Note on Doing
The term “doing” has come up quite a bit in my recent stretch of posts as I found myself stumbling upon it with some frequency in the work of Donald Winnicott, particularly in relationship to “being”. As Winnicott’s thought matured over the years, he seemed to bring the word “being” up more frequently and seemed at times to be devising a psychoanalysis of being. And I’m not the only one to think so. There is a pocket of contemporary British Analysts who seem especially interested in this developmental trajectory in Winnicott’s work, with a substantial body of secondary literature accumulated in exploring this facet of his work.
The relationship between the two terms shows up in maxims like “Be before do” and “Creativity is the doing that arises out of being”. Winnicott also talks quite a bit about lines of development from non-being to being. The trouble I think I sometimes encounter has its origins in the way something like “doing” is often framed in the world of phenomenology. Doing is often seen as something more ontic than ontological in the basis of Being. Further, it seems doing is often pegged at the more vulgar end of ontic behavior, being perceived as a somewhat object-oriented way of engaging with one’s world and the others in it.
My contention is that I don’t think this is always necessarily true. As I have been revisiting the work of Heidegger, I have been rereading Being and Time in order, though also allowing myself to be pulled away at times by other texts. It is thus with good fortune that I was able to revisit Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”. Having now read B&T, it is interesting to note how Heidegger’s other writings illuminate and complement various aspects of that text. This essay revisits various aspects of Dasein as it intersects with language, meaning, and thought. And it is the parts of the essay which tackle “thought” that I want to home in on here.
In the text, Heidegger compares two forms of “Thinking” that I suspect could say something about the way I am thinking about doing as Winnicott describes it as opposed to the way doing might be interpreted from a behavioral-based, directive, interventionist mode. Heidegger is trying to wrestle the word thinking back to ontology/Being and away from the techne of philosophical theorizing. The complaint is that the use of thinking and language towards a mere philosophical exploration of metaphysics covers over being. Rather than language serving as the “house of the truth of being” it “surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over being”. Thinking of a certain sort draws us away from being and into a description of some element of being that in its attempts to explain, loses the ability to accurately describe, or better yet reveal being as Dasein. The kind of thinking Heidegger is advocating for is a thinking that can “descend” into the “nearness of the nearest”, his having said on many instances that being is that which is farthest away because it is nearest.
My suspicion is that when Winnicott is advocating “be before do” this is the kind of doing he is advocating for. Earlier in the paper, against trying to offer a description of the kind of thinking he is promoting, Heidegger offers the following: “Said plainly, thinking is the thinking of Being. The genitive says something two fold. Thinking is of Being in as much as thinking, coming to pass from Being, belongs to Being. At the same time thinking is of Being in so far as thinking, belonging to Being, listens to Being.” Likewise, I think Winnicott wants to promote a kind of do-ing that is of Being and, especially, listens to Being.
Therapy itself is fundamentally an enterprise of listening. You will often hear seasoned therapists of a particular sort advocate that in the hardest moments of therapy, the most important thing to do is “just be there”. To refrain. To be reticent. I want to offer up the possibility that this, in itself, is a kind of doing, and one that is at times scoffed at a bit. That therapy as “doing” is the enterprise of those that would come in with coping skills and try to “fix”, “manage”, or “ameliorate” whatever the client might be feeling or experiencing. To be sure, this kind of doing follows the same kind of thinking which Heidegger is highlighting when he denounces thinking as “techne”, as the technical philosophizing that first took shape with Plato and Aristotle, and became concerned with constructing a metaphysics of values, ethics, science, etc. But anyone who has read Winnicott knows this is not his preferred strategy for entering into the therapeutic encounter. Winnicott wanted (and wants other clinicians) to evoke. He wanted to be in encounters which allowed his clients the freedom to be in their earliest developmental experiences in the here-and-now of the therapy session, to allow the past to present itself so that it may again become a (different kind of) past. He practiced with real tenderness, often taking the metaphors of the holding environment to the literal extreme and bringing modes of physical contact into the therapeutic encounter if he felt it was what the situation with the client was calling for. He was not trying to do something to or for the client which would create a particular kind of moment, he allowed the moment to create that which needed to be done.
At the end of the day, therapy is an activity. Doing it well seems to be predicated on the idea that doing itself can be a mode of existential activity if it can be rooted in the ek-sistence of Dasein. It can’t be that all doing falls into the categories of present-at-hand or ready-to-hand. Some modes of doing must depart from a place of existential authenticity. Holding, containing, even the ways in which we challenge our clients, if and when we feel the timing is right, are about ways of being-in the moment. It is a doing that demands presence, awareness of modes of related, answering the call to authenticity. It’s about knowing you are always already “in it” but also being curious about how you are in it. Knowing that whatever is happening already is it. And that all of this can yield itself to a way of doing-as-being which honors the richness and complexity of the experience of truly being-with another. Of allowing the creativity that arises out of the therapeutic encounter to be the doing that discloses and reveals the truth of being.
