Use Your Illusion: Further Encounters with the Illusive Real

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 metaphysical reality.

Firstly, given that the word illusion is associated with deception, it is often considered to be a human encounter with something that isn’t real. Etymologically, illusion consists of the Latin components in(against) and ludere (play), which form illudere (to mock) and finds its way to the English illusion, associated with deception. I will argue in this article, that due to this original antagonistic conjunction, the illusion has become over-identified with its deceptive component and has been divested of its important and meaningful associations with play and creativity. Perhaps more importantly, as a result of this over-identification, experience of illusory encounters are perceived to be outside of reality, whereas I argue, they should be considered very much part of it.

Psychoanalytically, the illusion is either a wished-for internal object, forming part of a necessary developmental process, a psychotic defence, or simply, a common, neurotic, untruth which we tell ourselves as a means of tolerating anxiety. Within this epistemology, the deception must therefore be mourned to see reality. As Winnicott understood, the capacity for illusion signifies the beginning of an important developmental process. In the early stages of life, the infant relates to the breast as-if it were under her control. If an infant is fortunate enough to grow up in what Winnicott calls “the facilitating environment”, which consists of “a good enough mother” who can tolerate the infant’s anxieties, then she can become slowly and gradually dis-illusioned, arriving at a place where she can relinquish the phantasy that the breast is under her magical control. This gradual loss of omnipotence is an important developmental milestone, as it introduces the child to an experience of mourning at the earliest stages of life, and bolsters her potential to tolerate disappointment. It also enables her to have psychological resources at her disposal later in life when she faces difficulty, by providing her with the capacity to think symbolically and play with ideas, to see other perspectives, rather than relying on omnipotent defences such as entitlement, superiority, or concrete thinking, all of which relate to the illusion stage of development. Importantly for Winnicott, this process of dis-illusion and mourning form the basis of the capacity to play; the child no longer only acts as if the breast were under her control, she now realises that she is doing so; she can think about what she does and she has her first encounters with meaning. All of this makes sense, as the illusion – as we have seen, etymologically, signifies a resistance to play, and the incapacity to mourn the illusion not only means the continuation of concrete thinking, but also the attachment to a wish, which is a self-deception. There is, therefore, certainly great value in this process of dis-illusion, as it brings us closer to truths about ourselves, particularly because the way in which we deceive ourselves can cause us plenty of problems later in life.

All of the above provides us with a strong argument for the divestment of the illusion, and this divestment becomes a necessary stage of getting at a truth about one-self - but does that necessarily mean that this truth is “reality” itself? I would argue that there is far more too reality than this: firstly, Winnicott ‘s paradigm contains the implicit assumption that the child’s illusion is “not real”, and he explicitly states that all that the arts or religion are really for is to help us to come to terms with, or sublimate our illusions. This is essentially reductive and myopic, for the illusion not only provides one with a means of accessing as-if states of perception in order to play, but also opens one’s heart to visionary encounters with the mystical, numinous, and the sacred, and to tolerate, enjoy, and find meaning from them; the illusion is therefore part of human experience that is entirely bona fide.

As I wrote in my previous posts on relational presence, the immanent longing of adolescence and its concomitant illusion of eternal love, rather than only being part of a developmental or psychosexual phase that we pass through, also becomes an important experience of an orientation towards a transcendent, metaphysical reality. This profound experience of yearning is both elusive and illusory; hence the hybrid neologism of the “illusive real”. Importantly, the word elusive, like illusion, evolves from ludere, though where the prefix of illusion is against, the verb to elude’s prefix is away from.

If we look at this through the lens of secular materialism, the “illusive” signifier bars access to play through deception in the ways described above, and this access is only granted once the infant comes to terms with the reality of her omnipotent self-deception. However, I would argue that, although the mourning of the illusion can help the child to play due to the newly acquired capacity for as-if states of mind, the disavowal of the reality of the illusion forecloses versions of play which are not based on mourning alone. Moreover, as the illusion is not considered to be real in materialist terms, this compounds the occlusive impact of these two prefixes and forecloses playful engagement with the illusion. If, on the other hand, we can countenance the counterintuitive notion that the illusion is part of the very fabric of reality – which, as an idea, I aver, is inherently playful - then this can broaden and enrich our experience of reality itself. In this way the prefixes of illusion and elude indeed bar us from play and creativity, but this does not mean that we should disengage from them, as if we perceive them only as indicators of hollow deception (not real). Instead, we should do the opposite, and playfully engage with these strange trickster-like elements of language so that we see them for what they are, as sphinx like ciphers which hold the potential of experiences of the unchartered real. This now equips us with a means of engaging with play at a greater depth, and we become more open to experiences of the anomalous, the numinous, the mystical, and the sacred. Children intuitively know how to play in this way, and they engage with the illusive real without any problems. As they grow up, they may become artists, and discover ingenious ways of playful engagement with the illusive real, through Surrealism, Dadaism, ritual theatre, and automatic drawing; they may grow up to become magicians, who engage through the I-Ching, the Qabalah, or tarot cards; the magician is a perfect archetype for the illusive real as s/he represents engagement with play, esoteric knowledge, and eternity.

Whether children, artists, and magicians engage with illusion through play, artistic practice, ritual, or esoteric knowledge, all are driven by a curiosity to know what lies beyond, and, to play with reality. Use your illusion, but remember it is real.

On Relational Presence (part 1, video)

How relational presence can enrich and deepen our relationships to others

On Relational Presence (Part Two)

As we enter adolescence we are often confronted emotional truths that are not easy to come to terms with. This is a time of burgeoning desires to individuate, fuelled by fantasies of liberation from the shackles of parental projections, rules, and regulations. An important driver of the teenage rebellion is an increasing awareness of the fallibility of one’s caregivers, and their depressing capacity to disappoint. After all, cherished memories of care can soon become tarnished through disagreements, misunderstandings, abandonment, and, in the worst cases, neglect and abuse. All such experiences become the blueprint for the way we relate to care as we move through our lives, and the way in which we give and receive love. 

When one falls in love for the first time, nothing else in the world exists; it is a state of becoming which is experienced as infinite, though this affective experience of eternity is quite different from that of the childhood experiences of love (relational presence) that were adumbrated in the first article in this series, it nonetheless stems from there; yet this adolescent manifestation is infused with a libidinised, intoxicating, abandon to which we can only surrender. Uncertainty and a sense of precarity are important drivers of this form of desire. When reality inevitably rears its ugly head, a nagging gargoyle reminds us that we should have heeded the dangerous signs as a warning, and seen beyond the immediacy of gratification. This is a harsh reminder of love’s evanescence, presenting us with a painful emotional reality: if love cannot survive its initial fires of first passion, only ashes will remain; there is no phoenix rising. Thus, we must accept love’s loss, no matter how much our hearts yearn for its resurrection.  This form of love promises the return of early relational presence, but its inherent excitement is driven by a deeper knowledge that this is illusory.

W.B. Yeats depicts this painful transition in his poem ‘Ephemera’ : the ‘child’ of short-lived passion is worn out, and can no longer be roused. Indeed, when love dies in a romantic relationship we are often heartbroken, and in the midst of our grief, we feel that the child of our earliest experiences of relational presence has fallen asleep forever; we have become dis-illusioned; all that now remains is a heart-rending nostalgia, a haunting specter of what once was. In the aftermath of this experience of loss, one may feel that it is one’s own desire which is the problem, and if only one had only not felt this desire that this love could have lived on. This is a cruel illusion.

It can be easy to write-off falling in love for the first time as an illusory phenomenon, though this ‘illusion’ is created by very real experiences. In this respect the most beautiful works of art are illusions. For William Blake, lost love represents the loss of innocence; his ‘The Garden of Love’ sees flowers cruelly replaced by tombstones. Although it is the beauty of nature for which the poet yearns, it is also that which, in the end, cruelly strangles the joys of his youth. Gérard de Nerval employs similar imagery of flowers and tombs to depict the agony of lost love in his ‘El Desdichado’ (The Disinherited). The poet pleads for the restored unity of the rose and the vine-leaf, longing for a near-symbiotic union; yet I wonder whether it is the ardor of the poet’s pining which causes these two symbolic lovers to become so intertwined that they could no longer see each other.

In Oscar Wilde’s poem ‘From Spring Days to Winter’, lost love is represented by the dove, whose golden wings are now broken, perhaps depicting a loss of contact not only with the beloved, but also with a sacred and enchanted dreamworld. In Wilde’s poem, and for the Romantic poets before him, there is an apparent parallel between the loss of Romantic love and a bygone transcendent ‘Jerusalem’; an Atlantean mythopoeic haven for which the poet yearns, an illusive real which becomes the basis of Romantic desire. 

Returning to Nerval’s stirring line in ‘El Desdichado’ - ‘Et la treille où le Pampre à la rose s’allie’ - beyond the individual relationship to the symbols of the rose and the vine-leaf, for the Romantics more broadly, it is art which becomes the treille upon which the rose (love) and the vine-leaf (the enchanted world) can alchemically unite. Indeed, Nerval’s individual longing is one that cuts across the Romantic experience; an inner search for a transcendent, unifying eternal which is also driven by the paradoxical awareness of mortality and threat of strangulation by the binding forces represented by the horrors of Blake’s Urizen: modernity. 

The spirit of Romanticism was becoming overcome by realism, like a candle being carried into a room fitted with electric light (Holmes, p.262).

Time and the progress of modernity are enemies of the Romantic, a lover who stubbornly and naively ‘holds a candle for’ one who has since long since moved on. Yet this pertinacious grip is the nucleus of the Romantic spirit, and its childlike naiveté is the creative fire at the heart of the illusive real. However, looking once again at Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’, one can clearly see how this candle also casts a haunting shadow upon the Romantic’s dreams. Where Nerval pleads ‘Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie’ (give me back Posillipo and the sea of Italy), there is a demanding, almost entitled nature to his wish for the past’s healing reprise, and as the poet’s demand appears to go unheeded, then I can only imagine this is felt to be a rejection of his love. Importantly, it is out of the feelings of rejection inherent to lost love that resentment and bitterness are often born, and it is this resentment which lies dormant in Romanticism. This resentment becomes more explicit in the Gothic and Decadent movements where these tenebrous affective aspects are now brought into sharp relief, continuing to forge a link between the developmental difficulties of adolescence and the cultural creep of modernity and its concomitant loss of wonder and mystery. 

As respective examples of the Gothic and Decadent movements, both Dracula and Dorian Grey - in their own unique ways - limn a Romanticised, Luciferian rebellion against the vulnerability of humanity. Aside from their supernatural gifts, both characters are incapable of real human love or tenderness. In part, it is this particular emotional deficit which drives their destructive actions, and with whom anyone whose love has been rejected can, at the deeper levels of the self, identify. Indeed, the adolescent identification with characters such as Dracula and Dorian Gray often begins with an experience of loss or rejection of one’s love. This loss is libidinised by a resentment towards an almighty, depriving other who is deemed to have shattered the precious illusion of eternal love and/or worldly enchantment. This resentment may relate to the earliest experiences of rejection: from one’s caregivers, in friendship, romantic relationships, or any combination thereof. This rejection relates to the adolescent’s closeness to the most isolated part of the self: the outsider.

Adolescents form aggregates rather than groups, and by looking alike they emphasize the essential loneliness of each individual (Winnicott, 1963, p.190)

For the Gothic and Decadent spirit, it is the bitter resentment of the rejected outsider which is romanticised; the lamented dead flowers and tombstones of the Romantics become the Decadent and Gothic raison d’être, an embrace of decaying, terrifying beauty (Dorian Gray), or a dreadful fascination with tombstones, death and the night (Dracula). Although it may appear that the supernatural powers which these anti-heroes possess provide compensation for feelings of resentment and suffering, on a deeper level they appear to be continued punishments for a repressed Romantic longing, a mocking retribution for the hubristic rejection of the real of mortality and modernity: Dracula possesses superhuman powers, yet he is also condemned to depend on the blood of mortals for his survival - he is still very much tethered to an illusive real that is divested of all creativity and love. Like Faust, Dorian Gray enjoys the promise of eternal gratification, but it is his enjoyment of the illusion which leads to his fall, rather than the illusion itself. 

Both Dracula and Dorian Gray are doomed outsiders and cannot exist within the prosaic confines of society, and once again, herein lies their appeal. Yet surely, beyond their apparent psychopathic tendencies and lack of conscience, it is ultimately an absence of the capacity for love which is their undoing. It is this missing link which perhaps leads both characters to transgress the illusive and become moths to the flame of the real. This transgression is a defensive maneuver formed from the archetypal infant need to know what is going to happen. Indeed, to enjoy the illusive aspects of the real (mystery, wonder, negative capability), we need these early foundations of security and predictability, though not everyone of course is fortunate enough to benefit from such solid emotional foundations, to have been gifted a mythical ‘trellis’ on which the ‘rose’ of mystery and ‘vine-leaf’ may climb. Knowledge and realisation of this lack may cause great resentment, envy, grief, anger, and sadness; yet the mourning of what one has lost is the beginning of a path towards the mysteries of the illusive real.

Holmes, R. (1985). Footsteps. New York: Harper Perennial.

Winnicott, D. W. (1963). Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain opposites. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press, 1965, pp. 179–192.