The Voice of The In-Between: Finding the Space Where God Lives
"What's the Trick"
Marcella Casu
The essence of illusion. Our beliefs. Our flesh. Our clinging. Our grasping. Our thoughts. Our words. We have to get to love. Love is the energy that is the life-force of all human beings. It is stored within and beyond our vessels and we can experience it when we press into each other in nakedness. But here is why it is very difficult: We are afraid. We simultaneously fear annihilation while we cling to self-loathing. The sameness of the walls, as a repetition, becomes a dialogue, and through that dialogue, I recognize my own sameness—the unchanging body that encapsulates me to form the inescapable boundary of separateness. I have to press through, beyond this sameness; beyond the illusion of identity. Pressing to evaporate the physical lines is a philosophy; what is the emotion? How do I break through these barriers? With a knife? Fist? Sledgehammer? Fingertips? Or, do I not break these barriers, but, rather, stretch them? Dance into them? Sing through them? What is a boundary? Does a boundary require an “other” in order to be defined or disintegrated? What is the energy of being caught in the in-between? Could it be that the answer to my suffering has been this simple all along? That I simply need to create?
The excerpt above is from a personal journal entry that I wrote in 2003, shortly after moving to New York City to write a one-woman show. The title of my solo performance piece was Pressing Beyond In Between. It was an exploration of my body, both as a container of accumulated experience, and also as a boundary between me and that which was “not me,” which seemed to prevent me from experiencing my experience. Somehow, my body simply could not seem to enter its politic. It moved in space while I observed it as if elsewhere in time, wondering how to either inhabit or abandon it; anything but remain stuck in the in-between. I was plagued by a sense that I was neither in nor out, neither fully alive nor particularly dead.
While the play did not get much traction beyond a few off-off Broadway venues, it helped me to explore the spaces within me and beyond me that seemed to be keeping me from my self. Somewhere in the process of writing that play, I began to suspect that, as painful as this in-between space could be, it was also the space of creativity. A place of mystery. A portal into something beyond me that felt foreign yet strangely familiar. It was the space where God lives.
In this paper, I wish to revisit my explorations of the in-between; explorations that I haven’t thought of since I put that play to rest nearly fifteen years ago. At the time, I had never heard of C.G. Jung or D.W. Winnicott. I knew nothing of Jung’s (1929/1969) transcendent function, nor his concept of the tension of opposites, though I now suspect that perhaps my experience back then could be defined in those terms. Only recently, as I began to study Winnicott’s writings on transitional spaces, did the felt experience of the in-between begin to unearth itself in me again. I started to feel that there was something I have been neglecting. A kind of reclamation of wisdom, of knowing, that I was attempting to excavate in my twenties, but that seems to have gotten lost in my (perhaps misguided) process of becoming. A sort of declaration that even then felt like hubris to proclaim: I am an artist. A creator. A maker of things. These things might not be tangible. They may not be beautiful to anyone, including myself. They might never be sold or bought, acknowledged or appreciated. But it is in the making of things that I come alive. And this aliveness beckons from the in-between.
This paper will explore the in-between from Winnicott’s perspective of transitional phenomena, while also considering the urgency to press beyond it. It will consider the depth and beauty of what it means to live with the in-between space; to not attempt to push through or pull away to evade it, but, rather, to experience it, to engage with and through it. Because I am now beginning to understand what perhaps I was grappling with all those years ago but never fully embodied or embraced: there is something in that empty space that sometimes feels like interminable loneliness and occasionally smells like death. Whether it feels like heaven or hell is often a matter of context or intention, or perhaps a shift in perspective. What it is may even be up to the whim of the gods themselves. But this I now believe: it is the space where God lives.
To write about the experience of the space where God lives is a heavy thing; it is, perhaps, even a heady thing. It is beyond the scope of this particular exploration to, in the words of psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, “quibble over whether such experiencing is possible” (Eigen, 1981, p. 3). The field of depth psychology, not to mention theology and philosophy, is replete with debates over whether this thing we call God is real or imaginary, inside of us or outside of us, both or neither. While I, similar to many depth psychologists, question whether God is “nothing more” than a projection of unconscious contents, ultimately, I have found my peace with accepting that it doesn’t really matter. If we follow what I consider to be Jung’s “little loophole” in all of this and allow for what he calls the psychoid, whether this God is a thing or a being, whether God-ness is real or imaginary, really doesn’t matter much; my experience of God-ness is real. And that experience is not only meaningful from a perspective of depth and soul; it also opens up an inexhaustible playground of wonder and delight that, for me personally, makes life a thing worth experiencing.
While I reject the forced imposition of an omniscient and an omnipotent Father God in the Sky, I have experienced God-ness too often and in ways too significant to reject it unequivocally. Here, I do not wish to defend God or explain God, either into or out of being. I do not even wish to feminize God/dess, or to reclaim a non-patriarchal view of the ultimate reality of our multi-gendered humanity, although I believe that is a worthy and necessary dialectic in which to engage at this time in human history. Rather, I wish to borrow from theater’s core principle that allows our entry into the imaginary and the imaginal: I wish invite in a suspension of disbelief in order to play in the space of God—to enter a space in which God-ness can be “seen” and felt and soaked in for a while.
Nobody knows what God is. As I am defining my experience of it here, it is something akin to Eigen’s description of faith—“a way of experiencing which is undertaken with one’s whole being, all out, ‘with one’s heart, with all one’s soul, and with all one’s might’” (Eigen, 1983, p. 3). In The Psychoanalytic Mystic, Eigen (1998) seems to be pointing to my own experience of God-ness when he describes Winnicott’s “formless moment that is the home base of the self” (p. 45). It is a sort of expansion beyond the in-between that includes the in-between, and is perhaps accessed through the in-between. It is a space that my twenty-eight-year-old self seemed to recognize could not be eradicated, but, rather, could offer a doorway into a kind of immanent transcendence by remaining in the tension of opposites until a moment of grace opened up in the space between my self and a perceived “other.” This space was simultaneously an experience of integration and disintegration, a place where “the personality can rest in unintegration, to float or drift between organizations, to dip into formlessness or chaos or nothingness” (Eigen, 1998, p. 46).
Jungian psychologist Ann Belford Ulanov speaks to the in-betweenness of God from both a Christian and a depth psychological perspective, also by invoking Winnicott’s psychological framework. She suggests that there are ways to see God through a fresh lens by learning about the transitional space through which “Winnicott witnesses to the location of the numinous in the space between self and other, in the human realm, and between the human and divine” (Ulanov, 2005, p. 5). Ulanov (2005) echoes the “all out” perspective of Eigen’s depiction of faith. In her words, she is
looking at what opens in the space between our experiences of our self and our experiences of God. Winnicott focuses on the transitional space between the infant and the mother…This transitional space is our first opening up to and moving into the experiences of being and becoming, our first opportunity to experience the evolving power of living full out, with all our heart and mind and strength…Thus Winnicott, researching the transitional spaces of childhood, opens for us the spaces we reconnoiter throughout our whole life, entering ever more deeply into contact with ultimate reality. (Ulanov, 2005, p. 6)
There seems to be something in this in-between space—this sense of me, living in and through a body, searching for a bridge to a perceived outer world—that captures and maybe even captivates our attention. Winnicott was masterful in depicting the human experience that attempts to bridge this perceived gulf between inner and outer, self and other, through what he referred to as the transitional space.
Of every individual who has reached the stage of being a unit with a limiting membrane and an outside and an inside, it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world that can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war. (Winnicott, 1953, p. 3)
This “limiting membrane” was precisely what I was struggling with when I wrote my one-woman show, and my desire to push beyond it could be perceived as my inner war. It is a membrane that is clearly semi-permeable, as it can allow energy, emotion, experience, etc., either in or out. It can even, at moments, feel as though it is completely extinguished or annihilated, e.g., through ecstatic states or mystical experiences. Yet, in our ordinary, mundane lives, where it is nigh impossible to sustain altered states of consciousness or non-ordinary reality while also living in consensus reality, we require a middle-ground—somewhere to live where we are anchored to “objective” realities while simultaneously open to transcendent ones.
The third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated (Winnicott, 1953, p. 3)
While Winnicott himself did not see in these in-between spaces a place for God, per se (Ulanov, 2005, p. 5), “he could not avoid the word ‘sacred’ in pointing to the incommunicado core of self that shines through integration” (Eigen, 1998, p. 47). If one is inclined to search for a God, or, at least to wonder about what God-ness might mean or where it might be found, Winnicott’s intermediate spaces certainly seem to point to this divine presence. Ulanov (2005) elaborates:
The transitional space of Winnicott needs to be enlarged and specified to be life-giving. This is the space of human beings who desire an interior life. Winnicott opens the space, and the result is a living metaphysics; we are now able to dwell at the core of ourselves and reality. (p. 6)
Winnicott’s transitional space is a holding place, a theater, a tennis match, a family dinner. “For adults, the transitional space is culture and the special provinces of the arts and religion” (Ulanov, 2005, p. 7). It is the invitation to connect with an “other,” through a third “other”—an other who is equally alive and autonomous, creative and destructive, though not typically seen or felt through “ordinary” perception. This other, in my estimation, is the “speaking through” of Jung’s archetypes; it is the voice of the gods communicating to and through us their own agendas of myth and destruction, expansion and contraction, creativity and madness. It is a space in which our tangible ways of being, our grounded trust that what we hold in our hands is real and never-changing, is wrested from us, though not entirely taken away. It is the child’s teddy bear, shared with the new friend at school yet still retained in his own tiny arms; a swim in the waters between your shore and mine where my arrival is not guaranteed and there is always a possibility of drowning.
“It is the potential for drowning—for getting lost in the in-between space—that I suspect is what gives transitional spaces their allure and also causes our resistance to entering into them.”
It is the potential for drowning—for getting lost in the in-between space—that I suspect is what gives transitional spaces their allure and also causes our resistance to entering into them. There is danger in the in-between; danger of being abandoned there, of never being met. Danger of being left alone in our imaginative play, awaiting the guests who never arrive for our tea party. Winnicott suggests that the transitional space—the space of our imagination—is thus a potential place of
illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. (Winnicott, 1953, pp. 3-4)
Ulanov (2005) reiterates Winnicott’s sentiment when she reminds us that the transitional space is not a space that we are meant to live in; rather, it is a space that we are meant to live through. In her words,
if we fail to make the crossing, our transitional space harbors madness, where we lose either the shore we are moving from—the self—or the shore we are trying to reach—reality—and plunge into the space between these, which threatens to swallow us up. Space becomes a gap, fearful and imperiling. (Ulanov, 2005, p. 7)
"Breathe the pain out"
Hafsa Idrees
This state of madness, of illusion, threatens us when we are caught in the in-between, rather than, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman insists with his idea of psychologizing (Hillman, 1975, pp. 111-164), seeing through. While the in-between may be a space in which God lives, if we are not gods, we must not inflate ourselves by attempting to live among them. There must be an entry and exit point; a way to hold both the imaginal and the manifest, without being caught in one or the other. This in-between space is, of course, not real, in the sense of the really real, although some would argue it is the only thing that is truly real, that is, beyond our projective-introjective identificatory operations (Eagan, 1981, p. 13). It is, in fact, the space that is necessary for relating and relationship, with the self, with others, and with the outside world. There is a need to know how to navigate the transitional space—how to live an interweaving life with and within it without getting stuck there—and this is the business of psychoanalysis. It is within “transitional experiencing” (Eagan, 1981, p. 7), that
a sense of the real explodes all adaptive and manipulative attempts…It is an all out, nothing held back, movement of the self-and-other feeling past representational barriers, past psychic films and shells, a floating freely in a joyous shock of difference…One is sustained sheerly through the unfolding sense of self-other presencing, a presencing no longer taken for granted but appreciated as coming through. (Eigen, 1981, p. 8)
Here, Eigen points to both the in-between and a pressing beyond the in-between, which leads us to a moment of realness when we can withdraw our fantasies about ourselves as either isolated selves, projected others, or as some mixed up, confused, Frankensteinian monster that ultimately seeks to destroy us all. But this “realness” is not equivalent to an acceptance of the objective, mechanical world and a rejection of the imaginal. On the contrary, Winnicott cautions that denying the imaginal world of the child is in fact what drives the child to madness (Winnicott, 1953, p. 18), and shuts down the potential for spontaneity and creativity in adults. He insists that creativity and play, which arise from transitional phenomena (Winnicott, 1971, p. 71) are essential components of self-discovery, and also of “artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming” (Winnicott, 1953, p. 7).
Here, Winnicott is not speaking only of the need to create or enjoy or participate in literal art (or even sports or a Sunday drive through the countryside). As Winnicott (1971) points out, an individual can produce art or even be a professional artist without entering what I am calling “the space where God lives.” If God, or, in Jung or Hillman’s terms, the archetypal, is not in some way (consciously or unconsciously) invoked into relationship with the artist through the process of creation, a product that resembles art may be produced, yet the artist may “yet have failed to find the self that he or she is looking for” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 73).
By contrast, psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s (1950) work suggests that not being able to create art in a way that is marketable or interesting to anyone else aesthetically, can, in fact, engage an individual in a process that brings one into, and through, the in-between space. Throughout her book, On Not Being Able to Paint, Milner (1950) attempts to “illustrate the gradual discovery both of ways by which the creative process is freed and of the content of unconscious ideas which interfere with that freedom” (Milner, 1950, p. xxi). She describes her process of moving through “vague uneasy feelings and an urge to follow certain trickles of curiosity wherever they might lead” (Milner, 1950, p. 169). This illustrates how one approaches and begins to navigate the in-between.
Somewhere in the books it was stated that painting is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space…So it became clear…it must also be to do with problems of being a separate body in a world of other bodies which occupy different bits of space: in fact it must be deeply concerned with ideas of distance and separation and having and losing. (Milner, 1950, p. 13)
When a person taps into the space where God lives, she emerges from the experience of transitional phenomena feeling enlivened. As Eigen (1998) points out, this sense of aliveness is not a sense of wholeness;
the sense of wholeness makes people kill each other: My wholeness is right, yours wrong. That is why Winnicott includes the capacity to be depressed in his definition. One must somehow find space in oneself for the Other’s viewpoint, so that wholeness is no easy oneness (pp. 52-3).
This space, it appears, can be felt or experienced as a depression because one must somehow find a way to “let things in;” one must find a way out of isolation into connection. Depression occurs when one is unable to do so. Transitional phenomena are not solely a place for an individual “I” to inhabit; they are a way to bridge the gap between inner and outer, self and other. While the space itself is holy, this “holiness” can only be utilized if it is somehow internalized—if it leads to a sense of connectedness. This, I believe, was what Jung was pointing to in his concept of the Self that he believed was symbolized by the mandala—a feeling of a central me-ness that expands outward to include an ineffable not-me-ness that is also me, or, at least, somehow related to or accessible to me.
If the space is felt into, as in Jung’s technique of active imagination, sometimes the space of contraction (felt as depression) can morph into a space of expansion. This process not only creates but also demands a “gap”—a stillness in space and a pause in time, where the sense of opening a portal or seeing into other realms or dimensions becomes possible. “One must trust that through the gap between himself and the Other…creative play will save him” (Eigen, 1981, p. 15). Whether this sudden spaciousness, located within me, outside of me, and between me and some known or unknown other is purely psychological or not, I do not know. To me, it feels like the space where God lives. A space where I find my self while in transit to and through a known or unknown other.
The theme is ancient and restless, its turns unpredictable. The vicissitudes of faith involve the struggle not only to know but in some way be one’s true self, to take up the journey with all that one is and may become, and to encounter through oneself the ground of one’s being. This is undertaken with the knowledge that we are mediate beings, that certainty is beyond certain reach, but that anything short of this attempt portends disaster and is self-crippling. The undertaking itself involves one in continuous re-creation (Eigen, 1981, p. 24).
This “continuous re-creation” is the ultimate effect of creative engagement. As Milner (1950) concludes after observing the psyche while in a process of creativity, the human condition is inherently one in which we are continuously negotiating inner and outer, self and other, as well as the love and hate that inevitably exist on either side of the in-between. She elucidates the dangers of our human propensity toward hatred of internalized loved objects, suggesting that this very confusion can “make one feel, in extreme conditions, that one’s inner world is wrecked and everything is hopeless; even though the external environment, objectively seen, may be full of promise” (Milner, 1950, p. 150). This feeling keeps us on our own shore, unable or unwilling to cross into or through the in-between to meet the other. This leaves one isolated, separate from, and alienated, seemingly from that which is outer (and, in some cases, this is literally true), but, more importantly, from the ability to feel and experience the vast expansiveness that is inner, and accessible, through the in-between.
This feeling of needing to press beyond the in-between, beyond separation, toward connection with an Other may be conceived, from a psychoanalytic perspective, as a desire to return to the maternal matrix of primitive merger. Perhaps it is. But I prefer to see our desire for merger, maternal or otherwise, as symbolic of our inherent human tendency to seek what Jung or Ulanov (2005) might call religion, though I am more apt to call it God-ness. This God-ness is a feeling-sense, an image, an ability to experience the multiplicity of our own is-ness. It is our ability to let love in, whether from another human, from nature, or from this nebulous, indeterminate thing we vaguely refer to as “the world.” It speaks to Winnicott’s contention that “the capacity to be alone is based on the experience of being alone in the presence of someone…Without a sufficiency of this experience the capacity to be alone cannot develop (Winnicott, 1958, p. 33).
"Isolation"
John Cunnane
To be alone, truly alone, is for most human beings a veritable hell-realm. Unless an individual is completely psychologically closed off from all ability to experience feeling or emotion, being held in (literal) solitary confinement is one of the most cruel and destructive experiences one human being can inflict on another. A person can be held in metaphorical solitary confinement, however, if he or she is unable to press beyond the in-between. This holding may have originated through the internalization of an outer experience, but, once internalized, that individual continues to live as if the external environment is still impinging on his or her ability to live “all-out” in “the world.”
If, as I am positing, the in-between is the space in which God lives, then living in the tension of an unwillingness or an inability to cross our own boundaries of confinement to enter this holy space will leave us with a feeling of despair—a tension between inner and outer, resulting in a feeling of isolation even when we are, literally, externally, in relationship, in the world. Similar to what I was attempting to do when I wrote my one-woman show many years ago, Milner (1950) suggests that, by deliberately engaging in the arts, we can “restore the split and bring subject and object together into a particular kind of new unity” (p. 151). She goes on to suggest that, by engaging in art, something from inside of the self-subject is brought into/shared with the world, and something of the world (e.g., the internalized image of a landscape one is painting) is brought into the self. As such, the “gap” between self and other is both entered and exited; we merge with the other and are freed from our projective-identifications with the other through the process. We become a new self, a transformed self.
Milner (1950) emphasizes that it is in the work of this process, the actual engagement in the process, that transformation occurs. We cannot think or talk ourselves into transformation. We must do, act, be, in love—not in love with a person or a thing or an idea, although that, too, can help us find the space where God lives. The problem, though, with being in love with a person or a thing is that things and people are fallible; they are subject to change, to decay, to disappearance. To be in love means to exist within a space of benevolent energy—an expansive, open-hearted feeling of simultaneously being connected with self, other (whether animate or inanimate), and an unknown, unknowable, mystical third. This can happen by engaging in artistic practice.
“To be in love means to exist within a space of benevolent energy—an expansive, open-hearted feeling of simultaneously being connected with self, other (whether animate or inanimate), and an unknown, unknowable, mystical third. This can happen by engaging in artistic practice. ”
While the art itself may be ephemeral, arting, as a process, as a way of existing and engaging in the world, as a method of literally moving paint on canvas or bodies through space or voice through the body, allows us to be alone but not alone. Or, as Henry Corbin (1969) suggests in the title of his book on Sufi mysticism, it allows us to be alone with the alone. It invites God into the room, even when, and perhaps particularly when, there is no embodied “other” to or with whom we wish to bridge the apparent gulf between.
Pressing beyond the in-between—finally meeting the real, actual person who awaits us on the other side of what Winnicott calls our “transitional phenomena”—guides us toward connection and saves us from alienation, though the only path across is through. This seems to be the wisdom that my twenty-eight-year-old self was beginning to unravel and unfold in the pages of a hard cover, spiral-bound journal that I found in a storage box shortly before writing this paper. That hopeful, inspired young woman left a paper trail for her future self that would guide and support her on their sinuous, perplexing, soulful, beautiful, sometimes terrifying, other times exhausting, unmapped road toward becoming. It is in awe and in gratitude of the woman I once was, and the child who came before her, that I close this exploration into the in-between.
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