Without sensitivity what would life be like? Sensitivity nurtures us, gives life color, expressiveness, charm - provides a basis for terror. Sensitivity, feeling and thinking feed each other, are part of each other. Thinking and  feeling are ways sensitivity unfolds or grows.

We speak of emotional sensitivity, reflective sensitivity, not just the raw life of sensations. But without the sensory sea we take for granted, feeling and thought would dry up and die.

We have the capacity to focus on different aspects of our experiential matrix, to select a bit of experience and zoom in on it, detach it from other aspects of experience for a time and try to see what it is made up of.

Attempts have been made to abstract sensation from the flow of experience and study its qualities. Freud wrote of chaotic sensory fields streaming through the body, involving inside and outside of skin, mucus membranes, glands, aliveness of tissues.

This readily expands to include proprioceptive and kinesthetic sensation, nerves, muscles, even a vision of cellular aliveness. Not all or most sensations throb and pulse, but one well knows what the latter mean. For Freud, such sensitivity is mediated by what he calls a pleasure or body ego, an idea which resonates with older writings on "the flesh," "concupiscence," mischievous, destructive, enlivening Eros.

In addition to the vague, sometimes sharp and insistent, tumult, spread and fluctuation of body sensation, one can focus on what philosophers called primary and secondary qualities (e.g., color, sound, odor, size, taste, shape, mass).

One can tease out sensory elements from the perceptual flow and imagine them to be building blocks of experience, as if what we see is made of sensation bits compounded into unities. It is, indeed, possible to decompose the world into bits and pieces, focusing on intensity of hue, textures, line fragments.

Stare at a surface long enough and it loses form, dissolves, changes contour, challenges categories. But the fact that we can tune into and break up our experiential field in lots of ways does not make any one way primary.

We can focus on the rise and fall of sensations or on the wholeness of objects. Or try to relax focus and let the perceptual flow splash through us. The fact such an attentional capacity exists at all is amazing.

That it provides us with ability to create worlds of experiencing by subtly blending sensation, perception, feeling and thought is even more amazing.

M. Klein and W. R. Bion apply the bits and pieces vs. wholeness categories, that characterize earlier writings on sensation and perception, to emotional life. Klein believes unconscious fantasy mediates affective movement from part to whole object experience, e.g., seeing mother as breast or nipple vs. seeing her as an actual person, a subject in her own right.

In the first, the other exists in terms of a partial function or service. If the function runs well, the other is felt as good and good feelings result (or, vice versa, good feelings produce a sense of good object). If things do not go well, affect is negative, allied with negative object perception.

It is as if, Klein suggests, there are two worlds of feelings and objects, good and bad, depending on the emotional sensation dominant at the moment. If things go very badly, affect may not only split into positive and negative valences, but fragment and disperse(proliferation of splitting), dovetailing with a sense of self and object fragmentation. If affect dispersal goes far enough, feeling thins and, finally, is lost.

In the simplest case, the psychic universe divides into good and bad affect, self, object. For Klein, the defense mechanisms that mediate this division include splitting and projection. One tries to preserve the good self-object-affect by splitting off and projecting the bad.

This basic attempt to preserve a good affect nucleus at the heart of the psyche is bolstered by denial, idealization and the manic defense. One has to deny what is happening in the psyche as a whole in order to split off bad feelings (one hand not knowing the other), and this denial is intensified by idealizing the good core one tries to maintain.

A chronic manic position develops, in which some portion of the psyche tries to keep good feeling above the bad, sweeping the latter elsewhere, into other parts of the world or self. This solution is only apparently stable. Defenses reshuffle and what is good at one time, may be bad at another, and the personality may end up re-organizing and hardening around a bad affect-self-object core (a rigidity ultimately linked with instability).

Klein calls the psyche’s reliance on splitting, projection, denial, idealization and the manic defense, the paranoid-schizoid position.

Development proceeds towards bringing split off affects and fantasies together in an attempt to see self and other more fully. The infant begins to realize that the hated witch mother (bad affect core) and the loved divine one (good affect core) is the same person in different aspects, and the loving, hating being is oneself in different moods.

Good and bad experiences are part of what happens between people, part of the necessary brew, as one enters more deeply into the life of injury and repair. The pain one receives and inflicts (in fantasy, in reality) and the pleasure are part of what whole people do together.

Klein notes a depressive tone to the realization that injury is part of inter-subjectivity, that we can not escape pain by splitting it off, that caring and reparation must evolve, partly, to make up for and heal some of the consequences of splitting.

She calls this growth in making room for opposite affects and differing viewpoints, the depressive position. A certain mourning attends awareness that injury and disturbance are inevitable and that faith in a good core must undergo much development in order to meet the challenges within and without.

Bion enlarged on Klein’s part-whole affective dialectics. He saw the movement from splitting to reparation as a particular case of more general psychic operations, which involve incessant breaking into parts and building into wholes. He thus placed a bi-conditional sign between paranoid-schizoid (PS) °Í depressive (D) positions, indicating two-way movement at once simultaneous, oscillating and periodic.

For example, he depicts an analyst patiently waiting in a semi-fragmented, bits and pieces state until a take on the emotional reality of  the session clicks into place. He describes this as a movement from patience to security which never ends.

There is something Job-like about Bion’s description. Waiting in unknowing can become intense indeed, characterized by a heightened sense of decomposition and persecution rewarded by a moment of enlightenment.

Sense of decomposition °Í Sense of enlightenment. The double arrow insists on movement between form and formlessness, but more. A mix of determinacy-indeterminacy is implied. Parts are wholes and wholes are parts depending on one’s focus.

For example, Bion stresses that causal notions. useful as they may be, often are misused as substitutes for other ways of experiencing. Causality can close off experiential flow, putting brakes on, slanting it this way or that. A common but frequently lethal mode of causal thinking is "moralistic", assigning blame: "It’s my fault" or "It’s your fault."

Reactive blaming is a commonplace use of causality to escape opening to more complex dimensions of living. In this case, precocious causality = precocious moralistic closure of growth. Bion found causal thinking suffocating. He did not want it to close off  sensitivity to the larger flow.

Proper use of causality views it is a selective configuration which organizes larger processes in certain ways for certain purposes. Any part of reality tapped by a causal apprehension, precedes, succeeds and exceeds the latter’s use.

Causal thinking organizes transformational processes that it is part of and needs to be seen as one tool mind uses. It is not always the only or best filter to express and amplify the full range of possibilities human sensitivity opens.

Organizing life via causal thought (whether scientific, theological, moralistic, psychological, common-sensical) contributes to the community of voices, the checks and balances of tendencies, our mixed and varied makeup of capacities - none of which has the last word. In such a mix of ingredients in process, the meaning of part-whole keeps changing.

To further complicate matters and bring out a challenge sensitivity opens, the idea, whole, intuitive sense or gestalt formed in the movement from PS to D may itself be explosive, threatening, de-stabilizing. The analyst waits in patience in chaos to be thrown for a loop by the emergence of a thought that is hard to handle.

Bion calls this thought (or feeling) messiah or genius because of its challenge to personality. A messiah or genius aspect of self threatens the status quo, which he calls establishment. He likens the potentially creative idea or feeling or intuition to a big bang birth of the psychic universe. It takes time to catch up with, assimilate, make use of intuitive leaps.

Thus we arrive at a position in which the movement toward security, the formation of an idea, intuition, feeling, sense or transforming slant concerning our attitudes and make-up, is a funny kind of security indeed.

What the analyst waits for in the decomposing unknown is a transformative sense of emotional reality that initiates and is part of a prolonged birth process (gestation °Í Big Bang). One moves from one sort of annihilation to another (waiting in chaos for the formation of a transformative pattern: both chaos and formation threaten to blow self away).

What sort of security is this? It is the security one gets from trying with all one’s being to make contact with oneself, with another, with emotional reality. There is hunger for reality, for truth about life, oneself, others.

A certain security comes from following that hunger, coming through the upset, living with the turbulence. Truth is highly charged, explosive and if used wrongly, can wreck life. But without it, soul is dead. For Bion, there is an emotional nourishment that comes with seeking the truth about ourselves, albeit compassionate or hateful use of truth makes all the difference.

Bion was fond of Samuel Johnson’s remark:

    "Let us endeavor to see things as they are, and then enquire whether we ought to complain. Whether to see life as it is will give us much consolation, I know not; but the consolation that is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable; that which may be derived from error must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive."

A remark like this opens many cans of worms – what is truth, how does one contact it, how does one use it, how to relate to fanatic use of "truth", hallucinated truth, the omnipresence of error and truth, and so on.

The Greek categories Johnson assumes are filled with holes now. Yet the sense of what he means comes through. Whatever difficulties and impossibilities plague this kind of discourse, one feels the reality of what Johnson appeals to.

It is this kind of security - maddening, perplexing, challenging – that comes from struggling with oneself, trying to open to the real. Bion describes this, too, as becoming at-one (at-onement) with oneself and transforming in O, his sign for unknowable ultimate reality.

Bion associates O with catastrophic impact. Even if it is a good O, a fruitful, potentially creative O-impact, there is a degree of shattering. The Big Bang moment is ubiquitous, ongoing, unpredictable, potentially exploding into new universes of experience – insofar as one is receptive or can take it or make use of it.

The impact of reality is far ahead of our ability to process it. We can’t take too much reality. Our equipment simply is not up to it. If we are lucky, persistent, patient, hungry enough for the real, our equipment grows into the job, building more capacity to work with what is. Nevertheless, we are always behind the impact of moment, at best able to process crumbs broken off from the whole. But those crumbs can be rich indeed!

Reality is processed through incessant transformations of impacts. Bion’s work can be viewed as descriptions of transformations that his sensibility and ability could manage. His particular bent makes him sensitive to impact as disaster or potential disaster.

He has a special gift for delineating psychotic deformations in response to disaster (big bang explosions, meteoric black winters). Any increase in reality or consciousness may stimulate disaster dread. Bion redefines resistance as resistance to the real.

Emotional and mental life may turn off to variable degrees, becoming numb, vacuous, deadening, in response to dread of heightening (and vice versa, heightening may ward off deadness). Therapy provides support for the psyche’s attempts to process what bits of reality it can. It aids the psyche’s attempts to sustain and digest the fact that we are alive and trying to learn something about living.

Psychoanalysis is a response to a sense of disaster that pervades psychic life. Its catalogue of anxieties – birth, separation, intrusion, abandonment, castration anxieties, life anxiety and death anxiety – expresses a sensitivity to injury with many forms, a wound with many faces. Psychoanalysis works with damage done and signifiers of disaster. It is a creative response to disaster, as so much culture is.

We keep trying to regularize disaster, wish it away, tone it down. Science puts pressure on reality to fit formulas. It squeezes reality into patterns that enlarge ability to control unwanted events. We are dazzled by ideas about reality generated by thinking that will not give up.

Science makes things better. But disaster does not go away. Heart attacks, cancer, terrorist attacks, emotional and physical and economic abuse – feed disaster anxiety. Our psyche partly forms around an internal sense of disaster that links with rich arrays of disaster fantasies. Not infrequently, unconscious hallucinated disaster moulds external reality, as well as vice versa.

Winnicott describes this internal sense of disaster as a kind of madness or deformation the personality undergoes as it begins to form. The self keeps growing and personality makes a go of it, following threads of good experiences to offset the bad, insofar as it can.

One tries to absorb deforming traumas and go on. But a nuclear sense of disaster anxiety persists in the background, sometimes erupting as part of hysterical, obsessive or phobic dreads that persecute daily life. Winnicott describes a double tendency, a need to go towards yet escape basic madness.

The paradoxical result of reaching towards one’s basic madness and the traumatized self, is feeling more alive and real. The model is not control so much as opening one’s experiential field.

Bion calls this opening faith. One opens oneself to reality (O) not because the latter is good or bad - it may be both and neither – but because it is. It is the only O we have and are and we’d best learn to become partners with ourselves, with it.

Faith is an open attitude that lets things register. It is not the closed faith of a particular religious dogma, ready to do violence to what is outside it. The faith Bion has in mind is part of the need sensitivity has to taste life, feel impacts and to digest them in ways that lead to more life.

This kind of faith is an attempt not to do violence to experience. An attempt which must fail, perhaps. But the attitude it embodies is significant – a caring, devotion, sincerity, respect, an imaginative loving objectivity – a  drive to do life justice, a need to do right by experience. If taken seriously, one possible result is increased ability to wait on each other, wait for each other.

A sensitivity to emotional smell, spirit, affective attitude – a desire to taste each other and our mutual impacts. Waiting, patience, a certain passivity are important in order to let impacts build and unfold: sensitivity grows around them and they stimulate growth of sensitivity. It is a faith that comes back for more, that keeps opening and opening in face of trauma waves, that registers impacts and learns to work with them.

One may need to pull back from sensitivity for a time, keep things down. But sooner or later sensitivity drives past the manageable, seeks heightened impacts, raw aliveness, fresh air. It needs to taste and shatter and stretch.

We will see throughout this book dramas sensitivity goes through, involving too much, too little, and more subtle nuances of quality. Sensitivity may be too much or too little for itself, moving between flooding and starvation, whether in sensory, emotional, social, aesthetic, ethical, intellectual or spiritual domains.

Therapy provides moment to moment possibilities of hiding, deforming, dying out, re-routing, re-grouping, coming back to open up once more, to try another way around or through, to find ways to work with one’s sensitive self, to let sensitivity speak.
________

This article is an excerpt from Chapter One of the book by Michael Eigen:
The Sensitive Self

© Copyright 2004 Michael Eigen
Published with the kind permission of the author.

Michael Eigen is in private practice in New York. Author of numerous books, he is also associate clinical professor of psychology at New York University and a senior member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.

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