novel Blindness; blind to recognition, containment, acceptance?

In Blindness— the 1995 novel by the Portuguese (1998) Nobel laureate for literature Jose Saramago— an epidemic of “white blindness” mysteriously renders all people, save one, blind, and chaos and cruelty ensue. Written without much punctuation the reader must, much like a therapist trying to make sense of the patient’s narrative, discern who is speaking to whom and about what. Blindness teems with allusions to our metaphorical blindness, such as people “behave as if they were afraid of getting to know each other.”  Saramago speaks to the sanctity of reciprocity: “I have no right to look if the others cannot see me,” and to the wrath – “some will hate you for seeing” –  of being the one who sees what all others are blind to (or disavow, like a parent who attacks the seeing child’s reality). There are moments of tenderness, such as when two blind lovers reunite: “how did they recognize each other…love, which people say is blind, also has a voice of its own,” and moments of despair when one’s true self goes unrecognized: “what good would it do her beautiful bright eyes…if there is no one to see them.”

Because all, save one, are blind, there can be no witness, yet some manage to find affective sharing when the blight can “convert strangers into companions in misfortune.” Despair overtakes many in this dark novel for “what meaning do tears have when the world has lost all meaning.” Even the one who is spared this affliction is incredulous to what becomes of those around her: “what shocked her was her disappointment, she had unwittingly believed that…her neighbors would be blind in their eyes, but not in their understanding.”

If blindness is, in part, the blindness to the need of the other, then I am reminded of Stuart Pizer’s 2014 paper The Analyst’s Generous Involvement: Recognition and the “Tension of Tenderness” which eloquently joins with and departs from Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of putting the suffering other above oneself. If one is to lean towards another’s need, one must first see (recognize) the need. Pizer takes Sullivan’s concept of the ‘tension of tenderness’: “the analyst’s recognition of a need or an affect state in the patient evokes an internal tug constituting the analyst’s need to provide for what has been recognized.” He writes, “An instinctual tug toward tenderness, or a spirit of generosity, in response to a recognized state of need in the Other is an inherent feature of our functioning attachment system.”

But how does a blind person see the Levinasian strange, transcendent, unfathomable ‘face’ of the other? Pizer sees generosity as instinctual, but expects Levinas to “reject instinct in favor of a subjectivity open to interruption, surrender, and awakening by an encounter with the Other.” Pizer continues, [we are] “wired to seek community, relational embeddedness, or ‘we-ness.’” Generosity sometimes requires of the analyst, per Corpt, an “unsettling re-evaluation and openness to amending any and all aspects of analytic practice in light of the patient’s forward edge strivings.” Pizer learned from his grandfather the healing power of the affectively resonant, witnessing presence of someone who recognized his need, and accepted him just as he was. Saramago notes its opposite, “Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.” That is, no hope of being seen, recognized, contained and accepted.

Pizer, S. (2014). The Analyst’s Generous Involvement: Recognition and the “Tension of Tenderness”. Psychoanal. Dial., 24:1-13.

Whose responsibility, anyway?

The task of the analyst is to help the patient learn about himself (discover the many facets of himself, if you will), not to impose on the patient the necessity to prove the analyst’s pre-learned theories about human behavior. The analyst, then, has no corner on ‘truth’ and cannot privilege her perspective over that of the patient’s psychic reality. Instead, both analyst and patient struggle to negotiate a working relationship toward discovery. Faltering, fumbling, rupturing, both then strive to upright and repair what has been lost in the relationship. No matter how both analyst and analysand are implicated in the co-creation of the transference, countertransference, or resistance, whatever the patient does is always in the service of trying to heal himself. The patient tests the analyst for trustworthiness, commitment, and circumspection. Make no mistake, that whatever the outcome—whether impasse, acquiescence, failure to improve, getting worse, or stopping treatment – it is always the analyst’s responsibility. The analyst  welcomes in, then must contain what has been welcomed. The analyst’s failure to monitor interactions between patient and analyst, to recognize and correct misattunements, can have dire consequences. While both take responsibility for the discourse, any failure lies on the shoulders of the analyst alone.

Revenge and Forgiveness

Because we all seek to maintain [or create anew] a sense of individual meaning, Lafarge writes that disruption of our sense of self can lead to the wish for revenge, “a ubiquitous response to narcissistic injury.” Revenge “serves to represent and manage rage and to restore the disrupted sense of self [and restore the] internalized imaging audience [the other].” Narcissistic injury is a disruption to meaning and self value and to the story of one’s experience. In efforts to reestablish meaning and to construct a story, as well as create a witness to one’s story, the avenger uses anger and revenge to consolidate early experiences (a time when the “imagining parent” [like Bion] helped construct the infant’s mind with meaning and with its representations of self and others). Communicating experience and constructing its story is also present in the revenge. It is a way of being seen and heard and helps maintain the tie to the lost, imagining parent. Thus, revenge can ward off object loss [Searles] and hatred can be an early form of object constancy. “Giving up the wish for revenge requires the avenger to recognize the rage and helplessness that are warded off…[and] involves acknowledgement of a transient disruption of self experience” that they accompany.

Lansky tells us that shame gives rise to rage as a strategy to protect one’s sense of self from the awareness of helplessness, abandonment, betrayal. Sometimes, clinically, it is easier to analyze the visible rage and resentment than its underlying shame, but it is the detailed exploration of shame that sheds light on its unbearableness. When one’s sense of self is chronically disrupted from the betrayal by needed and beloved others, attachment is at risk. All future attachment is at risk, for who wants to be duped again, subject to humiliation and shame? The disrupted self, in valiant efforts to reconstitute a self representation that can be lived with, may need to withdraw and isolate, project, omnipotently control, split, or retaliate. The latter, as revenge, can seemingly restore a sense of power and effectiveness as well as protect against awareness of vulnerability. Revenge also protects against the uncertainty of forgiveness. Only awareness of loss and its mourning can circumvent the need to humiliate the other, leading to forgiveness both of self and other.

LaFarge, L. (2006). The wish for revenge. Psychoanal. Quart., LXXV, pp. 447-475.

Lansky, M.R. (2007). Unbearable Shame, Splitting, and Forgiveness in the Resolution of Vengefulness. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 55:571-593.