Enter 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 The Way of the Dragon (1973) 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 then cradles his dying body with loving affection. Here, as in so many quasi-mystical kung fu movies, we can see Daoist 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 dao itself; wei wu wei, the action of non-action.
Curiously enough his 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 Daoist practice is precisely that of becoming unconscious. As practice this is far less obscure 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 is preternatural or uncanny. A habit, when repeated ten thousand times, becomes novelty. While psychoanalysis would attempt to limit acting-out and the reflex-arc—the jolt of 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 this same reflex-arc.
And yet here we find a convergence between Daoist non-action and psychoanalytic sublimation; the mythical dragon of the great Dao 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-association. At this moment for Freud the non-action 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 a project 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 admit 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 subjected todragons that fly beyond the bounds of categorical thought—such as language, history, desire and so on.
Reading Daoism back into the psyche, I find the Daoist’s insistence upon spontaneity to be reflective of the primary process, that spontaneous movement of the unconscious, and that forms the metapsychological basis for free association, the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, that when in speaking to your psychoanalyst you 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 wonder often 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, and yet you also cannot help but to express the dragon, no matter how hard you try not to.
I once heard the interior design theory of fung shui defined as that of designing your home to allow for a dragon to flow through it; does not the practice of free-association—whether in writing, or speaking—allow for the same thing?
