03.18.07
Wilson, M. (2006) Nothing could be further from the truth
6/13/06
Mitchell Wilson, in his article entitled “Nothing could be further from the truth”: The role of lack in the analytic process (JAPA 54/2, 2006), examines the paradox that falling short, getting over-involved, making mistakes often furthers analytic work. Wilson correctly notes that much analytic work is characterized by presence, by the offering of interpretations and new objects. Other analytic work is characterized by lack, loss or absence. To try to grasp something is to lose it. At times, this is the experience of confusion, of not knowing. To be obsessively filled up is to avoid surprise and openness. To the Western person, nothingness is associated with terrifying undifferentiatedness, Satre’s nausea or Bion’s beta elements and psychosis.
I think Wilson has trouble with the concept of nothingness. He uses it mostly in the sense of the presence and absence of objects. He is saying, correctly, that we cannot privilege presence without considering and giving equal weight to its opposite. Both are meaningful experiences. However, he hints at another meaning of nothingness. It is that all linguistic concepts, all words are necessarily incomplete, never fully capture experience. For example: “the analyst knows that his or her knowledge is incomplete…this knowledge and the words to formulate it are lacking” (p. 417). This would be the origin of the Lacanian idea that transference closes up the unconscious. The very use of words causes a kind of lack, a cutting off of experience.
I think we can clarify the meaning of nothingness by examining the Buddhist conception of nothing. Wilson’s first meaning of nothingness, that of the dichotomy between presence and absence, are both attributes of being. Both are important in everyday experience and neither should be privileged over the other. Wilson’s second meaning, that of a critique of language itself, is of much more interest to the Buddhist. In this sense, nothing (the Chinese wu or the Japanese mu) can take on two related meanings. Words and other linguistic concepts are ultimately empty in terms of a full experience of reality. Language is bound by its own constructs and internal rules and cannot provide a true and necessary relationship to nonlinguistic reality. All distinctions in language are arbitrary concepts that actually obstruct what is experienced. There is an unbridgeable gap between the signifier and the signified. In this sense, every assertion, every interpretation both reveals and conceals. We cannot do without words, they exist as practical instruments for everyday use. Yet words rigidify and obstruct the grasping of new and surprising meanings.
The second meaning of nothing comes from the Chinese Tao, meaning way or path. It refers to the undifferentiated source of all things. All reality is grounded in something more primordial that either Being or Non-being, form or no form. Nothingness is identified with absolute being. All being emerges out of non-being, something timeless and unchanging. Non-being, here, is not the negation of being but a third term, a kind of undifferentiated matrix. I would think of Loewald or Winnicott here.
The Zen equivalent of mu is no-thought (Japanese munen). This is not an unconscious state or a negative state. It is not passive as it requires both an active effort to break from thinking, from intellectualization, from any intent, and a full participation in the present. One learns to empty oneself, eliminate all conscious strivings and become spontaneous and responsive to the flow of events. Not to interfere with patterns of change but to contemplate them and be harmonious with them. Only in breaking from linguistic restraints and in the search for a deeper reality can we really achieve the openness and surprise that Wilson wants to find. I believe that the way to achieve these goals is not, ultimately to analyze presence and absence, but for the analyst to cultivate the stance of no-mind. We then can search for the experiences that hide behind works and are concealed by words.
I will close with a poem by Bashō
Ah, the stillness!
Penetrating into the rocks
A cicada’s chirp
Robert White