Spaces Liminal

Liminal Spaces, Personality and the Art of Kintsugi

Liminality and the Unconscious

Liminality is the space of thresholds and boundaries, borderlines, hinterlands and the indefinable. As such, it is the spaces deep inside ourselves, below the structures of the “ego” or the narratives we like to tell ourselves which are neat, orderly, defined and crystallized into place.

Freud called it the unconscious, but now psychologists dispute whether it “exists”. As if this will make any difference – it’s like disputing whether the soul exists, while knowing that there is a place of slippage and darkness from where impulses arise that we barely recognize, and dreams form themselves out of chaos.

As much as we build over this inchoate space, the concrete foundations for our “magnificent” structure of the ego, paving frantically over the soil of our real being, closing it beneath because we don’t want to hear it, its weeds and shrubs come poking up through the spaces in the slabs, reminding us that there is a whole universe beneath – the place that is “real”.

And in the night, a veritable forest erupts, taking over the house of ego, entangling it in its multiplicitous embrace.

The Foundations and Kintsugi

First come the foundations – and everybody knows, that the foundations are crucial. This is where the “flaws” and fault lines, the tiny fractures that can later on undermine the whole structure, become set into place. And then depending on what happens, they either become sealed, resolved – or are split ever wider open, allowing the cold winds to come whistling through the cracks, creatures to build their nests in the eaves. Things to rustle around in the darkness.

Of course, perfection is never the aim. The Japanese art of Kintsugi where fine cracks in pottery are filled in with Urushi, golden lacquer, highlights the beauty of “imperfection”. No matter how hard we might try to be perfect, polished, “finished” – we are never finished, and it is the imperfection of life that is to be celebrated.

The dish that is repaired with Kintsugi is stronger, less “breakable”, an apt metaphor for the way we respond to life’s turbulences – through more breakage or through our own process of Kintsugi. The result is greater beauty – not the superficial kind, but the kind that comes with experience.

The pattern born of Kintsugi is also unique to every vessel just as our experiences form a unique pattern in our own psyche that can be traced through our behaviours and mapped through our thoughts, yet never quite captured nor understood in its entirety.

Structure and “Knots”: Enneagram and Personality “Disorders”

Beneath our personality – the result of a confluence of factors, our experiences, our genetic predispositions that interact with environmental triggers – are patterns that are indelible and fundamental. In fact, these structures that are common to all of us, are like a framework around which our experiences and genetics loop themselves, repeatedly. Everything is fed through those patterns, our own enneagrammatic type – the “key” to our soul.

Perhaps personality itself is a type of “reaction-formation”. At the lowermost levels of “development” in each Enneagram type lurk our defining pathologies. Where the extremes of our particular type express themselves, down below in the tangled roots. Do not enter for here be monsters. The uncharted depths.

Something that disrupted development, resulting in a small block, a nodule – and then experiences became accreted around that, gradually resulting in an inflexible structure that from then on informed all subsequent development. A lot of psychic energy goes into maintaining these illusions, that are so rigid and lignified that they allow for no real growth.

The Dark Shadows of Narcissism

Sometimes a disorder like Narcissism is so woven into the collective fabric of a society that it is endemic. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, clinically defined in a very explicit set of criteria, and yet the lived experience of those of us who encounter it is, like many clinically defined phenomena, is hard to articulate.

Narcissism can be described well within a dynamic of shame, where the narcissist has none, and shame is projected always onto the other, with every dark impulse lived out through this ongoing dynamic.

And yet without the receptiveness to the narcissist, the dynamic can’t sustain itself, without the human lifeblood it withers and fixates its attentions elsewhere. The narcissists motto would always be, like the traditional vampire films: You let me in.