The Apollonian Eye and the Dionysian Ear - PsyBC

The Apollonian Eye and the Dionysian Ear
S T E V E N H . K N O B L AU C H , P H . D .
A comparison of the aesthetic underpinnings of psychoanalytic praxis is
undertaken using Nietzsche’s distinction between Apollonian and
Dionysian tendencies. Drawing from Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Jung, and
Stephen Mitchell as well as research and theory from the study of
infant–parent interaction, the author offers a clinical case to illustrate a perspective
that gives more emphasis to Dionysian forces in psychoanalytic
activity than in traditional case reporting, thus illustrating the utility of such
an expansion of underlying assumptions for psychoanalytic praxis. The
perspective highlights the importance of attention to “faintly conscious
stimuli” on nonsymbolized embodied registers of interaction for their significance
in the communication of affective meanings.
It’s not what you see that is art,
art is the gap [Marcel Duchamp].
The most important thing in music, is not the notes
[Pablo Casals].
RECENTLY, LEVINSON (2003) STATED, “THE ENTIRE PSYCHOANALYTIC
praxis, although annotated in words, actually takes place in a visual–
spatial modality … is organized more around pictures than words, more
Steven H. Knoblauch, Ph.D., is Faculty, Supervisor and Independent Track Chair,
New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Faculty
and Supervisor, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity; and author of
The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue and co-author of Forms of Intersubjectivity in
Infant Research and Adult Treatment.
The clinical illustration in this article first appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15(6).
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THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 327
around interactions than explanations.” (pp. 233–234). Levinson’s “logical
inversion,” as he calls it, of the psychoanalytic method represents an innovative
extension in thinking about the place of symbolization in the analyst’s
subjective activity. His contribution is to recognize how imagistically based
are analytic constructions and to remind us that words are not the product of
this symbolizing process so much as normatively shared building blocks
for representing interactive scenes or creative acts of deconstruction serving
as the basis for much, if not all, psychodynamic formulations, even when
they are schematic representations of intrapsychic dynamics as, for example,
in Freud’s early drawing depicting different agencies of mind.
In this article I suggest that the Apollonian aesthetic has guided much of
systematic modeling implicit in psychoanalytic theorizing including
Levinson’s most recent observations. Furthermore, I suggest that the expansion
of forms of analytic attention currently emphasized in psychoanalytic
thought can be further elaborated through a consideration of the Dionysian
aesthetic that underlies this emergent expansion of practice.
Demonstrating the origins of the two aforementioned aesthetics in artistic
expression, Nietzsche (1995) explained that the Apollonian tendency favored
sculpture and dreams: for, “In our dreams we delight in the immediate apprehension
of form … ” (p. 2). Clearly, it was Freud’s recognition of what is
formed in dreams, as well as in other nonreflective activity including daydreams,
slips of tongue, and associations, that served as the material for subsequent
reflection in psychoanalytic praxis. Freud’s recognition of a latent set of
meanings connected in complex ways to the manifest formations emergent in
dreams and other imagistic productions became the central fulcrum for analytic
work and is still central in contemporary psychoanalytic approaches,
whether these latent meanings be constructed through the lens of an object
relations, interpersonal, self psychological, relational, or other perspective.
On the other hand, Nietzsche (1995) also traced the Greek origins of a
Dionysian aesthetic that favored the “non-plastic … art of music.” (p. 1),
awakening emotions, “which, as they intensify, cause the subjective [or
principium individuationis of which Nietzsche claimed Apollo was the
image] to vanish into complete self-forgetfulness” (p. 1). (Freud, by the
way, did not favor music and believed he had no ear for the stuff.) Under
the Dionysian tendency “one feels himself not only united, reconciled,
blended with his neighbor, but as one with him; [the opposite of principium
individuationis] he feels the veil of Maya had been torn aside and were now
merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious Primordial Unity”
(Nietzsche, 1995, p. 2). In other words, the Dionysian sees form as an

328 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
illusion that separates things and individuals and hides the rhythmic
movement that connects and reconnects all things. In many ways, the
Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies parallel Freud’s idea of Thanatos and
Eros where Thanatos is the deadening of experience and Eros a force
bringing vitality. Interestingly Lacan (1977) in his reading of Freud,
described how the word as “symbol manifests in itself first as the murder of
the thing” (p. 104). Here we see words as a force of Thanatos. For Lacan,
the form giving word captures and memorializes, deadens as it symbolizes.
Freud’s take on the word as symbol was different. Freud saw meaning, a
new source of aliveness, coming from connectedness as when a “thing” is
connected in consciousness with the “word” to bring about symbolization.
So for Freud symbolization is an erotic act of connection, bringing life,
whereas for Lacan, symbolization is a thanatic act of collapsing space for
growth and movement, bringing death, two clearly different readings of the
Apollonian. Carl Jung and Stephen Mitchell read the implications of
Nietzsche’s contribution for psychoanalytic practice differently.
Whereas I have suggested that Nietzsche’s thesis can be used to reconsider
how Freud and Lacan understood meaning to be constructed and registered
symbolically, Jung used Nietzsche’s contributions to contribute a
model of personality types for distinguishing different styles of subjectivity
for organizing meaning. Jung saw the Apollonian capable of an inner perception
of beauty, as a psychological introvert producing dream images to
organize the world (Jung, 1923, pp. 170–183). In a certain sense, any practicing
psychoanalyst is an Appollonian in Jung’s terms, as we all need to
subjectively produce internal images to organize a sense of our selves and
“the world” to which we relate. (We could easily extend this generalization
to all beings capable of reflective functioning.) On the other hand, the
Dionysian was understood by Jung to be an extraverted personality type
who, in contrast to the Apollonian (guided by dreams), is rather guided by
an “intoxicated” contact with the world, akin to Goethe’s “diastole” or
Schiller’s “world embracing.” Nietzsche reconciled these two types with an
aesthetic solution apparent to him in the development of Greek tragedy,
one that Mitchell (1988) summarized for a relational perspective.
As Mitchell (1988) puts it:
The Apollonian builds elaborate sandcastles, throwing himself into
his activity as if his creations would last forever, totally oblivious to
the incoming tide which will demolish his productions. … The
Dionysian man sees the inevitability of the leveling tide and therefore

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 329
builds no castles. His constant preoccupation with the ephemeral
nature of his life and his creations allows him no psychic space in
which to live and play … Here is someone tyrannized and depleted
by reality [p. 195].
(It is interesting to compare Mitchell’s notion of the Dionysian preoccupation
with the ephemeral nature of phenomena as collapsing psychic space,
whereas Lacan saw the Apollonian process of giving form to experience
with the word as having a similar deadening and constricting impact on
experience.) Mitchell describes Nietzsche’s tragic man as “aware of the
tide and the transitory nature of his productions, yet building his sandcastles
nevertheless … The tragicomic play in which our third man builds,
Nietzsche suggests, is the richest form of life, generating the deepest meaning
from the dialectical interplay of illusion and reality” (p. 195).
But, in disagreement with Mitchell’s later reading, Jung rejects
Nietzsche’s tragic man aesthetic solution and offers a different source of
reconciliation. Jung (1923) states that “the aesthetic standpoint always
falls, i.e. it holds itself aloof from the problem” (p. 178). Jung’s approach
is to add the recognition of intuitive and sensation types of personality and
contrast these with the thinking (introvert) and feeling (extravert) types in
the following way: “Both these types [the intuitive and the sensation
types] have the mechanisms of introversion and extroversion in common
with the rational types but they do not—like the thinking type on the one
hand—differentiate the perception and the contemplation of the inner
image into thought, nor—like the feeling type on the other—differentiate
the affective experience of instinct and sensation into feeling” (pp. 181–182).
Rather Jung sees these intuitive and sensation types as adapting themselves
“by means of unconscious indications, which … [they receive]
through an especially fine and sharpened perception and interpretation of
faintly conscious stimuli” (pp. 181–182). Jung’s recognition of the significance
of a not yet symbolized “indication” arrived at through attention to
“faintly conscious stimuli” will become critical to a further consideration
of Levinson’s take on the organizing processes of an analyst’s subjectivity.
As part of that consideration, my reading of Jung is that his critique
catches Nietzsche sliding into an Apollonian solution. Nietzsche’s tragicomic
man in his courage to build sandcastles in the face of an anticipated
obliterating tide seems too intellectual, too dissociated from the pain of loss
of form, the loss of a coherent sense of self and reliable ties to others.
Tragicomic man seems unable to experience the closeness of intimacy with

330 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
his own life’s productions or with the lives of others. The price for the tragicomic
acceptance of transitoriness is the cold, anesthetization, the deadening
intellectualization of aloofness that Lacan recognized forms of symbolization
could bring to personal experience. Tragicomic man simply retreats to a
new aesthetic of form that feels like the commodification of contemporary
life, where artifacts are simply temporary tools, like Ikea furniture or computers
and cell phones that are destined to be obliterated by the rapid rhythms
of change in life styles and technological progress; where human lives
become an abstract statistic, and personal and collective violence become too
easily rationalized and anesthetized (see Scarry’s The Body in Pain, 1985).
But, while Nietzsche’s aesthetic solution seems to lean toward an
Apollonian tendency and the pitfalls inherent in such a position, I read
Jung’s solution as leaning heavily on a connection to a Primordial Unity,
an absence of capacities for delineation or differentiation that Nietzsche
would characterize as Dionysian. Critical to Jung’s discrimination of the
additional personality types of intuitive and sensation is that they do not
differentiate processes such as perception, contemplation, affective experience,
or sensation from processes such as thinking or feeling. So, the
intuitive type does not discriminate his or her dream about a relationship
from the shared experiences that construct a relational tie, and the sensation
type does not discriminate an erotic sensation or an aggressive urge
from a feeling of love or hate.
In contrast to Jung’s view, Mitchell reconsiders the dialectical interplay
of illusion and reality pointing us toward Loewald’s reminder that the word
“illusion” (Loewald, 1974, p. 354) “derives from the Latin ludere, to play.
Healthy narcissism reflects Nietzsche’s subtle dialectical balance between
illusions and reality; illusions concerning oneself and others are generated,
playfully enjoyed, and relinquished in the face of disappointments”
(Mitchell, 1988, p. 195). Mitchell’s version of tragic man expanding
Nietzsche’s tragic aesthetic solution with a playful one emerging from a
close reading of Loewald is interesting to consider in light of Kohut’s view
of tragic man as suffering from unmet developmental needs, narcissistic
injuries re-emerging in self-object dimensions of transference, that is, as
needs for mirroring, idealization, and twinship. Of what relevance are these
unmet needs to analytic interaction Guided by researchers of infant–
mother interaction, I read Kohut’s unmet developmental needs as resulting
from dysjunctive rhythms of connection that are critical to the determination
of whether the interplay between illusion and reality is constructed as
playful or annihilating. This is the difference between humor and shaming.

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 331
Infant researchers and, more recently, analysts guided by the need for
attention to registers of experience other than the symbolic such as gesture,
tone, and rhythm have begun to describe the kind of “faintly conscious
stimuli,” with which Jung explains intuition and sensation and which can
be catalytic to how experience is constructed as playful or shameful.
Tronick (1989) and Tronick and Cohen (1989), observing mother–infant
dyads, and Fivaz-Depeursinge and Corboz-Warnery (1999), observing
family triads, have noted ways in which the rhythmic timing of responses
can construct too much, too little, or a “good enough” amount of matching
in movement of pelves, heads, gazes, facial expression, voice intonations,
and gestures to sustain an ongoing sense of relatedness. Tronick’s work
suggests that a response within a two-second window is sustaining
whereby a pause of greater duration can create the uncertainty and concomitant
affective states characteristic of a rupture. At the same time,
matching occurs for the most securely attached pairs only one third of the
time. That a securely attached pair is not matched two thirds of the time
suggests something similar to Winnicott’s emphasis on the value of transitional
space for growth and creativity in the interactions between mother
and child. Therefore, it may not be the Appollonian states of attunement
or minattunement that are constitutive of experiences of play versus
shame, so much as the Dionysian rhythms of rupture and repair that can
constitute “indications” of faintly conscious stimuli out of which analysts
and analysands construct a sense of play or shame, a sense of connectedness
or breakdown in relatedness to self or other.
The research of Bucci (1997) in cognitive psychology has given us a
way to understand how the rhythms of intuitive and sensate experience
might be differentiated into thought and given symbolic expression. She
sees these rhythms as occurring on subsymbolic dimensions of interaction.
She explains, “The categorical function, by which the continuous gradients
of perceptual experience are chunked into discrete prototypical images, is
the core of the symbolizing process” (p. 142). In comparing subsymbolic
with symbolic levels of cognitive processing, she explains, “These [varieties
of information processing] include representations and processes
in which the elements are not discrete, organization is not categorical,
processing occurs simultaneously in multiple parallel channels, high level
units are not generated from discrete elements, and explicit processing
rules cannot be identified” (p. 13). She then points out, “Subsymbolic
processing accommodates infinitely fine variation; this processing is
not represented by standard metric systems or computational rules.

332 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
We recognize changes in the emotional states of others based on perception
of subtle shifts in their facial expression or posture, and recognize changes
in our own states based on somatic or kinesthetic experience” (p. 174).
Subtle shifts in face, posture, tone and rhythm of vocalization, and changes
in state based on somatic or kinesthetic experience seem to be the indications
of faintly conscious stimuli that Jung described. Furthermore, these
seem to be the basis for the Dionysian’ experience of being “united, reconciled,
blended with his neighbor” described by Nietzsche.
An Apollonian Formulaton Including a Dionysian
Approach to Analytic Subjectivity
Analysts are currently involved in developing new ways to think and talk
about harnessing Bucci’s distinctions. How do we experience the relationship
between the subsymbolic and symbolic in our clinical work
How can we harvest the attention afforded us by moving between the symbolization
process of organizing experience imagistically, Levinson’s point
(what Jung characterized as thinking and feeling types of organization), and
the especially fine and sharpened perception afforded by faintly conscious
stimuli that Jung recognized as characteristic of intuitive and sensation types of
organization How can we employ new narratives to organize the tensions
and rhythms between Apollonian structures in the form of state attunements
and symbolizations on the one hand, and Dionysian perturbations of process,
constructive and deconstructive of state changes, on the other How can we
sustain the space for the kind of creative play that Mitchell calls for, which
does not devolve into intellectual distance and anesthetization but sustains
and/or reconnects the intuitive pains and pleasures of the sensate world to the
thoughts and feelings of reflective analytic practice How can we practice a
kind of psychoanalysis, deeply engaging our analysands in the “gap” or
space, where analytic play emerges and moments of recognition and psychic
reorganization can occur around the narcissistic injuries resulting in shaming
affects that Kohut so intuitively recognized
An approach to these various and related questions suggests that the
“logical inversion” in thinking that Levinson offers emphasizing the
visual can be augmented by multiple “versions” of analytic subjectivity
that can also privilege acoustic and kinesthetic registers of experience
emerging in the rhythms of attention between the Apollonian eye and the

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 333
Dionysian ear. In my reading of Jung, the word is the thinking level of the
image, whereas the image is the intuitive level of the word. In Jung’s revision,
the Dionysian aesthetic involves the sensate as well as the intuitive.
This amendment to Levinson’s perspective suggests a different inversion.
Jung’s amendation inverts Freud’s organization of primary and secondary
process for the psychoanalytic process. According to Freud it is the impact
of the shift to secondary process, “from id to ego,” that characterizes the
therapeutic impact of analytic work. Rather, we now seem to be looking
for a way to account for powerful affective shifts in both the analyst and
analysand that signal important mutative effects of therapeutic interaction
even before they are recognized and symbolically articulated. We are finding
that primary process itself is the level on which shifts occur and only
later do we register these intuitive and sensate shifts on a secondary
process of articulated thought and feelings. In fact, LeDoux (2002) has
pointed out that sound as sensation is registered in the amygdalic structure
of the brain before it is processed for representation in the cortical structure
of the brain. This seems to suggest a primary process ordering of sensations
where previously ordering was thought not to occur because of the
absence of a capacity for reflective function (Fonagy et al., 2002). This
sensate organization is subjectively registered intuitively at first and then
thought about and contextualized as representations of feelings. These
thoughts and feelings are then open to a continuous process of revision as
new sensations and intuitions interact with and form the basis for editing
and re-editing thoughts and feelings.
Taking the previous points into consideration I believe that a Dionysian
analytic ear includes additional roads to the unconscious beyond the
dream or, for that matter, the slip or association (all forms of imagistic
symbols). The Dionysian ear adds to the Apollonian eye the significance
of affective communications carried on nonverbal registers of tone,
rhythm, and embodied gesture and sensation by the analyst as well as by
the analysand for recognizing and responding to unconscious meaning.
This perspective expands the terrain for mutative construction in psychoanalytic
praxis. It picks up and extends the daunting challenge of Racker’s
(1968) formulations for attention to countertransferential meanings central
to the analytic process. The following narrative of a clinical interaction
is offered as a way to begin to think about how to attend to and
therapeutically use the rhythms between the Apollonian scene and the
Dionysian music that constitute a clinical interaction.

334 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
Denise and Me
As Denise flopped herself into the chair in front of me, her chest rose
filling with air, as much as she could take in. Then when fully engorged, she
suddenly and swiftly released the gas, with a deep grunt, … no growl. The
trumpeter Rex Stewart would similarly punctuate the plaintive soundscape
of an Ellington depression era dirge. It was a cold damp January morning,
dark and lonely with cloud cover obscuring the few hours of sunlight and
relative warmth that we are sometimes allowed during these short days of
deep winter. Often, and particularly recently, Denise had begun sessions
with a similar intake and outflow of air, but the quality of her body resonance,
the complex interaction of abdominal muscles, throat constriction,
and facial display had usually constructed a moan of despair. When Ornette
Coleman’s alto saxophone would moan similarly in the midst of his free
form jazz solos of the 1960s, I would experience a visceral resonance in the
back of my head, gut, and spine, a kind of internal downward spiral toward
bottomlessness. Interestingly, I had never attended to Denise’s moans with
analytic curiosity until this morning. But now, I was impacted noticeably
by this shift to a grunt. I was startled and moved in the way that I had been
by Coleman’s saxophone sounds. Denise was clearly different and her gesture
cut a definite opening, a shift in my attention to her body and my body
and the meanings that were being constructed kinesthetically.
My body Well, before I could even begin to recognize the difference
between now and then, or maybe, as the register in which recognition was
first taking shape this morning, I found my gut swept with an indescribable
sense that I can only call a soft sadness, a movement in muscles and hormones
toward tears. But I did not begin to cry. Rather I too took in a deep
gutful of air. I sensed how it seemed to regulate my sadness, slow down the
muscular constrictions and increasing skin temperature that accompanies
the onset of tears. When I had filled to capacity, I released the breath, but
with a different resonance, one of a deep quiet sound that came from the
chest area and was somewhere between a moan and a sigh. Here our sound
shapes briefly filled a vast area of affective space, a space made possible (at
this point out of our awarenesses) for something new to begin to emerge.
We had co-constructed a pause in time, but one that immediately seemed to
plummet in space as a parachutist out of a plane.
Then, just as rapidly, our eyes briefly met. We exchanged brief nervous
smiles. But the tension in the muscles of our faces clearly suggested this

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 335
was not fun. I could feel it in my response and see it in hers. Now the
space was closing, as the time shifted. The rhythms of our “eye dialogue”
here were quick and nervous, starting and stopping like the twists and
turns that Bartok would command in his compositions, or Cecil Taylor
would explode in his piano improvisations. These syncopations, combined
with our earlier sound shapes, constructed feelings of uncertainty
and hypervigilance.
Denise, often depleted and hopeless in these states of uncertainty and
hypervigilance, would speak of her sense of failure and inability to feel as if
she were measuring up to anything in her professional growth and personal
life. She could find no satisfaction, no vitality in anything, not in her relations
with her colleagues, not in her accomplishments, not in her intimate
life. Nothing mattered. And yet, she could see how others would tell her that
she was performing effectively in her job, or that sex was satisfying and she
and her lover were getting along well and fighting with more fairness as
compared to earlier in their relationship. But no, nothing was good enough.
I noted that Denise seemed hopeless as before, but now rather than
depleted, as we began to speak, her tone was strengthening and her rhythmic
forward pressing flow, felt full with anger, a different affective texture
for our context. Was hopelessness shifting to hope on some unformulated
level of experience (Stern, 1997) I couldn’t tell at this point. So, as an
attentive and responsible analyst, I wondered about her satisfaction with
me and the treatment, her inability to find anything good enough in what
we were doing, in how responsive or not I had been—was being to her.
I noted the parallel meanings to her life descriptions and our work, our
relationship. She replied, slightly shifting to sadness but then regaining the
forward movement of her anger that, yes, she was unhappy with what we
were doing, or maybe not doing. Then, ambivalently she began to shift
again. Yes we had been making some progress. There were those sessions
in which we seemed to get very close and deep, in which she felt maybe for
a brief moment or two, I was getting her, that she was feeling gotten. We
had explored these moments when they occurred earlier and found them to
be shot through with erotic and destructive feelings constructing a kind of
mutual devouring, mutually engorging emotional experience of each other.
As part of this experience, Denise noted that our week of sessions seemed
to have a rhythm marked by a dissociated, devitalizing start that then
moved toward a last session of the week climax, fraught with complex
somatic and semantic encounters, stimulating, if not overstimulating, but

336 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
never enough, only to be drained of feeling and meaning into some dissociated
space again by the beginning of the next week.
I had wondered with her in the past about how much she was experiencing
me transferentially as some version or versions of her father, to whom
she had been very close and whose death had only exponentially potentiated
her eating disorder and self-mutilating, which took her through a
series of hospitalizations. Maybe in the weekly rhythm, we were re-enacting
the loss of her father resonated by the death of my affective responsiveness
to her, as recreated in the unfolding affective patterning, consisting of the
unbearable sense of her inability to continue to vitalize him or me for
which she either punished herself as previously recreated in her starving
and bleeding or dissociated.
While her treatments had been a path back to relative satisfaction and
relatedness as she pursued a somewhat successful athletic career and then
higher education for the current professional activity in which she was
clearly excelling and developing status and recognition, nothing had ever
been enough. She could never hold onto, in fact, even ever feel, a sense of
fulfillment, of having enough. It was never enough. Nothing could ever be
enough. We both sat in the silence of the long pause of despair that this
emptiness, this absence of presence had created between and within us.
Again, we were constructing, though with significant pain, a space expanding
time warp, an opening for some new melody or syncopation to come
forth and begin to constitute a new meaning between us.
Suddenly it occurred to me that either I had never asked about or had dissociated
the time in her development when her eating disorder and selfmutilation
had begun. For some reason, we had always focused on the
difficulty she had accepting the death of her father and never attempted to
wonder about the fact that her difficulties had begun much earlier in life, as I
now began to remember. My question was tentative, but clear, open to possibilities
for new meaning. Denise responded to my query about this with a
shift in body, rhythm, and tone. Her face and posture, relaxed. Her tone
shifted from the punishing whine of adolescent anger to a lower register of
sophisticated curiosity and collaboration. She began to recall how close she
had been with Dad as a child. In fact, she had almost been his little boy.
They had done so much athletically together. She would do things with him
like mountain climbing and so she became her father’s number one companion
in these activities with which they both filled themselves as much as
possible. But, now she remembered. It was when she began to grow breasts
and her body shifted from that hermaphroditic phase that can be achieved in

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 337
prepuberty but rarely sustained with the onset of menses that she began to
despair and self-destruct. In fact, I wondered whether her enacted symptoms
were not a crying out into the world by the “boy” companion she had been
to her father and longed to be forever, of that young boy’s sense of annihilation.
That self version of Denise was disappearing and would be extinguished
by her awful body, which refused to obey her desire. The only thing
to do was to punish her body and so she did.
Her eyes widened and her voice shifted to a rhythmic vitality that I
could recognize from the past, but never really see and hear as I was
hearing now, the voice of that young boy, that subjective experience of
being father’s special companion that had been sequestered to the ghost
realms by the curse of genetic physiology and against which Denise had
battled with alcohol, drugs, food, and blade to no avail. Now we could
be two close collaborating companions. Denise spoke more of her relationship
with her father, of how wonderful those days were, and of how
her father withdrew from her after puberty. It was as if their relationship
had died. My body was suddenly filled with a vitality I had rarely known
with her. Previously, such emotional closeness had catalyzed powerful
feelings of erotic desire or strange dystonic feelings of aggressiveness or
fear. We had spoken about an early childhood experience she had had
with some boys in which they would play a game of holding someone’s
head under water until he was almost close to drowning and then at the
last minute letting them up for air. I think I had sometimes felt as if she
were pushing my head under water forcing me into confusion and selfdoubt
as to whether or how I could ever be good enough for her as an
analyst. As we talked about this, she noted that she had similar feelings
as a patient, as you would expect in line with the self-doubt and denigrating
feelings with which she was constantly haunted. We had
observed how much analysis could feel at times to both of us like we are
masochists, holding our heads under water too long. Now, as I write this
narrative, I can see how we constructed a sadomasochistic pattern when
we found ourselves repeatedly enacting in our interaction, the dynamics
of her internal struggle with her sequestered boy self whom she unconsciously
rarely allowed up for air, but whose presence kept popping up
in the rhythms and tones between us until now when I finally could
recognize and name him.
This shift into vital lively rhythm and tone was suddenly perturbated
again. Was Denise about to hold my head under Her verbal stream had
decelerated. The boyish enthusiasm had left her face and voice. But now,

338 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
there was something touchingly little girlish and sad in her expression,
and her voice came from the throat constrictions that construct higher
frequencies, the tonal realm of childhood discourse, again a different
version of self. She looked directly into my eyes, her eyes wide with wonder
and questioning. She noted that when she thinks of her father in her
reveries, it is not the lively companion of her “boyhood.” But rather she
sees the dying father gasping for his last breath on his hospital bed. As she
spoke, my body filled with a sense of vitality that was not erotic, aggressive,
or fearful. Rather I found myself, now unable to use breath to regulate
my sadness. A deep and initially indecipherable grief flowed up from
within. Then, I experienced a brief internal memory fragment of my father
lying in his death as I viewed him before his funeral. My eyes began to fill
with tears. Sensing this palpable shift in me, Denise queried, “What’s the
matter” There was a tender tone of motherly comfort in the delivery and
flow of her utterance suggesting still another self state. I wondered if her
inability to hold onto feelings of satisfaction with and relatedness to her
achievements, colleagues, partner, and me were not colored by the unconscious,
and until this moment, dissociated internal tie with her dead father.
Stunned she dropped her gaze to the floor and attempted to self-regulate.
She looked up to say she never had considered this, but that it felt true. This
time her voice shifted from sounding softly maternal, to a deeper firmer
strength, should I risk saying, paternality. But, no, this was a different sense
of authority or agency than Lacan would suggest. Rather this voice seemed
to combine the resonance of a child’s wonder, a mother’s capacity to hold
and absorb, and a father’s capacity for delineation. In fact, these generational
and gender stereotypic distinctions fail to discretely capture what
more accurately seemed to wash and blur in the unparsed continuous sense
of her hermaphroditic voice and body as I sat in my chair still trying to regulate
my own flow of teary awe at the depth of connection and companionship
that was momentarily filling our space together. Maybe for a moment
we were both vulnerable little boys. Or maybe we were just both vulnerable
in a heightened momentary flowing sense of self and other and loss,
undisturbed by discrete categorical distinctions of gender or age.
I close this description still wondering about how this unfolding
patterning of tone and rhythm on kinesthetic and affective edges of shifting
self states affected my own countertransferentially dissociated potential for
multiplicity, of how much I was experiencing my mournful little boy crying
with the little boy/girl whose loving father had also died and who couldn’t
be a little boy anymore, at the same time that I was holding a soft, safe place

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 339
in time and space, at the same time that I was recognizing, reflecting
and delineating in words the significance of the internal presences of an
annihilated little boy/girl and dead father that had become black holes of
emptiness in Denise’s self experience. In subsequent sessions Denise has
begun to talk more about how “masculine” she feels and how confusing it is
as she feels good about herself in this way but also feels that others become
threatened or upset if she does not hide this aspect of herself.
Discussion
I want to use the previous narrative of my clinical engagement with
Denise as a point of departure for exploring some of the questions raised
by a consideration of Apollonian versus Dionysian tendencies in the subjectivity
of the analyst. To begin, let us return to the question of symbolization
and its mutative function. For Freud, the Apollonian tendency to
bring form through symbolization was the central fulcrum of psychoanalytic
activity. It was the reconnecting of the word to the thing that can
bring about a lifting of repression and an experiencing instead of thoughts
and feelings as bearable within the analytic matrix. This was the transformative
process for reducing and/or eliminating the neurotic symptom.
This process was understood as a sublimation of repressed infantile sexuality
leading to the triumph of Eros over Thanatos in the psyche (or maybe
a kind of “good enough” integration of these two opposing dynamic
forces), a re-connecting, a re-membering breaking the repressive bonds
constituting the neurotic bind. We can see this happening in the clinical
narrative when I connected Denise’s eating disorder and patterning of
self-injury to a time of loss earlier than the death of her father. This symbolization
of experience with words, then, catalyzed Denise’s recognition
of the relationship between her process of pubescence and the loss of a
special quality to her relationship with her father.
Lacan, on the other hand, positioning the symbolic within the effects of
culture on agency and affect, explicated the deadening, space collapsing
of a “membering,” memorializing process, giving form and thus reducing
experience from its multiple and complex textures to a symbolic representation
as word. We can see this happening in the clinical narrative, when
our naming of the repetitive patterning characterizing the rhythms of our
weekly sessions as a sadomasochistic enactment of the way Denise cannot
hold onto any sense of herself as good or of value for more than a fleeting

340 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
moment, was not able to shift the repeating sense of losing meaning and
feeling into some dissociated space that would mark the beginning of each
subsequent week. Rather our words, in this case, seemed to capture us in a
trap of distancing intellectuality, void of emotional depth, repeatedly collapsing
the possibility for new experience (suggestive of Jung’s warning
regarding Nietzsche’s approach to tragedy).
So for Lacan, the Apollonian tendency to give form to what we were
experiencing, through organizing words, so that we might contain and
represent our experience of a sadomasochistic enactment for reflection
and transformation, is thanatic and deadening. Rather than giving life, this
activity collapsed psychic space, annihilating the possibility for a more
affectively alive experience of our engagement. In fact, it was not the
Apollonian formation/representation of the experience, but rather the
Dionysian sensing and intuiting, indications of faintly conscious stimuli
registering acoustically and somatically that catalyzed a “uniting,” “reconciling,”
and “blending” (as Nietzsche described the processes that constituted
an affectively powerful experience) setting the stage for recognition of
Denise’s previously dissociated and unrecognized tomboy self states by
me. Here analytic attention to the ephemeral registers of our interaction
did not collapse psychic space as Mitchell’s reading seems to suggest such
attention could, but rather opened the possibility for an expansion of psychic
space for both analyst and analysand that made room for presences
and affective experience such as mourning, previously dissociated. Of
what utility is this to the analyst’s contextualizing of her subjectivity for
therapeutic practice
An answer to the previous question requires a revisiting of Levinson’s
assumptions about the imagistic versus semantic basis for the organizing
activity of the analyst’s subjectivity. In shifting our attention to pictures as
opposed to words, Levinson (2003) harnesses insights from the fields of cognitive
psychology and “currently advanced neurotechnologies” (p. 237). His
quote of Howard Gardner (1985) captures his central thesis, “Imagery should
be thought of on its own terms, rather than a cryptic version of verbal mediation
or symbolic manipulation. Perhaps there are two separate and equally
valid forms of mental representation. [p. 325]” (Levinson, 2003, p. 235).
Having come to this place of separate and equally valid forms of what
I would call “registration” rather than representation, Levinson seems to
me to double back on himself in a move that is repetitive, in an Apollonian
way, of most, if not all psychoanalytic theorizing. He builds on distinctions
made by Seigel (1999), Shore (1994), and others of the functions of the

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 341
right and left brain hemispheres, that is, “Semantic memory is a left-brain
function (e.g., memorizing the Declaration of Independence). In contrast,
right-brain memory encompasses the whole experience—visual, spatial,
sensory” (Levinson, 2003, p. 238). Using these distinctions, Levinson then
argues, “Right brain to right brain imagery may well be, in itself, mutative,
but to nail home the experience, to convert it into insight (i.e., to organize
this chaotic right-brain visual imagery into a narrative, a coherent story),
left brain input is required” (p. 239). But, then, he concludes, “Whether
“coherent narratives” have much to do with clinical improvement is another
story” (p. 239).
This far into Levinson’s argument, I find myself in agreement. But his
subsequent solution seems to repeat the difficulty that Jung found in
Nietzsche’s attempt to reconcile Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies,
that is, Levinson creates another set of Apollonian forms. For example,
Levinson (2003) says, “In contrast to interpretations, which are content
and theory-dependent, logical and linear, the following visual images are
spatial, pattern-dependent, and independent of content” (p. 239). While
this might be true, in order to explain how “the square, the plane, the circle
and the helix” are of utility to the subjectivity of the analyst, Levinson
has to provide “coherent narratives” that he previously argues may not
have much to do with clinical improvement.
There are two problems with Levinson’s approach. The first is that
while his images are spatial they are discrete forms, abstractions for
processes; in other words, they are symbolic representations. They may
describe spatial, pattern-dependent and not content-dependent processes,
but then, so do Freudian, Kleinian, and self psychological concepts. Just
think for a moment about transference, projection, and vertical and horizontal
splitting. Each of these terms meets Levinson’s requirements for
visual imagery. In fact, Levinson’s contribution can be extremely helpful
to the analyst in organizing a coherent narrative out of visual, acoustic or
somatic registrations. But it is still a conversion or transduction of nonnarrative
forms of registration into narrative. While this move is ultimately
necessary to the ongoing psychic equilibrium of any analyst, it does not
necessarily include a micro focus on the exquisite and clinically rich
process of attending to “indications” of non-narrative forms of registration
of faintly conscious stimuli to which infant research points as central to
the process of affective communication and with which the “intuitive” and
“sensation” forms of registering experience, construct a sense of self and
otherness.

342 STEVEN H. KNOBLAUCH
A careful examination of the interactive process between Denise and
myself confirms Levinson’s caution about whether clinical narratives
(alone) have much to do with clinical improvement. When Denise
growled instead of moaning, I was moved to feel and respond differently,
which catalyzed a sequence of exchanges between us, shifting our typical
affective experiences with each other. When Denise’s voice is shifting
giving “indications” of shifting self states she and I begin to
construct a different rhythmic and tonal feel to our interaction. It is this
shift representing a movement or “clinical improvement” that is the basis
for our narrative construction concerning the sadomasochistic patterning
in our work. When I experience and express shifts in somatic state, that
is, my crying and Denise experiences and expresses a sequence of shifts
in somatic state “indicated” by patterning in tone of voice, face, and
gaze, we have moved to new affective territory involving previously dissociated
mourning. This becomes the basis for new narrative organization.
The capacity to narrate and organize experience symbolically,
mediated by cortical as well as amygdalic levels of brain processing, was
seamlessly a part of our interactive flow. But, as Renik (1993) and others
have pointed out, therapeutic shifts occurred prior to the construction of
narration, and this is the central contribution for analytic work that can
be harvested by distinguishing the Apollonian eye’s recognition of verbal
as well as visual registrations of form, from the Dionysian ear’s registration
of movement of faintly conscious stimuli indicating a process of
clinical improvement.
The key point here is that there is a critical clinical function to the
analyst’s Dionysian ear that is central to the process of constructing verbal
and nonverbal responses to her analysand in the analytic process.
Without the recognition afforded by attention to the faintly conscious
stimuli registered nonverbally on tonal, rhythmic gestural, and facial
dimensions of interaction, the analyst is constructing interpretive
responses from a perspective limited to the Apollonian eye. Limiting
the analyst to this scope of attention robs him or her of critical cues to a
sense of vitalization or annihilation, a sense of connection or dissociation
that the analyst and the analysand might be constructing as a way to
move the treatment into a shared space that while previously not, may
begin to be, affectively bearable. Herein lies a critical focus for expanding
analytic attention that an increasing number of analysts are now
beginning to harness.

THE APOLLONIAN EYE AND THE DIONYSIAN EAR 343
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