My first article for this blog considers a dimension of anger and violence.
A hunger that can’t be met:
Murakami’s story The Second Bakery Attack as dissociated anger uncontained
In this essay I am assuming that the opposites of anger and violence and peace go together in human experience and human experience of the world. The question I am examining is this: where in the ‘peace’ of ordinary, everyday life and relationships does this anger lie and reveal itself in its origin?
Of course we can say readily enough that anger and violence express themselves in the aggression of war, and closer to home, in crime and anti-social behaviour every day of the week. In this, the second assumption I am making is that anger resides in all of us in a certain way. I am associating anger with violence. However, in the ordinary and everyday of existence, anger and violence can appear to be ‘out there,’ outside of a sense of self, and in other people: those with ‘anger management’ issues, such as clients, and others who are criminals. Such people can easily been seen as different to ‘us’. It may be said, as a possibility, that there was early emotional and perhaps physical damage to the brain in its hard wiring. That could be a possibility and could be one explanation of difference in a normative model of the mind. However, I have the bias of ‘sameness’. How can and do we come to know ourselves, and how does the nature of anger and violence reveal itself to us?
The ‘management of anger’ is an important approach in therapy and has obvious practical benefits. However I think that for those benefits to be sustainable over a period of time, then it is necessary to understand the well-springs of anger and how it originates and is found in ourselves. That origin is found in the very early infant experience, I believe. In that very early experience it is supposed (by W.R. Bion, for example) that there is not yet differentiation between physical and bodily experience and psychological experience. Feeding for an infant, for example, is a ‘total’ experience of a means of sustaining life, of being held and contained physically and psychologically against the fearful and terrifying possibility of not surviving. How the infant is helped or otherwise to contain that fear by the parents, and then helped to learn how to do that for her or himself, is key to how anger and violence will be experienced later in life.
Here, I am attempting to use Murakami’s story as an ‘aesthetic object’, as a ‘container:’ a work of art that allows us to understand and experience what is happening; an object that is itself containing, and in this sense, alive as experience.
Key concepts
Therapeutic container and the container-containing process; aesthetic container or object; dissociation.
The Container
W.R.Bion proposed the idea of a relationship state that he described as a container-containing process.¹ The state is conceived of as a basic or original state of relationship with infant and parents, and, particularly in Bion’s original idea, as between infant and mother. The baby is held and has needs met, such as feeding and cleaning, both in a physical and psychological way. Initially it is supposed that what we come to think of as the psychological and physiological are at this time largely undifferentiated.
If this relationship process is adequate (or to refer to Winnicott, ‘good enough’), then the baby learns how to tolerate ‘frustration’ as Bion puts it. The toxic sense of vulnerability and the overwhelming experience of the possibility of annihilation and not surviving is held and contained by the parents. In this way the baby comes to learn that such experiences can be survived with the containing function of the parents. In time the baby learns how to do this for her/himself. The baby can ‘wait’ and know that the immediate experience can be experienced even if uncomfortable and will not last forever. It does not have to be projected out and experienced as someone and something else, that is, it can be experienced as part of the emerging sense of self.
Bion supposed that the containing relationship happens in what he describes as a state of ‘reverie.’ This is a state of consciousness that is dreamlike and is experienced like dreams and metaphor. In a waking state this state of consciousness links with unconscious parts of a person and states that are normally thought of as sleep or states of unconsciousness. In this way there can be more of an integration with different parts of the mind and there is less of a mind-body split, as with the original less differentiated experiences that Bion supposes is the infant experience.
Anger and violence might be said to be related to a state of powerlessness that threatens to overwhelm when the containing process is not adequate. Not that it can be complete or some idealised state of perfection. There are always blemishes: as Donald Meltzer put it when referring to feeding ‘the breast always has blemishes.’²
Aesthetic object or container
An aesthetic object might be described as a work of art that ‘lives’ as a symbol or metaphor for the condition of human experience in relation to the world and universe. It lives because it can offer itself as a containing state. Such a state can go beyond individual relationships. Beyond, say, individual parents to the wider society of parents and parenting and to wider relationships with society. An aesthetic object may point further than that and be able to ‘speak’ of the nature of the world, say, for example the logos that Heraclitus³ conceptualises. Such a logos is both an account of the world and the poetic word, the work of art as word.
Dissociation
Freud demonstrated that part of what we think of as mind is unavailable to an ‘I’ that we usually conceive of as a sense of self, a sense of experiencing a centre as a person. The relationship between unconscious and conscious states is critical in my view to understanding how we are as persons.
Freud also demonstrated ways in which this relationship between states can occur that are both helpful and unhelpful to a healthy and whole way of being. Aspects of a person that are revealed or potentially could be revealed to the conscious state or sense of ‘I’, may be repressed by that conscious state, a process that is itself outside of conscious awareness. There is a way of partitioning or splitting experience as a way of defending against it without consciously experiencing it. Freud’s method was therefore to bring these areas of experience into consciousness and thereby establish a more helpful balance between the states of mind.
Murakami’s story: The Second Bakery Attack⁴
I am not saying that my interpretation of the story as outlined below is definitive. As with any work of art, as indicated in my definition of an aesthetic object above, it is necessary to allow the work to ‘speak’ for itself to an individual in that particular moment of the individual’s existence.
Perhaps we don’t so much choose things in our lives, but experience how things (or the world) happen and reveal themselves. This is obviously a generalisation and a bias. Things in actuality are much more complex and of course as humans we can choose in many ways. However, maybe we choose at critical or pivotal moments when there is the possibility that our unconscious selves will reveal the potential for choice to us as a conscious person.
Our response to the revelation is what brings meaning, importantly in terms of openness to what happens, or our shut-ness to it, as with denial, repression, splitting - to name some ways of being closed.
There is the strong theme in Murakami’s story of how we come to know ourselves, and others. The main protagonists of the story are a young couple recently married. Inexplicably, apparently, they wake up in the early hours of the morning and experience intense hunger pangs. They get up and find that there is hardly anything in the fridge that might properly be called food. While they are considering what to do, the main protagonist of the story – the male partner – finds himself unintentionally telling his wife something of his past that he hasn’t revealed to her before. While he is doing this he experiences a revelation that operates on another level as the ‘ordinary’ conversation continues.
This revelation is another story, experienced in cinematic images, that could be considered as a reverie – a state conceived of by Bion that might be said to be a state of unconsciousness in consciousness: an experience that links the unrevealed and revealed aspects of the protagonist’s mind to a sense of ‘I’.
In the revelatory reverie the male protagonist experiences himself, whilst sitting in his kitchen, as bobbing in a little boat. Below him the waters of a sea clear, revealing a volcano deep below emerging from the seabed.
The protagonist says that he doesn’t know what this experience of the hunger in these images mean. He is not Sigmund Freud he says. However, he goes on to make associations. The hunger is associated with a fear, that of acrophobia. When he makes this connection he then remembers the first attack he made on a bakery. He then ‘just happens’ to share this memory with his wife.
His wife draws the story out of him. She has a theory that this hunger can’t just be satisfied by going to an all-night restaurant. That is not allowed. He tells her that when he was a student he attacked a bakery with a friend. He was lacking money but work was not an option. They attacked a local bakery at night. However the baker thwarted the attack (not robbery) by doing a deal with them. If they listened to Wagner’s Tannhäuser and The Flying Dutchman they could have all the bread that they could take away. The deal worked in that they got bread and the baker was able to make his Wagner ‘propaganda.’
There was a problem though afterwards. The deal caused the breakup of the friendship with the male friend. There’s an implication here that this problem or ‘curse’ is still in force and might cause a breakup of the marriage. Therefore the wife insists that they need to act on the situation immediately whilst the hunger is still with them and attack another bakery.
Something to note is that the characters are not named, but are referred to in terms of their relationships. This in a way might give the story quite a depersonalised feel. However, it is a way that Murakami builds his main character as a sense of ‘I’. This is an ‘I’ without a name that we can identify with more readily as ourselves.
So, the couple set out in the early hours of the morning to find a bakery open in Tokyo. The world appears to have changed since the first bakery attack. They have difficulty finding a bakery that is open. There has to be a compromise. Having stopped the car near to an open McDonald’s they decide to ‘compromise’ and attack the McDonald’s, but for the bread buns only. McDonald’s must stand in for a traditional night bakery.
The protagonist’s wife has put her shotgun on the back seat of the car. She gets out of the car and covers the number plates of the car in quite a professional way. She has the equipment for an attack. The protagonist wonders at this, not previously knowing about the shotgun. They are both ‘respectable’ members of society. Aged around thirty, they have established themselves in conventional jobs and lead an ordinary lifestyle.
They enter the burger place, and, threatening the staff with the shotgun, order them to prepare thirty Big Macs, informing the shocked and bemused staff that they only wish to rob them of the buns and will pay for the rest of the burgers and Cokes to drink.
The manager reluctantly agrees to close the shop and comply. He worries about McDonald’s procedures and closing early. It would be more straightforward if they took the cash as that would cause fewer administrative problems.
Having made their getaway with thirty Big Macs, they stop on a desolate car park and eat several of them each until they are stuffed and satisfied.
The story ends with the wife going to sleep on the male protagonist’s shoulder in the car. The hunger has vanished with dawn breaking. He is now alone, bobbing in his boat. Looking down the volcano has gone. He stretches out in the bottom of the boat and closes his eyes ‘waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged.’
Summary Interpretation
As indicated above I am not proposing a definitive interpretation. The story needs to be read and experienced as a container and aesthetic object. Here, however, is a summary interpretation.
The hunger that the couple experience is associated with fear. The nature of the fear is to do with what it is to be a human person and experience the world. There has not been a process of containment to mediate the fear and therefore as a curse (or compulsion) the fear as anger at uncontainment must be acted out violently to expunge it, or to project it as an alienated world, where, in the context of the story, they are unable to find a traditional all-night bakery.
From the point of view of the male protagonist, the fear is expressed in a revelatory reverie as non-verbal images. The narrative of the story proceeds in two states, that of the revelation which is more dream-like and metaphorical, and that of the action which is more in the realm of consciousness.
At the level and state of understanding that the characters find themselves in, both in terms of self-understanding and the world and society as they find it, the fear as compulsive curse can only be dealt with by violent acting-out.
At the end of the story the female protagonist sleeps and the male is now alone and enters the state of reverie. Although day has come – which might be said to traditionally indicate consciousness – they enter a state of dream. The woman is asleep but he is experiencing a waking dream, a reverie. He can now wait to be taken by the sea to where he belongs. Presumably this waiting is not what he has been able to do before. In Bion’s terms, he is now able to ‘tolerate frustration.’
Application to therapy.
In the development of a sense of being a person, the ability to tolerate frustration is a key in the management of fear and associated anger and violence. This happens as the containing-container process.
I would suggest that with many clients, what clients want to understand in the first moment of meeting in therapy, is if they can be borne and tolerated by the therapist as a person experiencing fear. In the sudden intimacy of the one to one relationship will the therapist turn away immediately from this fear in the deflection and dissociation of their own defences?
Having in mind an aesthetic object such as Murakami’s story can help the therapist to meet and hold that fear. At some point in the therapy, the object might with caution and if appropriate be directly interpreted to the client. In my experience though, the use of such objects is largely for the therapist.
Such an idea of course – of using metaphor as containing object – is as old as Freud. This was one of the ways Freud established therapy as it is known today. The use of Oedipus as a story to understand theory and as an experience in itself is well known and has entered the group consciousness of society. Of course different people have different understandings of what that means depending on how they have come to understand the group meaning.
What I would suggest is that therapists have a stock of containing objects at hand to have in mind in support of the client. These objects may be a mixture of a therapist’s own containing moments and aesthetic objects. We have to have our narratives written first. Then, if we are to follow Bion’s paradoxical approach, at the moment of meeting the client we need to ‘eschew memory and desire’. In other words, be open to meeting the client in their own terms.
References
1. Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann Medical Books.
2. Meltzer, Donald. See foreword to The Vale of Soulmaking Meg Harris Williams 2005, Karnac
3. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus Charles H. Kahn, Cambridge University Press, 1979
4. Murakami, Haruki The Second Bakery Attack, in The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage Books, 2003, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin
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