Cosmic Game ER and Depth Psychology 1

Depth Psychology’s Preoccupations and Praxis

Chapelle (1993) in his book Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis discusses at length how the eternal return appears in psychoanalysis. Chapelle writes that while Nietzsche reintroduces the forgotten spirit of the eternal return, Freud’s psychoanalysis of transference provides concrete experiences of the eternal return. The two taken together are a positive feedback loop and enrich each other. “Freud gives Nietzsche concrete implementation, while Nietzsche gives Freud broader philosophic significance” (p. 7). Chapelle discusses the concrete experience of the eternal return in everyday life: Freud’s repetition compulsion, with its metaphorical basis in the Fort-Da game, along with its presence in transference; uncanny experiences and related ideas that participate in uncanniness, such as the double developed by Rank, Jung’s concept of synchronicity, Hillman’s notion of Hades and Archetypal Psychology in general. We will explore these briefly and add to them since Chapelle does not include other work by Rank, Jung, and Grof, nor does he discuss depth psychology’s general fascination with origins and myth. So let us begin with origins and myth.

Importance of Origins

Depth psychology recognizes the importance of going back to origins, to childhood, to word origins, and to the enduring archetypal images found in the myths around the world. Depth psychology had its beginnings in Freud’s recognition “I am Oedipus” (Downing, 2002, lecture). Freud analyzed himself after the death of his father and formulated the idea of the Oedipus complex and the Oedipal stage through which all children pass according to Freud. Chapelle (1993) notes: “Freud recognized in seemingly personal experiences of everyday life universal and timeless human themes . . . seeing the analogies suggested is also beginning to see the poetic basis of mind” (p. 6). This poetic basis of mind is what Flournoy (1900/1994) called the ludic function of the unconscious. Chapelle points out that Zarathustra was Nietzsche’s myth of the eternal return:

At the beginning, Nietzsche and Zarathustra are faced with the sphinx of eternal return. At the end they attempt to appropriate the vision and the riddle. This transformative process is the cornerstone of Nietzschean thought. Its ambition is the creation of a myth to live by that is inspired by eternal return. To think eternal return thus comes to mean to think transformation. (p. 38)

In Myth and Reality, Eliade (1963) explains that to cure the work of time, we must go back, through the reiteration of the cosmic myth, to the chaos of the beginnings, because this is the place out of which everything originally emerged and thus from where new things can come. Prigogine’s far from equilibrium point in chaos theory mirrors this idea. We can free ourselves from time, i.e., our history, by recollection of these events. By recovering the past, in the case of Freudian analysis, the traumatic content of the original traumatic experience can be relived and thus we can in some way lessen the trauma's effect in the present or master it. Archaic man had similar notions. Freud also thought that there was a blissful quality to origins, which to him was the paradisal time before weening (Rank and Grof would go back further to the womb). The techniques used by archaic man were similar to initiation and the hero’s journey, a symbolic “regressus ad utero” (Eliade, 1963). In both, a new mode of being was the result of a return to the origins. As we will see later, Grof’s work supports and reflects this idea.

Origins are important in another way, which the idea of neoteny reveals. Neoteny is a biological term that refers to the retaining juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Montagu (1983) has written extensively on the subject of neoteny, including both the physical characteristics and behaviors. Shulman (1997) in Living at the Edges of Chaos refers to this idea of neoteny, without using the term neoteny, as a characteristic of pedomorphic dynamics. Swimme (1995) following on Brown’s work (2002, 2003) discusses humanity as a neoteneous species. According to Swimme, neoteny is fundamental to our humanity and not surprisingly, play is one of the most important neoteneous qualities. Others neotenous qualities are: the need for love, for friendship, the need to know, a sense of humor, joyfulness, explorativeness, flexibility and openness, along with song, dance, laughter and tears. Neoteny, reveals how powerful our playful origins are, and the importance that evolution puts on play. [Neoteny is discussed at length in the "Kaleidoscope of Culture" section in the "Ongoing Themes" part of the "Mary Poppins" chapter, and in the "Cherishing of Childhood" excursion "Disneyland's Extra Extra Excursions" chapter.]

With Jung and Hillman, we return to the origins, to in illo tempore, through the archetypes themselves, or rather the archetypal images. Depth psychology is thus in essence the psychology of the eternal return, which perhaps explains why the death-rebirth pattern shows up everywhere, and why play is a therapeutic modality in almost all depth psychology schools. One major branch of depth psychology is Archetypal Psychology, which is a refining, deepening and broadening of Jung’s work. James Hillman, originator of Archetypal Psychology argues that the main task of Archetypal Psychology is to “remythologize consciousness—a sacred, psychopompic adventure which goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythical and metaphorical patterns" (Hillman, 1992a, p. 3). In Archetypal Psychology, soul is viewed as image, which Hillman "riffed off" from Jung’s notion that psyche is image. Rank shared this opinion and suggested that there is a “close relation between double, shadow, soul, and image” (Chapelle, 1993, p. 225). According to Hillman, images are the basis of concrete experience, and everyday concrete experiences are grounded in an autonomous and polymorphous imagination. Chapelle notes:

A psychology based on archetypal images, amounts to a psychology based on eternal return. It views all concrete experiences of everyday life as enactments of recurring universal and timeless themes which are best portrayed as archetypal images. As in the cosmology of eternal return the intelligibility and value of all events and experiences are associated with their eternal recurrence . . . . Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a means to fulfill the promise of redemption that Nietzsche made in his thought of eternal return. (p. 9)

Archetypal Psychology goes beyond the consulting room, into the world, so we can see the eternal return not only in repetition compulsion, but everywhere. As we will see later with Grof’s work, we can experience the eternal return through non-ordinary states of consciousness, using modalities such as holotropic breathwork. As they said in the musical Company “it's much better living it than looking at it!” (Prince, 1970). But we are getting ahead of ourselves, let us go back and see where all of this repeating began, since we have already firmly grounded ourselves in myth.

You Can Learn a lot From a Game—The Ooh and Ahh Behind Fort-Da!

Chapelle (1993) begins by discussing the repetition compulsion as a concrete example of the eternal return. Chapelle's discussion of Freud’s discovery of the repetition compulsion, while contemplating his grandson’s game of Fort-Da, is informative. Freud said that this game by his grandson using a reel on a thread was an attempt to deal with separation from his departing mother by controlling the situation through play, through the imaginative repetition of the experience, using a toy as a “stand in,” who substitutes for the mother. This game suggests that "life is symbolic even prior to the creation of symbols proper" in young child’s play this is already happening. In this game, there is the beginnings of ritual and ceremony, and “objects that place the child in role of high priest performing an exacting ceremony, repeating the same performance again and again” (p. 114). So, it seems that there is a lot more going on in this game, no wonder the child was oohhing and ahhhing:

Child’s play is an activity of pretence, of make-believe…treating his world metaphorically on the basis of the allusions that appear to be suggested by its depth dimensions. The allusions to a meaning that goes beyond the reel’s utility function as inviting suggestions, as promises of possibilities to be lived out, as luring gestures in the direction of worlds of fantasy. The boy playing Fort-Da and all children playing make believe games, take the world up on its promised possibilities. They are carried into realms of meaning through allusion. (p. 124)

In interpreting this game, Freud, like Huizinga (1944/1955) and Winnicott (1999) after him realized that symbolic pleay leads to culture. Before leaving childhood games behind, it is worth remembering that Jung during his conflict with the unconscious instinctively went back to childhood games. Arrien (1993) remarks:

As a result of this experience Jung discovered that our life mythos, or dream may very well be held in those childhood activities that we were drawn to do by ourselves, for hours. Often he would have his clients go back to the ages between four and twelve to remember those timeless solitary activities (p, 91).

For my first research project at Pacifica, I decided to follow Jung’s lead, an imitatio Jungi, as it were, and play with things from my childhood: I made my dragon out of childhood materials and used a favorite childhood song, after using the magic of Google on the Internet and look at where I ended up! The rest of my first semester's papers explored other childhood favorites: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Rankin and Bass, 1964) and Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964).

As If . . . It's not Just a Valley Girl Expression.

Chapelle (1993) says that the compulsion to repeat imaginatively, as in the Fort-Da game, is a compulsion to repeat by means of a likeness, or a metaphor and that this metaphorical as if existence is at the basis of human existence. Robert Romanyshyn (2001), has written extensively on the metaphorical nature of psychological life in his book Mirror and Metaphor Reflections on Psychological Life. Chapelle referring to Romanyshyn's work notes:

Freud’s grandson, and by extension all individuals under the spell of the compulsion to repeat, are engaged in an activity of metaphoric pretense in which identities are established where none exist. Thus the compulsion to repeat is at the same time a compulsion into metaphor. It is a compulsion into what Robert Romanyshyn . . . considers the life of metaphor and the metaphoric nature of psychological-cultural life. What Freud calls “instinctual renunciation” . . . is a renunciation of concreteness and literal-mindedness for the sake of entry into metaphorical existence. The means to accomplish this renunciation and this entry is compulsive psychological iteratio . . . .

It [The Fort-Da game] suggests that, as Romanyshyn puts it even though he does not discuss the Fort-Da game, that reality is a manner of reflection and indirection . . . . Psychological reality, then is a matter not of physical spatiality but metaphorical reflection. For an object to gain psychological reality it needs other objects that can reflect it and that it can reflect. (p. 115)

This metaphoric compulsion to repeat leads Chapelle to suggest “that human existence takes place under the rule of metaphor. Man is compelled to be the metaphorical animal—Homo metaphoricus.” Chapelle suggests that both Nietzsche and Freud would agree that man cannot escape the compulsion to live in an as if mode. “Nietzsche suggests that it is simply impossible for man to live otherwise. Freud suggests that man is propelled into metaphoric as if pretense as soon as he abandons animal life through renunciation of instinctual satisfaction by instinctual means” (p. 117). Huizinga (1944/1955), D. L. Miller (1970), and Hillman (1983b), also all stress the importance of as if, as we have previously seen and shall see.

Transferring to Transference

The repetition compulsion is expressed in the transference, where the client repeats behavior patterns with his therapist that occur in other areas of his life, usually resulting from his parental relationships. The transference is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory, which is also the “alpha and omega of its praxis” (Chapelle, 1993, p. 102). Chapelle points out that the repetition compulsion comes into the transference through the mechanism of projection. So, now we have a big clue why analysis became interminable; Nietzsche’s concretely based eternal return is at the bottom of it, like an anchor weighing one down, or Sisyphus endlessly rolling his boulder. Freud calls the compulsion to repeat the “compulsion of destiny” and connects this compulsion with psychological fate. Freud speaks of internal necessity and refers explicitly to Ananke, the Greek Goddess of Necessity.

Etymology provides images of the ways in which the experience of necessity has been described: narrow, throat, surround, embrace, strangle, ring, constrict, to wind around the neck as the neckband of a slave, chain, suffocation, chain-formed necklace, fetters lid around the neck of prisoners, necklace, cord binding yoked oxen. Repetition compulsions, then by virtue of their relation to psychological necessity, are the ways in which man is bound, enslaved, yoked, chained, fettered and fixated to personal destiny. In light of what we said earlier about the metaphoric nature of the compulsion to repeat, we can now say that the repetition compulsion fixates man into a personalized metaphor that must be enacted again and again. (Chapelle, 1993, pp. 116- 117)

This is where the notion of becoming comes in. We fulfill our destiny by the paradoxical process of becoming who we are through the process of "convalescence," which means "to remember," which Heidegger traced to mean "returning home." In psychoanalytic theory, we repress or forget what we find intolerable and this makes us neurotic and sick. Thus the work of therapy is to convalesce, to remember or recollect ourselves:

Thus convalescence is related to nostalgia, the longing to return home, to where one belongs. Taken broadly, to convalesce refers to the return to one’s origin, to the heart and core of one’s identity. It means, in the end, to return to who one was and is and will be. Convalescence has to do with the fulfillment of personal destiny. (Chapelle, 1993, pp. 163-164)

Becoming who you already are, doesn't that strike you as a bit uncanny? Well it did Freud. Indeed, uncanny repetition makes transference possible, where seemingly novel events represent the occurrence of an old and familiar but forgotten events.

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