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 I
want to begin with awe—because that’s
what I think we brought in today. Awe—first of
all because this gathering of souls and the
uniqueness of this meeting is awesome. Where else,
even at APA (especially at APA?), do grown men and
women stand around and reflect on the thrill and
anxiety of living, the core of living, through the
conduit of two such stellar explorers as Friedrich
Nietzsche and Otto Rank.
I
want to thank each one of the speakers for the love
you obviously poured into your presentations, and
the eloquence that resulted. If this symposium is a
love-fest, then let it be, proclaim it throughout
the halls of the convention! For we are in dire
need of such love-fests, and the lack of them in
our alleged science of the mind makes me almost
want to weep.
There
is so much richness in these papers, I hardly know
where to begin, let alone how to reflect on it in
10 minutes. The thread that kept striking me about
all the commentaries was that leather-bound gift of
Nietzsche’s collected works that Rank bestowed
upon Freud. It shows up all three times, and as
central content. For Will the act signified the
perpetual ambivalence of the original thinker, the
great debt owed (and that should be recognized) but
also the great push to break away, to proclaim
one’s freedom. I agree thoroughly that
Rank’s gesture was not mere narcissistic
wounding—but was both a chiding and a
declaration, a call to a future vision (which both
he himself and by implication Freud too were in on
forging). The core Nietzsche-Rank dilemma between
fate and freedom, necessity and possibility that
Will identifies (and actually all three presenters
allude to) is precisely the core "battle" as I call
it, of optimal depth psychotherapy.
This
is a battle that is being increasingly threatened
today--suppressed, denied, dismissed, cultured out
(as Laing would say). Indeed, the beauty of these
thinkers—and all those who followed in their
footsteps—is that they named and prized this
battle (this agon as the Greeks called it), but in
so many corners today it is being curtailed, and as
a result the heart of therapy is also being cut
out. What I mean here is that the exceedingly
informative battle between the part of a person
that that cleaves to the past, to destiny and the
part that struggles to emerge, that aspires to
possibility, is being resoundingly bypassed
today—tragedy, struggle, self and other
encounter are being gravely overlooked today in the
name of quick fixes—drugs, televisions,
computers, internets, junk foods and so on.
We
have so many ways and so many means today to
deflect the battle and convince ourselves we are
content. But the result is that we also deflect the
chance to deeply explore ourselves, to see what
"gods there may be in our diseases", as Jung put
it, or possibilities in sadness (Rilke), or
illuminations in bereavement (Shakespeare), or
intelligences in madness (Poe) and so on. And most
of all we deflect the chance to really "weigh" our
lives (both literally and figuratively, to pause,
slow-down, and give our lives weight), such that
profound and full-bodied decisions can be made
about who we are and how we are willing to be in
the world. In short, we are increasingly bypassing
the chance to live with intentionality, as Rollo
May put it, with a full-bodied orientation toward a
given direction or project, with passion and with
poignancy. And as a result, we are living on "thin
milk," as R.D. Laing put it, outside agents, pale
substitutes, that "program" but do not evoke
personal transformation. Ah, how we miss Will
Therapy!
The
Jazz composer, then,—suggested by all three
presenters--is a pivotal Nietzsche-Rank image.
There is no resort to pat answers or ready formulas
with jazz, and so it is with our dynamic duo; as Ed
said, "If you are too sure of yourself you do not
want a showdown with Nietzsche," and in another
place, he muses, "Nietzsche would have loved
Ellington." Yes, all these allusions are dead on;
Nietzsche and Rank are crying, screaming from
rooftops: "know the traditions, know where you came
from, know what you’re up against; but then,
let it rip, groove on your horn, celebrate your
voice, and make love to the tension!"
It’s
the living on narrow ridges, the heeding of demands
of the hour (Buber), that so define our
psychophilosophers. James Lieberman is right on
target to my mind when he speaks of Rank’s
brief therapy. Far from being a forerunner to
managed care, Rank’s short term therapy
evolved from his relationships; not from his
"approved" list of interventions. There is
assuredly something potent, poignant, and
mobilizing about discussions of termination; just
raising the question can be transformative. On the
other hand, it could be terrifying, and I do not
think Rank shirked that terror or unduly amplified
it. Simply put, and like Nietzsche’s prose, he
awakened people, kept them at their personal edges,
and called them to account. Such so-called short
term intervention is not about "short" at all, it
is about the recognition of death—how to step
up to it, grapple with it, and respond to its
inexorability.
Beyond
therapy, however, I am increasingly convinced that
the next big step for us who dwell on such
characters as Nietzsche and Rank, existentialism
and romanticism, the science of persons—is
21st century life. Our next big task, it seems to
me, is to translate the Nietzsche-Rank
nexus—the stress on life’s mystery, the
wisdom of the body, perspectivism with passion, the
great chain of being, the gay science--
wissenschaft (in its original terms), and the
complexity of will--into current social
practices--at work, at home, and in the schools. I
encourage each of us to consider these
translations—as for my own, I have recently
developed a notion that draws from the above that I
term the fluid center. The fluid center is a pivot
point, a pause, a space between the reductionisms
and elitisms of our age which aspires to elasticity
of living. More formally, I define the fluid center
as any sphere of consciousness which has as its
concern the widest possible relations to existence;
informally, I define it as the richest possible
range of experience within the most suitable
parameters of support.
Recently,
I have applied the fluid center to the educational
and work settings. In a very summated nutshell, the
fluid center at school would revolve around what I
call the "awe curriculum", which is a variant of
Ernest Becker’s (1967) exhilarating (though
too little known)"alienation curriculum." The awe
curriculum brings a sense of the thrill and anxiety
of living, the humility and wonder of living to
formal learning. In brief, the awe curriculum calls
for the systematic study of how various cultures
throughout history cultivated or failed to
cultivate a sense of awe in their populaces—at
home, at work, at places of public devotion or
worship, and in relationships. Put another way,
students would grapple with how and whether
cultures instigated humility and wonder (that is,
awe), or humiliation and arrogance (that is,
alienation) among their peoples, and second, how
those valences relate to students’ current
lives (a most important part).
I
would advocate the fluidly centered and awe-based
spirit at work by calling for business-wide mental
and physical well-being programs, where bosses and
workers spent 4 hours a week exercising their
minds, bodies, and spirits. For the mental
well-being program, workers would take one hour,
twice a week, to reflect on the significance and
impact of their work on their lives (and the lives
of those they serve); for the physical well- being
program, a wide array of dietary, conditioning, and
healing practices would be offered and
taught.
The
upshot is that these programs would work in tandem
with each other and with the awe-based educational
immersion to re-create (revolutionize?) the very
fabric of day to day life. They would nourish that
which Ernest Becker, following Robert Maynard
Hutchins, and echoing intensively Nietzsche and
Rank, terms "The Great Conversation; which are
everyday dialogues about the big questions, the
meaningful questions in life. Everyone, or most
everyone, could be in on these dialogues. And they
would be more than dialogues but genuine
encounters, where, following the carnivalesque
tradition (which each of us has celebrated today),
people would play out the varying parts of
themselves—would be granted access to these
varying parts--and would deepen, evolve, and call
out what is genuinely alive in each other, as a
result.
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