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Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Bionians, at Play in the Fields of Their Lord

 Here are three short excerpts from a single, randomly chosen spot (pages 4 to 5) in a fairly recent book of Bionian psychoanalysis called Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2016). By "Bionian," I mean deeply influenced by the work of analyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979). Quotations from the book are in red here, with yellow highlight on the errors therein.

Harris (2013) wrote about Bion’s well-known ideas about death in life in the context of his advice to analysts to work without memory or desire: 'This is Bion’s famous instruction to the analyst: work in the present moment, without reference to history and desire.' (Bion, 1967, p. 612)

This is wrong. The phrase Bion used was "without memory and desire." He was drawing upon T.S. Eliot, who was drawing upon Chaucer, who was drawing upon Lucretius (as usual with Bion, he gave no attribution to those sources). 


But let us introduce another Bion quote to add to the complexity of Bion’s relationship to temporality. To wit: 'I died on August 7th, 1917, on the Amiens-Roye Road. (Bion 1982, p. 265.)' 

No. The date Bion specified was August 8th, 1918, not August 7th, 1917.


James Grotstein, Bion’s analysand, thinks that Bion remained stymied, stuck, hopelessly lost in the wake of the death of that beloved friend in 1917. Grotstein ends his discussion of Bion’s memoir with this comment: 'Someone once said that Bion was “miles behind his face.” I take this to mean that he was withdrawn, lonely, and unreached.' (Grotstein, 1998, p. 613)


Also wrong, in at least three ways. First, James Grotstein adulated Bion for 35 years, praising him in hyperbolic, fawning language in publication after publication, as part of a successful effort to build a kind of cult around the man he idealized. He never called Bion "stymied, stuck, hopelessly lost," and that view does not fit at all with the myriad assessments Grotstein did make of his hero. 

Second, the soldier who died horribly in the foxhole he shared with Bion on August 8th, 1918 was a private whom Bion pseudonymously calls "Sweeting," apparently taking the name from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ("Trip no further, pretty sweeting"). This hapless soldier was by no means a "beloved friend" of Bion; at any rate, there is no evidence of this in the memoir or elsewhere, and the text seems to suggest they hardly knew each other. This supposed close friendship is a bizarre invention.

And third, as mentioned, the year was 1918, not 1917.


The point of my fault-finding is not to cast aspersions on the work of distant colleagues, whom I'm not even naming here because I'm reluctant to dent anyone's afternoon. Nor is it to impugn the editorial rigor of the publisher. The point is to illustrate, one more time, the anti-scholarly textual practice of the Bionian subculture. Those who toil in the Bionian field consistently present a markedly low standard of accuracy in their productions and, oddly enough, this trait is itself a legacy of Dr. Grotstein (1925-2015). Afraid of competing with the Master, Grotstein neutered himself in several ways; the major form this took was the obsessive praise of Bion that drives, and suffuses, Grotstein's work. Somewhat less obviously, Grotstein also inflicted upon himself a mental block against accurate quotation of anyone except Bion. Check any literary quotation in his entire oeuvre, and you will find it contains at least one error. Getting things wrong is simply part of the Bionian style. For a while I thought this was due to a repressed contempt for poetry, an alien resource they tend to deploy as a kind of credibility-enhancing decoration. But in some cases, it seems, the habit of misquotation and making-things-up affects even their presentation of the Master himself. Live and learn.


Monday, March 14, 2022

Iliad Book IX: The Embassy to Achilles

AN AUDIOVISUAL FORM OF AUDIOBOOK. I think this video of Iliad Book 9 is the best acting performance I've done so far in my life (that's not saying much; only about 25% of such acting as I have done was good, I believe; and Ive only been in 15 productions). It's an epic poem and I'm not off-book, but the project is so big that it seems to have developed its own form, wherein it's natural for my eyeballs to be continually checking in with the book in my hand. It's storytelling as theater, rather than theater as storytelling. I guess it isn't theater, since it's not live. But it's not a movie, in that it's not a visual depiction of the story. It's an audiovisual form of audiobook, in 24 movies. 

This is Book 9, the Embassy to Achilles, where the Greeks (aka Achaeans, Danaans, Argives) plead with Achilles (aka Aiakides, Peleion) to give up his anger against Agamemnon (aka Atreides, meaning "son of Atreus"), accept the abundant reparations Agamemnon is offering to him, and consent to defend the overmatched Greeks from the fierce Trojan defenders, especially their greatest fighter, Hector---whose wife and baby son we met in Book 6. 

We may detest the Achaeans for making war against the innocent but wealthy Trojans; we may root for Troy, as do Apollo and Aphrodite. But we are also subject to the love Hera and Athena feel for the Achaeans, who include "Patroclus, who was strong and gentle..." In Book 16, Patroclus' death will break our hearts; for now, a domestic scene of peace, where the man who soon will slaughter others all day and die under Hector's spear is quietly serving bread to the great, unwise, angry young man whom he loves. 

Book 9 is all about the missed opportunity for Achilles to stop the tragedy from unfolding by giving up his anger. Instead he refuses, and the mission (the "Embassy") fails. Especially moving is the plea of the aged Phoenix, Achilles' godfather, who reminds Achilles of his childhood.

Free download of my book How To Write about Homer (Infobase, 2010).

Friday, December 10, 2021

Note from a Dark Day in the United States, Not Long Ago

I posted the following essay to the Member's Message Board of the American Psychoanalytic Association, during the night of the January 6th 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. The post begins as a response to an eminent psychoanalytic historian, Peter Loewenberg.

Dear Peter,

Thank you very much for the passion of your post about this mad coup attempt, which I share. But it seems to me your experience of outraged bewilderment at "incompetence" among the gendarmes is only one option among several. You wrote, "It reminds me of the Dallas Police who let Oswald, the one person who had unknown answers to the assassination of President J.F. Kennedy (Russian stay, trip to Cuba), be murdered in the Dallas courthouse just hours after the event."

"One person"? Suffice it to say, this begs the question; there were many people who had answers that were "unknown" at the time, and became well known later; people did talk. Decades of FOIA releases, depositions, and other vetted sources populate the current understanding of 11-22-63, best codified in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James Douglass, S.J., among many other superb accounts.

The active role of the Dallas Police Department in 11-22-63 is well documented, but in some circles, it's still not respectable to discuss it. C. Fred Alford's Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power is a brilliant analysis of why that is.

I was for several years (2003-2006) the editor and collaborator of such a whistleblower, a former LAPD officer whom the CIA had attempted to recruit in the late 1970's. He refused when he learned their mission involved participating in the narco-economy in his precinct (Mid-Wilshire) and beyond. Michael Ruppert (1951-2014) was eventually driven to suicide, partly due to the strain of advocating for a dissident narrative with a detective's passion for evidence and argumentation, rather than the mere resentment and fantasia that we all deplore. Gary Webb met a similar fate. Some dissident American journalists, historians, and whistleblowers are incarcerated; others are more fortunate, living to work and thrive, by the mysteries of resilience and the love of friends and family. We increase the safety of them all, and our own, when we take their positions seriously.

Part of the reason Capitol Hill is currently under siege is the Forty Year Assault on the Public University; part is the work of right-wing think tanks shaping the public airwaves; and part is the complacency of American intellectuals who allowed the national security state to get away with domestic political assassinations for fifty years. This happened because the social and professional price of political truth-telling was and remains high, the world over.

America is no more immune to the quiet, complacent pressures against reasoned dissent than it is immune to state crimes against democracy. I believe what is happening tonight is a right-wing populist insurgency, saturated with racist ideology, information, misinformation, and abundant disinformation, continually egged on by Trump, Giuliani, and their authoritarian allies. The insurgents are, it seems, incompetent, poorly organized, enraged, thoughtless, and terrified of weakness, which inspires their sadism. But to emphasize the "incompetence" of the police is, in my view, to risk excusing their cynicism and their deceptively passive participation, as if  dangerous inaction against the insurgents were due to the armed authorities' lack of skill or training.

The FBI established back in 20o6 what the Black community and aspiring allies had known for many years: U.S. law enforcement, federal and otherwise, is (to a limited but alarming degree) pervaded by white supremacists. Surely the failure to purge police departments (and other armed authoritarian elements of the domestic national security state such as I.C.E.) of these persons is the work of more than incompetence, inertia, and faceless structural forces. And of course, the militarization of American police installations across the country can't be pinned on a "lone nut."

Much of the reason these pro-fascist insurgents will believe anything they are told, even if hateful and/or demonstrably false, is because the public state and its institutions abused the public's trust so many times, promulgating official falsehoods from 11-22-63, to 4-4-68, to 6-5-68, to Iran-Contra, to the WMD hoax of the Bush-Cheney administration, and so on. Leo Rangell's enduring work on Watergate: The Compromise of Integrity is exemplary of how psychoanalysis can bring its ethical commitments to bear on public life without falling prey to the seductions of disinformation (including official discourse at its worst), nor to its mirror image in misinformation (good-faith efforts at research that come to grief one way or another). That is, arguably, one of the vocation's responsibilities.

The "deep state" (a formerly obscure idiom from 
Turkish political science, recently appropriated and rendered useless by the MAGA right) triumphs over the public state when "anything can be believed, and nothing can be known." All this shock that a coup d'etat could possibly "happen here" is, I feel, rather obscene, since one succeeded 57 years ago, to the destruction of millions (mostly children, it seems), who perished in the ensuing regional conflicts in Southeast AsiaIndonesiaLatin and Central America and Africa. There is plenty of outrage to go around.

This is essentially my first foray into public discourse on APsA's listserv, having graduated as an analyst last July. I had no wish to marginalize myself by posting such a position, but I do myself a moral injury if I keep silent on this point. And Dr. Katz' posting of today's Black Lives Matter statement is a welcome harbinger of more frank public discourse---in which I repose my civic and, I suppose, even my professional hopes. If that BLM statement is intuitively acceptable to APsA members, as it seems to be, perhaps this one will be, too, since it is by no means unconnected (see, e.g., John Potash's bookon COINTELPRO, that I blurbed in 2007).

Civic debate can be hollowed out from above and from below, neither by omnipotent but unprincipled authorities acting alone, nor by rightist mobs out of nowhere---but by a long history of relationships between our best governing institutions, and those whose cynicism leads them to exploit these from within and from without, using deception and violence. Much of the liberal class makes this possible by complacently repeating the phrase "conspiracy theory" (which, I note, has not been done here) without noticing that it precludes discussion of any and all deliberate crimes against the public, except those committed by collective abstractions, by some "lone nut," or by accident. The phrase should be discarded.

I believe (1) Truth and Reconciliation---especially about the domestic political murders of the American 1960's to the present---is a necessary ingredient in any stable recovery of our political culture in the United States, along with (2) the active deconstruction of the toxic fiction of "whiteness," by European-Americans and others with white privilege, partly through (3) reparations for Black Americans and American Indians. The work of national recovery will fail unless it reckons with these extremely divisive issues, which must surely be named if they are to be addressed.

I hope my voice is not unwelcome here, though it may be unfamiliar in more than one way.

I usually talk about other things. Not tonight.

Thank you.
Jamey Adam Hecht, PhD, PsyD, LMFT ca/ny

Friday, October 15, 2021

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Five in Performance (Lattimore translation)

In Book V, an astonishing theophany (or, "Divine appearance") occurs: Athena's visitations to Diomedes prompt him to the wounding of an immortal, the Goddess Aphrodite, as she tries to rescue her own son, Aeneas. Sarpedon, son of Zeus, has what we today call a "Near Death Experience," though the many of the modern NEDs, like this ancient one, include a brief period of being actually dead. Unlike Aeneas, Sarpedon is a son of Zeus himself, and though other Gods rescue their favorites directly, Zeus never personally visits the battlefield. 

So far, Aeneas is the only other hero to be rescued from a death which he has momentarily (but actually) died already. But it took two Gods to do it---Aphrodite (his own Mother), and Apollo the Healer (who sees to his recovery after Aphrodite is wounded by Diomedes). The next time Sarpedon dies, killed by Patroclus in Book XVI, no God prevents or fixes it, because Zeus Himself cannot break Fate, or if he does, the cosmos might become a chaos.




Thursday, October 14, 2021

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Four in Performance (Lattimore translation)

 In the Fourth Book of Homer's Iliad, the fragile truce (that had temporarily reduced the Trojan War to a duel) is broken, and the carnage begins. Whereas in Book Three, Paris was saved from Menelaos' spear by Aphrodite, here in Book Four, Menelaos himself is saved from Pandaros' arrow by Athena. Agamemnon rouses the Achaean princes, and the two armies clash.

My many thanks to the brilliant John P. S. of Massachusetts for support of this blog.



Wednesday, October 13, 2021

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Three in Performance (Lattimore translation)

In the third book of the Iliad, an attempt is made to stop the war and hold a duel instead, between the two claimants to Helen's hand (and her possessions): Menelaos (King of Sparta/Lacedaemon, and her original husband) and Paris/Alexander, who carried her away to Troy. The duel is foiled by Divine intervention.


Sunday, April 25, 2021

 I've been sculpting in Plastilina for about 3 months now, and I usually put the heads onto public things like old cast-iron fireboxes or other street-common vertical surfaces. The photographs documenting the project are on my instagram, jameyhecht. Here are some shots of them, either new-made or new-installed on Brooklyn streets. Thank you, New York. 💞