Falling from the Allfülle
Every time I see a baby I get totally mesmerized; I’m like what in the world is going on inside that baby? It’s like looking into the very dynamo of humanity itself.
The psychoanalyst, likewise having no access to infantile experience—and that probably could not even be given the name experience—travels backwards into the infant’s psyche through the medium of fantasy, mythology, religious feeling and all of the extremes of mystical representation. The means of this travel is the logic of endopsychic perception, by which one’s interior state has been projected into exterior ideality. This is by no means a new technique, but is a twist on an old kabbalistic principle, that is, in short: as above, so below. Should you wish to peer into the far reaches of your own psyche look no further than the shadows cast by your own most transcendental beliefs.
Philip K Dick described this move from cosmos to carnality in his late novel VALIS (1981): “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” PKD is the druggy Christian so it is no surprise that his template for gutter gnosis matches the gospel story of incarnation, the most famous version of this strange trash mirror—also conveniently involving a baby—and that is a kind of gnostic fever dream by which an all-powerful and transcendent godhead winds up as a poopy baby, born out of wedlock, in poverty, of a persecuted people group at the desert edges of a cruel empire.
Except, of course, that for the psychoanalyst investigating the Christ’s psychic structure, this move is reversed. God does not become a baby, rather the baby at one time had been a little god, a worker of miracles, all of whose needs were mysteriously answered—by the Madonna no less. The Christ baby’s indulgence in his seeming omnipotence may, later on, produce all manner of narcissistic effects, like for instance, an addiction to mastery, the will to power, messiah complex and so on. When Christ freaks out to the point that he sweats blood, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he is reliving a breakdown that already happened, at some point in early childhood, maybe when his omnipotence failed for the first time?
The psychoanalyst is keen to point out that this failure, or something like it, is universal to the point that it becomes the crucible through which everyone must pass on their way to subjectivity. One early psychoanalyst in particular, Lou Andreas-Salome, referred to this failure as the fall from universal fulness: a fall from the allfülle (see note 2). By this notion she transmutes the common mythology of a fall from a state of grace—whether banishment from the garden, or, as in the east, the worldly devolution from nonduality to duality—into that charmed state common to every childhood. The rebellious and disillusioned teen is someone who is just waking up from a very long dream.
I find all of this compelling but am still wary: that we have fallen from an ideal state of nature is one of the bedtime stories that modernity likes to tell about itself. Like for instance that hunter gatherer societies lead beautiful lives of leisure and plenty.
While it has been noted regularly that even our intrauterine existence should not be confused with paradise—because really, who knows what’s going on inside that baby—and obviously there are plenty of just absolutely terrible childhoods, it does make sense to claim, as Andreas-Salome does, that something has been lost in the transition from preverbal to verbal, from childhood to adulthood; that the child tends to live in a world more magical, more intense, and far more alive (for better or worse) than anything the narrow-minded adult can conceive, or even remember. Whatever it was that had been lost is revealed in effigy, in all our chintzy nostalgia, and every image of transcendental plenitude—not to mention bouts of messianic omnipotence…
The Ein Sof, Plenary Godhead of Jewish Mysticism.
Madonna and Child, 1500, Andrea Mantegna
Note 1 :::: There is a growing body of literature tracing the history of how psychoanalysis developed out of the Kabbalah as it was practiced in the Hasidic shtetls of mitteleuropa, where Freud grew up. Some even go so far to claim that psychoanalysis may be regarded as a secular Kabbalah…
Note 2 :::: The allfülle makes a kind of inverse of Lacan’s notion of the Das Ding that appears (in Lacan) as a void. It makes sense, to me, to retain both of these polarities; as, for example, in the kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum from out of which the world was made and that is both plenary and void at the same time.
What I like about the word allfülle, aside from all those Ls and the umlaut, is its easy conflation with the English word awful, that meant, once upon a time, being full of awe. Which is to say that the Edenic world of childhood should not be defined by its bliss and beatitude alone but should also include obviously all kinds of hell and any number of dark nights of the soul. For some reason we usually only remember the beatitude of childhood; the bliss becomes in time the dynamic source of all our nostalgia. How does that happen?
