Readings of R.D. Laing’s Existential Psychology

We all suffer from various degrees of a split personality. Our treatment plan for dealing with this involves meditating upon the meaning of contributing a half shekel coin (machatzit hashekel). The halfness of this unit of currency or object of value does not only reflect rifts in our psyche (my person can never be whole in and of itself but requires a relationship with an other) but it also embodies my ability to make this division happen. In his extensive discourse on the mystical meaning of the half shekel coin, the Tzemach Tzedek (Derech Mitzvotecha pp.128-137) explains that the word carries with it the connotation of halving something (to make a division or split) rather than just the particle object (one part out of two which make a whole).

The half shekel as the schizoid self is intended to be offered to God as we see in Shemot/Exodus (30:13). It is specifically referred to as “terumah la’Havayah” where the name for the Divine employed is the Tetragrammaton which means ‘Being.’ The word for an ‘offering’ (terumah) also signifies a lifting up. Thus, these two words have a joint meaning of sublimating my fractured psyche by giving it over and elevating it to an ontological level. My schizoid self is an existential issue; it is a fundamental structure of Being. Returning to the passage in the Zohar (II 187b) that we began deciphering in the previous article (an interpretation cited by the Tzemach Tzedek as well), we see that the secret of the half shekel coin can be mapped onto the four letter Divine name (the Tetragrammaton) as follows:

The letter Yud (whose numerical value is 10) is considered to be a whole shekel coin and therefore it also represents the Chayah or living dimension of the soul–the complete    and unbroken person who is fully present. Since the Yud is graphically likened to a point, it informs us that this kernel of a complete self or unified soul is utterly simple. Experientially, it would be our overall sense of seamless being, our uncomplicated and unexpressed intuition where we are not separated either within ourselves or from our environment. Prior to grasping this experience of wholeness and attempting to cram it into concepts and categories, to try to articulate it in words (even to ourselves), it floats there, hovering on the threshold of consciousness in a manner of ‘touching and not touching’ (mati v’lo mati).

If the Yud is (relatively) the undivided wholeness of self, then according to the Zohar, its  split into two would be the equivalent of the two times the letter Hei appears in this Divine name. Mathematically, this entails taking the Yud (=10) and evenly dividing it into the Hei (=5) and Hei (=5). The first Hei (which is sometimes called the higher Hei on account of its comparatively abstract nature) designates the faculty of binah or understanding. By ‘understanding’ we mean to say all of our re/presentational thinking that moves in to try to grasp an experience and contain it within conceptual categories and rationals.

We cannot re/present (to present again via a supplemental depiction) something which is alive and free flowing. Our capacity to seize upon our experience with this faculty of mind, demands that it first be ‘killed’ and only then can it be intellectually dissected. The problem, of course, is that once taken apart, the wholeness of the lived experience can never be put back together again. We pick up on this every time we acknowledge that out rational understanding is fundamentally incomplete. Despite all our attempts to reanimate it, our lived experience has withered within our understanding and only a ‘supernatural’ resurrection will bring it back–a process that will have to liberate it from the categorical confinement that mummified the lived experience in the first place. Thus the undivided wholeness of our lived experience undergoes an exile/schism in the Egypt of our limited understanding.

The partiality of the higher Hei takes up a position of opposition to the partiality of the second Hei (which is also called the lower Hei in that it is more concrete than the first, representing our practical self-expression which takes on objective qualities that are associated with an external and separate world). If the first Hei is designated as the expansion of our internal (re/presentational) world of cognition, then the second Hei would assume the position of malchut or ‘kingdom’ within the powers of the soul. In Kabbalah, kingdom stands for a world at large or an objective reality. It is that which is outside the self that can be the recipient of the actions and expressions of the self. The idea of kingdom assumes the participation of an other (‘there is no King without a people’). While the first Hei marks the inner-space of my mentally (re) constructed world within the subjective sphere, the second Hei epitomizes the outside or exterior world whose objectivity is split off from my internal workings.

What the Zohar is addressing here is the problem of the subject-object split, the division of the psyche into inner and outer realities. Am I the same person on the inside, in my mind’s eye, as I am on the outside in the eye of an objective beholder? Once this split takes effect, we begin to realize that our subjective truth is incomplete. My personal perception does not tell the entire story. Yet, at the same time, I will not concede everything to an outside objective truth either. It too is incomplete. My pure intuition (the Yud which represents our faculty of chochmah or intuition/insight) reinforces this. The Zohar compares the Yud (the unbroken wholeness of pure intuition of life as it is lived which accepts no such division between the inside and the outside, between the subjective and the objective, no overlaid artificial borders and boundaries–only the seamless, uninterrupted, continuousness, and contiguousness of experience) to the standard weight of the scale (avna l’miskal) with which to assess the accuracy of our re/presentational acts within understanding (higher Hei) and self-expression/speech (lower Hei). Practically, this means that anything that I say or think gets weighed against my intuition. My two halves (the dual incompleteness of my subjective and objective worlds)  must always be compared with how I actually am, my lived experience or being. We struggle with the subjective half and/or the objective half, trying to figure out how to reunite them into the previous whole.

We still have one letter left within the Tetragrammaton which is the Vav. Graphically this letter looks like a connector (the name Vav means a ‘hook’) or a stretched relationship. Generally speaking the Vav provides the place holder for the emotive spheres of the soul (which are 6 in number as is the numerical value of the Vav). In this case, the Vav is both the knife that cuts or sections our psyche into inner and outer parts (it is the splitter of the shekel) as well as the positive tension that holds these two halves together. What this amounts to is an emotive spectrum that both attracts and repels the subjective and objective, the inner and the outer. Our emotional states get polarized when the relationship breaks off (leaving us feeling incomplete with only one side or half of the coin) or else they are depolarized with the relaxing of tensions as these two halves marry or synthesize back together and thus form a more integrated self with greater degrees of reconstituted wholeness. The Vav is both the bridge that separates and connects between the two appearances of the letter Hei.

Given this existential situation, Laing outlines its psycho-pathology as follows:

(The Divided Self p. 82) “A pseudo-duality is thus experienced in the individual’s own being. Instead of the individual meeting the world with an integral selfhood, he disavows part of his own being along with his disavowal of immediate attachment to things and people in the world.” Lacking psychic integration we are in danger of exiling our own legitimate expressions of self. We either don’t want to own up to our inner thoughts and subjectivity or we outcast our objective words and deeds. Either way we feel incomplete and our experience of ourselves has become divided. Under such circumstances, we may start to think that parts of ourselves are not really and truly our own. In this way we may come to depersonalize these parts and even turn against them (a sickness of the soul which may possibly seek to dismember itself or amputate its own psychic limbs).

Our analysis of these and other schisms will continue in Part Three.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-whole-half-self-part-3/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-whole-half-self-part-1/

Print PDF