Zwischen Tod und Urszene

Are there psychoanalytic ideas about what it means to be fully and creatively alive? Thoughts about this are prompted by Winnicott’s account of living by compliance or by creative apperception. A necessary aspect of independent, creative aliveness is a capacity to be interested in what disturbs our usual thought processes. Clinical examples show the truth of this for therapists in the clinical situation and it applies to life in general as well. Being fully alive involves a particular use of memory so as to move actively up and down one’s life experiences between past and present and also the ability to extend this imaginatively into the future, including particularly the experience of one’s own death which is ultimately and inescapably ‘uncanny’. Such freedom of internal movement makes it possible to see the present as a point of encounter between the past and the future. The past is bounded by the primal scene and the future by death, which represent the beginning and end of time. The present is thus also an encounter between time and timelessness. To tell a dream in an analytical session is to bring the timelessness of the unconscious into a time-bound framework. A clinical example shows how a sense of this crossover between time and timelessness helped a patient use his dream experience to develop a greater sense of aliveness. Vermeer’s painting of ‘The Kitchen Maid’ pouring milk is analysed as a visual representation of the intersection of time and timelessness. A case in a clinical seminar is described, which produced a disorienting sense of timelessness in the seminar group. The seminar leader then needed to help the discussion stay poised at a crossing-point between timelessness and time. A discussion of the myth of Orpheus considers Orpheus’ compulsion to look back at Eurydice as a failure of aliveness because he could not dream Eurydice at the intersection between the timelessness of the underworld and the linear temporality of everyday existence.