Stephen van Beek MA (Tripos), CMC, DCTP, Member CAPT

Projectiles

Time and space, time and space...we are living in a new era in which almost all of us accept without questioning the concept that time and space are one and the same thing, merely aspects of each other in an ever-expanding physical universe of which we know very little except awe and wonder.

The same seems to be true of ourselves, for don't we constantly catch ourselves noticing that our natures and being appear to shift, mutate and change from instant to instant, ceaselessly adapting and mutating while some part of us manages somehow to remain the same, like the experienced pilot of an ultrasonic aircraft or spaceship teetering on the edge of air and space?

It's certainly no new thought that humans are psychic amphibians, caught between body and mind, earth and air, pulled by the tides of our unconscious seas, never entirely certain of who we are, or what we are to be doing with or for this thing we roughly describe as 'myself'.

So what is to be done about our strange multi-part natures, if indeed we can even use the word 'nature' to describe our existences; for 'nature' suggests that we do not find ourselves in a somewhat fragmented state most of the time.

The very wise have tried for centuries to provide an answer to this puzzle, so my words here are absurdly pretentious as self-appointed spokesman for their far greater, far more sublime, thoughts. Old Heraclitus spoke of the essence of being human as the burden of being 'the creature that differs from its own self or being'. About a century later Socrates, no doubt the most nakedly honest thinker of whom record survives, told us that we were not real but merely the slaves of the flickering images that play before us in the illusory caverns of the mind, where we may pass a lifetime imagining we see the sun, though it's only a reflected pale shadow of reality that haunts us.

While men like Burton could in Shakespeare’s age casually remark that melancholia drives all of us into fits of depression that may with good fortune result in a creative madness, and optimistically opine that folly is our natural lot, I have never found myself wholly able to accept this as a final status for the restless and enquiring mind. Or should I see myself as odd and neurotic because much of my time I seek a truth I do not yet possess? Where is the line between genuine authenticity and falsifying denial?

We hurtle through a vast unchartable space for a few short years, it seems, and as that great Sufi sage Omar Khayyam put it, we neither can know our ultimate origin or our final destination. Meantime, in the short seventy or eighty years in which our corporeal existence runs its course, some of us appear gripped by a need to establish a meaning for our own existence that transcends the ordinary limitations of the day to day.

Time and space, time and space...

It is not only the old ones who had wisdom. In a later era geniuses of the spirit like Freud at the start of this last century posited that each of us is locked into the same elemental struggle between life and death, optimism and despair that Zoroaster responded to thousands of years ago. As Freud viewed it, our libidinal energies are capable of moving from a mere physical expression of that thing called 'love' into more and more rarefied and culturally satisfying levels of conscious communication with self and the Other. It's as if Freud was a Buddhist despite himself, for he subscribed to the concept that life is, at bottom, a series of unavoidable losses that, when borne, make us into women and men mightier - and less power-driven - than our primitive need-oriented selves.

Heidegger's avowedly non-psychological contribution to our collective wisdom, first expressed in his defining work Being and Time (1927), cannot be ignored. He claimed he knew nothing of Freud's work and his denial of the concept of the Unconscious has caused skepticism among those who reject Heidegger's view that ultimately we can know who we are, that we are not fated to live with the most significant aspects of ourselves endlessly out of awareness. He was rightly termed by Hannah Arendt the 'secret king of thought' for his insights have inspired the psychology, sociology, ecology and political science of the last century, not to mention subsequent philosophers who have felt his shadow over them.

His influence on the upper echelons of the psychoanalytic hierarchy through such leaders as Heinz Loewald and Jacques Lacan has intensified the awareness of the innate mysteriousness of the human dilemma and our marvellous and unfathomable responses to our life situation as 'ontologically-conditioned' subjective beings in a world foreign to our inner natures.

In essence, as I see it, Heidegger regards the essence of the human dilemma as the challenge of taking up the task of psychic self-creation while recognizing that death is our inevitable end. We are fated to risk the uncertainty that arises when we make the 'project of the self' a true throwing-forward of the dice of our fate into a future we cannot control.

We must become psychic projectiles launched by our desire to have a being authentic to us, while knowing that much of the time we will lapse into confusion, uncertainty,doubt, conformity, fear and inauthenticity. Launching ourselves, with all our admitted weaknesses, into the unknown of time and space to attempt ourselves requires true courage at the core.

What is so interesting about Heidegger is his steadfast refusal to fall in line with the currency of German philosophy in his time, a philosophy welded to the denial of human facticity, of human ordinariness, of the raw fact that none of us is master of his fate, and that (in Freudian terms) our egos and grandiose narcissistic attachments are simply denials of how vulnerable and small we are in a weltering world lost in a universe over which we have as little control as we do over the local weather.

It is obvious (is it not?) that when we undertake to be a self as much as we can, knowing fully that much of the time we are doomed to fall prey to the conformist demands of others, and in the knowledge that every human influences with a steady and largely malign pressure the power of all other humans to achieve the range of individual expression which is the goal to which we all strive, a huge amount of personal courage is required.

Freedom may be our birthright, for we are told this daily by the various cultural myths that encompass us, but in therapy we begin to notice how little freedom we currently enjoy and utilize. In therapy we can, albeit gradually, begin to loosen our socially and personally acquired fetters, and to grant ourselves permission to be living projectiles, thus risking our selves - at least, what we imagine to be ‘ourselves’ - in the act of becoming an authentic Self.

It was Heidegger who gave the word 'project' its core modern meaning; a project is something thrown towards a projectile. If I decide to go to the gym and get the strength needed to do five hundred push-ups, I need only commit to eighteen months of personal self-torture, disciplining my body to the wear and tear and building physical fibre. If I decide I cannot live longer without being the person I somehow know I am intended to be (or may possibly become) my physical pain is less, but the psychic demand is all the greater because not physical but mental fibres must submit to a course of re-learning and painful discipline. Burton's encouraging laughter is an antidote to the gloom that some see in Heidegger; if we are human, we are destined to failing our greatest ambitions, yet try we must.

When I read Heidegger, and try to live along the challenging line of personal authenticity, I remind myself that true analysis is not the irritating questioning of every word I utter, of every action I take, but rather the loosening of the hawsers that tie up an old Greek trireme to the shore against the pull and tug of the freshening wind. When the ropes are untied and 'analysed' the ship runs free. And so it is with the Self...a blessing following the greatest efforts of becoming...

Time and space, time and space. What must we do with the time we have, and the space to do it in? The great work or magnum opus of the alchemical tradition of becoming a Self is the work of our own particular and limited time and space, of our own life-era.

In doing it we make a time and space nobody else can give to us, and may perhaps achieve an existence which proves a local miracle, an enduring subjective anomaly.

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