Fighting the shadow

I got some inspiration from my meditation this morning, I would like to share with you.

When I was back in college, there seemed to be a war going on, a war for the truth, on an existential level. Behaviorists and psychoanalysts seemed to be opposed to one another, and they always got into each other’s hairs.

Behaviorists claimed that psychoanalysis was unscientific, that it was an obscure and idle kind of fata morgana, which had no roots in reality as it could be observed, measured, and predictably applied.

Psychoanalysts claimed behaviorists were superficial, and had no true framework for their discipline. They relied on how dogs could be taught and trained, and applied some tricks to get people into behaving differently, whilst ignoring the deeper levels of personal speech and conflict that were buried and engraved in the symptom. Behaviorists neglected the personal investment in the symptom, which could only lead to keeping the unsymbolized conflicts and fears unconscious, causing them to arise in a different kind of symptom formation. They would be substituting the arising of one expression of the conflict, for another expression elsewhere, by not taking into account the subjective problem-solving that the psychopathology was supposed to express.

I would like to take this a step further.

Today we celebrate the birthday of my former instructor in the martial arts of ninjutsu. It is my sensei’s birthday, and so I thought back to my years of training in avoiding blows, in administering kicks, and the years before that, when I was learning judo katas on the tatamis of my childhood.

I was also thinking of the devil, the image of the self that suppresses our native flow and which I have described as the saboteur that keeps us from truly expressing our souls and living our lives. I was thinking about the ego, and how martial arts is aimed at overcoming this instance, which is in fact the fear of dying itself.

It could lead us to wonder, in the end, whether dogs have an ego as well. It would seem that they don’t, because they are not able of recognizing themselves in a mirror. Our dog sometimes looks at herself in a reflecting surface, and then she starts barking and jumping, as if that dog were another animal, a friend maybe, or a rival.

Still, dogs seem to be susceptible to exactly the kind of reflexes that come from a kind of learning and memory, a kind of sense that this is what ‘I’ am and what ‘I’ am supposed to do. They may just be man’s best friend, because they share a bit of his vulnerable side.

So, enough with the dogs, let’s see about the martial arts. And the demon.

So in martial arts, you are always practicing against an offender. In Japanese terminology, we speak of the roles of uke and tori. Tori is the one who defends himself against uke. Uke is the attacker, who is overcome and loses in the end.

So when uke delivers for instance a fist blow at the face of tori, tori might block that fist incoming, stepping out of the line of attack, and respond with an elbow strike against uke’s cheek. I am just saying something.

So in terms of stimulus-response, tori is the one who responds to the stimulus initiated by uke.

It is important, to advance in our philosophy on behaviorism and martial arts, that the aim of the response is to neutralize the acting capacity of uke. His arm ends up broken, his throat is slit. Uke is brought down, uke is taken out of the equation. With efficiency, love and skill.

So, martial arts is about self-defense. It is about putting an attacker out of business, and ensuring the free movement of our own inspired and passionate being.

In a way, martial arts is a conditioning. We are constantly responding to stimuli, and practicing our capacity to view a certain distance or angle as an opportunity for action. In the end, we become very responsive to many an attempt at harming our lives that comes from an opponent who is acting out hostile intentions.

Of course, we do not take such attacks without firm responses.

But there is another side to the martial arts, and that is the side of contemplation, the side of meditation, zen and the overcoming of the ego, fear and the belief in death itself.

In writing my book ‘the magic of psychoanalysis’, I have described the ego as a straitjacket that is limiting our every impulse. It is keeping our hands down, it is keeping our breaths down, it is keeping our heart and all of the love that lives in it, simply down. It says no. It forbids. It forever keeps us from being who we truly are.

The ego will come to repress our libidinal flow according to the logic and command of the super-ego, the social role that we have taken on from the Other, the field of organization that makes our human societies function in a spirit of interdependence and connectedness. We are the baker, so the ego makes our hands knead bread. We are cyclists, so the ego pushes our legs in a repeated pumping of our pedals. We are taxi drivers, so the ego has our hands and our feet balancing their movement to the traffic. We are in constant control and under constant domination by our conscience and our personalities, playing a role but taking it seriously, behaving as if our social and perhaps patriotic personalities were all there is to it.

So the ego controls the soul, and takes its commands from the super-ego.

If we try to relate the psychodynamic view of the personality to the logic of behaviorism, we might say that the ego transmits the stimulus of the command given by the super-ego, which the divine within us, then responds to and obeys, follows and executes.

We are, in this regard, all in a state of mind resembling slaves not in the least awake and conscious. We just follow orders. There is no life of the soul that has its own behavior.

So, we are weaving thoughts, following some inspiration, meandering through shores and side-canals, and now we flow back to the martial arts.

In a way, the ego/super-ego complex, the symbolico-imaginary in Lacanian terms, is what martial artists would identify as uke, the one who initiates the fight through giving an impulse that compromises our freedom and our lives. In martial arts, as well as in the behaviorism of every day life, the response comes from our tori-soul. It is the soul that defends itself against the domination and attempt at control, instigated by the mind, if we may call it that, the combination of the command and the enforcement of the latter.

So in martial arts, we do not bend, as we do perhaps in everyday life. In martial arts we refuse, we resist. We quarrel and defy, we fight for our freedom and for nothing more than being humorous and loving people who like to live their own life their way. Not the way someone else wants us to be.

So the tori-soul will try to neutralize the ego, trying to force him or her into a certain position where they are dominated, menaced and unfree. The tori-soul will stand from a love of freedom and a belief that no other person should take that away. The tori-soul must be awake to love and freedom, attentive and alert at any attacks coming from another’s ego. He may flow with the latter, but in the end, he will overcome and surpass the attempt of the other, whom we may call uke.

So if uke is the ego (and super-ego), and the soul aims to overcome this instance that attempts to overshadow its own inner light shining, we can see how the spiritual essence of martial arts would make us inclined to choose psychoanalysis over behaviorism.

For in the end, the commands to which the soul, in a state of sleep and hypnosis, is brought to obey like a slave that has no inner will or power, are exactly the kind of logic the martial warrior will oppose. He will put his life and body on the line for freedom from being told what to do, how to act and how to behave.

In the end, the warrior does not act at all. He is not an actor. He is a lover. A lover of freedom, and a believer in the fight.

This is exactly the point psychoanalysis is trying to make addressing behaviorists. To them, psychopathology is all about the point where the soul is resisting, refusing and fighting the restraints of the ego following the super-ego logic. It is a fight for freedom that they aspire to help in its realization. To the psychoanalyst, reinforcing the freezing and restricting, suffocating instance of the ego through an implant of super-ego logic, would only make the soul fight harder. The repressed always returns. Exactly that, to them, is the symptom.

In the end, returning to martial arts, we must transcend the ego. There must be no uke anymore. There must be freedom, the freedom from the ego, the fear of death, so that we may exert our freedom on every level of our lives. We must be freedom. We must be what we fight for. Love, uncompromising.

In conclusion, I would like to return to my passion for anarchy, as this is in fact, what we have been talking about. The freedom from being controlled and instructed, the freedom from being ruled by fear, the freedom of our hearts and the loving currents of our souls, which Freud called libido.

It is not about control.

It is not about the logic.

It is not about taking commands, and it is not about sleeping all the days of our short or lengthy lives.

Of course, that is what programmers like. A robot that follows logic, orders and commands.

That is what governors like, a mass of people who obey their policies and nothing more.

The good slave, the obedient citizen.

Taking orders from who ?

From uke ?