Down Below
A few weeks ago, I saw Leonora Carrington’s exhibition ‘The Symptomatic Surreal’ at the Freud Museum. I knew her work from before, and her associations to the Surrealist movement but I was not aware about her breakdown, aged 23.
She spent 6 months at Morales Sanatorium (also known as Peña Castillo) in Santander, Spain. Where her consultant, Dr. Morales administered Cardizol shock therapy while encouraging her to sketch.
The exhibition, at the Freud Museum, consists of those sketches and some letters from 1938 to 1941, following Carrington’s flight from Nazi occupied France, her hospitalisation, and her journey through Madrid to New York, where she was reunited with the Surrealists in exile in 1941.
The exhibition is anchored by the presentation of Down Below (1940), a painting created when Carrington was hospitalised. Down Below is also the title of her autobiographical memoir, recounting her flight to Spain following the arrest of her lover Max Ernst, and her subsequent confinement in a Spanish mental asylum. This book is structured as an alchemical journey, allying personal trauma with surrealist myth and an alchemical rebirth. The title refers to a room beneath the asylum that she believed was the epicentre of the cosmos.
But before we dive down there, perhaps it would be good to know a bit more about how Leonora arrived at the point where inner and outer realities merged, and an alchemical rebirth was begotten.
Leonora had a real fascination for Celtic culture and folklore. This was primarily inspired by her Irish mother, grandmother and nanny. Growing up, she was immersed in tales of Celtic mythology, the Sidhe (fairy people), and the Tuatha Dé Danann. These fantastic stories taught her to view animals and nature as forces of harmony, magic, and rebellion.
At age ten, Leonora saw her first Surrealist painting and later became familiar with the movement by reading Herbet Read’s book, Surrealism.
Surrealism was a cultural and artistic movement, developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. You could say that it helped artists process the trauma of the War. Most of them believed that the cause of the war was the rational, capitalist, and political systems, so they sought to side-step rationality and express the unconscious mind through dreams and automatism. The intention was, in Breton’s words: to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality" (1969), or surreality.
Leonora was born into a Roman Catholic family. Her father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, and her mother was from Ireland. Her father opposed her making a living as an artist, and even though her mother may have encouraged her, she received little support from her family to forge an artistic career. In 1937, Carrington met Max Ernst at a party in London. The artists fell in love and moved to Paris together. In 1938, they settled in Saint-Martin-d’Ardeche.
Ernst, who was German, was imprisoned by French authorities at the outbreak of World War II for being a "hostile alien." With the mediation of friends, he was released a few weeks later but soon after the Nazis invaded France, Ernst was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo due to his art being considered "degenerate”.
The loss of her lover and the invasion of the Nazis were the catalyst for Carrington’s journey into Down Below. She was in shock; these events had a profound emotional impact: the loss of what she later referred to as “her happiest time”.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded Analytical Psychology, found himself in a similar situation, a few years earlier. In 1913 his prolific relationship of six years with Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, came to an end.
This separation deeply affected Jung, he withdrew from many of his professional activities to reassess his personal and professional path. He viewed this period as a "creative illness". He produced Liber Novus, which is an illustrated manuscript, in which he recorded his visions and conversations with characters of his psyche between 1914 and 1930. Jung, like Carrington, experienced a war whilst going through this journey, in his case it was World War I.
Jung thought of alchemy as a symbolic map of the human psyche and it was this map that guided Leonora through her ‘journey’. Jung thought of the alchemical journey as a confrontation with one’s unconscious. Unconscious means a space for experiences that have been stored away because they were too challenging. Jung thought that: “the realization of the hidden in the unconscious signifies reunion with the unconscious laws of our being, and the purpose of this reunion is the attainment of conscious life” (Jung, 1967, p.20).
In other words, “self-realisation requires the psyche to turn round on itself and confront what it produces” (Stevens, 1994, p.38). This is a lifelong process, of overcoming inner dualities, and achieving psychic balance.
Jung mapped this psychological transformation by using the different stages of alchemy: Nigredo or state of depression; Albedo, a stage characterised by the gain of insight and clarity. Citrinas, where the light of consciousness emerges to transition towards wisdom; and the last stage, Rubedo, the stage of integration and synthesis. This points to a psychic capacity to expand consciousness, where unconscious components are integrated into consciousness.
For Carrington, this process ended in her moving to Mexico. Her journey took her from being a femme-enfant for Max Ernst and the surrealists, to becoming a pivotal figure in Mexican surrealism and a founder of its women's liberation movement. By the way, in case you wonder what does femme-enfant means, it is an archetype of a woman who retains a youthful, innocent, and playful disposition, without ever fully leaving her childhood spirit behind.
I invite you to consider, what if a diagnosis or a mental health problem is actually a door into the depths of yourself, a journey into the unknown, and an expansion of consciousness and possibilities. Existential psychotherapy certainly provides the space to hold those thoughts and navigate what appears to be unsurmountable.
“One has to be careful what one takes when one goes away forever.”
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
Interested on reading the real stuff:
Breton, André. "Manifesto of Surrealism." Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 1–47
Carrington, L. (2017). Down Below. New York Review Books.
Jung, C.G. (1968) The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 13) Alchemical Studies (ed.) Read, H., Fordham, M., Adler, G. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Read, H. (Ed.). (1936). Surrealism. Faber & Faber.
Stevens, A. (2001) Jung: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Loneliness Experiment
Launched on BBC Radio 4’s ‘All in the Mind’, the Loneliness Experiment was designed to find out who feels lonely and what can be done to help them feel more connected. In total, 55,000 people from across the world responded to the survey.
What do you do when feeling lonely?
What's addiction?
I finished watching yesterday a webinar run by the BACP on Addictive Disorders. It was amusing, and mind-opening to hear different speakers, from a shaman to neurobiologists, present their perspectives on this subject.
One of the things that struck me the most was to hear that addiction can be considered an interpersonal problem (interpersonal meaning relationships and communication between people), rather than an intrapsychic problem (intrapsychic meaning internal psychological processes of the individual). This, of course, can be disputed depending on which psychotherapeutic modality you prefer.
If we consider that our identity is developed in relation to what and who we care about, we can say, as Tim Leighton explained, that identity is about relationships, and that if you don’t care, you don’t feel. In relating to the world, one develops a multiplicity of identities with different hierarchical order which hopefully cohabit together without major distress. Leighton and colleague, Kirby Gregory, affirm that in addiction, ‘the addict identity’ takes over and comes first in the hierarchy of identities, hence removing meaning to most of other relations or possibilities of being. Then, it could be said, that addiction provides a substitute for feeling, and intimacy is achieved solely through crisis and intensity.
Alastair Morday highlights the difference between addiction as a set of behaviours, such as, impaired reasoning, drug seeking behaviour, cravings and poor impulse control and the primary condition which he states to be a dopamine dysregulation and reward deficiency. What does this mean? You may wonder….well, dopamine functions, in the brain, as a neurotransmitter. A neurotransmitter is a chemical released by neurons (nerve cells) which sends signals to other nerve cells. Dopamine as a neurotransmitter plays a major role in reward-motivated behaviour. Dopamine provides a sense of meaning and purpose, attributing a feeling of ‘wanting’ a reward (desire) rather than ‘liking’ of it (pleasure).
Looking at the word desire online, I found it described as a ‘sense of longing or hoping for a person, object, or outcome’, explaining that ‘when a person desires something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the thought of the item or person, and they want to take actions to obtain their goal’.
The problem in addiction can be seeing as a lack of desire, due to poor (dopamine) tone, leaving a person in unbearable states of restlessness, irritability, mind crushing boredom, discontent, and lack of meaning and purpose. Addiction can be understood as a behaviour which boosts and reinforces meaningful and purposeful feelings rather than pleasurable ones. Quoting Carl Jung on this, he says that ‘man is not seeking happiness, but rather meaning’.
In other words, if there is no desire, there will be no drive, and without drive the body might think is endangering survival. In front of this, the oldest part of the brain, the reptilian brain, sends urgent alert messages to the system. Usually, we learned to regulate these negative emotions from our primary caregivers having done that to us when we were not able to do it by ourselves. This is ingrained in our memory and learning centre of the brain, the limbic system. However, in adverse childhood experiences, like for example, experiencing a constant lack of response to feeding cry, having a stressed and depressed mother, or due to developmental trauma, these skills might not be acquired. Hence, we might find ourselves during critical periods of neurobiological and psychological growth, like adolescence, for example, looking for substitutes to smooth our aroused system. These substitutes can range from sex, to food, to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, relationships, etc. The problem is that the brain never forgets what helped it to get into balance, in spite of our safety. This means, that the strength of the survival signalling is so massive that overrides our rational brain (prefrontal cortex) triggering cravings, drug/sex/food/money seeking behaviours, poor impulse control and impaired reasoning. Morday considers addiction as a chronic illness of the brain.
In saying so, Rokelle Lerner, comes to my mind. She spoke of the importance of the process of grieving: to grieve the loss of dreams. What does it mean? Imagine a gap, a gap installed between the primary caregiver and the crying child, a gap filled with unmet needs. This unrecognised needs are left for so long unseen that mutate into an intoxicating feeling, or poor hedonic (dopamine) tone, in Morday’s words. Desire, the sense of longing or hoping for a person, object, or outcome, entraps the unspoken needs, there is no meaning, purpose or pleasure, there’s no care. Unable to cope with this perceived nothingness, the mind becomes a dream of itself: I think who I am, constantly fighting the reality of my unsubstantiated self.
Addiction buys freedom until it face us with our deception: we wake up to realise that the dream has never been there, the primary caregiver will never come, the panic captures me, I am filled with a despairing void, I am going to die. Lerner challenges this view by reminding us of winter: things seem to be dead but actually they are very much alive. They are sleeping, just looking for the right time/conditions to grow back into life.
Kurikindi, shaman and guest at the conference, said that he have met big hearted people in England, however he noticed that they are very disconnected to mother nature. His words made me think if what he means is that we as society are disconnected from the rhythm of life, its natural cycle: spring, summer, autumn, winter and spring again; and not giving the time or space to celebrate in meaningful ways important transitions, such as, childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, parenthood, etc. This lack of time, may be costing us the possibility for appreciation and meaningful encounter with ourselves and the world.
It was very moving to hear a man from the public say that he was coming to the end of his rehab treatment, and recognised that his addiction was because of disconnection. He said: ‘I drank to feel connected because there was no connectedness in the community’. His words were a reflection on what every speaker in the conference agreed upon: to overcome addiction one of the best tools is social support, the one that is intimate, which provides meaning and relational support. This kind of support, encourages the development of different ways of relating, and re-connects a person to a more fluid multiplicity of identities.
Mordey views addiction as a pandemic of modern society, a nihilistic disorder, and calls for a social pyramidal shift, Kurikindi says that addiction is a man-created illness and the only way through is connecting back to who we are, life itself. These ideas emphasise Rokelle’s words, we need to grieve the lost dreams so the possibility to create a new future can be borne.
I would like to thank the BACP for such a lovely experience and all their guests: Tim Leighton, Kirby Gregory, Rokelle Lerner, Alastair Mordey, Miles Adcox, David Nutt, Bruce Parry, Tamara Russell, Kurikindi, Celia Morgan and Richard Sherry.