Then all the charm

Is broken-all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape[’s] the other. Stay awhile, Poor youth! who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon

The visions will return! And lo, he stays,

And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms

Come trembling back, unite, and now once more

The pool becomes a mirror.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Much may be lost when have experiences which are emotionally profound, but cannot be shared with others. Of course, certain experiences on the face of it may not seem to require this, such as those which are experienced as sui generis and cannot therefore be easily explained, for example those which are numinous, uncanny, or downright weird. Yet even these unusual experiences probably involve other people, if not physically, but ideationally, often at an unconscious or pre-conscious level.

The most spiritually profound experiences occur when we are most connected to our authentic selves (souls), and this often happens during moments when are least trying to do so – moments of atemporality, durée - and this also explains the connection between uncanny or numinous experiences and the True Self, (of which more later) because emotionally impactful experiences tend to occur at this “accidental” level - those strange and arresting affects which slowly erupt from the unconscious and force us immediately to stop whatever we are doing.

Although I do not subscribe to the Freudian notion that the “oceanic feeling” may be written off as a “cope” for unresolved yearnings or aggression in infancy, or that it is simply a Lacanian style méconnaissance wherein the subject unconsciously mobilises such affects to deny their immanent fragmentation, I do nonetheless think there is a significant link between what one may loosely classify as a longing for spiritual transcendence and those affects first encountered in infancy.

Despite Freud’s well-documented early interest in metaphysical experience - particularly telepathy - he largely adhered to a materialist epistemology which relegated religious experiences to a regression to infancy, thereby dismissing an entire ontology in one fell swoop, and this rejection paved the way for contemporaries such as Jung, Silberer and Myers to seize the opportunity to reclaim a far reaching Self which included transpersonal experiences that shared more with the epistemology of the Neoplatonists than those of the enlightenment.

Later in the twentieth century, Winnicott revolutionised psychoanalysis once again, and it is his concept of the True Self which provides us with a pivotal conjunction between secular-materialist and transpersonal/ spiritual epistemologies, and it is by virtue of this concept that the notion of the spiritual journey towards the Self and the parallel return to infancy need no longer be considered pathological, or any further need to reduce profound religious and spiritual experiences to a wafer thin, monochrome, materialist metaphysics. Importantly, it is at this crucial developmental stage of infancy when one first becomes conscious of a True Self which is experienced within and without.

The internalisation of all our early affective experiences, including those where we feel loved and contained, as well as those when we were forgotten about and let down, all go into the affective pot, and these emotional vicissitudes are the basis of our reaching towards the divine, and enable us to experience a connection with the sacred both within and without the confines of the body. Moreover, it is impossible to reach for spiritual wholeness without the affective lack that is the inevitable result of this early stage; indeed, it is within the emptiness of the lack that the divine resides.

Although the oceanic feeling may be considered by some to be a regressive defence, which indeed may be true in certain scenarios, but to apply this as a fundamental paradigm it is flawed, give that it is based upon a linear, temporal ontology which privileges “mature” or “sophisticated” ways of being in the world. This myopic perspective fails to see that there is nothing inherently pathological about religious and spiritual feelings such as longing, wonder, and awe, because they are among the most authentic and meaningful one will ever experience.

To conclude then, although feelings of lack may firstly indicate a separation from the divine, we cannot move towards wholeness without them. To experience the oceanic feeling is thus a return to the True Self, and to the divine.

The old ghosts have gone

Salamander survives

Phoenix rises from the golden Ilex

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Who knows whether tonight we shall not see it in the labyrinths of our dreams and not even know it tomorrow.

Borges, Paradiso, XXXI, 108

Part one of this essay explores the ways in which the uncanny nature of absence provoked by déjà vu memories and the forgotten “messages” of dreams are ways which we feel that we have been shut out of the Graal castle - The Shut Palace of the King. In some cases, these instances are merely uncanny, but they may also be experienced as profoundly transcendent, and therefore inspire one towards a return to a familiar unknown.

When I wrote about the uncanny in Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy, I posited that uncanny events are not only caused by a return of the repressed, but also may be reminders/ remainders of archaic remnants residing below the repressed unconscious. Indeed, I would argue that it is from this wellspring that experience of the transcendent emanates; from the depths of the ancestral past. Here I define transcendent experience as an immanent longing to return to an unknown, yet ineffably familiar place. This is ontologically experienced as outside the immediacy of the corporeal self, and visually represented as a distant, or lost horizon.

The longing which inheres the transcendent may be driven by a wish to return to an archaic place of wholeness. Perhaps our most profound experiences of transcendence take place when we are confronted with the feeling that we have lost something quite wonderful, yet which we have never known. Arthur Machen describes this beautifully in The Secret Glory, a story of a young man’s search for the Graal.

Sometimes I dream of wonderful things. It is just at the moment when one wakes up; one cannot say where one has been or what was so wonderful, but you know that you have lost everything in waking. For just that moment you knew everything and understood the stars and the hills and night and day and the woods and the old songs. They were all within you, and you were all light. But the light was music, and the music was violet wine in a great cup of gold, and the wine in the golden cup was the scent of a June night.

Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory

The Secret Glory then is the sacred gnosis of the dream, though that which cannot be retrieved from its oneiric origins – the faraway land of “the stars and the hills and night and day and the woods and the old songs”. Many of us have experienced something similar when we dream, or in moments of reverie when we are arrested by the quality of an image, or a particular message that is conveyed to us and gilded with profound significance - a divine communication, perhaps. Yet, in archetypal terms we know that this desire to retrieve “the great cup of gold” is doomed to fail, illustrated by myriad fables of gods who try to live among us.

DIODORUS SICULUS relates the story of a broken and scattered god; who of us has never felt, while walking through the twilight or writing a date from his past, that something infinite had been lost?

Borges, Paradiso, XXXI, 108

It is interesting that when I tried to recall this sentence from Borges before returning to this passage, that I had mis-remembered the “something”, not only as something infinite, but also of infinite importance. Indeed, surely such twilight transmissions emanate from the depths of the soul, and therefore may never be fully deciphered, as they are encrypted with a faery dust which sabotages any mundane and futile attempts to do so.

The affective nature of the dream’s forgotten message of infinite importance evokes a similarly fascinating uncanny phenomenon – that of the déjà vu. The déjà vu is a synchronicity par-excellence, and, like the forgotten message of the dream, its occurrence is experienced as ontologically significant: the uncanny nature of its doubling somehow indicates that, through the feeling of having been somewhere before, or something happening before, we are briefly mesmerised by the mischievous faery glamour once again, – for faeries are certainly tricksters - taunting us with the promise of inexplicable realities way beyond our mortal ken, but also, importantly, realms of temporal dissolution.

For Bergson, the déjà vu is a collision at the vertex of memory and experience, provoking the uncanny sense of the past repeating in the present. He writes:

I hold that the formation of memory is never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it. Step by step, as perception is created, the memory of it is projected beside it, as the shadow falls beside the body. But, in the normal condition, there is no consciousness of it, just as we should be unconscious of our shadow were our eyes to throw light on it each time they turn in that direction.

Bergson, Memory of the Present and False Recognition

According to Bergson then, there is no memory that has been forgotten; it is the shadow for which we mistake the body. The virtual (here, the déjà vu memory) is contemporaneous with the actual (the event). This virtuality accounts for the spectral, eerie nature of the déjà vu memory, which becomes, as Mark Fisher would perhaps have called it, a something where there should be nothing; an unheimlich presence in absence. The actual event happens in the present, and it therefore has a temporal marker which the subject perceives, yet its “shadow” - the déjà vu memory – emerges from a timeless past: we are presented with the strangely elusive feeling that the event has happened before, yet we cannot pinpoint when. By continuing to follow Bergson’s metaphysics here, it quickly becomes apparent that attempts to find out when the déjà vu happened, or exactly what the dream was telling us, are merely fool’s errands wherein one projects a quantitative multiplicity onto its qualitative counterpart; the former of which will always remain but a fragment of the scattered deity. Nonetheless, despite the misguided nature of this epistemic curiosity, it emanates from a deeper longing for a sacred gnosis that resides within us all.

He returned after this digression to the central point of his argument: the probability of an all but universal ‘ignorance’ or ‘blindness’ as to things of the very highest moment. He suggested further that it was even probable that there might be one central truth, one eternal beauty, one great ‘Word’ that had not been lost (at least in time), because it had never been found: a secret of secrets, a master mystery, a key opening the door of the Shut Palace of the King. Taking this as his hypothesis, he imagined this one truth as everywhere present, everywhere visible, everywhere known-and yet all unknown.

Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory

Please subscribe to this newsletter so that you can read the next part of this essay where I shall explore the link between the feeling that something infinite has been lost and the longing for transcendent experience, to re-assemble the scattered god.

A few years ago, I visited Chanctonbury Ring in Sussex for the first time. It is a haunted, beautiful place. While I was sitting there alone, I wanted to try to capture its peculiarly charged atmospheres, and wrote the following poem.

The archaic wind

Is a protecting veil

There is nothing to see here

You turn around with a start

She grabs you

She shocks you

With her verdant charge

Violet frequencies

A maelstrom just above your head

Siamese stones awakening

A cacophony of spirits

Who speak as one

Twilight cold grips

A Hawk stops time

Then drops

Into the stillness below

Although the previous article in this series concerns the False Self, it is important to reiterate that, for Winnicott, the True and the False Selves form a dialectical relationship. In this article, I will expand upon and move beyond the developmental and psychoanalytic confines of this dialectic in order to place our attention upon …

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Before reading this piece, I recommend that you read part one on the collateral effects of adverse childhood experience on the psyche. In that essay, I set out the way in which, as a result of early adverse childhood experience:

the child …

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It is obvious to say that – and even rather banal to do so at this stage in the game – that we are in danger of losing our capacity to imagine, think, and the motivation to create things for ourselves by ourselves. In this short essay, I hope to do something at least slightly more interesting than that, by providing examples of ways which a few of the psychoanalytic concepts created by Wilfred Bion can be re-vivified in this context in order, not only to offer important perspectives in terms of the perils of handing over various forms of mentation to AI, but also as an essential reminder of why particular aspects of consciousness are so closely associated with human vitality in the most profound and urgent sense.

Alpha Function

Bion calls the capacity to convert sensory impressions into thoughts and ideas “alpha function”. For Bion, importantly, the development of alpha function is predicated on a relationship in which the infant experiences his frustration (e.g. hunger, the need to defecate, sleep) as tolerable, due to his mother’s^[1] awareness of his feeling states, and her capacity for “reverie”; her reverie allows her to enter unnamable states alongside the infant so that they can be named and born(e): this is the template for what Bion refers to as “learning from experience”.^[2] The mother’s reverie is also linked to her love for her child and her concomitant capacity to tolerate his distress; it allows her to “dream” his emotional experience into life - from sensory impressions into “alpha elements” - primitive, seedlings of thoughts that can be born into ideas for creation. Alpha elements are the prima materia of creativity.

Alpha Elements

Following repeated and incremental cycles of alpha function experienced in concert with his mother, the infant then “learns from experience” for his own intra-psychic use, and grows to intuitively bring it to bear, not only for the purposes of thinking, but for acts of creation. “Alpha elements” then, are the psychic fabric that evolve into the tapestry of dreams; indeed, importantly for Bion, whilst one is alive, one always dreams; whether asleep, or awake; without them we can do neither. Moreover, alpha elements remain active as we “dream” our way through our lives, generating thoughts and ideas through rhizomatic associations and processes - much of which we are not aware.

Beta Elements

Alpha function and the capacity to think one’s own thoughts are contingent upon tolerance of emotional frustration; if sensory impressions are felt to be intolerable, they cannot be transformed, and are thus rendered psychically homeless; neither residing in the dynamic conscious or unconscious, morphing into what Bion calls “beta elements”; the stuff of free-floating anxiety, circular hypochondria, or nightmarish, nameless dread. Beta elements are unheimlich (unhomely) threats which distort consciousness so that ideas become conflated with “living things” in the mind; yet these “things” are paradoxically not yet “born” as they cannot be symbolized for the purposes of thinking; they are felt to be undigested dead matter, divested of the psychic nutrition of alpha function, and antithetical to creation. Beta elements are therefore reminders of primitive thoughts and feelings that were felt to be too terrifying to be given life.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let
not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed
ghoul come near me.

Prayer Before Birth, Louis MacNeice

Artificial Intelligence and Alpha Function

The absence of alpha function and an encroachment of creeping beta elements provide us with a conceptual model to think about the rapidly increasing reliance on artificial intelligence and the casual rejection of the ordinary cog-turning pleasures of thinking. Thinking has been under attack for some time, and it is now starting to feel a bit too much like hard work. As many news reports now inform us, we now face unprecedented levels of cerebral decomposition, described by metaphors such as “AI slop” and “brain rot”. Although these pithy epithets may initially come across as benign memes, they should be seriously heeded as warnings of a frankly sinister process of mental and spiritual deterioration. A widespread incapacity to tolerate the inevitable frustration that accompanies thinking means that we cannot any longer “digest” our thoughts so that they are “born” into ideas; they become beta. As a result, we outsource alpha function to the machine, and although it might provide us with ideas or hypotheses which are undoubtedly of some use, what happens to what is left over; the unthought thoughts, the ideas that might have been - do they become slop too? Herein then lies the real danger: Thoughts are acts of creation, they are life-affirming, and in handing over alpha function to the machine, we only affirm the opposite.

The Contact Barrier

As we become increasingly less able to tolerate frustration and boredom, and consequently rely on ChatGPT or its equivalent, general capacity for alpha function is eroded, and this brings us to the next important reason why we must strive to cultivate it. Alpha function has a significant relationship to what Bion calls the “contact barrier”^[3].^: The formation of said barrier means that transforming sense impressions into alpha elements has a secondary function: the creation of a mediating zone between conscious and unconscious, inner and external reality. Our relationship with AI (if we are to call it that) threatens to erase this contact barrier by replacing it with inter-machine contact: I use the term inter-machine or inter-machinic to signify processes which anthropomorphise AI bots and in doing so, replace alpha function with its machine replicant counterpart.

As we all know, it is now common to “ask” ChatGPT (or whatever you use) for ideas for a poem, stories, essay etc., and this can easily be justified as a benign auxiliary “tool”. Nonetheless, bots are all too quickly and insidiously starting to become “friends” - we begin to treat them “as-if” they were human; we might, for example, begin to notice impulses to include “please” and “thank-you” in our ChatGPT “requests” as we don’t wish to upset our new “friend”. There is nothing wrong with being polite - right? Yet aside from any concerns regarding the sinister and aggressive implications of AI becoming a “master” down the line, there is also a sad reality to these inter-machinic dynamics, particularly the treatment of the bot as if it were human and the development of an “I-thou” relationship with an “it”.

Make no mistake here: our “as-if” function is related to play, creativity, and the imagination, and was hard won in the fires of infancy: it is what enables us to distinguish between inanimate objects and sentient, living beings. It should not need to be said therefore, that the symbolic function which makes us so unique should not be parted with so readily and unthinkingly; it is a deeply concerning example of how easily what makes us human, and the frailty of our imaginations could become the very things which lead us to our subjugation to the machine.

To conclude then, the inter-machinic dynamic represents not only a flattening out of the contact barrier, but also the distinction between conscious and unconscious processes, inner subjectivity, and external reality; all of which means that “the thing” (the bot) has taken over. As a result of the increasing rejection of alpha function and the threadbare nature of the contact barrier, combined with the subservient attachment to AI and its derivatives, while we unwittingly provide bots with human attributes, we ourselves begin to resemble the machine: neither sleeping nor waking.

Notes

^[1] Mother here represents the caregiver in general, whoever it may be.

^[2] Learning from experience is a complex term and a full definition of its use is beyond the scope of this essay.

^[3] This is not conceptually the same as Freud’s “contact barrier”.

References

Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: William Heinemann.

Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation: A scientific approach to insight in psycho-analysis and groups. London:Tavistock Publications.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot, East Coker.

After reading and enjoying John Bowlby’s excellent, but brief essay “On Knowing What You’re Supposed to Know and Feeling What You’re Not Supposed to Feel”, I felt compelled to spend some time meditating upon …

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A deficit in mirroring (the experience of having one’s emotional needs recognised by another) in early life often leads to a lack of capacity to differentiate between primary and secondary narcissism: in the mind of such individuals, feeling proud of one’s achievements and wanting others to share in them (primary narcissism) can easily become falsely equated with grandiosity, or showing off (secondary); in such cases one acutely feels that there is something unbecoming and vulgar about the primary and immanently human need for validation. Herein lies a confusion between a self which naturally needs to be reassured, validated, and encouraged by other people at times (as we all do), and a dissociated shadow self which was deprived of this in the early years and feels greedy, envious and resentful. It is where the former becomes identified with the latter, and out of the ensuing psychic chaos that a particularly toxic form of shame is born.

Sadly, in later life, this confusion between two selves can sabotage the opportunity to enjoy what one has worked hard for, and it is a bind which plays out time and again, as the individual looks for validation from others from this intersected point of confusion, and tends to seek out situations where he/she will feel rejected (and shamed). Importantly, due to the level of distortion created by the original narcissistic wounds, even if one’s emotional needs are met by another in later life (through, for example, a heartily sincere “well done!” or “congratulations, I’m so proud of you!”), this will be internally rejected by the individual, as they do not deem themselves worthy of it. This sincere validation is rejected as the individual feels that they are being “too-much”, “narcissistic”, or simply “pathetic” for having such needs as here, the internalised rejecting parent is boss. People who experience this inner drama are very sensitive indeed, and they know at a deep emotional level that there is a wound which they are trying to heal, yet each time they face these kinds of situations, it is often laced with shame because it is experienced as yet another failed attempt at doing so, and it is particularly humiliating as this shame is experienced interpersonally – in the public eye.

So how does the suffering individual address this issue? It is important, I would suggest, to find compassion for the wounded self, and, most importantly of all, to also find some much needed love for the rejected child who felt (and still feels) greedy for validation and is so resentful and envious to have been deprived of it in the first place. Through finding some emotional space and time for the most rejected aspects of oneself, it will then become easier to appreciate and enjoy the validation of others as they become living, flawed, people in one’s mind; people who can share in the enjoyment of what one feels proud of, rather than being perceived as idealised versions of one’s rejecting parents, who eternally, tantalisingly, offer the promise of making us feel “whole” but always fail us in the end.

Following on from my previous post on the illusive real, I now think it is important to provide a proper definition of what that is, by virtue of a more in-depth interrogation of what is meant by the concept. I also provide examples of how a deeper understanding of the illusive real has the potential to foster a playful and rich engagement with metaphys…

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*I was not happy with yesterday’s video so I have re-done it.

I have been a frequent and enthusiastic follower of BBC show “Uncanny” for a couple of years now, which began its life as a half-hour podcast, and is now an hour-long TV programme, also shown on the BBC. “Uncanny” is written and presented by Danny Robins, who has a background in performance, comedy, TV, and journalism. Robins’ significant experience of dramatic performance and structure is abundantly manifest in “Uncanny”, and he draws upon his experience to build an atmosphere of suspense, which is sometimes infused with irony (though in the most good-natured way), and, at times, comedic bathos and self-deprecation. It seems unfair to call this show “light entertainment”, given the profundity and sometimes distressing nature of the experiences that often feature, but it is certainly an element, which Robins and his team use as a means of enabling listeners/viewers to form an emotional attachment to the programme.

In terms of structure, the audio incarnation of “Uncanny” features an interview with guests who recount their experience of supernatural phenomena. This usually tends to be experiences of ghosts or poltergeists, though what I found particularly interesting about “The Shadow Man” episode - of which I will write more shortly - was that it did not easily fit into either of these categories.

The way in which Robins interviews his guests builds a playful atmosphere of theatrical expectation, deftly ramped up by dramatic pregnant pauses, interweaved with snippets of sonic “hauntings” panning across the aural field, musique concrète style, inviting the listener to become an affective participant in the appointed guest’s dread-experience, they themselves becoming dramatis personae. The guest’s narrative is split into sections across the episode - rather like scenes in a play - to allow for an evaluation of what they have shared, by two experts in the parapsychology field. This usually features Evelyn Hollow and Ciarán O'Keeffe, respectively representing what Robins refers to as “team believer'“ and “team skeptic”. Whenever I hear this, I feel as if I am being spirited back to a forgotten 80s children’s show, surrounded by lots of other kids high on orange squash as we “cheer on” our side; it feels anachronistic and nostalgic. This part of the show ordinarily results in quite a predictable, yet respectful disagreement between both factions about the “cause” of the phenomena in question.

With the expanded duration of the TV version of '“Uncanny”, the use of scientific experiments has now been introduced to see whether O'Keeffe’s various physicalist hypotheses can be “proven”. One recent episode featured Robins venturing into a wind tunnel to test out O'Keeffe’s theory of “convection currents” to explain what Hollow attributed to poltergeist phenomena. Aside from O'Keeffe’s hypotheses being at least as far-fetched as any supernatural theory one might consider, this was one of those comical/ bathetic moments, and Robins really seemed to enjoy clowning around, being forced into involuntary “wind-gurns” as the gusts increased their velocity (you will need to watch the episode to appreciate this). Once again phantasms of the 80s light entertainment scene loomed large here, and I couldn’t help but think about bygone eldritch British shows such as '‘Game for a Laugh” or “The Late-Late Breakfast Show” where one would find Noel Edmonds or Matthew Kelly involved in some prankish stunt or other, but, of course, without the irony, and, perhaps more importantly, without the self-awareness of the postmodern era. In the following episode, looking directly into the camera - “Lovejoy” style - Robins half-jokingly admonishes viewers for screenshotting and sharing images of his wind tunnel face; it's funny and entertaining, but there is a palpable tension.

So, what of “The Shadow Man”? When this episode was initially trailed, I immediately felt quite fascinated, as the way in which the guest described the experience immediately struck me as a some-thing that does not belong in the usual anthropomorphised realm that is typical of regular ghostly apparitions, but rather what one might describe as an “entity” or “being”. When I finally got round to watching the episode, I was struck by the recognisably portentous atmosphere right from the start, once again accentuated by the creeping shards of audio, now with accompanying tenebrous animation effects depicting “the shadow man” as a corporeal, but somehow simultaneously nebulous mass. Robins’ approach towards the guest - a man in his forties, called Julian – was notably tentative, and cagier than usual, and it quickly became clear that the theatrics would have to be dialed down for this episode out of respect for the serious nature of the content. Robins seemed to clearly know what he was dealing with: a disturbing metaphysical third, that may, or may not, reside in the mind; that can never be reduced to “team believer” or '“team skeptic”.

Two important concerns in this episode are Julian’s experiences of intergenerational trauma and grief, and the way in which they interact with experiences of supernatural phenomena. Julian has clearly been deeply affected by his many encounters with “the shadow man”, and he tells Robins that the apparition had no face and was “blacker than black”, which to me appears to describe a singularly supernatural form of malevolence: I say this because the way in which Julian describes the threatening presence of “the shadow man” betrays a particularly numinous quality that is not ordinarily encountered in response to material phenomena. This very subjective observation is of course debatable when one considers extreme situations of physical or existential threat, or instances in nature which we might describe as “evil”, but nonetheless, the way Julian describes his terror evokes a threatening emotional quality that is distinct.

Julian has been haunted by the visitations of ‘the shadow man” since his father died when Julian was just seven, due to an accident. He tells Danny that his mother, who is now also deceased, never recovered from his father’s death. The night Julian’s father died, he went to his grandparents, and he and his mother were put up in a temporary bed in the attic, and Julian remembers seeing a very tall (approximately seven foot tall), faceless, jet-black man in the window. Julian’s mum also saw “the shadow man” and ran out of the attic screaming, which must have been extremely frightening for them both.

Perhaps one of the other unusual aspects of Julian’s experience, is that several people have also seen “the shadow man”, including Julian’s family and friends, but this does not dissuade the materialist aspect of the show from questioning the reality of his experience. At one-point, Robins looks into the camera once again, (though this time with a solemnity that cannot be considered Lovejoyesque) and asks: although Julian is undoubtedly being ‘genuine’, how can we be sure he isn’t being ‘caught up’ in the emotion? This question points to an implicit assumption that either Julian’s experience must be an emotional response, which causes a hallucination, or, it is a supernatural entity, and that is the binary decision which we must therefore make. However, surely before even thinking about such a decision, we must consider some additional factors: even if Julian is “caught up” in the emotion, does this automatically mean that the “shadow man” is a hallucination, merely a figment of his imagination? As Robins himself affirms, what Julian experiences goes way beyond simply seeing a “figure in the mist”, and, as O'Keeffe says, “the shadow man” is like a “supernatural stalker” which is an appropriate term, given the relentlessness of the psychic and emotional attacks Julian experiences, which, as Julian tells Danny, even “got physical” at one point. Could it be that the emotional element of Julian’s experience is the very thing which leads to his encounters with “the shadow man”? And, perhaps most importantly, does the involvement of Julian’s emotions necessarily mean that “the shadow man” is not real?

Aside from “the shadow man” as an entity, Julian also describes the level of threat that the house takes on, “as if it were alive”, becoming the arena of a frightening temporal synchronicity: Julian was not present at his mother’s bedside when she died, missing her by moments, and he recalls that the time of her death was 2:11 in the morning. Following this, he was cruelly taunted by experiences in the house that took place exactly at this time: the kitchen cupboard opened on its own, and an armchair moved itself into the centre of the room with his mother’s photos from her bedroom balanced on the arm. The “shadow man” then began to breathe in the same labored way as his mother towards the end of her life, and Julian says that he feels as if he is being “targeted”, and that “the shadow man” was “taking the piss”. As Julian described his experience, I began to consider the deeply punitive and corrosive states of mind that can manifest in guilt and grief. I must emphasise at this point that I am not attempting to make any formal interpretation of Julian’s experience based on a TV show, and, perhaps even more importantly, in the light of my earlier comments, I would not attribute his experiences of “the shadow man” to guilt or grief alone. However, I do feel that it is worth considering in the light of this episode of ‘Uncanny”, whether Julian’s harrowing experiences may have increased his sensitivity and expanded his field of apprehension to a zone of reality which we may call paranormal, numinous, or supernatural: I do not believe any of these words are sufficient to describe elements of this experience which are quite ineffable, especially on an emotional level. Moreover, if we are to think about traumatic experience and the supernatural from this perspective of the emotional response as a window which opens to the supernatural realm, a decision as to whether people’s experiences are “real” or not becomes redundant, aside from the obvious entertainment and dramatic value that “Uncanny” offers. It is important to note that we do not have an adequate means to “prove” whether such experiences are “real” or not, and this is quite effectively demonstrated by the show’s experiments, which are based on narrow materialist metaphysical assumptions.

Fortunately, the show contrasts these experiments with some fascinating insights from folklore which comes as a relief as it frees us up, by providing us with a hermeneutics that transcends the need to bifurcate experiences into either material or supernatural categories. Evelyn Hollow informs us that a folkloric version of “the shadow man” has featured in cultures for hundreds of years, including Inuit, Native American, Scottish, Irish, and Japanese. As she explains, two aspects of “the shadow man” that are consistent throughout, is the way in which the entity “attaches” itself to people who are “emotionally vulnerable”, and “experience a lot of death”, in some cases manifesting as an “omen” of the latter. Indeed, Julian feels that this “shadow man” has attached itself to his father, his mother, and now to him, which must have been extremely frightening, given its ominous associations. Folklore of course is clearly not a standalone means of healing from traumatic experience, though, like certain fairytales, it can tell us something profound about the darkest, and most disturbing aspects of human experience, and, given its archaic roots, it spans not only cultures, but generations, providing us with a depth of meaning that is forged through an affective response to the lore: it stirs something deep within the confines of the collective anima. The way in which the folklore represents this shadowy “attachment” profoundly illustrates the feelings of utter helplessness that traumatised people experience. I have written about this phenomenon previously, where, in such cases, “past events become future omens”, and the traumatised individual feels that there is no escape, as the spectral haunting of the past is experienced as perpetual and inescapable. Fortunately, as it turns out, in Julian’s case there is a way out. At the end of the episode – the most moving of the episodes I have seen – he meets the new owner of the house where all of the terror took place, and which he has now gladly moved out of. Julian appears relieved to know that although the new owner appears to have experienced something similar, (which they do not wish to disclose) the atmosphere of the house has now transformed, where light has replaced much of the relentless darkness that he was subjected to for such a long time. It is deeply moving to see Julian’s relief: it seems that for him, knowing that another person outside of his circle of family and friends has independently experienced something like him, and has survived it, has finally broken the spell.

In melancholia it strikes me that there is a regression which we might call something like “oceanic striving” where the individual unconsciously wishes to return to a state of fusion with the original caregiver(s). One may also look for partners to fulfill this wish, and who will become co-conspirators in a destructive union. In this wished for scenario, there are no problems anymore, and growing up is unnecessary. I suppose this is something like what Michael Balint called “malignant regression”. The partner is recruited to become an idealised lost mother object, and together the couple then enter a vortex of mutually destructive longing from which it is very hard to escape. The partner has also been selected as they are wounded in a destructively complementary way, as the individual experiences the wounded aspects of his/her partner as a potent “empathic” elixir which he/ she feels will satiate his/her oceanic striving. This is an unconscious strategy to avoid mourning, and ensures that the individual remains walled in by depression (melancholia). This can become very destructive as it is a malignant spell which can last for many years and which prevents mourning of the wounded self.

Floats like paper in a black sea

The moon becomes its own reflection;

For it is its own dream.

“There is no time in this Cathedral; there is eternity”. Auguste Rodin, The Cathedral is Dying

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