is strong and she does not want to let on that she is so vulnerable that she does not think she can take one more step.  Exhaustion and fear and insomnia and disease and helplessness and hopelessness will devour her if she takes even one more step toward life.  The piano is too heavy to carry.

She is addicted to the tune, that is how I know she will come back.

memories and losses

Canada has been much on my mind lately—i am craving a trip to my homeland

writing with light

Scenes of people in canoes rushing down a river remind me of the Hudson Bay Trappers…I love the memories of Canada.  I love the delicious French Canadian foods and the moods and the wonderful Catholicism which the ancestors imparted to me in the early years of my life.  I was a 2nd generation Canadian boy and at the end of my youth, my culture that I had embraced and loved had died in America.  I felt abandoned by my own life.  As I look at the canoe piloting down a cold river in northern Canada, I remember my good grandmother and her stories of life in the Laurentian Mountains in a small village.  The bears would come out of the great north woods.  The bears would rampage a village and they would have to send troops out into the woods to kill the bear because once they became use to…

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Q & A on borderline issue

Albert, your post today really resonates with me and puts something into words that I have been seaching for – that is, seeing the person as caught in the narcissistic phase of development, which comes from an inability to understand their pre-verbal drives, and who sees conflicts as ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’, and so is looking outside of itself for answers, because he can not decipher the messages that are coming to him internally. You say that the messages that come internally are experienced as foreign and therefore the tendency is to act on the outside world rather than on the internal conflict that is perpetual. Is this due to the lack of holding, and psychological containing as an infant by the care-giver, who could not help the infant decipher the ‘inside’ messages and so they remain ‘foreign and inaccessible?

How do you help with this developmental/pre-verbal conflict that has not had resolution? I ask this because I recognise this in myself, the seeking of approval from others, the defining of myself through my connection or communication with others, and now , slowly, through analysis and art-making, starting to find the core ‘me’ inside myself, that grounds me in my being, rather than through being mirrorred by others.

The Problem with our problem is that we think we should not have problems.

The Problem with our problem is that we think we should not have problems….other than that I think most of us do fine with our problems.

We awaken each day with one of two goals in mind–I am here to make it through this day and I am here on a mission to find and sustain joy to the best of my ability.  I will run into problems that will attempt to de-rail me and I will run into problems that do de-rail me; but I want to remain deliberate about my belief that joy is in me waiting to be employed by my decisions to aim for well-being.

Or, we awaken a fuck’en miserable mess, put the covers back over our heads and lament that it is cold, it is too early, it is dark or what ever the lamentation of the day happens to be.  We think we are obligated to do something that we hate and we are victimized by our inability to console ourselves and we proceed to be unhappy (out-loud) and hope that we can snag at least one somebody to drag into the gutter with us.  Misery does love company.

That about sums up the two positions on waking up.  Now, let’s examine awakening for a moment.

Hoping that you as reader are interested in the former, I want to spell out a few guide-posts for you to keep in mind while you begin your meanderings through the day.  First, there are only two states that you need to be aware of:  1)  I feel good, and 2)  I feel awful.  Each of these are paradigms that exist in the mind and are there fully formed waiting to be employed.  If you are aware that you are in a negative state, say anywhere from 0 to 90 on an applause meter, you must deliberately decide that you want to bring that number up somewhere between 90 and 180 on the applause meter.  The closer you get to 180 degrees the more likely you will be chosen as Queen for a Day.

The glimpse that we have a positive state within, ready made and ready for us to use, is the perception that is necessary to shift from under-the-covers to into-the-light-of-day.  All you need to know is that you want out of the negative state and some aspect of the positive side of life will appear.  I have a friend who calls these apparitions angels.  But, regardless of what we call them, we recognize it by its benign, comfortable and casual nature.  In this state nothing is right or wrong, perceptions are about effectiveness not judgement.

So, we need awareness–subjective awareness.  Next, we need a glimpse of the better feeling state, and after that we need to make a deliberate decision that that positive state is the state that we want to be in.  It is the state from which we want to watch our problems develop, emerge, and fade.  Problems follow the course of life, they are a seeds that grows, have a life, flowers and begins to wither and eventually decay.  Problems are no better at life or no worst at life than we are.  Problems have a life of their own and we need to respect that problems will arrive and depart like the tides, and the morning sun.  Problems come and go they have a life cycle. There is nothing unusual or abnormal about a problem.

Do not be afraid of a problem, its purpose is to educate you about your character and to give you clues about the nature of your drives.  So, give yourselves a loud round of applause and watch that meeter climb and surpass even your most unexpected dreams.

The choice that is ours to make has to do with nudging the negative numbers below 90 degrees into the positive numbers on the other side of the radius. We get connected with our more perfect self by deliberately wanting to be rid of what ever the misery is.  We get connected by being persistent in our yearnings and in believing that allowing ourselves to let in the good will eventually over-power and eradicate the negative. We know there is a positive state in the mind someplace.  You have to find it.  It shows itself as a smile over a thought, or a scent that has you recalling a day in the third grade, or perhaps you hear a song that recalls a man you loved or a pet you lost.  The positive state is not loud or even jubilant; it is a murmur, a whisper, a breeze.  It can be anything as long as it reminds you of something pleasant.

Announcement of resumed services

Mindfulness in Psychoanalysis will resume hours in Providence, RI at the 16 Trenton Street office.  If you have not already contacted me to schedule an appointment please do so before Sunday of this week.  

Telephone Consultations are still available if that is the most convenient–although, I would like to see everyone in person who I have not seen in the last seven weeks.

 

All appointments will be in Providence this first week back.  Appointments in Charlestown will resume when I am fairly certain that the road is passable and the drive way is cleared of ruts of ice.

Both the Tuesday and the Wednesday groups will meet as scheduled.  I would appreciate a count of who is returning this semester.  We will accomplish 13 weeks of group between February 25th and June 20th.  

If you know anyone who would enjoy or gain help from a group please have them contact me as soon as possible…

Be Mindful, As Ever,

 

Dr. Dussault

January 2014–multi-media images

These images were completed while living in St. Augustine.  I spent the month practicing with acrylic paints.  The original images are primitive, bold and in many cases overly saturated.  Much of the coloring on the original is too bright.  The subsequent process of importing the image to photo shop and manipulating and simplifying the boundaries between the colors and the shapes.

 

 

 

The Spirit of Willie….

The Spirit of Willie….

“Hey Bernie, I’m getting hungry.”  “We’ll eat.”

So, I was setting up my computer for a twenty minute session of writing and I Heard, “Willie…”  So I looked up from what I was doing to see what Willie was doing.”  At that moment I recognized that Bernie must have said, ‘we will eat,” but I heard him calling out for our cherished little Silky Terror who died of a long happy life this past year.

This split second of a non-essential event gave me an idea.  Because, how I responded to Bernie was to say, “The Spirit of Willie must be around here because I thought I just saw him.”  What on earth do I mean by that and where inside of me did that nearly autonomic response come from.  I don’t believe in spirits.  I don’t wrestle with extra-terrestial holograms.  “yet, I was sure of what I mean without really knowing “in-english” what I meant.

I am going to use this kick-off story above to engage a dialogue, a conversation with and between spirits that I know first hand with my mind and with my heart,  to be true spirits.

Back in 1913 about the time that Carl Jung was about to break-up with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung began a new journal that was not to be published until nearly fifty years after his death.  It was a large, red leather bound book in which he recorded his most intense and most internal musings, along with pictures and paintings that might for the first time in centuries rival the illuminates.

It has become know as, The Red Book.  His heirs were protecting the name of the good doctor.  Having convinced themselves that these were ramblings of a psychotic, de-compensating old man, they locked the book in a safe and only in 2010 was the book finally transcribed and published–psychotic ramblings and all.

I am told that if there is a theme to this red book it is the rebirth of God in every soul.

He had my attention.  For the last six years since having left the modern psychoanalytic institute in Brookline, Ma, I have been researching the inter-disciplinary connections that psychoanalysis has with the rest of the world.  In many ways the psychoanalytic movement is somewhat of a liberal, philosophical science, that has spent as much time proving to itself that it is a science as it has spent advancing that science.

Having said that, the best education, bar none that I ever participated in has come directly and indirectly from the unique and sophisticated techniques that facilitate, like nothing else that I know, the art and science of learning how to be with a patient.

Continuing the theme of the divided mind that has occupied most of the essays thus far, I would like to have us look at what Carl Jung had to say about the idea of a divided spirit.  Early on in the new red book Jung refers to a “spirit that rules the depths of everything contemporary.” And shortly thereafter he refers to, “a spirit of the depth from the time immemorial.”

Jung plays with these two spirits giving them voices. As I read his words my rendition of this calculates well with what I have been referring to as the ego (the CEO, the self, my first name); and the second spirit aligns well with what I have been calling the deeper instincts.  I add this here because the use of the word, “ego” really need to be defined each time it is used.  It is an amorphous word that carries almost as many definitions as there are writers who use it.  It is best to use the German idea (self) as it is the most generic and the closest to the classical use of the word. (1)

The following is an example of a dialogue I might be having with myself. I am using it to illustrate the commons sense value of our subjective understanding.  How do we interpret the symbols of our communications with ourselves?  Can this view give us a practical look at the simplicity of becoming aware of the duality of our nature?  Jung begins this way: “God is a symbol of libido; that is, the God image vs. the metaphysical existence of God.”

The ego speaks in this way–this and this alone is who you are.  This, the corporal you, the linguistic you, this who speaks of good and evil, and right and wrong; this is you.  Then in a low, calm whispering voice this spirit came to my inner ear and spoke thus:  You are a mirror of antiquity, you are an image that reflects the mysteries of light and darkness, you are humanity, you are the outer limits of knowledge.  You are The Creator of your world.

Well, you can imagine that I was more than surprised after thinking that I saw the ghost of Willie to be confronted with these two internal views of myself was disconcerting.  But the magnitude and the grandiosity of it all appealed to my well honed narcissism.  Like the true addict that I am, I immediately wanted more.  I was becoming tantalized not only by a book, but but how quickly that book resonated with my internal understanding of my eternally conflicted mind.  Here was an opportunity to ask myself, “just what kind of opportunity is this, what am I to be gaining by entering the spirit world.  After all, I am the one who perpetually claims that it does not exist, so humor yourself, Al, go for it, you love the challenge of newness.  You love the tenderness of fresh warm flesh and the emerging of enthusiasm, if not joy–allow yourself to enter this world that does not exist.

(1)     “Ego” is a Latin and Greek (ἑγώ) word meaning “I“, often used in English to mean the “self”, “identity” or other related concepts. Ego, one of the three constructs in Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche;  Ego (religion), as defined in various religions in relationship to self, soul etc.