CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION:

There can be a positive element in all this, that is, an element that is not a defense. It can be said that only out of non-existence can existence start. (D. W. Winnicott, Fear of Breakdown)

The keynote papers by Stefanie Teitelbaum and Susan Kavaler-Adler will explore the terrors in facing the end of existence. Stefanie Teitelbaum choses Haruki Murakami and his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The “End of the World” is a fictional landscape of the state of mind after the world has ended. Murakami’s split novel, 40 chapters, alternating two distinct narratives of a divided self, each unaware of the other, even as glimpses of the other appear.

Susan Kavaler -Adler uses the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson to illustrate annihilation terror, showing how this brilliant poet struggled to create and survive. She explicates the aspects of Dickinson’s life that led to the profound creative expression of a descent into madness, and to the survival that is so evocative for us today. Susan Kavaler-Adler also explores Dickinson’s split self in the poet’s masculine and feminine states of mind, as well as the poet’s use of her splits in her creativity. Both papers explore the role of mother absence in this most excruciating form of anxiety.

Stefanie Teitelbaum:

Annihilation Anxiety in
Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:
Dreaming Psychotic Anxiety 

“Even the term annihilation anxiety does not do justice to the nameless dread that pervades psychosis.” (M. Eigen, 1986)

“Nameless Dread”:  Bion’s coinage of a particular dread in absence of alpha-function to name that which is dreadful. Thoughts from Michael Eigen’s 1986 Psychotic Core serve as a hub with spokes of Freud, Ferenczi, Tausk, Bion, Meltzer, Winnicott, and Grotstein are enlisted to create the dreamer who dreams the dreams of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

The plural, dreams, reflects the novel’s 40 chapters. The odd numbers telling the story of one protagonist, the even ones another. Each protagonist is named only by his function. The first, the Calcutec, is a surgically altered human male who is designed to create impenetrable encryption codes. The second, the Dreamreader, is who is partially blinded by a knife painlessly inserted into his eyes. Daylight becomes intolerable and he reads the dreams of ancient beast skulls in a synaesthesia of sonority and light fractals. For both protagonists, the meaning of the encrypted material and the meaning of the light-sonar dreams are experienced only in sensory and bodily impacts; proto-mental beta elements. Proto-symbolic alpha elements, and symbolic language of alpha-function are unknown to each protagonist. Consciousness is annihilated.

“Freud used his developmental schema as a kind of musical scale; a resource that changes in value according to context” (Eigen, 1986, p.). As the Calcutec’s function fails, he experiences annihilation anxiety and weaves a womb of music to envelope him as his consciousness expires.  As the Dreamreader, residing in a realm called “End of The World” begins to recover, he finds music as a link to remember a lost mother.

This novel calls up an investigation of Bion’s soma-psychosis and Meltzer’s elaboration of the concept in examining the analyst’s task of being where the soma-somatic patient is in the moment. Not only are the objects split, but the attention of the split object subject is also split as well. The analyst needs to be able to split their own attention to hold each of the split objects at the same time. A comparison of Winnicott’s version of holding and containing the splits will be explored.

Murakami’s fictional mad-genius, the deus ex-machina of the novel will be presented as a personified creator of Viktor Tausk’s Influencing Machine, described by Michael Eigen as “a delusion which involves an overwhelming sense of impending evil fed by hidden omniscience that thrives on and malevolently exploits the invisibility of mental life.” Murakami’s indescribable visual imagination captures both the psychotic and dreamwork giving visibility to the invisibility of mental life. For me, reading Murakami’s dream world required the reverie possible in Bion’s faith position without memory, desire or understanding.

Susan Kavaler-Adler:

Emily Dickinson and Annihilation Anxiety

Emily Dickinson’s poetry reveals an internal world filled with the terror of facing the void or abyss within, when her compensatory masculine father identification would fail her, and leave her with the primal mother absence that perennially haunted her. Right before her most rich and inspired period of poetic creativity, Emily Dickinson confronts a descent into madness. It is in her ability to find words for this threatened psychotic break that she emerges as the brilliant and inspired poet that we know today.

In The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers, I have explicated the aspects of Dickinson’s life that led to the profound creative expression of a descent into madness, and to the survival that is so evocative for us today, even though this most famous American poet, who was seen by herself as a “Nobody” in her life, did ultimately decline during her years of increasing seclusion from the world.

It was only after despair, and then a period of brilliant struggles with madness that her incredible productivity dissipated. She ends with her manic masculine defense causing her to say, “I can kill, without being able to die.” Her feminine self could never evolve to allow for sufficient reparative healing. In this conference paper, I will draw on all my research of Emily Dickinson, and on the chapters on Dickinson in The Compulsion to Create, to share the extreme annihilation anxiety suffering in this famous female poet.

Loray Daws:

Children of Perdition:
Dreaming the Head-Heart of Annihilation Anxiety with Teitelbaum and Kavaler-Adler

Psychically traumatized analysands present the clinician with certain forms of dread and a collapse/collapsing inner life, the result of various types of shock and the painful reality of their heartbrokenness. Reading Teitelbaum and Kavaler-Adler annihilation anxiety opens up the exploration of attachment shock, cephalic shock, limboshock, shattershock, soulshock, potential shock, cataclysmic shock, and somatoform shock as described by Kathleen Adams, reflecting the primary agonies  explored by Donald Winnicott, as well as Wilfred Bion’s nameless dread, James Masterson’s abandonment depression, Michael Eigen’s psychotic self and Sandor Ferenczi’ reproduction of mental and physical agony, which follows upon incomprehensible and intolerable woe. Special attention will also be given to the cultivation of an analytical space and mind able to dream the ‘un/dream/able’ dream ‘for’ and ‘of’ the analysand.

LEARNING POINTS

By the end of this educational activity, its participants will be able to:

• Discuss and analyze various forms of annihilation anxiety.
• Discuss and analyze the relationship between annihilation anxiety and Bion’s “nameless dread.”
• Discuss the function of hallucinatory phenomena in giving sensory form to the nameless dread.
• Discuss and analyze how annihilation anxiety and creativity interact in the life story and poetry of Emily Dickinson.
• Contrast the masculine manic defense against annihilation terror in Emily Dickinson with the arrested feminine self that could not surrender and had to carry the “loaded gun” of murderous killing rage.
• Differentiate between the various forms of shock as described by Teitelbaum, Kavaler Adler, and Kathleen Adams.
• Describe what is meant by object-relational holding of the dream space for the psychotic self as found in the work of Teitelbaum and Kavaler Adler.