Inner Zero & Subject of the Unconscious

 

One key idea of Horse Speak is “Inner Zero.” It is hidden. You have to believe in it to make it exist. It's unconscious, elusive, yet active. It's not aggressive but it can silently make itself heard, make its presence felt. It is housed in your body, yet has a relation to others. It can be read by 'you' (and here the problem peeps through, for who is the 'you' who reads?) and by others, including horses. 

To give it more texture, Sharon Wilsie sometimes links “Inner Zero” to the eastern arts of tai chi, yoga, or qi gong. It is understood as a kind of “energy.” It is alive, it can move, it can expand, and decrease.

The key idea in psychoanalysis is the unconscious. You have to believe in it to make it exist. It has a link to the body, but it is more the body of orifices than the one governed by the brain. Once you have the unconscious, other key ideas come forward: drive, ego, subject, Other, symptom, suffering, jouissance, etc. Ideas of energy also exist and get expressed as the life drive and the death drive: libido, drive. The subject of the unconscious has one foot in the Other, and this gives us an experience of Otherness in the most intimate part of our being. It helps to explain how we end up doing things that we say we don't want to do. This beautiful idea, the unconscious, has the value of naming something uncanny (un-homelike), which many people testify to in the clinic.

To understand the space in which the unconscious subject and the Other operate, it helps to have an idea of topology and ethics. This is because the unconscious has no materiality even though it has many effects that can be read from the traces that it leaves. In the clinic, these are often noticed in slips of the tongue, bungled actions, dreams and jokes, but it may also have manifestations which can be testified to by mysteries like love, hate, jealousy, gut feeling, spine tingling, palpitations, shivers, blushes, hunches, intuitions and so on. It may also leave traces that can be translated by the inscription machines of medical technologies. Some traces are read by the way they manifest themselves in repetitions in someone's life. Readings can be produced from the effects it leaves on the heartbeat, breathing, and brain. But for all these traces, the thing itself has no ontic.

Lacan noticed that Freud's genius was to recognise that the unconscious has no ontic, but rather that it is made of ethics: "I am not being impressionistic when I say that Freud's approach here is ethical – I am not thinking of the legendary course of the scientist who recoils before nothing. ... I am formulating here that the status of the unconscious is ethical, and not ontic." (Seminar XI, p. 34)

And this ethic is a vital part of clinical practice. When someone is welcomed into a consultation, the analyst listens in a way that is unlike any other. The analyst doesn't try to correct, reassure, reduce, improve, but aims to listen for signs of the unconscious and draw out the subject who can take responsibility for it.

In a recent Horse Speak Club Meeting, Sharon made an intervention that aimed at shifting the orientation of a human (Elle) in relation to her pony. The pony in question is a native breed famous for its ability to live on its wits independently outdoors, preferably on hills, but is also famous for lending itself to working with humans through a long history of collaboration. Elle was having a problem getting her pony to give himself a break from being constantly alert to potential dangers and to give himself a chance to experience the pleasure of some activities with her in the indoor school. But he wouldn't drop his vigilance. Every few steps, he stopped with his head raised, apparently looking for danger. Elle respected this by stopping what she was trying to do, turning to look in the same direction that he was looking, and then announcing that there was nothing to be frightened of by imitating a tail-swish with her arm, letting out a loud breath of relief, and turning away to refocus. He took no notice. Nothing. Not even the smallest twitch of recognition. She had made a video of this and sent it in to be analysed in the weekly on-line club meeting. Sharon's intervention aimed to sweep aside any ideas Elle had of being inadequate or of doing something wrong. The point was, in this case: trust the horse in his stance, listen to that, interpret it better. When Elle had "swished her tail," the pony had not acknowledged it. Sharon's interpretation was: He didn't believe Elle. For this horse, at this time, then, his key idea was vigilance, and he could not give it up.  Sharon's idea is that the pony needed to have his stance recognised before he could even think about the enjoyable activities she had prepared for him. This is not the same thing as saying that the pony is frightened, or that he is "just being a horse," or that he is stupid or being naughty. The lack that Sharon points to is in Elle's reading of her pony. This draws attention to the domain of language where this is playing out – on the symbolic plane. There is a function and a field of speech and language; there is a symbolic register that horse and human seem to be able to read from each other. There is a "subject" that can be supposed in each.

Sharon did not rely on ideas of innateness to explain the horse's stance or of the function of his brain or his nervous system. Instead she stressed the 'role' or job he was taking, which is part of the lexicon of Horse Speak. She says he is a "protector." This is in the register of speech and language. It takes place on the symbolic plane. There are many stories about horses sensing danger and saving their human. There are also stories where the human overrode the horse and went on to regret it. But there are also stories where the horse had to be helped by a human to re-evaluate the situation. We are in a field of life in which judgements have to be made, experience plays a part, and where responsibilities are taken seriously, even by horses. This is amazing.

Trying to get another living being to change according to your idea of what would be best for him is fundamentally a risky business and can lead to abuses of power. In the practice of psychoanalysis, first, you have to read the 'symptom' that the subject is suffering from, and that she brings into the consultation. This is an essential precondition when working with the human psyche. What happened in this video on the Horse Speak club seemed to bear more than a passing resemblance to this. That considerations like these are now emerging in the field of equine encounters bears witness to the reach of Freud's ideas. The analytic discourse is being operated these days out in the fields with the equines.

Sharon's intervention in the club meeting aimed to let Elle recognise the truth value of the communication from her horse as well as the truth value of his non-communication to her. Both of these things belong to the symbolic order in which zero has indeed a value greater than the "nothing" and which should not be ignored. In this particular case, Sharon pointed out that the pony made no movement at all with his tail, not even a twitch, and this she read in relation to Elle's tail-swish move. His non-acknowledgement can be read only when and if you accept that a register of communication is in play. First you have to believe in this––only then can you read the non-move as a part of the text. 

All of this is fundamental to the psychoanalytic clinic and all those other kinds of therapeutic practices that have sprung up out of Freud's invention whether or not they acknowledge it as such. Stop ignoring it, don't try to cancel it, don't try to override it, don't try to undo it. Something new will open up in front of you that you had been blind to up till then. 

A horse, like a human, has to learn a language and find a way to live with it in his or her particular herd. He, and we, have to live in a land made of language and the logical consequences that it holds. Take that away from a horse or a human and you take something more than precious – and to all intents and purposes, ethically speaking, that could be a crime.

Footnote on the etymology of the word 'crime'

John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins (Bloomsbury, 1990) explains that the word 'crime' is one of a wide range of English words (including certain, crisis, critic, decree, discern, discrete, discriminate, excrement, riddle, secret, and secretary) which come ultimately from or are related to the Greek verb krínen 'decide.'  This was a relative of Latin cernere 'decide,' from whose root evolved thenoun crimen 'judgement, accusation, illegal act,' This passed via Old French crimne (later crime) into English, where traces of the original meaning 'accusation' survived until the 17th century. See also: certain, critic, decree, discriminate, excrement, secret. 

References:

Jacques Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (1953), Ecrits: The First Complete Translation in English, trans.Bruce Fink, (New York and London, 2006).

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Norton 1981)

Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious" (1915), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol XIV (London, Vintage Hogarth Press, 2001)

The Horse Speak Club, The Horse Speak Academy (available on line with membership).