On Not Being Able to Symbolize

ON NOT BEING ABLE TO SYMBOLIZE

KEN ROBINSON

This paper explores ideas from Marion Milner which the author has foundhelpful in conceptualizing work with a patient who felt tyrannized by herobjects, terrified that she would be swallowed up by them never tore-emerge. Her terror interfered with her capacity to symbolize. Thepaper looks at the concept of a bodily self and its creative engagementwith the world especially in the form of fusion with the object. Itplaces Milner’s theory in the larger context of psychoanalytic andneuroscientific thinking from Freud and Winnicott to Damasio as well asrelating it to philosophical and Romantic accounts of creative appercep-tion and personal knowledge. Although confidentiality precludes adetailed account of the analysis, the author provides an outline of thegradual development of her capacity to symbolize alongside her growingsense of a continuous self. He further comments on her finding whatMilner called ‘intuitive images’ to bridge intellect and intuition and toallow them to co-exist peacefully. The patient brought drawings to ses-sions and the paper reflects on these as an index of change as well as onthe importance of the process of creating them in relation to her anxietyover the tyranny of objects.

KEY WORDS: SYMBOLIZATION, PSYCHOANALYSIS, BODILY SELF,NEUROSCIENTIFIC THINKING, DRAWING

Confidentiality prevents me from making more than the briefest mention of the patientwhose analysis prompted this paper. In thinking about our work together I foundcertain ideas in Marion Milner’s work helpful and I here reflect on them. My paper isnot intended as an exegesis of Milner but simply as a record of how her work hasinformed my thinking.

THE POETIC NATURE OF PERCEPTION: PERCEIVING AS MAKING

After some time working with a patient, Esther, she began to arrive at sessions withexcited news that on the way to her session she had just seen something in the naturalworld, more often than not a bird. As she pictured it I had the impression that she wasstill in the experience of seeing it. Energized, she would quickly describe it, its shape,size, colour, movement and song. Wrens were her favourite. As she expressed thesemoments of wonder, my mind turned to poets and artists who try to capture moments in

British Journal of Psychotherapy 30, 3 (2014) 363–371 doi: 10.1111/bjp.12100

© 2014 BPF and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

time, moments when we ‘are the music whilst the music lasts’: T. S. Eliot, GerardManley Hopkins, Winifred Nicholson, Norman Adams, Wordsworth and so on.1 Poetsand philosophers have shared a conviction that such spots of time have a specialsignificance as they seemed to have for Esther. They constitute a special form of beingor a special form of knowledge that is neither rationalist nor empiricist. In suchmoments we neither know anything empirical about the world nor do we have to regardthese moments as simply evidence of mental states (though they can be so regarded).As the philosopher Karl Britton2 puts it: ‘They are taken, each one, as “somethingunderstood” – neither explaining nor explained, but understood’ (1984, p. 51).

These ecstatic moments of standing aside are not epiphanies at the point of beingexperienced, but are instead known only after the event. Whilst they are happeningthe subject is not aware of himself as subject or of the object as object, even thoughthey happen in the presence of and in relation to an object (albeit a special sort ofrelation). The subject is the experience whilst the experience lasts. He can only knowthat there has been an experience; and he only knows that when he becomes con-scious of himself as subject and the object of his gaze as object. Then he becomesconscious too that the experience he has had was unlike the contact with his worldthat he normally enjoys. Like paradise, such experiences can only enter conscious-ness as passed or lost.

These moments are a mode of perception when, as Milner put it, ‘the original“poet” in each of us created the outside world for us,’ moments that are ‘too much likevisitations of the gods to be mixed with everyday thinking’ (Milner, 1987, p. 88). Inthis god-like realm, the world comes alive with intensely personal meaning in, asColeridge puts it, ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in theinfinite I AM’ (1965, p. 167).

There is a poem by Charles Tomlinson (1960), ‘How Still the Hawk’, in hiscollection Seeing is Believing, that embodies such perception in action. The openinglines catch an inward awareness of a self caught in the act of perception itself, and thehawk as felt on the senses through imitation in such a way that perceiver and perceivedare one.

How still the hawkHangs innocent aboveIts native wood: (p. 11)

Tomlinson’s lines incarnate, to quote Milner: ‘the astonishing fact of being alive – butfelt from the inside not looked at from the outside – and relating oneself to whateverit is?’ (Letley, 2013, p. 27).

Such moments are experiences of integration, integration of psyche and soma in thebodily self, of subject and outside world in vital inter-relation, of the familiar and theunfamiliar. They constitute experiences when the subject feels to be peculiarly alive inhimself in the world. As Tomlinson’s poem shows, this aliveness is built on anawareness of our bodily self, in Milner’s words on a proprioceptive ‘non-symbolicdirect sensory awareness of [our] own state of being alive in a body’ (Milner 1987,pp. 236–7).

Ken Robinson364

© 2014 BPF and John Wiley & Sons LtdBritish Journal of Psychotherapy 30, 3 (2014) 363–371

THE BODILY SELF

This sense of a bodily self which was important for Milner has a history in psycho-analysis stretching back to Freud and forward to recent neuroscience. ‘Normally,’Freud wrote, ‘there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of ourself, of our own ego’ (Freud, 1930, p. 65). As Sletvold (2013) has recently remindedus, the ego for Freud is formed by an interaction of external and internal perceptions.It is our combined experience of the external world and our internal perception of thestate of our own body that underpins ‘the feeling of our self, of our own ego’ and givesthat feeling its personal quality. This feeling entails, as Milner emphasized, the directnon-symbolic perception of a body state, as distinct from our awareness of thoughtwhich reaches consciousness ‘through becoming connected with word-presentationscorresponding to it’ (Freud, 1923, p. 20).

Here we have a conception of a core embodied self that is not only anterior to thereflective verbal self but its foundation. Recent neuroscientific research bears this out.In Damasio’s account of the core self, our knowledge of our conscious self stems froma feeling which arises from ‘the non-conscious proto-self in the process of beingmodified’ (2000, p. 172). Damasio hypothesizes a nonverbal narrative ‘of an organismcaught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representingsomething else’ (p. 170). For both Freud and Damasio the sense of a core self isbeyond language but ‘continue[s] underground, nonverbalized, to lead an unnamed(and, to that extent only, unknown) but nonetheless very real existence’ (p. 175). And,according to Damasio, ‘autobiography memory is architecturally connected, neurallyand cognitively speaking, to the nonconscious protoself and to the emergent andconscious core self of each lived instant’ (p. 173).

In our workaday worlds we are not consciously aware of but take for granted thiscore embodied self. We may only become aware of it if our body is impinged on orafter an experience of its absence, after, for example, an episode of transient globalamnesia (Damasio, 2000, pp. 202–04), or by ‘deliberately directing [our] attentionto the whole internal body awareness’ (Milner, 1987, p. 236). It is with this bodilyself that we encounter the world, both objects and others, outside ourselves. Thediscovery of mirror neurons provides neuroscientific underpinning for Freud’s idea– taken from Lipps who in turn had derived it from David Hume’s concept ofsympathy – that we know about the external world, including the mental and emo-tional world of others, by empathically recreating its bodily state within our bodilyselves through imitation, through Einfühlung. When we listen to another we listenwith our bodies.

It is important to remember that, in talking about the bodily self in this way, weare not simply in the realm of psychoanalytic hypothesis. I am describing a primaryform of knowing about and relating to the world that crosses historical and culturalboundaries. The Japanese poet Doho, for example, taught, following his masterBasho, that in order to write about an object the poet must ‘enter into the object,sharing its delicate life and feelings’ (Basho, 1985, p. 14). In Edgar Allan Poe wefind:

On Not Being Able to Symbolize 365


When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wickedis any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of myface, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and thenwait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to matchor correspond with the expression. (Poe, 2008, pp. 176–7)

And in much the same way the Kalahari Bushmen imitate the animals that they hunt:

When you track an animal you must become the animal. You feel a tingling inyour armpits when the animal is close. . . .

When the springbok heart beats in your ribs, you see through its eyes. You feel itsdrive, dark on your cheek. (Foster & Foster, 2000)

It is part of Milner’s contribution to our psychoanalytic understanding of personalknowledge that she drew on such a sense of the body’s centrality in the act of relatingcreatively to the world through illusion.

It is also important to emphasize that, although Milner writes of (and celebrates)godlike moments of creativity, like Winnicott, she is more broadly concerned withordinary creative living in our day-to-day lives, with the role of illusion in good-enough development. Indeed Winnicott highly prized her description of godlikemoments (Winnicott, 1971, pp. 44–5), because it caught an important aspect of hisown sense of what it is to live in ‘the third area of experience’ located in the potentialspace between the individual and the environment, subject and object. For the pur-poses of this paper it may be useful to distinguish three types of awareness of thebodily self. Firstly, the rudimentary non-conscious feeling of having a bodily self,secondly, a sense of being alive creatively in oneself – in Winnicott’s terms this is thecombined experience of ‘continuity of being’, of ‘I am’ and personalization or the‘psyche indwelling in the soma’ (Winnicott, 1989, p. 264) – and, thirdly, the intense,heightened awareness that Esther experienced. In her case the more ordinary creativityof the second type was absent: she did not enjoy the continuity of being or theconfidence in her objects that it requires. It was a considerable developmental achieve-ment for Esther to experience in the way that she did for she had come into analysistyrannized by her objects, terrified of being sucked into them, never to re-emerge.Nevertheless, her creative spots of engagement with the world remained unstable for,when she became aware of having them, she became anxious that, amongst otherthings, the illusion of identity with her object was irreversible, illusion giving way tofact, and that she was lost or annihilated.

KNOWING THE OBJECT BY BEING IT AND ‘THE INTOLERABLEWRESTLE/WITH WORDS AND MEANING’

My patient reported moments of heightened awareness of what Lipps, Freud andMilner thought of as knowing through fusion with the object. As Milner remarked,these moments do not mix easily with everyday thinking, but bring with them a

Ken Robinson366


challenge of how to integrate them into ordinary experience. This was very much thecase for my patient who no sooner named whatever it was she had experienced –let’s say a wren – than she would become very distressed, contort her body, hitherself, and undo her creation, muttering: ‘Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish’ over and over.Naming, it seemed, plunged her into ‘the intolerable wrestle/With words andmeaning’ that haunted T. S. Eliot. In the excitement of conveying her experience mypatient seemed unaware of words as words, but once she named the wren the vitalityof her apperception was lost. She would become absent and stare into a cornerof the room. Esther came to life creatively only sporadically in discontinuousmoments.

I came to link this cycle of creation and destruction, associated for her with naming,with Thomas Traherne, the late 17th century clergyman-poet and meditative writerwhom Marion Milner (1957) refers to and quotes many times in On Not Being Ableto Paint. Traherne expresses and reflects on acts of subjective or personal knowledgein which we feel that we create the world for ourselves. Milner quotes Traherne’spoem ‘Dumnesse’ as an epigraph to Chapter 15. In it Traherne describes his creativespontaneous apperception:

Then did I dwell within a world of light,Distinct and separate from all men’s sight,Where I did feel strange thoughts, and such things seeThat were, or seemed, only revealed to me,There I saw all the world enjoyed by one;There I was in the world myself alone:

For Traherne such perceptions involve a ‘Non-Intelligence of Human Words’ whereasLanguage deadens:

But when IHad gained a Tongue, their power began to die. (p. 122)

Like Traherne, my patient was clearly experiencing difficulties in integrating intuitionand logic, as Milner puts it:

Two opposing ways of relating oneself to the other, . . . the way of detachment,of analysis, of standing apart and acting according to a preconceived purpose;and the way of fusion, becoming one with what is seen, steeping oneself in it ina spontaneous acting together. (p. 126)

Traherne and the Romantics share the idea that the child comes into the world‘trailing clouds of glory’ (Wordsworth, 1950, p. 460), capable of ‘Pure Virgin Appre-hensions’ only to have them ‘Ecclypsed . . . by the Customs and maners of Men’(Traherne, 1966, p. 263). This loss must be redeemed in maturity. For ColeridgePrimary imagination, ‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception’ isrecreated in a secondary form which ‘is essentially vital, even as all objects (asobjects) are essentially fixed and dead’ (Coleridge 1965, p.167). The idea contains aParadise-Fall narrative. As Proust recognized (and John Milton before him), ‘the only



true paradise is a paradise we have lost’ (2002, p. 179). Proust believed that we canre-enter that paradise not by attempting to recall it, but ‘for the duration of a flash oflightning’ by encountering a physical sensation, the simple taste of a madeleine, forexample, that enables us to live simultaneously in the past and in the present. Suchexperiences are, for Proust, ‘a little bit of time in its pure state’ (p. 180), a phrase thatapplies equally to the experience of moments of creative wonder which are alsomarked by loss. Perhaps the roots of this myth of lost vital imagination and lostvisionary moments lie in the experience of the primary object as also marked by itsloss, and perhaps too in the slippage between amodal global experience and language,described by Daniel Stern, that comes with the child’s passage into language. But, asStern argues, slippage does not entail loss of amodal global perception although, insome cases, the ‘global experience may be fractured or simply poorly represented’ sothat it leads ‘a misnamed and poorly understood existence’ (2000, p. 175). So, too, thecapacity to be the object, experienced as ‘a glimpsed visual picture’ is not lost andrestored but operates side by side and in tension with intellect and language. As Milnerputs it:

I had so often felt, when a thought was first experienced in terms of a glimpsedvisual picture, that to turn it into words would be to lose something irreparably,that its wholeness and splendour would be forever destroyed. It seemed to menow that I had been right in supposing that something would be lost, wrong inassuming that it would be forever, wrong in not realizing that the acceptance ofdivision, analysis, bits, acceptance of the partialness which was inevitable inlogical communication was necessary for the growth of new wholes. (1957,p. 125)

Milner comments on the role of the intuitive image in bridging lived experience andlogical thought together with acceptance of the inevitable conflict and the rhythmbetween them (p. 124). All my patient had was the experience of fusion with the objectas a way of experiencing it and the destructiveness of naming it. In between was a gulfwith no intuitive image to capture the experience and bridge the gap.

FINDING AN APPROPRIATE MEDIUM FOR THE INTUITIVE IMAGE

When the child gradually comes to recognize that its mother is after all not its creationbut has a life of her own, that it has a body that both feels to be its own but that is alsoout there, a bodily self that its mother recognizes as its own, it also has feelings withinthat exist independently of the mother, feelings which require a medium of expressionto gradually give them shape. The environment/mother plays a key role in recognizingand helping to turn a cry or a movement into a communication or a gesture and to buildup a sense of a medium being available. In this formative process the infant’s firstmedium is its own body and what issues from it. If the environment fails in providingsufficient recognition of the value of its expressions it also fails to sustain the infant’sfeeling of going-on-being. The (bodily) self is rendered fragile or discontinuous andhas no, or uncertain, value; psyche and soma are not integrated. The way that Esther

Ken Robinson368


turned her moments of creative activity into rubbish, contorted her body and physi-cally attacked herself seemed to suggest such a failure. She was professionally verysuccessful, but her intellect had become split off from, as Winnicott might have put it,the psyche of psychosomatic existence and living. She had grown up in an environ-ment where reason and intellect were prized and subjectivity was feared, rather likethe world of Thomas Traherne which complained that he spoke ‘too much in the firstperson singular’ (Traherne, 1997, p. 91). Internally, Esther attacked her joyful per-ceptions as if, because being subjective and just hers, they were at best trivial and notworth attending to or at worst a threat. As well as risking the tyranny of the object, thevery personal creative engagement with the world that Esther reported to me carriedall the danger that Winnicott attributed to the dangerous assertion I AM (1986, p. 141).Her mother’s difficulty in letting Esther individuate left Esther feeling that god-likecreative apperception destructively asserted her separateness and she therefore had tosabotage it almost as soon as it happened – hence ‘rubbish, rubbish, rubbish’. Estherfound herself in her moments of interpenetration with objects. When she negated themshe lost a sense of being present in her own life – something she often reported to me.Her self-representation and object representation collapsed into a void of non-representation (cf. Botella & Botella, 2005, especially pp. 29–38). And her contortionswere the outward and visible sign not only of inner conflict but of suffering dislocationto her continuity of being. They suggested a bodily self which, if felt at all, was feltas ‘un corps morcelé’. Over time she started to go out looking for birds (and later otherobjects in nature) rather than being suddenly struck by them: she spent time in hideswatching and then would come and tell me about what she had seen. She wasdeveloping a freedom to have an experience which was hers, that she could keep toherself if she wished (or talk about), and which was less fragmentary, just as she hada more continuous sense of herself.

I close with a few general words about working with Esther. For some consi-derable time the underlying security of the setting, my tacit expression of interest incontinuing to work with her and my care not to enter into a pseudo-intellectual analysisseemed to be the central features of our work. Esther had developed precociouslyintellectually, and in this sphere she could symbolize, but when she initially allowed herdevelopmental disturbance to show in the consulting room she had only her bodilycontortions to carry her anxieties and feelings. I say ‘carry’rather than ‘express’becauseI am not sure that her contortions can be said to symbolize. To symbolize her interactionwith the world was to individuate, to talk in the first person singular as a separate person.As our work unfolded, after she had become a bird-watcher, she revealed that she drewbetween sessions and she began to bring her drawings to her sessions. Initially crude,like an infant’s first scribbles they developed into a series of vortexes, then vortexes witha figure to one side, later two figures as she allowed me more into her world. Theseincreasingly sophisticated intuitive images – to the point of being exhibition standard –were available for us to explore. Her drawing and sculpture allowed her to sink herselfin her objects without being tyrannized by them, to remain herself, the representingartist.And although her representations existed in the public world, they remained hers,with personal value whilst also valued by others. Over years of working together she



began to risk sustaining and trying to communicate her capacity in a context in whichshe looked for and felt that she received recognition and could accept it. And as she did,I had a sense of a woman emerging who was feeling creatively and intuitively alive bothin relation to herself and to her world without having to attack herself. Her bodilycontortions diminished little by little until they disappeared except when she wasoccasionally very anxious and regressed.

Esther left me with a question about the relative value of her art and language. Ispent a lot of time helping her to put words to her feelings and she became more ableto do so, but she remained at the end of our work more able to bring her inner and outerworlds together through her art than through words, even though she had becomemore articulate in her own right about her art. Here there is a challenge to the priorityof word-presentations over thing-presentations. Esther’s art increasingly incarnated itsmeaning, had a felt meaning for her for which a verbal description was a feebletranslation, but at the same time being able to show her art and discuss it gave it anadditional value. This was only possible because at some level she came to understandthat to discuss was not to replace her work or have it taken away from her. Naming wasno longer destructive, but instead words and art could peacefully co-exist. When KarlBritton wrote of moments of wonder as ‘something understood – neither explainingnor explained, but understood’, he went on to quote Bernard Williams to the effectthat: ‘Something is lacking in life unless we feel more than we can say and grasp morethan we can explain’ (Britton, 1984, p. 52). Esther, I think, had come to understand andaccept this too.

NOTES

1. For a discussion of putting words to wonders in poetry, see Robinson 1992.2. Karl Britton was Clare Winnicott’s brother.

REFERENCES

Basho, M. (1985) On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, Stryk, L. (transl.). Harmondsworth:Penguin.

Botella, C. & Botella, S. (2005) The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States WithoutRepresentation. London: Routledge.

Britton, K. (1984) Wonders. In: Dilman, I. (ed.), Philosophy and Life: Essays on John Wisdom,pp. 49–60. The Hague: Martinis Nijhoff. (International Philosophy Series, vol. 17.)

Coleridge, S.T. (1965) Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life andOpinions. London: Dent.

Damasio, A.R. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making ofConsciousness. London: Heinemann.

Foster, C. & Foster, D. (2000) The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story. Cape Town: EarthriseProductions.

Freud, S. (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 19, pp. 1–66.Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. SE 21, pp. 57–146.Letley, E. (2013) Marion Milner: The Life. London: Routledge.

Ken Robinson370


Milner, M. (1957) On Not Being Able to Paint. London: Heinemann.Milner, M. (1987) The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men. London: Tavistock.Poe, E.A. (2008) Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Cambridge: Worth Press.Proust, M. (2002) Finding Time Again. London: Allen Lane.Robinson, K. (1992) Putting words to wonders. Essays in Criticism 42: 299–319.Sletvold, J. (2013) The ego and the id revisited: Freud and Damasio on the body ego/self.

International Journal of Psychoanalysis 94: 1019–32.Stern, D.N. (2000) The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and

Developmental Psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books.Tomlinson, C. (1960) Seeing is believing. In: Poems. London: Oxford University Press.Traherne, T. (1966) Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, Ridley, A. (ed.). London:

Oxford University Press.Traherne, T. (1997) Select Meditations, Smith, J.J. (ed.). Manchester: Carcanet.Winnicott, D.W. (1986) Home Is Where We Start From. London: Penguin.Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Penguin.Winnicott, D.W. (1989) Psycho-Analytic Explorations, Winnicott, C., Shepherd, R. and Davis,

M. (eds). London: Karnac.Wordsworth, W. (1950) The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Hutchinson, T. (ed.), revised E. de

Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press.

KEN ROBINSON is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Newcastle upon Tyne, a member ofthe British Psychoanalytical Society and Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at NorthumbriaUniversity. He is a training analyst for child, adolescent and adult psychotherapy in the Northof England and lectures, teaches and supervises in the UK and Europe. His latest publicationsinclude Sandor Ferenczi – Ernest Jones: Letters 1911–1933 edited with Ferenc Eros and JudithSzekacs-Weisz (Karnac, 2013) and two forthcoming essays: ‘The ins and outs of listening as apsychoanalyst’ in Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication and arelated paper on ‘Empathy, tact and the freedom to be natural’ in the American Journal ofPsychoanalysis. He has also contributed the Introduction to the first volume of the forthcomingD.W.W. Winnicott: Collected Works (Oxford University Press, 2015, forthcoming). Address forcorrespondence: [[email protected]]



mailto:[email protected]

Documents

On Not Being Able to Symbolize