The Apollonian Eye and the Dionysian Ear - PsyBC

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