The author examines a particular form of addictive exploitation of sensory experience to extend Meltzer's concept of claustrum states. She elaborates how bodily experience-both the patient's and the analyst's-is key to emergence from these states. Following the distinction between holding and containing made by Bion and Cartwright, the author traces the reciprocity of meaning making through the analyst's seeing/sensing of beauty in the patient, noted by the analyst's erotic response to a coming-alive self, allowing for aesthetic reciprocity and transformation.
PROLOGUEIn the first book of C. S. Lewis' (2003) space trilogy, 1 the scientist Ransom is abducted in a spaceship by a pair of megalomaniac scientists bent upon the exploitation of extraterrestrial worlds. As their vessel breaks through the earth's gravitational field and into the luminous reaches of deep space, Ransom's terror at his plight gives way to a state of exaltation. Up until this moment, he realizes, he had been dominated by his rationalist scientific worldview. He had imagined earth to be suspended in an insensate void, a terrain from which life flared up briefly, only to be extinguished in a vacuum of meaninglessness. Now, looking out upon an infinite expanse of celestial radiance, he felt as if he were contained within a "womb of worlds" (Lewis, 2003, p. 34), of infinite iterations of living forms shot through with light that streamed through him in currents of aliveness. He became aware that up until this moment his life had been held together by a muscular contraction of existential dread, a chronic clenching against an abyss of meaninglessness. With this revelation, he found himself now inhabiting a world drenched in meaning, and his heart rose to meet it, swollen with delight.Katy, the daughter of a highly intrusive and controlling mother, spends the vast majority of the time when she is not working lying on the couch watching reality TV and eating junk food. She is able to slip through a wormhole in her everyday world and enter an alternate reality in which the boundary between day and night, conscious and unconscious, dissolves into a timeless present of narcotic sensory gratification. Over the years her emotional life has become blunted 1 Out of the Silent Planet. Correspondence should be sent to Karen Peoples, Ph.D., 6 CHASSAY and downgraded to a world of craving and satiation, lulled by the softness of the couch, the reassuring companionship and surrogate living she gets from a constant stream of reality TV shows, the perverse triumph of her absolute untouchability. She is now in her mid 30s, and although successful enough at work, she has never had sex, barely even dated. A first-generation immigrant, she comes from a culture that privileges arranged marriage, a mandate that she has been able to elude by declining all prospective suitors while enacting a form of arranged marriage with what we have come to call "couch-world." Outside the boundaries of this world lies an unthinkable darkness; within it, escape from an oppressive matern...