On the Nature Of Disappearance: A Modern Existential Dilemma * Paul Lippmann, PhD

In the oncoming shadow of Hitler and Nazi Germany, Bertold Brecht wrote:

“Whatever you say, don’t say it twice
If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them
The man who hasn’t signed anything, who has left no picture Who was not there, who said nothing

How can they catch him? Cover your tracks.”

And now millions happily volunteer their presumed innermost selves on Facebook.
We are living in extraordinary times.
Natural life has been surpassed by the machine and human values are up for sale to the lowest bidder.

We are living in extraordinary times.

Our exact locations can be tracked, our sexual proclivities, political preferences, relationships and purchases recorded, our innermost habits detected. It knows who and where we are. It has us in its cross hairs of zeros and ones. In the world of ancient imagination, God was once the only one who could know us inside and out. Now the machine is the only one. It knows us, each and every one. Mysterious, powerful, controlling—the machine is now God. We kneel and pray to a technology that herds us along, urging us, as in a recent ad, to “be what’s next.” From Chaplin in Modern Times, to “be what’s next,” technology and its buddies–consumerism and materialism–play us to its own tunes. Breathless, overstimulated, exhausted, we keep dancing and hope for the best. The machine sees all. Mother Earth is gone. God is gone. No one is home any longer except for the tiny green and red lights that tell us the machine is warmed up and ready.

Yet the machine has us in its sights. But it not only tracks us. Like God, the machine has produced extraordinary miracles as well as disasters. We can fly; we can move a heart from one body to another; and we are about to insert more of the machine into our own bodies so that we can live longer and communicate with everything, all at the speed of light. It is such a mixed deal, this life in modern times, living in intimacy with the machine. It destroys our own imagination. It enlivens our own imagination. It constricts us. It expands us. It can delight. It can delete. It is everywhere. I drive along in my car, listening to music I love on a CD. Surrounded by the machine which propels and delights, hardly noticing the trees and the hills and sky that seem more like a screen image than anything real. We live inside machines. Machines live inside us. Look about in this room. There is more machine life around us and in our pockets than there is evidence of the natural world. And mostly we don’t realize it. Adaptation is powerful.

This is an effort to begin to think about disappearance, as a survival method, in an age where the machine rules. Disappearance is an old idea and our question is whether ideas about disappearance have any particular relevance for modern living.

These seeming opposites: disappearance and appearance, presence and absence, have forever engaged in a most intimate coupling in which each is revealed in the other. But life as we now live it brings disappearance to a new level of significance.

Put briefly: (1) the natural world is increasingly disappearing. To a great extent, our species has gained an upper hand over Nature, and we are no longer rooted in our natural home. The qualities once thought of as specifically human may be vanishing as we merge with our own amazing tools. As we become more and more connected with our tools we lose connection with our own grandparents. Human beings are slowly turning into machines.

As our electronic objects become more essential to us, we finally realize the deeper meaning of that clumsy concept: “object relations,” which now reveals itself to mean relations with our objects. They are in our hand, at our ear, implanted in our bodies, involved in our sexual pleasures, at birth, at death, in our nurseries, in our emotions, in our dreams. They matter more and more and are centrally located in what is meaningful for us.

To repeat: The natural world is disappearing. And we, ourselves—as we once knew ourselves to be–are disappearing. A virtual world is replacing the actual and natural one. A new form–part human, part machine–is replacing us. The post-human era is upon us and disappearance is its signature.

These changes have resulted both in excitement and in anxious confusion. Among the many natural responses to uncertainty, confusion and anxiety is disappearance—a retreat, usually temporary, to the shadows of the cave or the mind until confusion clears and one has some idea of how to proceed. I believe that such adaptive disappearance is a defining underlying characteristic of many in our time.

Death, of course, is the great disappearance. All organic matter dies. While I am not exactly sure how I came to an interest in the invisible side of life. I know that as a small child, I explained death to myself, always with a small shiver, to mean “no more.” “More” meant the opposite. It meant living. I was very careful not to need or want or ask for “more,” never to be greedy. That side of me took up unconscious residence. I was a very skinny kid, in a very poor family, filled to the very brim with images, dreams, smells, sounds of family disappearance in the Holocaust. No more. Now in my middle 70’s, “no more” returns again. Death is coming near. What then?

No more.

Perhaps, after we die, we can be remembered in the consciousness of the living for a generation or two—in our children’s children, or in works we leave behind. For most of us, we vanish within a few decades after dying. Gone from consciousness, from presence, from memory.

No more.

Of course, we originate from an eternity of “no moreness” and then soon, too soon, we disappear again into that same realm, with only a brief candle on this stage of appearance. Disappearance may be our most natural home. In modern culture, dying and disappearing is being treated as an aberration, a failure, a sickness. But it remains natural, necessary, inevitable, real. Spielrein and Freud both envisioned a death instinct as an essential part of our nature.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she was bitten by a dog that ran off and couldn’t be found. For weeks following her treatment with a series of anti-rabies shots, the baby doctor could discern no fetal heart beat, no fetal movement, no weight gain. But, nevertheless, after several silent weeks, I was born–lively, healthy, well rested. So apparently, for some time, I existed in some kind of hiding, some silent state, hibernation, suspended animation. As though I had disappeared before I was born; as though I was “no more” before I could show myself; as though I learned to die first, to be entirely still, to disappear, before I could be born. For me, disappearance is natural.

Also, my father was a luftmensch. For those unfamiliar with this term, a luftmensch is a person who seems to live on air alone, without any seeming physical means of support. Dreamers, poets, lovers, philosophers, opera lovers, chess players, like the characters in mid air depicted by Marc Chagall, written about by Sholem Aleichem as fiddlers on the roofs, by Yitzkhok Leibish Peretz as the Bunsha Shveigs of the world. These are the Jews of exile—living in alien territory, without a land of their own, with barely a piece of bread, silent, modest, unassuming, taking up so little space, all but disappeared, yet with a profound, warm, and loving vision of life that nourished and sustained a people. The Jewish people, as a whole, despite the accusation that they were all materialists, were in fact all luftmenschen to the core—without land (disembodied), adrift in the world, in love with any country that gave them a break, in love with the dream of an unnameable God.

And so, in my professional life, as a way to make a living, as a way to be helpful in the world, I was drawn to psychology and psychoanalysis and found a home in dreams—that stuff of imagination, that lightness of nighttime wanderings, that entirely natural disappearance into a virtual universe. Disappearance is not foreign to me or to most people I know. It goes with living. There have been so many disappeared groups of people—the poor, the disfigured, gays and lesbians, women, blacks—all of whom, with Ralph Ellison, know something about the complex world of invisibility.

And now, our technologically driven culture is forcing psychological disappearance on a grand scale. Our ancient home in the natural world is being replaced by a new home in a virtual universe (E.g., We used to see each other and meet in our towns’ centers, now we purchase digitally, invisibly. Also ,virtual sex is so much less complicated and faster. Who has time for romance when one is trying so hard at “being what’s next” and keeping one’s job about to be lost to a machine?

Our children text, connect and disappear. For them, the telephone is too close, too intimate—you can hear the breathing. We talk to machines on machines about machines, loving them, hating them for what they can do and not do for us.

The creation of the virtual universe is an act of survival genius. 20th Century’s technological destructiveness, the Holocaust, the nuclear threat and the degradation of the natural world all required that our species find a way out. Space exploration was part of brilliant, desperate, exit strategy. The idea that the heavens could save us was appealing but unrealistic in the short run. We needed to escape our polluted, endangered, dangerous world and create an alternative universe here and now. And we did. Our species developed an entire alternate universe–a virtual world. The virtual electronic digital universe, interacting with world economics, created new frontiers, new jobs, new communities, new wealth, new languages, new forms of communication and community—not in the embodied world, but in a zero/one way of coding and mapping all experience—in the cloud, in the ether, in images, in the invisible, disappeared world of digital life.

The virtual universe is our new frontier. Now, virtuality is not a new thing. One could say that thinking, imagining, dreaming all take place in the mind—the original virtual space. This mind, as virtual world, interacts intimately with the real world. It makes the real world ours, and ourselves part of the real world—a wonderful match. However, this mind-real world relationship takes on a new form when both the mind and the real world are, themselves, being deconstructed and redefined by technology. What is real and what is dream, what is image and what is actual are questions not always easy to answer any longer.

Over the past 200 years, we have exercised our technological genius to expand our muscles to move mountains, our eyes to see outward into the heavens and inward into our cells, our ears to hear the music of distant planets. We can fly like the birds once envisioned only for gods and only in dreams. Our bodies can be restored and our genes altered. In our cities, nothing dwarfs our own creations. We can turn night into day and are imagining the end of death through the permanence of cyber-information. We can make babies in new ways and we can change gender almost at will. Limits are off in this new world. In the virtual universe, as in dreams, anything is possible.

The machine is trying to capture, use and expand consciousness, and unconsciousness as well. Memory is now increasingly a machine property as is large scale planning and design. Our dreams, once the province of the inner screen and our own imaginative capacities are now transformed by technology into the Hollywood Dream Machine. The external screen—large and small—has our full attention for information, learning, commerce, political expression, and propaganda—so long as we pay for the machine. And now, we hear of implanting computers in our bodies such that the external screen will become a part of us. Robotics has our imagination.

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My patient disappears into his room or when out under his sweatshirt hood because being visible is unbearable. Another disappears into silence or verbal ambiguity because his mind is too clogged. Another heads North because he can’t bear the familiar any longer. A man disappears under a wig or in a costume or a role because naked he feels himself freakish. My dearest friend, David Schecter disappeared by flying out a window. Women used to disappear routinely into their husband’s identities. We disappear into our jobs, into sleep, reappearing in dreams invisible to all others. We disappear in death. We constantly disappear and reappear as part of normal existence. Brain imaging studies show how modern technology is edging more and more into the secret inner mental world, while, at the same time, leaving that inner world even more distant.

People have remarkable ways of disappearing while still existing in the physical world. They learn to adjust their face, to say just the right words, to position their body in this way or that. One young patient I saw spent her life adjusting her face, her mouth, her eyes, so that others will think she is there. She ends up grimacing, stretching her neck, looking attentive. As to the Holocaust daughter, no one suspected she was not there, that she had died, but was still walking around. I often found the tension of her pain and her grieving silence unbearable. Since her parents and my parents all came from the same town in Poland, we considered ourselves more like siblings than anything else. I had missed having a sister and she a flesh-and-blood brother. And since I had also somewhat disappeared in the imagination and the reality of the Holocaust, we were a good match. The imagery of the Dybbuk, and of other Yiddish literature, of dead and wandering souls was well familiar to us both and we spent much time in that nether realm where souls mingle and inhabit one another for good and evil.

Disappearing persons sometimes are so deeply disconnected from others that they can only reconnect through the nonhuman world. Of course Harold Searles knew a lot about this realm, And so, my dog hanging out in the office, or the workings of the fireplace, or the patterns of sunlight in the room, or the shells and stones on the table can be an entry point for reappearance.

People who have had to disappear dramatically from life or from others or from aspects of themselves, and who are often diagnosed as the most severely disturbed, can be assisted if one is not too devoted to bringing them around again, but rather by being willing to enter the world of disappearance with imagination, interest, and respect. And mostly, from the side.

Disappearances of many sorts may show up obscured by the up-front presentations. After all, we live in a culture where showing and image are extremely important. How can one be an image and real and disappeared all at the same time? Are we taking more and more pictures as we disappear more and more into obscurity? As we become machines are we trying to capture the picture of the human being more and more insistently? Are we needing to record our various itches and tics as we turn into zeros and ones?

Psychoanalysis, a proud and daring child of the Enlightenment, was born to heal increasing malaise and psychological alienation in the Western mind as a result of the effects of the Industrial Revolution. What will be the role of psychoanalysis in the increasing malaise in the Western—now the World—mind, as a result of the effects of the Electronic Revolution? Does our understanding of mind and especially of dreams offer us any special place in the discussion? Or should we continue to argue about the requirements for training analyst and whether 4 or 3 times a week therapy is best—as we matter less and less, as we ourselves disappear?

Presentation delivered at Division 39, (2011), New York, NY – published posthumously.

Paul Lippmann, Ph.D. was an Adjunct Professor at NYU Postdoc, a Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, and Director of the Stockbridge Dream Society. He lectured and wrote about dreams and their use and misuse in psychoanalytic therapy for close to 50 years. In 2000, he wrote Nocturnes: On listening to dreams. Analytic Books. Paul was a gifted painter and musician (from Chopin to Klezmer music). He passed away earlier this year.

*Edited by Velleda C. Ceccoli, Phd

Photo credit – Vanishing/Velleda C. Ceccoli