By Lorena Preta
The podcast currently has 6 episodes available.
With The COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, the government was unable to impose a lockdown, but asked people instead to do same thing voluntarily. Incorporated in this, sacrificial rituals can be seen .
Furui Hiroaki is a psychiatrist specialized in psychoanalysis. For some decades he was dedicated to the treatment of in-hospital patients, then 15 years ago, he opened his own clinic and has to date treated over 6000 patients there. Within his career, he has spent 2 years, from 1997 to 1999, in the US for training as an international fellow at the Karl Menninger School in the United States. At that time, he also received training analysis. He is currently working as a full-time clinician in his psychiatric clinic, he also dedicates as much time as possible to doing psychoanalysis. In June of 2020, He was admitted as Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. His major studies in psychoanalysis include: countertransference to aggression in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder,and psychotherapy processes in patients with borderline personality disorders who have experienced sibling sexual abuse.
I am a psychiatrist specialized in psychoanalysis. I have been dedicated to the treatment of in-hospital patients for decades, and after that, I open a clinic by myself 15 years ago. During my career, I stayed in the US for 2 years at Menninger Clinic for training, and it is my great pleasure to have this opportunity to do podcast.
I have a clinic as a psychiatric practitioner. During COVID-19 pandemic, I saw patients under various situations. Some patients have implied suicide to escape from the hardships of their life. Despite the severalty of their claim, their tone of expressions is very calm as if they are talking about daily conversation or a joke. COVID-19 has killed many people. Since the therapist and the patient share the social situation of being next to death. It may be changing the treatment space shared by the two. There may be a special sense of solidarity between the two. Such a special relationship and environment gave me the opportunity to reconsider the Japanese view of life and death.
This pandemic revealed that our government cannot use the method of “lockdown” in the Peace Constitution of Japan. Therefore, the government demanded that the people voluntarily refrain from going out in consideration of their surroundings. Most people obediently followed government instructions of “Jishuku”, which means voluntary restriction of oneself, despite confusion and contradiction. It seems that we can no longer think of the word as a volunteering to choose on our own initiative. In the history of Japan, we don’t prohibit suicide so strictly. I think that one aspect of the Japanese view of life and death is expressed in people's words and deeds for this pandemic. We can't just take it as a pathological mental condition.
French philosopher Roland Barthes discussed the characteristics of Japanese culture, using the example of his observation of eating habits of Sukiyaki in his “Empire of Signs”. For Westerns, forks are an extension of hunting, reminiscent of spears. For Japanese people, what they use are “hashi” chopsticks in Japanese, and it means the little thing and a tool to play. Freshly cut raw vegetables and thin slices of meat are prepared on a table, with the heated frying pan at the center. People gather and surround the table, picked up the prepared veg and meat with their own chopsticks and fries them in a pan with sugar and soy sauce while enjoying conversation. The movement of the body with chopsticks is like a child's play which seems that the sacrificial ritual is taking place in front of them. Without this book, I wouldn't expect sacrificial rituals to be incorporated into our daily diet.
A book “Voluntary death in Japan” (1984) written by Maurice Pinguet who was a friend of Roland Barthes, a professor of philosophy at the Paris University and later taught at the Tokyo University, was very helpful in thinking about the Japanese view of life and death. Voluntary death was derived from the Latin mors voluntaria. In pandemic I began to imagine about the Japanese ceremony of “Seppuku”. But “Hara-kiri” or “Seppuku” is not unique to Japan. Pinguet presents an example of Cato, who was the first Roman to fight Caesar and was defeated, refused to submit to Caesar and be harassed by him. The spectacular situation that Cato's near relative tries to stop his behavior was drawn. In contrast, the Hara-kiri of Japanese samurai is ritualized, and some have the role of decapitating to shorten the time of the death agony. And he points out that historically Japan has never forbidden the freedom to die. In Japanese behavior, this ultimate act of death, often painful, is associated with rational and deliberate decision-making. The reason for living and the reason for dying are calmly planned. I hope this feeling may still remain in the current Japanese.
Suicide is a term that started to be in use in the 18th century and is influenced by Christian religious condemnation and prejudice linked to medical pathology. He looks back on the history of various suicide studies and arrives at the influence of Durkheim and Freud. Durkheim performed typology of suicide, in which he takes up anomie suicide as a hallmark of modern society. Anomie stands for undisciplined state. Modern society has given individuals freedom, but actually it has only driven him into loneliness and anxiety. It is said that the human group will collapse and increase the number of self-centered suicides aimed as an escape from reality and anomie suicides caused by the disappearance of collective obligations. Durkheim idealized a world of labor in order to escape from the chaotic suicide-prone world of the end of the century. Pinguet says that Japanese companies with seniority and lifetime employment have something close to that ideal.
Freud also helped free suicide from the category of mental illness that was previously trapped by psychiatrists. The hypothesis of the death instinct reveals that suicide is just the tip of the iceberg of primitive masochism. Some people see masochistic characteristics in Japanese culture. Japanese try to avoid the formation of Oedipus and delay its time to immerse it in the symbiotic relationship between the child and the mother. Heisaku Kosawa’s Ajatashatru Complex and Takeo Doi's Anatomy of Dependence are mentioned as references. From the point of view of current psychoanalysis, Japanese people tend to focus on the early Oedipus complex. That is, all dramas are in the mother's body.
Pinguet continues to carefully trace the history of voluntary deaths in Japan, its light and shadow. First of all, the legendary hero of Japanese history in Kojiki, Yamato Takeru, goes to the eastern expedition on a ship at the command of the emperor. Along the way, a storm occurs, damaging the god of the sea. The story is that his wife, Oto Tachibana, jumps into the sea and sacrifices to calm the wrath of the sea god. Subsequently, various stories of “voluntary death” will be taken up and discussed. The Tale of Genji, Bushido, Geisha, General Nogi, Special Attack Units, Yukio Mishima, etc. Pinguet said, "After careful observation of the various paths that have led the men and women of the Japanese archipelago to “voluntary death” for centuries, I can now clearly say: Of all the virtues of the Japanese, the most outstanding and beautiful virtues are their vitality. "
Maurice Pinguet's idea of seeing vitality in voluntary death seems to be a hint to overcome the current pandemic. Finally, I would like to pick up two recent topics that have been talked about on the theme of saving people by making self-sacrifice and discuss them as a summary.
Topic1
The movie "MINAMATA" starring Johnny Depp has become a topic. It depicts Eugene Smith, a photographer known for his collection of photographs of Minamata disease patients, "Minamata." The motif of the movie is a picture titled "Tomoko and the Mother of the Bath" (1971), in which a 15-year-old girl with fetal Minamata disease and her mother are taking a bath. Is reminiscent of Dante's Pieta statue of Mary holding Christ down from the cross. When Minamata City was asked to sponsor the screening, it refused to sponsor it because the creator's intention was unknown, and it was not possible to determine whether it would contribute to discrimination against victims or elimination of prejudice. The mother believes she was able to maintain her health because her daughter absorbed organic mercury on her behalf during pregnancy. The mother had her daughter play a role in informing the world of her Minamata disease, but she wanted to release her from that role. Tomoko passed away in 1976 at the age of 20. This parent-child photo contains a story of self-sacrifice and salvation, not just accusations. Tomoko does not save mankind like Christ does. The name of Tomoko means a baby of wisdom. The mother wanted to bring the poisoned sea back to the original sea of fertility. Fifty years have passed since the photo was taken, and now we can take fresh seafood from the Shiranui Sea. Shiranui means mysterious lights on the sea. This is where darkness and light intersect. The dawn comes while the lone moon remains in the sky. The sun rises and the sun sets over the sea. There is the Pure Land in the West.
Topic2
The movie version of Demon Slayer：Kimetsu no Yaiba “Infinity Train” became the world's number one in 2020 movie box office. In the movie a Japanese monster “Oni” goes into a dream and destroys the core of the spirit. Rengoku, the pillar of the demon Slayer corps, and his juniors exterminated the demon. However, an upper rank demon appeared. Rengoku fought and was severely injured by the demon. The illusion of his dead mother appeared before him at the time of death. Once Rengoku was taught by his mother that the strong will use his power to protect the weak. He asked his mother if he had completed the teaching and mother praised him for doing well. The idea is a kind of the spirit of Noblesse oblige, but different. The teaching is from an unnamed mother who died of illness. Rengoku said “Someday you guys will become HASHIRA and be the pillars of the Demon Slayer Corps.” This anime empowered many Japanese people to live. Given that the economic crisis is progressing and the number of people in need is increasing, it is possible that suicides will increase in the future. Reviving the vitality of Japan's history of " voluntary death " may lead to a decrease in the number of suicides.
After World War II, it became difficult for Japan to teach its own myths at school. Nowadays, young people who have lost their myths are free to create their own myths through manga or anime. The main character in the manga is mostly adolescents. The hero is about 14 years old. A long time ago, Japanese samurai’s children at the age of 14 performed a coming-of-age ceremony called genpuku. And now, the ritual of genpuku is gone, but I think that children create psychologically, their own myth of Parental Killing: The Japanese version of the Oedipus Myth, through manga and grow up to be adults. Unlike suicide, Voluntary death is, so to speak, a story of rebirth. To conclude this text, I would like to express my condolences to the victims of COVID-19 by quoting the words of the Master of Demon Slayer. At the beginning of the movie, he visits the grave of Demon Slayer corps. And he said “No matter how many lives a demon takes, the one thing they can never crush is a human’s will. No matter how battered we are, we will rise up and fight again.”
Thank you.
Latin America’s particular relation with death implies something even worse: the practice of disappearing people in connection with State terrorism. The disappearance of rituals, which has reached an unprecedented extent, further exacerbated in times of pandemic, only increases contemporary anxiety. In this context, the analyst’s role is to function less as archaeologists—as Freud imagined—than as forensic anthropologists.”
Mariano Horenstein has published three books (Psicoanálisis en lengua menor; The compass and the couch. The necessary strangeness of Psychoanalysis; and Funambulistas. Travesía adolescente y riesgo). He has received some awards, among them Lucian Freud, Ángel Garma, Elise Hayman and FEPAL. He has given seminars and conferences in institutions from Latin America, Europe, EEUU and Asia. Former chief editor of Calibán-Revista Latinoamericana de Psicoanálisis. Current Training Director of the Asociación Psicoanalítica de Córdoba.
I If we had to pick just two words as the focal points of an ellipse that might serve as an approach to comprehend the subjects comprising the human species—at least the human species as conceived by psychoanalysis—they would be sex and death. Not only are these words focal points in terms of two points equidistant from the center of the ellipse; they are also sources of illumination that shed light on a large part of the phenomena that psychoanalysis has always engaged with, those inherent to clinical practice, and to daily life.
Although psychoanalysis has usually been identified with sex, almost to the point of caricature, death is no less present in its theoretical structure.
With his habitual insight regarding psychoanalysis, Woody Allen once said “There are only two important things in life. The first is sex and the second I don’t remember.” Of course he doesn’t remember the second one. And the artist himself offers a clue when he says “My relationship with death remains the same. I’m strongly against it.”
II Sex and death then: Psychoanalysis’ Two Crucial Themes
There is no place here for generalizations, because what matters from a psychoanalytical standpoint are the particularities—even more so in a project that emphasizes the value of a Geography of Psychoanalysis, like the one that Lorena Preta imagined—the place where enunciation occurs. Although I have the good fortune to work in different geographical contexts, I speak from one in particular: Latin America, a continent that has proven to be fertile ground for psychoanalysis.
III On more than one occasion, Freud identified with Heinrich Schliemann, the man who discovered Troy, and assimilated the analyst’s task to that of the archaeologist. However, maybe we should admit instead that as psychoanalysts we work more like forensic anthropologists than archaeologists.
All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal.
A time to destroy, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh.
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather.
A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to get, and a time to lose.
A time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew.
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
A time of love, and a time of hatred.
A time of war, and a time of peace.
Any intent to shorten the time to weep has its consequences. The same is true for not paying due attention to having been advised that, almost like a premonition, there is “a time to be far from embraces”…
Upon any discussion on the elaboration of “death” in Iran, one inevitably comes face to face with the often argued and examined notion that Iranians symptomatically suffer within a culture that is obsessed with the celebration of death, nostalgia and mourning. Many interdisciplinary scholars in recent decades have examined and provided data which proves such tendencies and their disastrous consequences for Iranians. Here, Gohar Homayounpour attempts to delve deeper into the various palettes of the “Persian Blues”, in the name of integration and a continuous re-examination of our comfortably established notions, she attempts to add a but, referring to the various derivatives of Eros’s footsteps upon the Persepolis of Persia, dreaming that this but might become a possibility for “linking”, a sense of orientation, inspiration, out of these particularly destructive and melancholic aspects of the Iranian culture, orienting us towards a voyage from melancholia to mourning.
The first thing that comes to mind when one is asked to elaborate on “death” in my geography is the often discussed and examined notion that Iranians symptomatically suffer within a culture that is obsessed with the celebration of death, nostalgia and mourning. Many scholars in recent decades have examined and provided data which proves such tendencies and their disastrous consequences for Iranians.
Bibliography
Ferdowsi, A. (2016). Shahnameh: The Persian book of kings. UK: Penguin Press.
Green, A. (1999). The work of the negative, Weller A, translator. London: Free Association Books. [(1993). Le travail du négatif. Paris: Minuit.]
Homayounpour, G. (2012). Doing psychoanalysis in Tehran. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality. California: Stanford University Press.
Kiarostami, A. (1987). “Where Is The Friend’s Home?”[Film]. Home for the intellectual development of children and adolescents Productions.
Shaygan, D. (2005, 12 Dec). The depth of ordinary. Tehran: Shargh magazine, 294(20). [In Persian]
Sepehri, S. (2008). Eight books. Tehran: Tahoori publication. [In Persian].
Hezaar va Yek Shan (Thousand nights and a night) (2011). Translated by Mirza Abd-al Latif Tasuji Tabrizi. Reprinted of Kolaale Khaavar Publications (1936): Tehran
Definitions and the symbol of Eshragh. (2018, 6 Jan). Tehran: Eshragh Institute of higher education.
Link: https://eshragh.ac.ir/index.php/en/eshragh-at-a-glance/introducing-eshragh/279-terminology-and-symbol
Latin America’s particular relation with death implies something even worse: the practice of disappearing people in connection with State terrorism. The disappearance of rituals, which has reached an unprecedented extent, further exacerbated in times of pandemic, only increases contemporary anxiety. In this context, the analyst’s role is to function less as archaeologists—as Freud imagined—than as forensic anthropologists.”
Mariano Horenstein has published three books (Psicoanálisis en lengua menor; The compass and the couch. The necessary strangeness of Psychoanalysis; and Funambulistas. Travesía adolescente y riesgo). He has received some awards, among them Lucian Freud, Ángel Garma, Elise Hayman and FEPAL. He has given seminars and conferences in institutions from Latin America, Europe, EEUU and Asia. Former chief editor of Calibán-Revista Latinoamericana de Psicoanálisis. Current Training Director of the Asociación Psicoanalítica de Córdoba.
I If we had to pick just two words as the focal points of an ellipse that might serve as an approach to comprehend the subjects comprising the human species—at least the human species as conceived by psychoanalysis—they would be sex and death. Not only are these words focal points in terms of two points equidistant from the center of the ellipse; they are also sources of illumination that shed light on a large part of the phenomena that psychoanalysis has always engaged with, those inherent to clinical practice, and to daily life.
Although psychoanalysis has usually been identified with sex, almost to the point of caricature, death is no less present in its theoretical structure.
With his habitual insight regarding psychoanalysis, Woody Allen once said “There are only two important things in life. The first is sex and the second I don’t remember.” Of course he doesn’t remember the second one. And the artist himself offers a clue when he says “My relationship with death remains the same. I’m strongly against it.”
II Sex and death then: Psychoanalysis’ Two Crucial Themes
There is no place here for generalizations, because what matters from a psychoanalytical standpoint are the particularities—even more so in a project that emphasizes the value of a Geography of Psychoanalysis, like the one that Lorena Preta imagined—the place where enunciation occurs. Although I have the good fortune to work in different geographical contexts, I speak from one in particular: Latin America, a continent that has proven to be fertile ground for psychoanalysis.
III On more than one occasion, Freud identified with Heinrich Schliemann, the man who discovered Troy, and assimilated the analyst’s task to that of the archaeologist. However, maybe we should admit instead that as psychoanalysts we work more like forensic anthropologists than archaeologists.
All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal.
A time to destroy, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh.
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather.
A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to get, and a time to lose.
A time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew.
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
A time of love, and a time of hatred.
A time of war, and a time of peace.
Any intent to shorten the time to weep has its consequences. The same is true for not paying due attention to having been advised that, almost like a premonition, there is “a time to be far from embraces”…
Rubén Gallo is a writer, the author of Freud in Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2010), and a professor at Princeton University. In this podcast, he explores the meaning in death in Mexico, from the well-known images of joyful skeletons painted by artists like Diego Rivera, to the more somber political and social manifestations of deadly impulses in contemporary society, including drug-related violence.
I am Rubén Gallo, a writer and academic, and today I would like to share with you some reflections on the culture of death in Mexico. Without a doubt you have read and heard about the special place death has in Mexican culture. You might have seen photographs or paintings of the Day of the Dead, when families visit their deceased relatives in the cemetery to bring them food, thus transform mourning into a festive occasion. And you are probably familiar with the many joyful depictions of skeletons, skulls, and other symbols of death, in the paintings of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and other Mexican artists. In popular music, such as ranchero songs from the north, singers cheerfully announce that they are not afraid of death, and if they die, it should happen while they are drinking and dancing.
But, as I would like to suggest today, beneath this appearance of a unique and joyful approach to death, there lies a darker reality, one that is closer in spirit to traditional accounts of death. Octavio Paz, one of Mexico’s greatest poets, made a similar argument in his essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, published in 1950. Paz argued that many of the images associated with Mexico —the celebration of life, the passion for fiestas with music and dance, the raucous drinking —conceal a more complex psychology. Mexicans, he argued, are melancholic beings, and these outwards explosions of joy are attempts to cover-up an unresolved mourning emerging froma series of historical traumas that hark back to the conquest of Mexico and to the violent encounter that ended with the destruction of the Aztec civilization.
Paz, who was a passionate reader of Freud in his youth, believed that these unresolved historical traumas resulted in a repetition compulsion that can be observed in many of the most famous Mexican rituals: bright celebrations full of music, song, and dance can easily degenerate into fistfights leaving revelers dead; and, in one of his most poetic images, Paz draws attention to how at every fiesta, there comes a point when the life of the party, he who has been drinking and eating and singing, inevitably plunges into an explicable melancholia, an irrational feeling of solitude. The singing gives way to a taciturn state for which the Spanish language has a beautiful word: ensimismamiento, becoming trapped in oneself.
México: Olimpiada de 1968
A Dore y Adja Junkers
La limpidez
(quizá valga la pena
escribirlo sobre la limpieza
de esta hoja)
no es límpida:
es una rabia
(amarilla y negra
acumulación de bilis en español)
extendida sobre la página.
¿Por qué?
La vergüenza es ira
vuelta contra uno mismo:
si
una nación entera se avergüenza
es león que se agazapa
para saltar.
(Los empleados
municipales lavan la sangre
en la Plaza de los Sacrificios).
mira ahora,
manchada
antes de haber dicho algo
que valga la pena,
la limpidez.
And now in English:
Mexico City: The 1968 Olympiad
for Dore and Adja Yunkers
-- Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Lucidity
(perhaps it’s worth
writing across the purity
of this page)
is not lucid
it is fury
(yellow and black
mass of bile in Spanish)
spreading over the page.
Why?
Guilt is anger
turned against itself:
if
an entire nation is ashamed
it is a lion poised
to leap.
(The municipal employees
wash the blood
from the Plaza of the Sacrificed.)
Look now,
stained
before anything worth
it was said:
lucidity.
Paz noted that sacrifices — with their share of sadism and destruction — continued to be repeated, though in different form and with different purposes, at the foot of the pyramid, which remained an important archetype in Mexican culture. Most importantly, Paz read this persistence of political violence as the underside of the famously joyful Mexican attitude towards death: a culture that does not respect death is a culture that cannot respect life, and the underside of the insouciance with which Mexicans treat death is the ease with which human lives can be cut short.
Death, its fear and the efforts of human imagination to address the fear is a universal that has been addressed differently by different civilizations at different times of history. In modern scientific West, the cultural home of psychoanalysis, death is not only the end of body but of all consciousness. Its terror is a separation from everything we know, love and are attached to. But what happens when the cultural imagination, such as that of the Indic civilization, envisages death as a form of union as much as it is also a moment of separation?
Sudhir Kakar is an Indian psychoanalyst and writer. He has been a Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at the universities of Chicago, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton, Berlin and Cologne and is on the Board of Freud Archives. His many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, McArthur Research Fellowship, and Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Kakar is the author of fourteen books of non-fiction and six novels. His books have been translated into 22 languages.
"As an Indian born Freudian analyst I live a professional life that is peculiarly bi-cultural. I was born and raised in India but my education has been in the cultural home of psychoanalysis, the post-enlightenment West. Non-western analysts like me are not heirs to the Judeo-Christian civilizations, but we practice in enclaves of Western modernity in our civilizations that have similarities to the small subset of the human population that the Harvard psychologist Joseph Heinrich and his colleagues in an influential article in 2010 called WEIRD.
‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death: and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in his unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality. (Freud 1915/2001, p. 289)
We are less familiar with similar sentiments voiced in other cultures. In 7th century Syria, the Sufi saint Uwais al-Qarani is asked,
‘What has Grace brought you?’
‘When I wake up in the morning I feel like a man who is not sure he will live till evening,’ Uwais replied.
‘But doesn’t everyone know this?’
‘They certainly do,’ Uwais said. ‘But not all of them feel it.’
And in north India, sometime between the 6th century B.C.E. and 4th century C.E. (the dates assigned to the Hindu epic Mahabharata) King Yudhishtra is asked the question, ‘What is the most amazing thing in the world? He answers,’Day after day, countless creatures are going to the abode of Yama [God of Death], yet those that remain behind believe themselves to be immortal. What can be more amazing than this?
But perhaps the most plausible explanation of the ‘nightmare’ of dying and death lies in death stripping the self of memories of which the most vital are of persons we have loved and who have loved us. In psychoanalytic language, the dread lies in the self being emptied of the mental representations of our most important attachments. In India, this has also been the position of one of its greatest writers, Rabindranath Tagore. Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross, the author of the popular and widely influential On Death and Dying, was so convinced that no one had thought more deeply on death than Tagore that she printed quotations from Tagore at the head of each chapter of her book.
For Tagore, what a person cannot imagine about death but vaguely senses is an annihilation of his psyche, an emptying of the self of its past, obliterating memories, attachments, fears, hopes, a process that is deeply unsettling. Tagore’s ideas came from a near-death experience. I believe Tagore’s sixty-hour sojourn in the borderland between life and death, haunts these poems.
With the light of the world extinguished,
in the heart of darkness,
quietly came the envoy of death. Layers of fine dust,
Settled in the sky of life, extending to the horizon, Were cleansed with the solvent of pain—
This quiet scrubbing continued every moment
With firm hands, like a nightmare. (Tagore 2003, p. 27)
Whereas most Weird people believe there is no other alternative to accepting or resigning oneself to ‘being nothinged, unselved, unparented, unsonned.’ (Bertrand Russel), Buddhist and Hindu thought offer the possibility of rebirth and thus a continuation of consciousness in a different form. A common attitude towards death is that of an old village woman who says to the anthropologist (Das, 1977) ‘ It is like being shifted from one breast of the mother to the other. The child feels lost for that instant, but not for long.’
Most psychoanalysts, I imagine, reject the idea of a continuation of consciousness after death on the basis that the mind is indistinguishable from the brain so that with brain death all consciousness is forever extinguished. While the dismissal of any kind of consciousness surviving death is associated with the modern West and especially the WEIRD, it has also been present in other civilizations. In 600 C.E. in India, the popular Lokayata school that had a large number of adherents dismissed any possibility of the existence of a soul separate from the body. ‘He that maintains, owing to error, that the Soul is distinct from the body and exists after the loss of the body, cherishes an opinion that is unreasonable…’.
The Lokayata school however is not mainstream. In the mainstream of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thought, where ideas on the nature of the soul are not identical but share a strong family resemblance, death is dehanta—end of body, not end of what was called soul and is now often called Consciousness or Self with a capital ‘c’ and ‘s.’
While Freud, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle posited the twin forces of Eros and Thanatos in eternal conflict in the psyche, Hindu and Buddhist thought has had no trouble in accepting that life and death are closely intertwined; they are twin brothers. In Indian conception, though, there is no conflict between Eros and Thanatos. Death is as vitally engaged as life in the further evolution of personal consciousness into the universal consciousness. As Tagore observes, ‘The mercy of death works at life’s core, bringing it respite from its own foolish persistence. The opposite of death is birth, not life. Death and birth both belong to life of the self: ‘the walk is in the raising of the foot as in laying it down.’ Death is negation of life, not its antagonist. He writes, ‘Life as a whole never takes death seriously. Only when we detach one individual fact of death do we see its blankness and become dismayed. It is like looking at a piece of cloth through a microscope. It appears like a net; we gaze at the big holes and shiver in imagination. But the truth is, death is not the ultimate reality. It looks black, as the sky looks blue; but it does not blacken existence, just as the sky does not leave its stain upon the wings of the bird.’
A culture’s view of death is an integral part of its overarching ‘vision of reality.’ Visions of reality are composites of certain verifiable facts, acts of speculation and articles of faith that unite groups of human beings in specific cultural consolidations. A culture’s vision of reality, absorbed as an intuitive inner orientation in early childhood, continues to color a person’s life and death. In the tragic, WEIRD vision, which is also that of psychoanalysis, each of us lives in our own subjective world, pursuing pleasures and private fantasies, constructing a life and a fate that will vanish when our time is over. A cornerstone of this vision is the necessity and painfulness of separation.
The Indian vision does not doubt the reality of separation but refuses to admit that separation-individuation is the higher level of reality, and asserts that union or oneness is. Even in the Punjabi proverb about death being the shifting from one breast to another, it is the continuation of breastfeeding rather than the aspirations of weaning and the independence implicit in weaning that dominates the Indian imagination
The podcast currently has 6 episodes available.