Readings of R.D. Laing’s Existential Psychology

Once the vortex of self-consciousness is opened and a false self springs forth from an alternative universe, we may succumb to the charms and challenges of this ‘other’ that is me. In doing so, we may find ourselves giving up real relationships with real people. Imagined others who are just persona of myself afford me the opportunity of playing an extended game of solitaire wherein I control the script which is a monologue disguised as a dialogue.

To be disconnected from reality would be to withdraw from an actual exchange with a real other. This is precisely what happened as a result of the eating from the Tree of Knowledge. According to the Talmud (Eruvin 18b) Adam separated himself from Chava/Eve for a period of 130 years. During this time, he experiences seminal emissions which gave rise to all sorts of demonic forces. If we overlay a psychoanalytic reading of this midrashic interpellation, then it becomes clear that the prolonged absence of a real other (Chava/Eve) brought about Adam’s disconnection from reality. Here wasted seed is understood in Kabbalah as wasted energy, squandered creativity, unproductive expenditures, useless efforts. As a result, the offspring were not ‘real children’ or fully actualized objects that connect with reality and the world, but rather just the demonic which represents all of the psychotic tendencies of a person who is out of touch with the real, having overly indulged in fantasy.

This then begs the question: Why 130 years? One of the analogues for this number is the word semel [סמל = 130] which means a ‘symbol’ or ‘image.’ To enter into the symbolic universe always has its dangers in that my mind may get bounced around in a hall of mirrors which reflect each other rather than any real object. As with a hallucination, my consciousness is cast into a maze of signifiers that may or may not correspond to any signified. The images that I am conjuring may all be in my mind as creations of my subjectivity. For Laing:

“Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc. (imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible.” (p.83)

Furthermore, all of this may lead, according to Laing, to “a form of Onanism, i.e. wasting his powers of creativity and productiveness.” (p.157). Thus, the splitting of the self and the subsequent auto-affectation that comes from relating back and forth between true and false selves, introduces a kind of psychological idolatry in the form of fantasy whose critique places it in the category of mental and emotional masturbation. Along these same lines we find Laing contending that:

“Masturbation was an activity in which par excellence he had substituted a sterile relationship to the phantoms of phantasy for a creative relationship with a real other; instead of the possible guilt that he might have had arising out of real desire for a real person, his guilt was that his desires were only phantastic ones.” (p.132)

What happens when we are content with the halfness that we’ve become? Or perhaps more extremely, what transpires when we mistake this incompleteness for completeness? If in the hermitage of the disconnected self we become complacent with the virtual world that we’ve constructed there, if we resist awaking from this self-induced dream, then the creatures that we create and encounter will all be phantoms rather than real people. And yet, there is still a seduction to this world of fantasy. It holds the pretense of super-empowering the sovereign subject to act and be acted upon according to the dictates of one’s personal desire. All of the environmental controls are possessed by the agency whose self-reflective activities need not consult with nor be mindful of anyone else. Psychological idolatry essentially tries to absolutize the self by bestowing unlimited power upon the imaginative sphere as Laing aptly diagnoses in the same spirit of the Talmudic teaching about Adam’s self-conscious separation:

“Whatever failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is thus omnipotent and completely free – but only in phantasy. Once [it] commit[s] itself to any real project and it suffers agonies of humiliation – not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-up-ness in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to be kept apart.” (p.84)

Given all of this covert history, we can segue into a sequel to this event with the episode of the Golden Calf. Mystically speaking the same negativity that was brought about by the primordial snake crops up in the instigation of this foundational example of idolatry. The parallelism becomes evident when we consider how idols are often substitutes for some original and unmediated experience of Divinity. The people had a hallucination wherein they thought they saw Moshe/Moses deceased and being carried off in a coffin (an illusion bred by a miscalculation and impatience with his return from atop the mountain). That being said, it is important to point out that Moshe/Moses was not an interrupting intermediary (which would mean that there is no direct connection of the people to God but rather that they must attach themselves to Moshe/Moses and that he in turn would connect to the Divine) but rather he is thought of as a non-interrupting intermediary (someone who uplifts the consciousness of the people so that they can realize their own direct connection to the Divine). He marries the people to a real Divine Other as opposed to an intervening image which switches out the real for the symbolic. When his mochin d’gadlut (expansive consciousness) seems absent, when the maturity to have an adult connection with the Creator appears to have lost its vitality, then the people fall into a state of mochin d’katnut (constricted consciousness) whereby their limited mentality becomes immature and demands spiritually childish images to relate to.

The heart of the problem has to do with our tendency to come under the spell of our ‘imaginative faculty’ or ko’ach hamedameh ([כח המדמה] = 122) which equals the words ‘Golden Calf’ or eigel hazahav (122 = [עגל הזהב]). This allusion informs us that idolatry spouts out of our false associations and musings of the imagination. When we choose to relate to something that we dreamt up and imagine to be real and then imbue it with all sorts of qualities that we bow down or submit ourselves to, but which in actuality do not exist, we are reenacting on a psychic level that Golden Calf conundrum. Interpersonally, this would be similar to a man who tells his significant other that he worships her only for her to turn around and say ‘you don’t really desire me but only your imagined ‘idealized’ (idolized) idea of me.’ She then continues: ‘the real me, you don’t know at all because you cannot get past how you think and fantasize about me and those thoughts have no bearing on how I actually am nor upon our relationship.’

Our melting down of the Golden Calf continues in Part Six.

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