April 11, 2025

We are the past as a tree is its rings. As Faulkner said, the past is not even past, for we are still living it. This is not necessarily predestination, for we have a choice how to respond to the environment in which we grow up and the experiences we undergo. We all know how two people coming out of the same family may turn out utterly differently. Still, when we attempt to understand ourselves, it is natural to look back at our early life to see how it shaped us. We did not need Freud to tell us this: Augustine knew it when he wrote his Confessions in the 4^th century. But our memories only go back so far. Freudian therapy, the “talking cure,” begins at the point at which the analysand has something to talk about, the memories of early family life out of which emerge the Oedipus complex. But as it developed, depth psychology became aware that exploring the psyche is a kind of archeology. There is a deeper layer of experience prior to the Oedipal stage. Even if no one can remember it, it can be inferred from the traces it leaves in people’s patterns of thinking and behaving. The Oedipal stage is dominated by the relationship to the father, but the pre-Oedipal stage concerns the relationship with the mother. During this stage, the child begins to learn to distinguish between self and other: the mother is the first other, the first “object” in a world that the child will increasingly learn is “objective to,” external to itself. The school of psychoanalysis known as object-relations theory, which included Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, was concerned with this level of identity, as were, later, the psychoanalytic feminists of the 70’s and 80’s.

But a few theorists have been more daring, or more foolhardy, take your choice, and have attempted a theory based on the premise that the psyche is first shaped by the experiences it had before birth. I know of three. The most recent is the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whom I have mentioned in this newsletter before, in his enormous, audacious, and utterly unconventional three-volume work Spheres. Thanks to his mention of it, I have learned, to my surprise, that he was preceded by R.D. Laing in an equally audacious work called The Facts of Life in 1976. But Sloterdijk is silent about a much earlier work, Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, published in 1924. Mind you, to say that Rank’s work was not favorably received is a bit of an understatement. According to the editor’s introduction, after it was published in English in 1929, “In 1930 A.A. Brill denounced Rank as mentally ill, and ousted him from the American Psychoanalytic Association” (x1v).

I have no psychological credentials, and approach this subject from the standpoint of the imagination. Whether there is a scientific basis for saying anything at all about the experiences of a fetus in the womb, I am not qualified to say. Does a fetus have a mind of any sort to be conditioned, even an unconscious one? But whether these theorists qualify as scientists or not, they are powerful mythmakers, and the myth that they are recreating in modern terms has a long lineage and powerfully informs our ways of thinking and feeling in ways that will seem familiar when they are cast in the imagination’s common vocabulary instead of the terminology of science, or pseudo-science.

The imagination thinks it knows what life in the womb is like. It is the original paradise, a comfortable, carefree, safe, and harmonious condition, floating in peace. It is the ideal human experience the best we will ever know—it’s all downhill from there. We all “know” this, without any evidence whatever. Unless, however, we assume that our feelings are in fact a kind of memory of our prior condition, which is what Sloterdijk quotes Laing as speculating: “When I look at the embryological stages in my life cycle I experience what feel to me like sympathetic reverberations, vibrations in me now with how I now feel I felt then” (311). Laing goes on to recruit allies for his notion: “That many people feel similar, and often strong, sympathetic vibrations (resonances, reverberations) when they unguardedly allow themselves to imagine how they might have felt from conception to and through birth and early infancy is a fact” (311). Laing does not ask whether what sets these alleged people to vibrating like tuning forks might not be wish-fulfilment rather than some kind of scientifically impossible memory. If we cannot remember the first couple of years of life after birth because the brain is not developed enough yet to record permanent memories, how would it record anything before birth?

Life in the womb is one way of imagining a condition without effort and hardship, a passive, relaxed condition without struggle. We yearn for such a condition, and for good reason. Freud himself said, in Civilization and Its Discontents, “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures” (22)—including the ultimate palliative measure, death. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is about death imagined as an escape from “The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to”:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

Freud himself disconcerted his own followers by postulating, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), a “death drive.” Life is striving, and we have an innate urge to seek out that condition in which we are at peace because we no longer have to strive. But, the argument goes, the only such condition is death. Rank quotes a line found in several Greek tragedies: “Count no man happy until he is dead.” It is sometimes assumed, therefore, that nostalgia for the condition of the womb is tantamount to a sort of deathwish. It is even a pun in English: womb/tomb.

But that is not quite right, for death is oblivion, and what our theorists are postulating is a form of consciousness that can enjoy the bliss of a totally relaxed existence. It is nurturing, it is healing: those who puritanically condemn it are trying to deny one of the necessary Contraries, in Blake’s sense, of human life. Death is attractive to those who are in such intolerable pain that they seek death as an anesthetic. What we more normally want, however, is not oblivion, mere absence of pain bought at the price of the loss of everything. We want a condition of enjoyment. Of course we cannot find it literally. We speak of the longing to return to the womb but in this case Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again. But—and this is Sloterdjik’s thesis—we seek instinctively, or whatever the word is, those “palliatives” that Freud spoke of. Once, we were protected and nourished inside the sphere of the womb. Ever since, we have sought out or created various spheres, using the term broadly, various means by which we recreate the sustaining and pleasurable life within the womb as we imagine it. Whether it “really” was that way is probably an unanswerable question.

Sloterdijk speaks of the theme of his first volume as “intimacy,” and it is on the intimate level that we feel the delighted shock of recognition that makes us take Sloterdijk seriously, whether he is scientific or not. When life has been punishing, we “cocoon.” We treat ourselves with favorite foods, maybe bingeing on them. “Comfort foods” are typically soft and soothing, like ice cream and oatmeal. In emotional pain, we curl up into fetal position. We “baby ourselves.” But even days not especially punishing are ordeals to be gotten through, and at the end of them we may sit in front of a screen whose joke name is “boob tube,” because we use it to regress. Then we go to the warm, soft womb of our bed, and fall into the mental womb of sleep. No one seems to know what the purpose of sleep is, and some strenuous souls with they could eliminate it as a waste of time, but it may be that its real purpose is to withdraw into a condition that “knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” A family, at least a functional family, is a kind of protective womb in which children grow up in a warmly nurturing environment. I have raised a succession of guinea pigs, and they need to have a place to hide out, to be protected, and animals in the wild of course have their nests and burrows. So do hobbits. Clothes are protection from the elements, but they are protective in a deeper way as well. Nakedness feels exposed and vulnerable. Children do not feel that way, but adults who know how judgmental and wounding other people can be feel the need for the psychological safety clothing provides.

Human communities in early times were small and closely-knit. To be exiled, expelled from the circle of the community, was a terrible thing, often a fatal thing, the curse of Cain. Villages and later the first cities were typically laid out in the form of a mandala, a crossed circle representing wholeness and totality. The circle was a temenos, or sacred space. Sloterdjik mentions mandalas at least once, so supposedly they will be taken up later. The entire Christian cosmos of the Middle Ages was a mandala, composed of spheres nested within spheres, navigated by Dante in his journey in the Divine Comedy until he arrives at the presence of God, which is a vision of three circles symbolizing the Trinity. It could be said that the function of the imagination is to construct the many spheres in which we live and move and have our being. Whatever psychology and philosophy may come to think of it, Spheres will remain valuable as a rewarding, if demanding and intermittently exasperating, meditation on one of the primary symbols of the imagination.

The first volume of Spheres, delightfully titled Bubbles, deals with womb-equivalents on a personal, or more accurately interpersonal, level. It therefore reads as a kind of revamped psychoanalysis. This entails declaring, usually with a kind of blithe dismissiveness, that all psychoanalysts starting with Freud himself have been wrong and he is right, although he is not psychoanalytically trained. However, that does not bother Sloterdijk in the slightest. Volumes 2 and 3, which I have not read, are titled Globes and Foams respectively, but open out into a wider cultural and historical dimension. The crucial question is how to categorize this 2500-page magnum opus. There is some mention of experiments attempting to measure fetal responsiveness to various stimuli, but this is not a work of hard science. Nor is it normal philosophy, methodically unfolding a argument that convinces by relentless logic. Quite the opposite: it is the work of an intuitive type, in the Jungian sense, that explodes in all directions with ungoverned and ungovernable associations. You never know where it is going to go next (and, maddeningly, it doesn’t even have an index), but it is worth staying with because of its repeated sudden flashes of metaphorical connection.

How are we intended to take this work? Sloterdijk identifies with Diogenes the Cynic, who did and said outrageous things in order to wake people up. I think Spheres is most rewarding if read as satire: it is what Northop Frye called an anatomy. It reminded me at times of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which reads as a parody of German Romantic philosophical style, with its maddeningly prolix sentences and abstract vocabulary, including the neologisms so easy to form in German through compounding. One example of Sloterdijk’s style, chosen at random: “The third wave…is currently being thwarted by the heightened individualism characterizing the current thrust of telematic abstraction, as well as the aestheticistic neo-isolationism of postmodern lifestyle propaganda” (231). “Telematic” turns out to be a real word, but “aestheticistic” sounds like one of those words students make up to sound impressive. Elsewhere, denying that the condition of the fetus is equivalent to Nirvana and nothingness, Sloterdijk says that “The fetus with which the mother is pregnant is itself pregnant with its own tendency to fill out its space and affirm itself within it. The child’s movements, with their cheerfully enigmatic ‘cat in the bag’ impressions, testify to this intra-uterine expansionism” (318), which the next paragraph describes as “the tendentious nature of fetal swelling.” I can’t help but laugh at this, and can’t help feeling that Sloterdijk intends us to laugh. The tendentious swelling here is that of the polysyllabic philosophical prose—and yet, ha!, a moving, kicking fetus really is like a cat in a bag. Terms like “bubbles” and “foams” are the same kind of thing, silly-sounding and yet serving a serious purpose. Foams are the decentralized spheres of private individuals in a modern, disunified age, and it is again serious wit to say that what the media call globalization is “the universalized war of foams” (71).

Sloterdjik realizes that the vision of the unborn child floating in amniotic bliss is too simple, however powerful it is as an emblem: we remember the final image of the cosmic fetal child staring like a figure in a Byzantine icon at the earth at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he knows that is not the whole story. Somewhere around the middle of a 663-page volume, it is as if the thought strikes him that he should explain the methodology by which he purports to know what goes on within that place of mystery, that dark place of waters in which a Creation myth is being enacted. He calls his method a “negative gynecology” (355), “negative” here having two meanings. One is a refusal to medicalize the discussion—he even tries as much as possible to avoid ordinary anatomical names. This is not a vagina monologue from the point of view of ordinary medicine. Well, then, what is it? Negative gynecology is a counterpart to what used to be called “negative theology,” the medieval attempt to arrive closer to a knowledge of God by demonstrating the inadequacy of ordinary language. It has Eastern counterparts, represented by the phrase “not this, not that” in Hindu texts. He begins in the womb’s darkness, and in a sense he begins with nothing, for the fetus was not always in the womb. Freud said, in a famous remark in The Interpretation of Dreams, that there is a point at which dream interpretation reaches a limit, where the dream disappears into its unconscious source, calling that spot the dream’s navel, where it reaches down into the unknown. Sloterdijk contemplates the descent quest upon which he has embarked and grows, for him, unusually serious. Though one might think he would use the metaphor of diving, perhaps in a bathysphere like a philosophical Jacques Cousteau, instead he uses the metaphor of mining downward into stone. Suddenly, descending into the womb becomes a descent into one’s own self: “there is no alternative to confronting your own black monochrome. Whoever tackles this will soon understand that life is deeper than one’s own autobiography; writing never penetrates far enough into one’s own blackness. We cannot write down what we began as” (346).

In the next paragraph, as he becomes the darkness, he becomes the rock itself:

The first “where” still lacks the slightest outlines of structure or content. Even if I knew that this is my cave, all it would initially mean is that I am lying here as a deep gray Hegelian cow in my own night, indistinguishable from anything or anyone else. My being is still an uncreased heaviness. As a black basalt ball I rest within myself, brooding in my milieu as if it were a night made of stone. (346-47)

A page later, though, he asks:

Can there be a substance that is simultaneously sensation? Are there mountains that are pregnant with non-rocks? Has anyone heard of a basalt that will develop as animation and self-awareness? Strange thoughts, vapors from dark vaults—they seem to be the sort of problems on which the dead pharaohs ruminate in their crypts for millennia without making any progress. Mummy meditations, glimmers in the mineral, brooding without a subject. (348-49)

This strange, lyrical passage actually makes a couple of kinds of sense. The Hegelian cow is a philosopher’s in-joke. Hegel made a famous joke about how Schelling’s Absolute is the night in which all cows are black. This takes us back to the German Romantic philosophy that Carlyle was satirizing and yet taking seriously. Kant said that reality, the “thing-in-itself,” also called the “noumenal,” is unknowable: we know only the “phenomenal” world that is constructed by our minds from the data of our senses. That noumenal world is the mystery out of which all things arise. Metaphorically, it is beneath or inside the ordinary phenomenal world. Carlyle used the clothes metaphor: the title Sartor Resartus means “the tailor retailored”: the noumenal world is the body hidden under the phenomena that clothe it. Or, in the metaphor at hand, it is the womb out of which all phenomena are born. Ignoring Kant, the German philosophers tried to know the unknowable. So did another group long before them: the alchemists. Can a black rock develop self-awareness? The alchemists too were “mining,” digging down to the level at which rock does develop self-awareness, symbolized by the Philosopher’s Stone, for mind somehow develops out of matter. Sloterdijk could have had a productive conversation with Jung, who wrote several difficult books on alchemy because he was tunneling towards that point where matter becomes mind, becomes a fetus that will later be conscious. How is that possible? We have no idea.

For the fetus was not always in the womb. In the beginning, there was conception, starting with a fertilized egg, a kind of singularity out of which the embryo will expand in a kind of organic Big Bang. This is the real “intra-uterine expansionism.” His Creation myth, for that is what Sloterdijk is writing at this point, thus begins with what he calls a “monad” (351), a word I used in The Productions of Time. Is that dot of matter already a human identity? The fundamentalists who say so put themselves in a difficult position, satirized by a Doonesbury cartoon I remember from years ago. One panel was completely white with a black dot in the center. The caption read, “This is Timmy.” Sloterdijk omits the whole development from monad into embryo into fetus, the evolution in which it recapitulates the entire history of evolution, to the point of having at one point vestigial gills. The image of the unborn child floating in seemingly timeless bliss is potentially challenged: there is a lot going on in there. Thus it is possible to look at the state before birth in a completely different way, as a process of continuous metamorphosis. This dynamic view not only fits better with the theory of evolution but also with pre-modern speculations on where the human identity in the womb came from. Some religions believe that every birth is a rebirth: the soul, or whatever we should call the enduring identity, transmigrates from another physical form. This is of course not Christian, and yet Donne has a satiric poem called Metempsychosis that is as wild as anything in Spheres. It follows the successive reincarnations of a soul that began lodged in the forbidden fruit eaten by Eve. The poem is unfinished, and we never learn the contemporary identity of the soul, but I suspect it was working towards the idea that there is only one universal identity born over and over in many forms.

I have known Donne’s poem since I was working on my doctoral dissertation on Dylan Thomas, because it was an influence on him. Odd as it may seem, Thomas’s early poetry is obsessed with the condition of the unborn child in the womb. At least a half dozen of his poems treat it directly. The very first poem in his Collected Poems, “I see the boys of summer,” represents the “boys of summer” painting crosses on the walls of the womb:

I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

To divide the spherical womb with crosses, turning it into the cosmological image of a mandala, is a kind of Creation myth. But the uterine state is anything but serene. Thomas’s poem “Before I knocked” is the monologue of an identity who not only remembers its life before birth but remembers entering into the embryonic state that was “Before I knocked and flesh let enter, /With liquid hands tapped on the womb.” Once arrived, what the identity finds is anything but a peaceful existence: “As yet ungotten, I did suffer.” And what it suffers is all the needs and desires of life: “My throat knew thirst before the structure / Of skin and vein around the well” of the throat. “My heart knew love, my belly hunger.” The key to this mystery is that all times, places, and identities are one. Everything is happening everywhere all at once, and there is no escaping to a peaceful existence apart, not even in the womb.

This is potentially a horrifying vision. Hamlet feared that death was not an escape into peaceful oblivion and eternal rest, and Thomas in his early poetry seems to deny any kind of prenatal peace as well. His attitude changed in later years, especially after the birth of his own children. In “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” his refusal is based on the fact that the child is now “Robed in the long friends, / The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother” the earth. The poem’s last line is, “After the first death, there is no other,” which means several things at once. It denies the “second death” of the Book of Revelation, an afterlife burning in the fires of hell. It also means that there is a state beyond otherness. Thomas’s earlier and later poetry set forth the same vision, but from the perspective of the natural and spiritual self respectively. The natural self says, like Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” explaining later that “where we are is hell.” In the womb, during life, after death—it is all one, and there is no escape, no respite. The only thing to do, then, is to break out of it, to be reborn as a spiritual self whose vision is the exact opposite. Why this is heaven, nor are we out of it. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “The kingdom is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.” When, in Milton’s Paradise Regained, Jesus resists the temptation to adopt the natural self’s point of view, it is “Eden rais’d in the wast wilderness (Book 1, line 7).

Sloterdjik is fascinated by the prenatal state because it represents for him a condition prior to the subject/object split of ordinary experience. The newborn infant does not distinguish between itself and the mother, but in fact they are now separate beings. That is not so in the womb. There, mother and child are directly fused, connected by the placenta and umbilical cord, and there is an interchange of nutrition between them. Ordinary language, with its syntax constructed out of subjects and objects, cannot accurately speak of a condition in which what Blake called the “cloven fiction” does not yet exist. Although he does not stick with them or the book would be unreadable, he invents new names for what are not really objects or subjects: “To avoid straying onto the misguided path of object relations theory, we shall give the organ with which the pre-subject floats in communication in its cave a pre-objective name: we shall call it the With” (356). We are probably stuck with “fetus,” he goes on to say, but if we were to rename it, it should be called the Also. In other words, in terms of parts of speech, a conjunction and a conjunctive adverb—connective words. Womb and fetus are not things but connections. And at this point Sloterdjik continues his psychological Creation myth, for out of the monad comes the One that is the conjoined womb and fetus, but, he adds immediately, that One is never singular but always dual. Moreover, the Two are never just two, because they are linked by the placenta and umbilical cord, which means presumably they should be nicknamed the And. If this is beginning to sound familiar, there is a reason: it is a gynecological version of the Trinity as “consubstantial” which we discussed last week, with the difference that it is Mother and Child rather than Father and Son who form the dual.

Isn’t this a ridiculously abstruse way of talking about a pregnancy? I don’t think so. The unborn child floating in uterine bliss is an image of solitude. When we “cocoon” in any manner, we are introverting, withdrawing from a world that has been hard on us, or at least has exhausted us. We need time out. We say, with Garbo, “I want to be alone.” We agree with the Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell in his enigmatic poem “The Garden” that “Two paradises ‘twere in one / To live in paradise alone.” Such solitude is good, and in fact necessary. It is the mood out of which individuality is born, the detachment from the collective, from the herd. We cocoon mentally as well as physically: reading is the best form of cocooning ever invented, when we “curl up with a good book.” But the paradoxical need of human nature is to be alone and yet connected. Pure solitude is solipsistic, and the mark of a damaged personality. We need to be what the unborn child is: at once alone and at the same time “dyadic,” part of a larger identity that is a 2-in-1.

There is a reason that Sloterdijk says his first volume is about “intimacy.” A psychological sphere consists of two hemispheres conjoined. We lose that connection at birth, then go through a long period of maturation in which we learn the hard truth of separateness. We are alienated from the world and everything in it, including other people. Often we are told that we have to resign ourselves to our alienated condition, that that is “maturity.” But such resignation is emotionally impossible. People who try to achieve such disillusioned maturity can only do so by falling into narcissistic personality disorder: the ego attempts to be self-sufficient by loving itself and denying attachment to others, even denying that others are real. Such people are Donald Trump and Elon Musk. What we yearn for is a “dyadic” relationship in which two individuals remain themselves while at the same time forming a larger identity, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. That is what we talk about when we talk about love. One of the greatest science fiction novels ever written, Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953), is about a next step in human evolution, produced by a mutation that gives some people a way of being linked into a gestalt. The five members of Homo gestalt who are the story’s protagonists are not at all a collective hive mind. But, while remaining quirky individuals, they may unite telepathically. Like Sloterdijk, Sturgeon had to coin a word to express an experience that transcends the subject-object relationship. The mutant outcasts blesh, a portmanteau word combining “blend” and “mesh.” They are a kind of Five Musketeers, whose “All for one, one for all” mentality is continually contrasted with the closed-in selfishness that makes most of the ordinary human beings in the novel blind and cruel.

This is science fiction: we do not have telepathy. But we have our ways. Once the child is born, mother and child are still connected physically through the contact sense of touch and through breast-feeding. Sucking at the breast restores something of the physical unity lost with the cutting of the umbilical cord. But psychologically, they begin to relate through the distance-sense of vision, through a mutual Gaze. The body of material about the Gaze in modern thought is largely negative: the Gaze is aggressive, a weapon. But in contrast, early in Spheres, there is a long foray into art history, an examination of a succession of medieval and Renaissance paintings of Madonna and Child in which the two are staring rapt into each other’s eyes. This mutual, loving gaze forms a sphere, a 2-in-1, a maternal counterpart to the patriarchal Father-Son consubstantiality of the Trinity—from which the feminine has been excluded. It is a fine disquisition, but Sloterdjik’s prickliness about his outsider status in relation to psychoanalysis makes him makes him too eager to dismiss any psychoanalytic insights other than his own. The mutual, loving gaze of mother and child was in fact discussed by the object relations theorist D.W. Winnicott.

I learned this, not from Winnicott’s own work but from its use in Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) about her relationship with her mother. It is not a sequel but a complement to her earlier, better known graphic novel Fun Home, and to my mind an even greater achievement. At one point, the narrator’s voice says (I am going to combine passages broken up into several different boxes):

I’ve always been fascinated by this snapshot of the two of us. [A drawing of a photo of the mother bending over an ecstatically smiling baby]. But I didn’t realize until relatively recently that it was one of a sequence. Five other shots had been scattered about in different albums and boxes.

Bechdel draws those photos together in a 2-page spread. She intersperses a quotation from Winnicott that says:

ordinarily the woman enters into a phase, a phase from which she ordinarily recovers in the weeks and months after the baby’s birth, in which to a large extent she is the baby and the baby is her. There is nothing mystical about this in the ordinary devoted mother.

Bechdel’s narrative voice says in a kind of counterpoint:

For a long time I resisted including my present-day interactions with mom in this book precisely because they’re so “ordinary.” Then I started seeing how the transcendent would almost always creep into the everyday. In my arrangement of these photos, the rapport between mom and me builds until I shriek with joy. Then the moment is shattered as I notice the man with the camera.

The chapter ends with the following statement:

For two separate beings to be identical—to be one—this seems to me as mystical, as transcendent of the laws of everyday reality, as it gets.

This mysticism of everyday life is by no means unique to the mother-child relationship. Paul says that we see here as in a glass, darkly, but in eternity face to face. To be face to face, to look into each other’s eyes, is a greater intimacy than to be naked. Socrates in Plato’s Symposium said that love begins with the eyes, and the troubadours of the medieval Courtly Love tradition echoed him. When Dante is reunited with Beatrice in the Garden of Eden, she enters veiled, and all he can see of her at first is her green eyes. All these are in the high tradition of romantic love, but love is also…ordinary. I had never heard of Peter Sloterdjik. Bubbles was given to me as a gift by a friend and kindred spirit, Michael Verde, who rightly decided that I needed it. Michael is the founder of an organization called Memory Bridge, dedicated to helping those suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia in general. Dementia cannot be cured, but the terrible isolation from which dementia patients suffer can be bridged, and Memory Bridge offers education and training to those who wish to bridge the gulf. The organization has a film called Love Is Listening: Dementia without Loneliness. There are some eloquent speakers, including Michael himself, but much of the film simply shows people interacting with dementia patients, and the interaction is always the same. They gaze deeply and attentively into the other person’s eyes, sometimes holding their hands, and, often, they smile. Those moments may well bring tears to your own eyes. You may get the idea simply by watching the 1:30 trailer, in which a patient says to one listener, “but this smile is such a help.” What do we know but that we face / One another in this place?” wrote Yeats.

This is why teaching has to be face to face. Even in a group discussion, when a student contributes, I walk down the aisle and get closer to the speaker. I tune out the rest of the group as best I can: for the moment, it is the two of us interacting. Cell phones are not bad because they waste our time, but because Internet culture has prevented us from being face to face, to the point where some students feel unable to relate in person. And those who are radicalized are never recruited in person, but always through social media which ironically sucks people “down a rabbit hole” away from one another when it was originally intended to connect.

Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth precedes Spheres by an entire century, but Sloterdijk never mentions it, not even in one of his usual backhanded dismissals. Rank begins in the same place, with the yearning for the blissful state in the womb, but his focus is on our eviction from that paradise. Birth is a physical and emotional trauma for the child, who is inexplicably forced down a narrow passage, giving rise to panic and claustrophobia, at the end of which the dyad is severed, its symbiosis lost. Then the child is slapped until it learns how to breathe, which somehow it knows how to do. No wonder our first reaction, as King Lear remarks, is to “wawl and cry.” Paradoxically, birth is kind of death, death to an old identity and birth into a new one. Much of the birth trauma is due to the fact that our heads are so large: animals mostly do not give birth so traumatically. Yet Rank argues that the intensely negative experience turns out to have a useful function: it sets up a permanent psychological barrier to regressive behavior. Trying to get back to the womb or return to the mother provokes not just guilt but anxiety. Essentially, the birth trauma is the angel with the flaming sword set to guard the gates of paradise after the Fall. It forces us to go forward. Dante’s Purgatorio opens at the dawn of Easter Sunday with imagery of rebirth. Purgatory has an irascible guardian, Cato of Utica, who comes upon a group of the newly arrived who have been listening to one of Dante’s poems set to music by his friend Casella, when suddenly Cato descends upon them furiously, scattering them “like pigeons,” telling them to get busy climbing that mountain. Even art can be a form of regressive behavior if it is used as a way to avoid plunging into the hard work of living. There is in fact an Antepurgatory, a waiting room, for those who put off the work of their own transformation, for procrastination, as I mischievously tell my students, is another form of regression, usually these days by scrolling on your phone. But we all know that procrastination produces anxiety, and that is the birth trauma checking in.

Rank knows, as does Freud, that we are not capable of renouncing our yearning to “return to the womb.” The standard Freudian answer is that the libido, instead of serving the pleasure principle, has to be “sublimated,” rechanneled into the active work of building civilization and raising families. Art was to Freud what he called a harmless “narcosis,” peddling various wish-fulfilment fantasies as a substitute for real regression. Many if not most ordinary people might agree: art is entertainment, what you use as a mild escapism after a hard day’s work. After he was kicked out of the psychoanalytic movement, Rank went on to develop a very different view of art in his late work Art and Artist (1932), and a number of artists who were analyzed by him, including Anais Nin and Henry Miller, spoke highly of him. He came to realize that we have to undergo the birth trauma time after time, because life is a process of being continually reborn, of outgrowing previous ways of thinking and modes of life and having to undergo some kind of symbolic death into a new form of consciousness. While popular entertainers in various media do peddle mildly regressive escapist pleasure, there is a kind of serious artist whose task is to provide what Matthew Arnold called a “criticism of life,” breaking through outmoded conventions, transvaluing obsolete values. The Modernists of Rank’s own time saw this as their task. Art that provides a criticism of life finds its center of gravity in those forms of art whose allegiance is to the reality principle, which in literature means the genres of tragedy, realism, and irony. In modern literature, such works often critique the regressive behavior of those who are trying to live in some kind of comforting illusion, such as Emma Bovary, the mother in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, and the entire family in Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical A Long Day’s Journey into Night, in which the mother is upstairs lost in a drug-induced haze of fantasy about her past when she was convinced she was a gifted pianist. Meanwhile, the father and sons are lost downstairs in alcohol-fueled illusions, including the actor-father’s high-flown speeches about the glory of art. The serious purpose of true art, however, is to rip away all the comforting lies and stare the hard truth in the face.

There is a third function of art, however, one that Rank did not recognize and in fact actively denied, at least at the time when he wrote The Trauma of Birth. In his essay “Psychology and Literature” (1930, revised 1950), Jung distinguished two types of art. One, that he rather misleadingly called “psychological,” is the type of art described above, providing a criticism of life and devoted to the reality principle. But there is another type of art that is not mimetic but visionary. Instead of holding the mirror up to nature, it takes the form of a descent quest—back to the womb. Jung’s first book, The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), rewritten as Symbols of Transformation (1952), is about exactly this quest. Its theme is a praise of “regression.” It cost him his relationship with Freud because it denied that the form of thinking—actually of fantasizing—that went downward and inward always had as its ultimate explanation the erotic desire for the mother in the sense of the Oedipus complex. Regressing libido or psychic energy breaks in fantasy through the incest taboo—but then keeps going, deeper and deeper:

Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the mysteries…in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous in their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life. (419-20)

Visionary or symbolic art like that of Blake, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Wagner’s Ring, and the second half of Goethe’s Faust—examples given by Jung in “Psychology and Literature”—not to mention, in the Western tradition, Greek, Celtic, and Norse mythology and the Bible, do not seek merely to criticize life but to decreate and recreate it, renewing it with “new possibilities” drawn from the mystery below, whether it is called the collective unconscious, the imagination, or divine grace. The Trauma of Birth was written expressly to attack Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious so that Rank could play the good son taking the side of the father against the bad son. Therefore it cannot admit there is any such thing as creative regression, and attacks Jung for idealizing, or, as critical theory would say, “mystifying” the matter. Nevertheless, going down into those depths is a kind of symbolic death, a “night sea journey,” a heroic act. The hero may fail. Goethe’s Faust is a failed hero. But in the second part of Faust, he dares descend to the realm of the Mothers, in a realm that Mephistopheles describes as “Nothing,” beyond time and space. What are the Mothers? Personifications of the ultimate mystery: “Formation, transformation, / The eternal mind’s eternal recreation, / Enswathed in likenesses of manifold entity” (Part 2, Act 1, lines 6288-90, Walter Arndt translation). In those depths, Faust touches a key to a tripod, which sounds like a sexual symbol but could also be interpreted as re-establishing the umbilical union with the maternal ground. That lifegiving connection to the source is what gets broken, and then we may have to dive down again to re-establish it, as Adrienne Rich does in her poem “Diving into the Wreck.” Sloterdijk’s Spheres is an attempt to do the same. Like its great German predecessor, it is half in jest and half in earnest, and that may after all be the proper attitude with which to approach these things.

References

Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. Norton, 1961. Originally published in 1930.

Jung. C.G. “Psychology and Literature.” Translated by R.F.C. Hull. In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Volume 15 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Bollingen Series XX. 1966.

Jung, C.G. Symbols of Transformation. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 5 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Bollingen Series XX. Second edition 1967, first edition 1952. A revision of The Psychology of the Unconscious, 1912.

Rank, Otto, The Trauma of Birth. No translator listed. Dover, 1994. Originally published 1929.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles: Spheres I: Microspherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. Originally published 1998.