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Interrogating Integration, Dissenting Dis-integration:
Multiplicity as a Positive Metaphor in Therapy and Theology
Abstract:
The term “integration” has long been used as a metaphor for psychological health and wholeness, and a therapeutic goal. It is counterposed to related conceptions of pathology, such as “disintegration,” “fragmentation,” and “splitting.” Christian theology has similarly framed salvation as “at-onement,” vs. sin as alienation. Contemporary psychologies have begun to contest the hegemony of the “One,” leading to a number of paradigms of health that do not privilege “integration” as the primary model (e.g., feminist, postmodern, and relational-psychoanalytic). The seeds of a positive view of multiplicity already exist in earlier psychoanalytic models. This paper will argue for valuing multiplicity in psychotherapy, as a way of conceptualizing both health and a goal of treatment. Re: pastoral psychotherapy in particular, multiplicity will be shown to have fruitful parallels in a constructive Trinitarian theology of multiplicity of God, as framework for interrogating “integration,” and claiming “dis-integration” as psycho-spiritual dissent and creativity. It is the aim of this paper, drawing on my most recent book Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective, to generate a lively discussion building upon some themes explored in previous year PCR sessions.
~~~~~~~
“Integration” as Hegemonic Discourse
The term “integration” has long been used as a metaphor for psychological health, healing, and wholeness, and as a goal for psychotherapy. It is usually posited in opposition to a variety of related conceptions of pathology, such as “disintegration,” “fragmentation,” and “splitting”—all the “schiz’s.” Paradigms for health from a variety of psychological schools value metaphors of oneness, as posited against division, dividedness, or fragmentation. Popular conceptions of mental health such as “having it all together” are counterposed against “having a nervous breakdown” or “going to pieces.” In Self Psychology, the metaphor of the “cohesive self” counters fragmentation and lack of psychic structure.1 2Developmental models value individuation as maturity, in contrast to forms of dependence, merger, or lack of autonomy, and Erikson’s “ego integrity” is posited again despair as the last crisis of the mature adult who faces mortality.3 Rogerian therapists affirm “congruence.” Ego psychology values “ego strength” against the various forms of removing mental contents from awareness, ranging from neurotic repression and the defense mechanism of denial, to pathological dissociation.4 Jung’s archetype of Wholeness is a universal metaphor for all as one, echoing imagery from world religions and mysticism.5 Klein’s emphasis on unconscious splitting as the source of psychopathology is a vivid metaphor for pathology as dis-integration.6
Christian theology has similarly valued oneness in the form of salvation as unification with God—“at-onement,” and especially in depicting sin as alienation, separation from God, going astray, or missing the (one) mark (hamartía).
Thus, the language of integration has functioned as a central metaphor, both of mental health, and as a goal of therapy, in a variety of theoretical and practice orientations, and as such, I would argue, has operated as a “paradigm” in the Kuhnian sense7—a social-scientific world view that has shaped approaches to healing and influenced if not circumscribed the questions that can be asked within it. In other words, the paradigm of integration has become in some sense a form of hegemonic discourse.
Integration and Its Discontents
In contrast, contemporary psychologies have begun to contest the hegemony of the “One,” leading to a number of paradigms of health that do not privilege integration as the primary model. For example, feminist developmental theorists have critiqued the privileging of individuation (Belenky, Gilligan, the Stone Center), placing emphasis on the capacity for interdependence and relationality.
Feminist postmodern theorists, heavily influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly Jane Flax, value multiplicity over models of a unitive self, asserting multiple subjectivities (“emancipatory subjects”) as a form of political resistance.8 (I will return to Flax later in this paper.) This postmodern view is not unlike Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial formulation of hybridity in relations between subjects.9 Relational psychoanalysts (Jodie Messler Davies, Phillip Bromberg) have drawn an important clinical distinction between multiplicity and fragmentation, and maintain the importance of multiplicity as a paradigm of self-knowledge and fluid agency.10
Moreover, the seeds of a positive view of multiplicity already are to be found in earlier psychoanalytic models as well. Jungian “Wholeness” is better understood not as a symbol of unification but as a dialectic that maintains the tension of opposites, as they are brought into consciousness from the Self and the collective unconscious. The theory of archetypes may even be better understood, as Don Browning and Terry Cooper have written, as a model of “instinctual pluralism”—“a veritable choir of instinctual voices all trying to sing their special songs, although not always at the same time.”11 Freud’s positing of the “institutions” of ego, id, and superego already represent a view of multiple subjectivities inherent in the human personality, and the construction of conscious and unconscious domains of psychological functioning. Object relations theories, deriving from Klein, take this even further, with models of mind such as Fairbairn’s encompassing multiple internal representations or “objects” that have their own dynamic life within the psyche as well as in relation to other persons in the external world. Bion’s and others’ formulations of multiple self-states further elaborates this model of mind as mutable, fluid, and dynamically constituted.
My thesis here, then, drawing on my book Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective,12 is an argument for valuing multiplicity in psychotherapy, as both a way of conceptualizing health and a goal of treatment —if not entirely as a replacement for the model of integration, then at least as an important counterpoint to it. Multiplicity is the conceptual through-line, or red thread, that weaves through the work I have been doing most recently. I am interested in an anthropology, both psychological and theological, that explores the multiplicity of persons (not only in terms of pluralism and diversity of human beings in our relations with one another, but multiplicity as internally constitutive of each individual mind/self/subject, at both conscious and unconscious levels.
An appreciation for this multiplicity informs a corresponding pastoral psychotherapeutic praxis, as a method of working with all the varied, contradictory and creative parts of each patient in his or her many self-states, identifications, and subjective moments. This model of psychotherapy differs a good deal from a traditional therapeutic model that holds integration as a goal. Integration as a term may be all too easily (mis?)-understood as a kind of process of homogenization, in which the unconscious is brought into consciousness somewhat as the contents in the bottom of a blender are brought up and whirled together into a pudding with those on the surface.
Note the verticality of this “blender” image, which corresponds to a classical psychoanalytic paradigm (Freud’s “topographical model”13) of consciousness and unconsciousness in which the unconscious is “deeper,” pressed down and out of sight, beneath the repression barrier. For a number of years now, beginning actually with a paper presented to the Person, Culture, and Religion Group,14 has been turning away—or perhaps, more accurately, turns sideways and three-dimensionally—from an exclusively vertical conception of consciousness and unconscious. I have been playing for some time now with the concept of a more spatially dispersed model of the mind, where conscious and unconscious co-exist more fluidly, on multiple planes or axes. The therapeutic process of tapping unconscious material in such a model involves not only a cathartic release (upward) of repressed (pressed-down) mental contents, but all feelings, thoughts, fantasies and sensations that have been dissociated, disavowed, projected, and split-off, in a potentially infinite number of inner and outer directions.
A Multiple Anthropology
“What are human beings, that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God/the gods, and crowned them with glory and honor.”
--Psalm 8:4-5
All theology, but especially pastoral theology, begins with human beings, and in particular, the pain and brokenness of the human condition (and indeed, all creation). Pastoral theology takes suffering as its starting place15—in Jürgen Moltmann’s words, “the open wound of life in this world.”16
In Many Voices I have developed a much more elaborate framework for pastoral theological anthropology, in which I have described human beings as created good, yet vulnerable (fragile, easily wounded, confused and tempted by the complexity of the world, and susceptible to straying away from our own highest good), embodied, both alike and unique, including individually and culturally (as Lartey has highlighted: “like all others, like some others, and like no others”17), intrinsically relational (connected with all creation and with one another, knit into the entire fabric of creation, and interwoven in an unfathomably deep and wide “living human web” to quote Bonnie Miller McLemore18), multiple not unitary, mutable, fluid and in process, and finally both loved by the divine, and therefore also loving—as creatures made in the image of God, human beings are endowed with the capacity for love.
For this paper, however, I want to elaborate just a bit more on the theme of multiplicity.
Human Beings Are Multiple:
One of my favorite quotes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is: “The two of us wrote [the book] Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”19 Contemporary relational-psychoanalytic theory, with its operating concepts of relationality, mutuality, and intersubjectivity has brought a strong critique of the classical Freudian model of mind based on a paradigm of inner conflict and repression. As I have already discussed in previous years in this meeting, Freud’s model of consciousness and unconsciousness has been conceived of vertically, following the “topographical model”20 in which conscious, preconscious, and unconscious reside in successive layers from top to bottom, with repression as the central mechanism for removing mental contents from consciousness. While this model represented a powerful metaphor for depicting the forceful influence and seeming independence of unconscious mental processes, its hegemony is now increasingly being challenged within psychoanalytic schools of thought. These challenges are arising from a number of separate theoretical and clinical spheres, generating ideas that are just now increasingly converging toward a new, more multiple, dispersed, and spatially (horizontally or 3- or even 4!- dimensionally) conceived model of mind. I have detailed the various challenges from a variety of clinical and philosophical sources previously, so today I will just focus on the relational-psychoanalytic critique (which is one of many possible critiques of Freud’s “depth” model21), and on one postmodern philosopher, Gilles Deleuze.
Contemporary psychoanalytic theory is increasingly replacing Freud’s vertical “depth” model of consciousness/unconsciousness with an even more sweeping re-conception of the mind as a multiplicity of mental states—a “normal nonlinearity of the human mind,” 22 conceived as more spatially or horizontally dispersed, and at varying levels of conscious awareness.23 In relational-psychoanalytic theory, the traditional psychoanalytic focus on repression as a byproduct of conflict has been replaced or at least set alongside an interest in dissociation as a nonpathological phenomenon. Jody Messler Davies summarized this aspect of relational theory "that has begun to conceive of self, indeed of mind itself, as a multiply organized, associationally linked network of parallel, coexistent, at times conflictual, systems of meaning attribution and understanding."24 In her words: 25
Not one unconscious, not the unconscious, but multiple levels of consciousness and unconsciousness, in an ongoing state of interactive articulation as past experience infuses the present and present experience evokes state-dependent memories of formative interactive representations. Not an onion, which must be carefully peeled, or an archeological site to be meticulously unearthed and reconstructed in its original form, but a child's kaleidoscope in which each glance through the pinhole of a moment in time provides a unique view; a complex organization in which a fixed set of colored, shaped, and textured components rearrange themselves in unique crystalline structures determined by way of infinite pathways of interconnectedness.
Dissociation is no longer being regarded in this model solely as a pathological outcome of trauma, or an irremedial state of alienation from one’s self, as in Lacan’s concept of the illusion of a unified self as seen in the mirror defending against the infantile experience of being a body-in-pieces (corps-morcelé), “sunk in motor incapacity, turbulent movements, and fragmentation.”26 As Philip Bromberg, another relational thinker, has observed,27
The process of dissociation is basic to human mental functioning and is central to the stability and growth of personality. It is intrinsically an adaptational talent that represents the very nature of what we call 'consciousness.' …There is now abundant evidence that the psyche does not start as an integrated whole, but is nonunitary in origin--a mental structure that begins and continues as a multiplicity of self-states that maturationally attain a feeling of coherence which overrides the awareness of discontinuity. This leads to the experience of a cohesive sense of personal identity and the necessary illusion of being 'one self.'"
A way of explaining this more concretely might be that at any given moment, each of us experiences ourselves in one particular “self state,” or state of consciousness that is laden with thoughts, memories, physical sensations, emotions, and fantasies. Our subjectivity is not monolithic. In this sense, none of us at any given point in time is a unitive “Self” or “Being.” This accords better with non-western conceptions of the self, which tend to understand selfhood and identity more in terms of one’s belonging in community, and not as an isolated individual defined by his or her own consciousness or will.28 In fact, as Clifford Geertz wrote,29
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.
We are more accurately understood in this theory as a conglomerate or web of self-states, affect-states, personalities formed in identification with one or more of our inner objects or part-objects, and especially a multiplicity of “selves in relation.”30 At any given moment, we may experience ourselves as a Subject, an “I,” but behind, beyond, or alongside every subject-moment, are all the other subject-moments that comprise the whole of this web.31 We experience ourselves as intersubjectively constituted both in our own internal relationship or “primary subjective experience”32 of our multiple selves, and in relation to others—particularly as we are formed from infancy onward through identification with others’ responses to us.33 In a postmodern conception, what is outside of consciousness at any given moment is not necessarily repressed, suppressed, or disavowed, as in other models of the unconscious. These are all potential parts of the web, but there are multiple varying degrees of accessibility and inaccessibility between and among the different parts.
Further, this web develops relationally, not in isolation. Like Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the implex, development occurs in a mutual process of enfolding and unfolding, even, as we will imagine theologically, “God folded in all things and all things enfolded in God.”34 Relational analyst Ken Corbett has suggested that we re-imagine Anna Freud’s classical concept of “developmental lines”35 in terms of a “weblike substance…a spiral web or tissue that can be stretched, twisted, elongated, folded in on itself—and that springs back…but is never quite the same…like taffy but each having a different tensile strength (some spirals are more flexible than others).”36
While Corbett does not take this theological turn, his words leave room for the pastoral theologian to conceive of multiplicity in quantum theological terms:37
The lacework of a web articulates the confluence and coadaptive dependence of the interlacing on the context; it is not a Newtonian a priori structure, or a fixed form, but rather a structure that is never fixed and is always in transition, always moving in accord with the atmosphere.
The very illusion of seamless going-on-being from one self-state to another, then, is a developmental achievement, and represents the fluidity of mental contents.
Thinking Rhizomes:
Another image that is helpful in considering this multiplicity of the human person is Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s image of the rhizome. A dictionary definition of a rhizome is “a horizontal, usually underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes.”38 It is different from a root, in that it extends horizontally, in network-like fashion, and biologically carries on multiple functions—e.g., reproduction as well as nourishment. A root, by contrast, normally grows downward, and when used as a metaphor signifies such unitive meanings as depth, foundation, source, and origin (even though roots, too, if not the taproot, can be multiple). Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of the rhizome to challenge the privileging in western philosophy and in capitalism of images that tend to reinforce or justify hegemony, as if the natural order itself privileged “the One” or “unity” over multiplicity and difference.39
The principles or properties Deleuze and Guattari identify with the rhizome are useful in conceiving of the mind as similarly multivarious and complex. The rhizome is characterized by connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and something they term “decalcomania.”40
The rhizome presents an alternative model to the classical psychoanalytic assertion that all thought, all behavior, proceeds genetically and to some extent deterministically from a deeper root cause, in the past. With the rhizome image held in tension with the image of roots, the psychoanalytic importance of tracing associations is retained, but now we can see the possibility for a different kind of associational chain of events—horizontal, at times more randomly selected, and linked by present conditions as well as past. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome provides a useful image to hold in tension with traditional psychoanalytic conceptions of the mind in terms of psycho-genetics, tree-like tracings of pathology, and heroic metaphors of plumbing the depths of a single, vertically conceived unconscious.
The metaphor has its limits, of course.51 Like many postmodern thinkers, Deleuze objects in general to modernist, binary oppositions, but there is no doubt that the rhizome-tree dichotomy presents another logical dualism of its own.52 By placing the rhizome in opposition to the root, Deleuze and Guattari again posit a kind of contest. The humble potato wins out over the formerly exalted tree.53 This, too, however, is problematic in psychoanalytic thinking, it seems to me, since some events, some behaviors and feelings, do appear to be “generated”—“rooted” in early childhood experiences and wounds. Yet, to assign all problems in daily living to a theory of infantile origins may be too reductionistic as well.
It might therefore be most useful to take a both-and approach: rhizome and tree, horizontal and vertical, spatial associational chains and the repetition that can arise out of repressed early childhood experiences and wishes—taking Deleuze and Guattari’s caution seriously, never to lose sight of the more uncontrollable rhizome in favor of the seductively analyzable tree. Imagine mind and self in terms of a three-dimensional multiplicity (or more)—neither vertical “depth,” nor purely horizontal “plane,” but an infinitely dimensional, quantum substance, with internal indeterminacy and some fluid external parameters. Imagine a subjectivity, a multiple self, identifiable as both an “I” and a “Thou” simultaneously, subject and object, “self” and “other,” and with a mobile consciousness that scans and networks various parts of the “self,” in an illusory but functional sense of self-cohesion, self-regulation and self-continuity.
There is a political and ethical dimension to this reconceptualization as well. Being open to a variety of “others” within the web that constitutes oneself, it seems to me, should potentiate a greater openness to “others” beyond oneself. The idea of a multiple self as emancipatory also relates to the dimension of time, and to the flow of selves in relational process as well. Drawing from Luce Irigaray, feminist postmodern theorist and psychoanalyst Jane Flax describes multiplicity and fluidity of subjects as emancipatory:54
I believe a unitary self is unnecessary, impossible, and a dangerous illusion. Only multiple subjects can invent ways to struggle against domination that will not merely recreate it. In the process of therapy, in relations with others, and in political life we encounter many difficulties when subjectivity becomes subject to one normative standard, solidifies into rigid structures, or lacks the capacity to flow readily between different aspects of itself… No singular form can be sufficient as a regulative ideal or as a prescription for human maturity or the essential human capacity… [I]t is possible to imagine subjectivities whose desires for multiplicity can impel them toward emancipatory action. These subjectivities would be fluid rather than solid, contextual rather than universal, and process oriented rather than topographical. Emancipatory theories and practices requires mechanics of fluids55 in which subjectivity is conceived as processes rather than as a fixed atemporal entity locatable in a homogeneous, abstract time and space.
Postmodern writers thus highlight the ethical implications of a non-unitary conception of self and mind, especially as they influence the social construction of self and others, and the resulting social construction of categories such as gender, race and class, and the distribution of power.56
A corresponding psychotherapeutic approach would have as its goal an increasingly harmonious awareness and constructive dialogue among all the disparate parts, conscious and unconscious, of the person who comes for help, rather than an integration of conscious and unconscious into one homogenized whole. Drawing both from postmodern understandings of the diversity of truths, and from the postcolonial notion of hybridity in which dialogue partners join together in new creative ways without losing their individual distinctiveness, this model of pastoral psychotherapy seeks to help individuals come to know, accept, and even appreciate all the distinctive parts—the many voices—that live within them.
This approach to psychotherapy is, in the final analysis, more orientation than method. Specific therapeutic techniques can be discussed and debated in relation to various psychoanalytic practice theories (I will not go into detail here - exceeding the scope of this paper57). But the main point is that this, finally, is an orientation toward multiplicity, toward embracing mystery and all that remains beyond knowledge, beyond certainty, beyond any singular Truth. By embracing such multiplicity, and honoring such mystery, the psychotherapist (and I would emphasize from my own field of pastoral theology, specifically the pastoral psychotherapist) may help to facilitate a process by which the patient may discover a more expansive, appreciative, and generous way of living and relating with others, even with the divine—the source of all loves, all mercies, all creativities, all truths, all voices, and all just relations.
In considering pastoral psychotherapy in particular, this model of multiplicity has led me to explore what I have found to be fruitful parallels in doing constructive theology emphasizing the multiplicity of God—elaborating a Trinitarian model drawing on Deleuze’s theory of rhizomes and Catherine Keller’s “tehomic theology.” I have posited a trinitarian model of God as Creative Profusion, Incarnational Desire, and Living Inspiration as a theological framework for interrogating “integration” and even claiming “dis-integration” as a form of psycho-spiritual dissent, and creativity.
A radical image of the multiplicity of God may be drawn from Gilles Deleuze’s image, again, of the rhizome58 Deleuze’s discussions of “difference and repetition” have prompted theological meditations, for example by John Milbank, on the nature of God’s creativity as “non-identical repetition.”59 Deleuze links difference to “original depth,” a chaotic, plenary source from which all being does not so much emerge, upward, as it “unfolds.” For Deleuze, the idea of “God” is constricted by such “deep” formulations as the “Ground of Being,”60 since “ground” itself is not exempt from deconstruction—there yet must be a deeper deep or preceding profond (“deep” in French), a “pro/fond,” a bottomless or groundless pre-origin, which precedes the stable “foundation” (fond) implied by the term “ground.”61
This resonates well with the psychological construct of the unconscious as more a matter of horizontal or spatial multiplicities of subjectivity and affect, than of Freud’s vertical “depth.”62 For Deleuze, depth itself is a matter of “extensity,” heterogeneity, and the horizontal play of differences, not defined by any shared “root,” origin or ground: “the (ultimate and original) heterogeneous dimension is the matrix of all extensity, including its third dimension, considered to be homogeneous with the other two.”63 (In other words, what we perceive as the three dimensions, represented by a point, a line, and volume, are to be conceived in Deleuze’s philosophy as spreading out spatially, and depth is therefore more than simply vertical. It is depth as in our depth perception.) Deleuze’s rhizome is an image of such horizontal extensity.
The fluid multiplicity of the created universe is neither chaos nor cleaned-up composition, according to Deleuze, but a “chaosmos”64 (a term borrowed from James Joyce, meditating on Aquinas’ "wholeness," "harmony", and "radiance”)65.
Deleuze further describes this bottomless origin, “chaosmos,” as a “matrix” (which literally means womb) and a “milieu of milieux,”66—suggesting, or at least resonating with, maternal imagery for the divine as creator. So, extrapolating from this discussion of a multiple, heterogeneous, bottomless origin, God, from a Deleuzian framework, must similarly be bottomless, unfathomable not in the sense of abdication from all attempts to relate to and with the divine, but super-abundant, impossible to reach the depths and thus objectify or possess it.
In a brilliant new work on the theology of creation as creatio ex profundis, entitled Face of the Deep, Catherine Keller67 exegetes the Book of Genesis to develop a “tehomic theology”—a theology of the primordial waters (tehom). God did not, she argues, create ex nihilo, as an act of power and mastery upon an external sterile void, but as a messier act of unfolding, germinating, and forming out of the chaotic, unruly, primordial “tohu vabohu” that pre-existed creation. God, like the “chaosmos,” for both Deleuze and Keller is infinite in possibility. Creation, states Keller, is not a “function of power and order, upholding transcendent power-structures,” but the ancient scriptures “imagine a messier beginning, with no clear point of origin and no final end:68
Catherine Keller has also discussed the multiplicity of God in terms of the “plural-singularity of creation.”69 Following Hebrew bible scholars Danna Fewell and David Gunn, she explores the “curious slippage” in the grammar of Genesis 1:26a,27, literally: “Then God(s) (Elohim - plural) said (singular) ‘let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness’…So God(s) created (bara – singular form of the verb) humankind in his own image, in the image of God(s) he created him, male and female he created them…”70 “God ‘himself’ is unsure whether he is plural or singular, echoing the narrator’s grammatic confusion of a plural name (elohim, which may or may not be a proper noun!) and a singular verb.”71 Keller cites rabbinic sources who suggested that God needed here to consult a heavenly court, the angels: “The role of the angels ‘is to suggest a ‘many-ness of viewpoints, a spectrum of opinions’…”72 Keller reads philosopher of science Michel Serres, in his reflections on the “angelic swarm,”73 to support a “divining” of “the multiple” as the “Manyone”74 [many/one]—“an elemental power of creativity, articulate, humble, kenotic, almost democratic, in its delegations; and effusive in its delights.”75 This multiplicity is always in relation, both internally, as the plurality of god(s) and the angelic court, and in relation with the creation/humanity.
Concluding a meditation on the multiplicity of God, Keller brings this “matrix of possibilities” back full circle to the multiplicity of creation, and what I would also describe in terms of the intersubjective relation between humanity/creation and the divine.
As an Anglican/Christian theologian, finally, I continue to find inspiration in an evocative and compelling metaphor of multiplicity that is already present in ancient Christian theological resources, namely, the Trinity.76 One of the most compelling images, from the 4th century Cappadocian theologians (including Gregory of Nyssa, Basil “the Great,” Gregory of Nazianzus, and Macrina—the sister of Gregory of Nyssa and Basil77), is the image of the Trinity as perichoresis—the complete, equal, and mutual inter-permeation of the three persons or dynamic dimensions of the Trinity. 78 LaCugna gives a beautiful, clear description, as follows:
[P]erichoresis expressed the idea that the three divine persons mutually inhere in one another, draw life from one another, “are” what they are by relation to one another. Perichoresis means being-in-one-another, permeation without confusion. No person exists by him/herself or is referred to him/herself; this would produce number and therefore division within God, Rather, to be a divine person is to be by nature in relation to other persons. Each divine person is irresistibly drawn to the other, taking his/her existence from the other, containing the other in him/herself, while at the same time pouring self into the other…While there is no blurring of the individuality of each person, there is also no separation. There is only communion of love in which each person comes to be … what he/she is, entirely with reference to the other. Perichoresis provides a dynamic model of persons in communion based on mutuality and interdependence.
This parallels Deleuze’s own concept of differences: i.e., not arising as separate outcroppings or representations from some prior unitary Source or Ideal, but constituting difference through mutual interplay in a weblike horizontal extending (“extensity”79) of relation. The Trinity is, then, a spacious room—even a matrix/womb, in which multiple metaphors can flourish, honoring simultaneously the relationality and the multiplicity of God. In its constantly shape-shifting play of images, I would want to argue that the Trinity itself can become a “third space” between theological certainty (as a classically posited finiteness of precisely one ousia or essence and three hypostases or immutable characteristics of God), and a vacuumed-out negative theology—Anselm of Canterbury’s three inscrutable and completely unknowable “nescio quid”’s or “I know not what’s.”80
As we embrace a model of greater complexity and multiplicity of the human mind, this will lead us to a more complex and nuanced appreciation for the diversity and mutability of human persons in the way we understand pastoral care, counseling, and psychotherapy.81 What is pastoral—that is, what protects and promotes human growth, and helps to heal psychic and interpersonal wounds—from this relational perspective, then, is not a vision of ultimate or reified oneness, as in a homogenization of all “patients” (as objects) into a single uniform model of health and wholeness, but rather the capacity for a pluri-form and diversely just and loving human creativity. This creativity is grounded/surrounded/infused in the creative profusion, incarnational desire, and pulsing, living inspiration of the Trinity/loving God, which is the “source, wellspring and living water”82 of mutual desire that bridges, through the very embracing of difference, toward the creative multiplicity of the other. This, then, becomes the new starting point for an emancipatory praxis of pastoral care, counseling and psychotherapy, wherein the goal of care is to provide a space in which the person can be freed from the constraining myths of oppression (whether individual, intrafamilial, or social and cultural) toward a freer exploration of her own multiform creative potential.
What might the three traditional aspects of the trinity say, in a non-essentialist key, particularly as a source for a healing and liberative pastoral praxis? With an ear toward metaphors that resonate with the pastoral functions of healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling and empowering, I have begun playing with the following Trinitarian language: God as Creative Profusion, God as Incarnational Desire, and God as Living Inspiration.
I can’t begin to unpack this Trinitarian theology fully in this paper, but I will summarize, with the hope of provoking further conversation here:
I will begin with God as creative profusion, and the creation is no longer conceivable as a pristine product by a supernatural maker, but an irrepressible fecundity. This fecundity, this turbulent swarming of creation, it seems to me, is a much more consoling, liberating, and empowering image for pastoral relations than a singular, authoritarian “God the Father.” To liberate the first “person” of the Trinity from a concretized identity as “Father,” or even “Creator,” opens the way to affirming the dappled, fickle, freckled multiplicity of the real human persons who come to us for care and healing. We are accepted, confirmed, loved in our complexities and contradictions. It is not the attainment of a shiny, polished integration that will save/salve us, but the increasing consciousness of our own intricacy—in Annie Dillard’s words: “Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birth-right, and in intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failure of all life.”83 Our own inner landscape is, borrowing from Dillard’s words, “ring-streaked, speckled and spotted.”84
This theology has resonance with an expansive and non-condemning view of the human person as messy, multiple, in process, loved (in spite of and/or because of all his or her chaos) and therefore also loving. This is where all pastoral praxis has its beginnings and its endings: in learning to know and love all the messy, conflicted, chaotic parts of ourselves, even as God has loved us from our beginnings, “made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth” (Ps. 139:14b), and springing from that knowledge of being so deeply loved, growing in the capacity to love others. So the creation stirs in us and brings us into a second awareness of God-with-us in our daily lives: God as incarnational desire.
In all three aspects of the Trinity, God is love: the power of the erotic of life breaking through and insisting upon newness, change, growth. This is true in a particular way as God is imaged in the second dimension of the Trinity—God willingly and lovingly present, in the flesh, fur, feathers, sea and soil of the creation. Just as perichoresis was used by the Cappadocians to describe the inter-penetration of the three persons of the Trinity, perichoresis also applies to the relationship between God and the world. God is in us and we are in God—not on some disembodied or theoretical or “spiritual” plane apart or above from daily life, but deep in our blood and our bones. As we walk forward in time and space, loving, working, watching, weeping, rejoicing, God is the whole energy of both justice and mercy, struggling forward through us and in us, in the historical movement of the world. God walks with us and in us, incarnate in history, and intimately involved with us through the very human (and hence animal) experience of living and suffering in the body.
This is the miracle of Incarnation as it is em-bodied in the Christian tradition in the life, passion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The particularity of the astonishing revelation to the early Christians, that this Jesus was God, further tells us about what God is like. Jesus’ character, as depicted over and over in the palimpsest of multiple Gospels and overlapping stories, was preoccupied with two central aims: to heal and restore to community those who were ill and/or outcast; and to reverse the social order so that the oppressed would be liberated and the poor lifted up.
This promise of transformation is at the heart of the pastoral enterprise. It heralds that change, however improbable, is never impossible. The Incarnation is about God’s desire. Not condescension, but love of the creation, draws God to us, “as close to us as our own breath.” The promise of the Incarnation, the promise of the transformation from fear to love, and from death to new life, lived vigorously, joyfully in the body, the promise of God’s desire to be “as close to us as our own breath,” leads in turn to the third aspect of Trinitarian imagery, that of the Holy Spirit as living inspiration, the ongoing energy that infuses and empowers the wonder of our relationships.
This third dimension brings God to us in the very rhythm of our breath. Biblical images of “the Holy Spirit” as wind, breath, life force, and inspiration, collide and combine to form an impression of great power and energy, space enough for air to swirl, a feeling of freedom and release. The metaphor of wind suggests both gentle breezes and ferocious, awesome storms. There is power here, power for healing, power for change, power for revolution. Although Luce Irigaray states that a “feminine god is yet to come,”85 much in Irigaray’s language about women’s embodied experience is already present in the ecstatic language used to describe the Spirit. The Spirit conveys “multiplicity, difference, becoming, flows, rhythms, and ‘the splendor of the body’…the god of fluidity and transient boundaries, of the amorphous elements of fire, air, earth and water.”86 While assigning gender to any of the three persons of the Trinity runs the risk of collapsing into essentialism, such fluid images can function to defeat a reified masculinist reading. As feminist theologians have emphasized, ruach itself is a feminine noun. Irigaray’s work entertains “[t]he divine [as] a movement…a movement of love.”87
Because the Spirit also a partner in the Trinitarian dance, it is in its own distinctive way another symbol of the relationality of God, and of our life in and with God. This has Buddhist resonance as well. As we breathe in, we know that we are not isolated. We do not live in bell jars; we breathe in the entire world. And as we breathe out, if we are aware, we realize that we are reaching even with our breath beyond the confines of our own physical being. Our very existence affects others. Our very breath ties us to one another, and to the planet. Even our breath, then, is unavoidably a matter of ethics.
We cannot extricate ourselves from the very atmosphere in which we and all others live. Breathing reminds us that our very lives are intrinsically ec-static. We cannot live only for ourselves, but in and for one another, even as the Spirit swirls around and in and through us and all living beings in one great dance—a dance so great that it encompasses the entire cosmos and beyond.
The pastoral relationship, then, encompassing the full spectrum of care, counseling, and psychotherapy, is no less fundamentally infused with this energy of God to help heal, grow, strengthen, and promote the flourishing and just relating of all persons and creatures. As with all relations among living beings, the pastoral relationship is characterized by a fluid inter-subjectivity, where each partner in the relationship is simultaneously both “I” and “Thou” to both self and other, and where meaning is co-constructed, not on either “pole” of the I-Thou duality, but in the “third space” that exists as a bridge of communication (the ancient Greek word metaxu -metaxu), a place of potential but as yet unformulated understandings, and a continuum of shared experience between them (thinking psychoanalytically, at both conscious and unconscious levels.) In the pastoral relationship, given the asymmetry of roles between “helper” and “helpee,” the psychoanalytic categories of transference and countertransference become but one symbol of this dynamic inter-relation, filtered through the separate subjective experiences and asymmetry of responsibilities of each partner.88
A pastoral perspective, “oriented” (paradoxically not just toward a singular “east,” but toward a multiplicity of compass points and unfixed directions) toward a God conceived as fluid, vulnerable, multiple, in motion, and in perpetual relation both with us and within us, emancipates us from constraining, static, monolithic notions of both God and human beings. A multiple/trinitarian, relational pastoral theology it seems to me, is hospitable to a roomy conception of mind and self that makes new breathing space—space for each human person that can heal narrowness of vision and the constraining hardness of psychic scars, to encompass an ever-widening capacity for relationality, both with other people, and with and among the inner selves that inhabit the time and spatial dimensions of one's own lived life.
This mutual relation never operates only at the conscious, interpersonal level of ordinary communications and transactions, but encompasses the full range of unconsciousness in and between the participants as well—and encompasses the “unformulated experiences”89 and co-constructed meanings that lie only in potential, in the realm described by Christopher Bollas as the “unthought known.”90 This is the foundation of relational-psychoanalytic therapy. But in pastoral psychotherapy in particular, we are further convinced that we do not do this merely by our own powers of reason or intuition, but with the help of the pulsing, energizing breath of God dwelling in both partners in the therapeutic dance, and dwelling in the intersubjective space between us, which then opens up as a further space for God’s creative profusion, God’s incarnational presence, and God’s living inspiration.
Theology and psychology meet in this pastoral “third space” between certainty and unknowability, where rigid hierarchies of both deity/humanity and consciousness/the unconscious begin to collapse, as we recognize that our creativity, art, and human nature itself, contain spheres of both divinity and humanity, rationality and irrationality, knowability and unknowability, of abstract thought, emotion, and animal sense, both within ourselves and in our relations with one another and with God.
In the words of T.S. Eliot’s “Dry Salvages” from the Four Quartets:91
…Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
NOTES
1 Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (International Universities Press, 1971).
3 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950) and Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: International Universities Press, 1959).
4 The concept of “ego strength” is emphasized in Ego Psychology, the psychoanalytic school of though stemming from Anna Freud, e.g., Hans Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: International Universities Press, 1958).
5 E.g., C.G. Jung, Answer to Job, in Collected Works 11: 469.
6 Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963 (New York: Delacorte, 1975), 1-24.
7 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
8 Jane Flax, "Multiples: On the Contemporary Politics of Subjectivity," in Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 93.
9 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); see also Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
10 The foundational text for this school of thought is Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); see also Jay Greenberg, Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991; and Lewis Aron, A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1996). The development of relational theory can be traced through the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues beginning with Vol. 1 in 1991, and in Mitchell and Aron, Eds., Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1999). For more on the history of relational psychoanalysis, see Mitchell and Aron, Preface, Relational Psychoanalysis, ixff; Jay R. Greenberg and Mitchell, “Object Relations and Psychoanalytic Models,” in Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9-20; and Mitchell, Relationality: From Attachment to Subjectivity (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2004).
11 Don Browning and Terry Cooper, Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 152.
12 Pamela Cooper-White, Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006).
13 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE 5:541ff.
14 Cooper-White, “Higher Powers and Infernal Regions: Models of Mind in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and their Implications for Pastoral Care," Person, Culture, Religion Group, AAR annual meeting, Boston, November, 2000; published in Pastoral Psychology 50/5 (2002) 319-43.
15 This tradition runs deep in pastoral theology, including Anton Boisen’s concept of “the living human document,” The Exploration of the Inner World (New York: Harper, 1952); see also Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “The Living Human Web: Theology at the Turn of the Century” in Jeanne Stevenson Moessner, ed., Through the Eyes of Women: Insights for Pastoral Care (Minneapolis: Fortress press, 1996), 9-26. It is also part of a larger trend of correlational theology, attributed to Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 Introduction, and Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975); and Mark Kline Taylor, Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North America (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1989).
16 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 1993, p. 49.
17 Emmanuel Lartey, In Living Color, 34, citing anthropologists Clyde Kluckholn and Henry Alexander Murray, Personality in Nature, Society and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1948).
18 Miller-McLemore’s play on Anton Boisen’s “living human document.”
19 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3.
20 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE 5:541ff.
21 Cooper-White, “Higher Powers;” see also Many Voices, 51-57.
22 Philip Bromberg, "'Speak! That I May See You': Some Reflections on Dissociation, Reality, and Psychoanalytic Listening," Psychoanalytic Dialogues 4/4 (1994), 529. See also Stephen Mitchell, “Multiple Selves, Singular Self,” in Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 95-122.
23 In an offshoot of self psychology itself, intersubjectivity theorists Robert Stolorow, and George Atwood have proposed three interrelated forms of unconsciousness: the "prereflective unconscious--the organizing principles that unconsciously shape and thematize a person's experiences; 2) the dynamic unconscious--experiences that were denied articulation because they were perceived to threaten needed ties; and 3) the unvalidated unconscious--experiences that could not be articulated because they never evoked the requisite validating responsiveness from the surround. All three forms of uncoinsciouess, we have emphasized, derived from specific, formative intersubjective contexts." In Stolorow and Atwood, Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1992), p. 33. For the sake of brevity, I have omitted a detailed examination of this contemporary movement in psychoanalysis, since most of its contributions are similar to those of the relational school, whose appropriation of object relations and constructivist paradigms in my view carry more explanatory power.
24 Jody Messler Davies, "Multiple Perspectives on Multiplicity," Psychoanalytic Dialogues 8/2 (1998), p. 195. The relational-psychoanalytic understanding of “dissociation” as potentially nonpathological, and the distancing from the automatic equation of dissocation with trauma, is also discussed in Cooper-White, Shared Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 48-50, in relation to intersubjectivity.
25 Davies, "Dissociation, Repression, and Reality Testing in the Countertransference: False Memory in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse," Psychoanalytic Dialogues 6/2 (1996), p. 197. See also Adrienne Harris: "This model of consciousness is less archaeologically organized and more a set of surfaces or representations with boundaries of varying permeability." In "False Memory? False Memory Syndrome? The So-Called False Memory Syndrome?" Psychoanalytic Dialogues 6/2 (1996), p. 159 n2.
26 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, 3-7.
27 Bromberg, “Speak!…”, 517-47. Cited in Cooper-White, Shared Wisdom, 49. See also Bromberg, “Standing in the Spaces: The Multiplicity of Self and the Psychoanalytic Relationship,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 32 (1996), 509-35, and Standing in the Spaces: Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2001).
28 E.g., Alan Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross Cultural Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
29 Clifford Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding, in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 59.
30 Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, 105.
31 This may be close to what C.G. Jung referred to as the “Self” (capital-S), which is greater than the executive “ego” who does the conscious knowing, and incorporates all the disavowed and unknown parts of oneself. But there is a distinction from Jung’s concept as well. For Jung, the Self was conceived of as a whole, or potentially whole, and desiring the archetype of Wholeness. There is still one unitive self, or being, implied, and the direction of the unconscious is still imagined largely in terms of downward “depth.”
32 Steven Stern, “The Self as a Relational Structure: A Dialogue with Multiple-Self Theory,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 12/5 (2002), 698.
33 Ibid., 702, also citing Freud’s views on identification in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), SE 18, 1-64; W.R.D. Fairbairn, An Object-Relations Theory of The Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1952); and Hans Loewald, “Instinct Theory Object Relations, and Psychic Structure Formation” (1978), in Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 207-18.
34 The doctrine of panentheism, articulated by early church theologians such as Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997) was a view of God in all things and all things in God; for a contemporary view, see also Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, Eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); see also “Pantheism in Time,” Science and Theology News, online at http://www.stnews.org/articles.php?category=guide&guide=Panentheism&article_id=418.
35 Anna Freud, “The Concept of Developmental Lines,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 18 (1963), 245-65.
36 Ken Corbett, “More Life: Centrality and Marginality in Human Development,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 11/3 (2001), 328.
37 Corbett, 328.
38 American Heritage Dictionary , 4th ed., 2000 at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=rhizome
39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3-25, et passim. An excerpt from pp. 7-13 outlining the principles of the rhizome are also reproduced online at www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/deleuze.html (first accessed 7/05).
40 Ibid., 3-25.
41 Ibid., 7.
42 Deleuze and Guattari, 7, citing Catherine Clément in an interview by Deleuze in L’Arc 49 (rev. ed., 1980), 99.
43 Deleuze and Guattari, 8-9.
44 Ibid., 9.
45 This term is used frequently in the survivor literature. It was originally used by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”
46 Ibid., 12; Jean Baudrillard works with a similar image in Simulation and Simulacra, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995; orig. publ. 1981)—“the cartographer’s made project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory.” (p. 2).
47 Deleuze and Guattari, 12.
48 French décalcomanie, from decalquer, to transfer a tracing (de-, off, from from Latin de-; see de- + calquer, to trace; see calque) + manie, craze (from its popularity in the 19th century) (from Late Latin mania, madness. American Heritage Dictionary 2000 at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=decalcomania.
49 Deleuze and Guattari, 13.
50 Ibid.
51 Deleuze and Guattari’s work should not be taken uncritically. For example, their image of the “body without organs” (Thousand Plateaus, 149-66) is troubling in relation to a feminist insistence on embodiment. While they are not referring literally to the individual human body, but rather to a corporate communal “body,” the image calls for some careful critique and qualification.
52 The authors anticipate this critique directly, and assert that “it is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map.” (13) While continuing to privilege maps over the rootlike metaphor of “tracings,” they insist that as soon as any theorist pursues a genetic line of thinking, “whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death.” (14) While still arguing dichotomously, they are showing the rhizome as a continually necessary corrective to the universalizing tendency of root-and-tree thinking.
53 “Where the potato is the hero of this story, the tree becomes the villain.” Dan Clinton, “Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Rhizome,’ Annotation,” online at http://www.chicagoschoolmediatheory.net/annotations/deleuzerhizome.htm.
54 Flax, “Multiples,” 93.
55 This term is from Irigaray, “The Mechanics of Fluids,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 106-18.
56 For further elaboration of the relationship between postmodernism and justice, including an appropriation of Winnicott's Playing and Reality, see Jane Flax, "The Play of Justice," in Disputed Subjects, 111-128.
57 For a detailed discussion of therapeutic technique in relation to this model of multiplicity, see Cooper-White, Many Voices, Chapters 4-5, pp. 135-238.
58 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
59 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 267, 306, 309.
60 Tillich, Systematic Theology Vol. I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),155-157, drawing on his acquaintance with Eastern religious sources, and resonating with the biblical passage “God, in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28).
61 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 229; also described in Keller, op. cit., 168. I do not find that, for my own theological thinking, Deleuze can be incorporated “whole.” His strong dependence on Nietzsche in “radical horizontal thought,” including his refusal like Nietzsche to stand in a lineage of philosophical thought but tending to repudiate all genealogy (for a summary of these constructs, see John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers, Routledge, 1994, at http://pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Deleuze.html accessed 7/05); his absolute rejection with Felix Guattari of Freud (notably, as read via Lacan, in Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983; reprint of 1977 Viking edition; orig. publ. 1972); his strangely unreconstituted oedipal meditations on masochism (in Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Braziller, 1971; orig. publ. 1967); and his disembodied notion of the “body without organs” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 149-66) are all troubling to my own feminist psychoanalytic sensibilities. Irigaray uses the same term precisely in critique of the relegation of women’s sexuality to otherness in relation to a phallocentric norm in French Freudian analysis (“Così Fan Tutti” in This Sex Which Is Not One, 90). Nevertheless, Deleuze’s reframing of existence in phenomenological terms, using horizontal rather than vertical images and metaphors, such as conceiving of depth as “extensity” (p. 229); his intricate discussions of repetition as distinct from Identity as in the pure realm of Platonic Ideas, as a slavish reiteration of unity or the Same (Difference and Repetition); and his image of the “Rhizome” (A Thousand Plateaus, 3-25 et passim, as discussed in detail above in Chapter 1), contribute to both theological and psychological ways of thinking that avoid monolithic vertical plumbing for a single universal truth. See also Cooper-White, "Higher Powers and Infernal Regions: Models of Mind in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and their Implications for Pastoral Care," Pastoral Psychology 50/5 (2002) 319-43..
62 Cooper-White, “Higher Powers.”
63 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 229. Also cited in Keller, in connection with the chaotic depths of “tehom,” in Keller, 168.
64 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; orig. publ. 1991), 205. Cited in Keller, op. cit., 171. For a further discussion of Deleuze’s concept of “chaosmos” in comparison to process theology, particularly Whitehead, see also Keller, “Process and Chaosmos” in Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell, Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 55-57.
65 Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans.Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989); also excerpted at http://www.noteaccess.com/APPROACHES/Chaosmos.htm, accessed 7/05.
66 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987/1980), 313. Cited in Keller, 169.
67 Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). For a similar discussion of chaos theory, creation theology, and a critique of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo from a scientific perspective, see also Sjoerd Bonting, Creation and Double Chaos: Science and Theology in Discussion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), esp. 52-125.
68 Ibid., frontispiece: “Face of the Deep is the first full theology of creation from the primal chaos. It proposes a creatio ex profundis—creation out of the water depths—both as an alternative to the orthodox power discourse of creation from nothingness, and as a figure of both bottomless process of becoming.” Keller explicates: “The heteroglossic Deep—the Hebrew tehom or primal oceanic chaos—already marks every beginning. It leaks into the bible itself, signifying a fluid matrix of bottomless potentiality, a germinating abyss, a heterogeneous womb or self-organising complexity, a resistance to every fixed order. It sweeps away myths of abstract potency—of the paternal Word—in a tumultuous jumble of neglected parts whose creation is material and laboured.” Levinas worked in similar images in his early writings, grappling with Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology. In a fragment “Il y a,” he posits a “dark and chaotic indeterminacy that precedes all creativity and goodness.” (Peperzak et al., ix). Levinas’ work from the beginning focused on the ethical, however: in his first book De l’existence à l’existent (Existence and Existents), the Good transcends Being, even as for Heidegger, Being transcends the “‘metaphysics’ of beings.” (ibid.)
69 Keller, 172-82.
70 Translation from Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: the Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon, 193), 23, quoted in Keller, 281n6.
71 Ibid., quoted in Keller, 173.
72 Keller, 174, citing Rashi in Avivah Gottleib Zornberg, The Beginnings of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1995), 4ff.
73 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 118, quoted in Keller, 176.
74 Ibid., 181.
75 Keller, 177, also drawing from Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 6. Keller also finds support for this multiple reading of God in Lynn Bechtel, who translates Elohim as “differentiated unity…a grou-orientation where individuality comes only embedded in collectivity and nature,” unpublished manuscript, ‘Genesis 1:1-2:4a Revisisted: The Perpetuation of What Is,” p. 6, cited in Keller 177; and Irigaray’s meditation on angels, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 42.
76 The beginning of this trajectory can be found in Cooper-White, “Toward a Relational Theology: God-in-Relation,” Chapter 7 in Shared Wisdom, pp. 181-93, including a summary of implications for pastoral praxis, pp. 186-93. In choosing to work with the Trinity as a living image, I disagree at this point with Keller, who characterizes the “logic of the Christian trinity” as “awkwardly frozen in an exceptionalism that only proves the rule of the One.” Keller, 177-78.
77 The two Gregorys and Basil are usually cited as the “Cappadocian Fathers.” However, by Gregory’s own witness, in his Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan(Toronto: Peregrina, 1996), their sister Macrina provided theological inspiration and correction to them both, as well as founding, together with their mother, the first Christian community of men and women. For a brief biography of Macrina, see any edition of the Episcopal Church, Lesser Feasts and Fasts from 2000 forward (e.g., 2003, New York: Church Publishing, 2004).
78 LaCugna, 270-71.
79 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 228-30. Also cited in Keller, 168.
80 Anselm, Monologion 78, in Saint Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S. N. Deane (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1974), 142, cited in Johnson, 203.
81 Cooper-White, "Higher Powers and Infernal Regions.”
82 Borrowing from David Cunningham’s Trinitarian formulation, from These Three Are One, op. cit.
83 Dillard, 145.
84 Dillard, 145.
85 Luce Irigaray, “Divine Women,” trans. Stephen Muecke, Sydney, Australia: Local Consumption Occasional Paper 8 (1986), 8.
86 Joem Lechte, “Luce Irigaray,” (Routledge: Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers, 1994), at http://www.envf.port.ac.uk/illustration/images/vlsh/psycholo/irigaray.htm. (accessed 7/05)
87 Elizabeth Grosz, “Irigaray and the Divine,” in C.W. Maggie Kim, Susan St. Ville and Susan Simonaitis, Eds., Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 210.
88 For a much more detailed discussion of transference and countertransference from a relational, intersubjective perspective, and its ethical implications for boundaries and care, see Cooper-White, Shared Wisdom, esp. Ch. 3 “The Relational Paradigm: Postmodern Concepts of Countertransference and Intersubjectivity,” 35-60.
89 Donnel B. Stern, Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1997).
90 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
91 T.S. Eliot, “Dry Salvages” from The Four Quartets, cited in Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), viii.