Way of the Dragon
Many years ago I read some writing advice from a writer of fantasy books which is that if you are blocked and bogged down in plot and can’t decide what to do the best solution is to introduce a dragon into the action and see what happens. While I do not usually write in the fantasy genre, I find that this is pretty good writing advice (if not a whole practice of living); what better way to blow up old habits than by adding an alarming dose of novelty?
Not so long ago I was walking to the subway in Union Square and one of those gnarly old lifer-alcoholics, so common to NYC, with crazy red spiral-eyes and dirty jeans, pointed to me and shouted in manic glee: “Haw haw, you look just like Chuck Norris!”
Though I was somewhat dismayed by this accusation I immediately went home and watched the final scene in TheWay of the Dragon (1972) where Bruce Lee fights bad-guy Chuck Norris at the colosseum in Rome. Chuck Norris is really kicking Bruce Lee’s ass until Bruce Lee closes his eyes and finds inner calm just as a mysterious wind blows through the fighting arena; only then does he defeat Chuck Norris and cradles his dying body with loving affection. Here, as in so many quasi-mystical kung fu movies, we can see taoist principles at work; the goal in any given fight is not to overpower your opponent, but rather to be overpowered by the dragon, which is the movement of the tao itself; wei wu wei, the action of non-action.
Curiously enough this is an intention opposite to that of psychoanalysis: whereas the putative goal of psychoanalysis is to make conscious what was once unconscious, the goal of taoist practice is precisely that of becoming unconscious. As practice this is far less obscure and mystical than immediate and practical; time and again extreme virtuosity, whether in sports, music or handicraft, is often described as being particularly unconscious; in these contexts the thinking conscious mind is an obstacle; one becomes virtuosic not only by not thinking, but by not even acting; allowing for something else to act on your behalf, in an act that may be described as preternatural or uncanny. As Bruce Lee revealed, a habit, when repeated ten thousand times, becomes novelty. While psychoanalysis would attempt to limit acting-out, or acts-of-passion—known technically as the reflex-arc: the jolt of drive impulse that leaps past rational thought and goes straight to motor function—acts of extreme agility, inspiration, and technical prowess would seem to consist of nothing but acting out this same drive impulse.
And yet here we find a convergence between taoist non-action and psychoanalytic sublimation; the mythical dragon of the great tao becomes for Freud, a horse. When writing the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud likened his lack of planning and direction to the joke of Itzig the Sunday rider—“Itzig, where are you going?” “Do I know? Ask the horse”—in which the horse is the unconscious put into action by free-associative writing. For Freud the non-action here is the suspension of critical judgment, letting the horse go where it will.
But twenty five years later in The Ego and the Id, when Freud again describes the id as the horse and the ego as the rider, the implication is rather more anatomical, as if the id were a kind of organ of horse-power that the mature ego can put to use. The project of ego-psychology—by which therapy is meant to strengthen the ego, and that was born whole-cloth out of this text—can be seen as an elaborate form of horse-training. Compare this to one of the stated ends of Lacanian psychoanalysis which is—get ready for it—to assume your castration; that is, to realize that you do not possess the phallus.
Despite the recent and telling children’s feature How to Train Your Dragon, I do not think that dragons can be trained. It is likely that Freud retreated into ego-psychology due to a bias towards anatomy; as he says “anatomy is destiny.” The anatomical individual is one confined to the hard perimeters of enlightenment science; most of us still live there. This as opposed to later psychoanalytic visions of the subject, from Bion or Lacan, where the subject is a void, or a nexus of conflicting forces—forces that invalidate strict anatomical assumptions of inside/outside. The subject is both emergent-from and subjected-toall manner of dragons that fly beyond the bounds of categorical thought—dragons such as language, biology, history, desire, spirit and so on.
if we read taoist principles back into the psyche, I find the taoist’s insistence upon spontaneity to be reflective of the very movement of the unconscious. Freud called this spontaneity the primary process—the logic of that reflex-arc—and that forms the metapsychological basis for free association. In the clinic this becomes the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis that, when speaking to your psychoanalyst, you be as honest as possible and say whatever is on your mind, no matter how absurd or shameful. In my own practice—both in seeing patients, and in being a patient—I can’t decide if this is something that one does, or if it just happens of its own accord. Both and? Freud made it the rule because it is a technique (see automatic writing) and yet also the dragon cannot help but be expressed, no matter how you may repress it—that’s called the symptom.
