9
Psychoanalytic Act, Metanoia, Conversion
Helena Sedlackova Gibbs
For several years now I’ve been teaching Plato’s Symposium and Saint Augustine’s Confessions in an undergraduate seminar on great books of Western civilization at Bard College. Reading Lacan’s Seminar XV, I was struck by resonances with some of his notions of a (psychoanalytic) act. In one of his many definitions, Lacan even states that it concerns something of the order of “a conversion,” something like “a turn” (Sem. XV, E15/F27). In my reflection on the topic of the (psychoanalytic) act and its transmission, I would like to explore these resonances by looking at Augustine’s depiction of his conversion to Christianity and the Platonic model behind it.
A psychoanalytic act is what analysts practice; it entails the subversion of the subject with regard to his relation to knowledge, and it takes place in transference. So there is a difference between clinical practice and what I will consider, namely a written text. My intention, however, is to look at an act in terms of a structure, and to explore the intersection of writing with an act and with transmission.
Augustine draws in his narrative upon a number of Platonic concepts, rereading them for his own theological purposes. The “turn of the soul” (metanoia) of the stages of cognition, as well as the function of love in attaining wisdom are the central themes of the Confessions. How can Augustine’s text illuminate what an act is and how it is transmitted?
An act is “that which has an effect”
I will begin my reflection with the famous passage from the Confessions in which, we might say, Augustine depicts a moment of subjective transformation. This is the narrative culmination of his trajectory towards conversion, a trajectory that unfolds along a series of minor steps—or turns. The conversion happens in a garden where Augustine attempts to take momentary refuge from persistent doubts and an agonizing inability to change. Unable to stop the flood of tormenting questions, he says that “ . . . all at once I heard the singing voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl I cannot say but again and again it repeated the refrain ‘Take it and read, take it and read’” (VIII.12.177). Augustine picks a random passage from St. Paul’s Epistles and, after reading it, experiences a sudden peace of mind: “For an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled. . . . My looks now were quite calm . . .” (VIII.12.178).
How does Augustine transmit what takes place here? To begin with, what has been called his conversion is an instant, and it happens as if by chance. Further, he is unable to describe what happens; he can only tell us of its effects. There is the immediate effect, as all of a sudden his long internal struggle ends and he feels at peace. From this point on, Augustine experiences a sort of rebirth; sees things differently, changes his life, and assumes a new calling: he becomes a monk, returns to his native Northern Africa, and eventually assumes position of Bishop. There is also the larger context of the effect of his text(s) on the foundations of Christian dogma and on the Western understanding of human subjectivity. During the course of his long, productive life, he contributed to the discussion of the dualisms of reason/faith, merit/grace, determination/free will, among others.
Augustine conveys the effects of his transformation in various ways, most interestingly on the level of the structure of the Confessions, where post-conversion sections (Books X – XIII) are a sort of repetition with a difference of the pre-conversion ones (Books I-IX). This textual strategy is perhaps most evident in his changed attitude towards death and mourning: the inconsolable loss he feels, prior to his conversion, when in his youth a close friend unexpectedly dies; and the quiet grief he experiences when, after his conversion, his beloved mother Monica dies.
We have here two dimensions of an act to which I will return later: on one level, a transformation that happens independently of the subject’s conscious agency; on another level, an act that is known by its effects.
Augustine and love
The central role of love in Augustine’s trajectory towards conversion is signaled early on, and in this respect his path towards (knowing) God evokes the Platonic trajectory from eromenos to erastes, of the ascent from the lower to higher modes of cognition and love. A young student, newly arrived in Carthage, Augustine is famously “in love with love.” He explains that “I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began to look around for some object of my love . . .” (III.1.55). He throws himself head on into “the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust” (III.1.2). He enjoys women, good food, bad friends, and theater, yet does not obtain the satisfaction he is looking for. Quite the opposite, he begins to have a sense of enslavement: “My love . . . finally shackled me in the bonds of its consummation. In the midst of my joy I was caught up in the coils of trouble, for I was lashed with the cruel, fiery rods of jealousy and suspicion, fear, anger, and quarrels” (III.1.55). Like with prisoners of Plato’s cave, Augustine’s chains are his ignorance. Instead of the distance from the realm of Forms, however, it is his soul’s distance from God and his grace that prevents him from seeing truth.
His chains are also metaphorical sins. Original sin, debates about which Augustine contributed to, is for him the cause of an internal division, for since the fall an “evil principle” dwells in man and is the source of actions at odds with his will. The fall from grace is the fall into the body, and it is the “impulses of nature” that become at war with the “impulses of spirit” (VII.5.164). Here Augustine conveys a keen understanding of subjective division. Describing his state prior to conversion, he claims that “My inner self was a house divided against itself” (VIII.8.170); he likens the conflict he experiences to “two wills at odds with each other” (VIII.10.172); and he echoes the notorious “I know but” of the subject of the unconscious with his “To will it was to do it. Yet I did not do it” (VIII.8.171). In Augustine’s perceptive grasp “The reason why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with the full will. For if the will were full, it would not command itself to be full, since it would be so already” (VIII.9.172). He experiences this internal conflict as “sickness,” “torment,” and “agony,” proclaiming that “I twisted and turned in my chain” (VIII.11.175).
In Augustine’s understanding, souls fall into mortal bodies from their previous state close to God, but not without memory of former happiness. For the soul, like Odysseus, wanders through life and returns to God and its heavenly home (Teske, 151). For Augustine, the three aspects of mind are memory, understanding, and will but love is present in understanding along with memory. He explains that “without memory the gaze of our thought has no object to return to, and without love it has no reason to return to it” (On the Trinity, V.21.41). What is at stake in this notion of the forgotten memory is a certain savoir that has always been there. Augustine asks: “How then shall I find you, if I do not remember you?” (X.17.224). It is memory, understanding, and love that grant an “obscure understanding of the triune God” (Teske, 157). This forgotten memory, this savoir, is the inexplicable source of longing that impels humans towards their true purpose–God. [1]
Unlike with the ignorant and self-sufficient eromenos, therefore, Augustine has an acute awareness of an absence since early on, a want that motivates his unconscious search and takes him through the different steps of love, from eros to philia and to the final agape—the selfless, God-centered love, spiritual in its nature. The moment of his conversion thus is the moment of his soul’s return to God, in a union that heals the internal division and the wound of the original separation, and that entails immortality.
The function of the lack
I think it is not difficult to recognize Aristophanes’ myth from Plato’s Symposium inhabiting Augustine’s idea of the soul’s odyssey as a journey towards restitution of the original state. Aristophanes, as we know, traces the genesis of love to an originary loss that was the splitting of initially self-sufficient creatures into two. Love, according to him, “calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature” (191d). This loss explains the sense of a mysterious longing, on the one hand, and the joy of lovers being with one another without knowing exactly what it is that brings it about, on the other. “Love,” he continues, “is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete” (192e). In this perhaps most recognizable segment of the Symposium, therefore, Aristophanes gives us the structure of love as desire, predicated upon loss, and understands the purpose of love to be a restitution of a previous state.
There is, however, another version of the function of the lack in the Symposium, offered in Diotima’s tale. Whereas for Aristophanes the originary loss is the motor force towards a restitution of the state of completeness, for Diotima the loss becomes a lack sustaining desire. That is why in her conception, Love is a lover (erastes). In the Symposium, Socrates embodies this position: a lover of wisdom (as in philosophia), he is wise, yet aware of his own ignorance, of his lack (agalma) sustaining desire, his own and that of his disciples.[2] In Diotima’s tale, the assumption of the lack is the condition of the possibility for creation, both in body and mind (poiesis: any kind of production or creation, in the sense of poetry as creating something out of nothing, the latter of a higher order. This capacity for creating good and beautiful (kalos) ideas is what humans have in common with gods; it is also how love leads to immortality. This function of the loss as lack does not seem to be overtly articulated in the Confessions; on the contrary, Augustine shows that conversion is the moment when the longing comes to an end, its goal achieved.
Act and transmission
Augustine’s conversion cannot be thought of without taking into account his writing about it—his text(s). Transmission is Augustine’s implicit aim in writing the Confessions. Written by the end of the fourth century (397-98 CE), during the time when Christianity was in the process of consolidation, his concern was to provide a model to be imitated. Hence the two layers of his text: an intimate, first person narrative addressed to God; and what reads more like a case study—overcoming difficulties, probing, searching for wisdom and truth, and learning by imitation—addressed to the reader who might identify with his example and follow his path.
What Augustine takes from Plato is the function of loss and longing for completeness as the motivating power that drives human beings towards their purpose—the union with God. In this respect, it is Aristophanes’ tale that serves as a vehicle for transmission, ultimately of a certain model of subjectivity (God as the cause of self), and of the subject’s relation to lack (God, in the place of objet a, covering the lack). Yet, something of the order of Diotima’s version, with its emphasis on the assumption of the lack is transmitted by Augustine’s text along with the other model. For we might say that the Confessions, as text (and the vast body of Augustine’s writing), bears witness to the persistence, in its author, of the lack sustaining desire.
Augustine evokes Diotima when he describes his mother’s joy, after his conversion, as “far sweeter . . . than any she had hoped to find in children begotten by my flesh” (VIII.12.179). The implicit reference here is to Diotima’s distinction between the two ways in which humans achieve immortality, physical procreation and spiritual creation. What his mother has in mind is that Augustine’s conversion (the love for/of God) and his celibacy, more so than marriage (the love for/of a woman) and biological offspring, has secured his immortality. It is of course the spiritual creation in Diotima’s secular sense, of creation as poiesis, that made Confessions survive for more than 1,500 years, securing Augustine’s afterlife.
Something of the order of Diotima’s tale has thus been transmitted beyond the narrated content of the Confessions and its more explicit aims. It is perhaps in this sense that an act is not an action, and why an act bears witness to the subject of the unconscious. Augustine is aware of this dimension, and as we have seen, his awareness is signaled throughout the Confessions, perhaps most evidently by his distinguishing between the two paths towards knowing God: rational logic and learning in the sense of instruction (connaissance); and what he calls “the wisdom of the heart” (savoir). Understandably, he cannot sustain the larger implications of what his text shows.
This (performative) dimension of writing is at work every time we read, and particularly when we read literature and poetry. As Luis Borges, among other postmodern authors, makes us often painfully aware, the text comes about not when it is written but only when it is read by someone. It comes about between the author and the reader (as if co-written by the reader), not unlike the truth that comes about between the analyst and the analysand, in the locus of the Other, which is the locus of the operation of language. This is the dimension where, in my understanding, psychoanalysis and literature in a larger sense meet.