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| 2007/01/22 14:46:43瀏覽593｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
DO WOMEN HAVE AN AFFINITY FOR THE ARCHAIC? To the extent that the fantasy is the psychic representative of the drive, which we have already seen, it is important to understand that the term representative as the Kleinians use it, has a dual meaning. In the first instance, the fantasy is a representative of the drive because it is a “transposition”—or rather an “outgrowth”—that precedes the idea and language and that corresponds to the Freudian term Repräsentant. Only then does the representative become an ideal representation that corresponds to the Freudian term Vorstellungsrepräsentant. We have also seen that Klein’s phantasy, more so than Freud’s or other analysts’ notion of the fantasy, is sensitive to—and even privileges—the primary meaning of preverbal representation. This interest in what is primary and what is organic is not the exclusive domain of Melanie and her disciples. Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, a number of female therapists have highlighted the way organic experience informs psychic life: think of Eugenia Sokolnicka and Marie Bonaparte, just to name the most prominent analysts in France, as well as the modern psychosomaticians who followed them. Although this is not an exclusiverly female theme, women’s interest in the organic, which is accompanied by their strong countertransferential impulse, is worthy of our attention.26 If we keep in mind Klein’s contributions to the understanding of female sexuality and the fantasy, and if we reevaluate the contributions that have succeeded her, we can better understand why female sexuality—and not just the female body subjected to the ovarian cycle and to maternity—fosters women’s affinity for the archaic. And we can also understand how this attraction, provided it does not get too bogged down in a faciled and unfortunately all too common organicist complacency, can serve as the driving force for an analysis conceived as psychic rebirth. As first, the little girl is attached to her mother and seduced by her mother. As the child’s mother-container and the father’s wife-lover, this initial presence is inscribed in the girl through an Oedipus conflict that I shall term “Oedipus I.” Freud considered this primary attachment to be a lost archaeology that is almost inaccessible, much like the Mino-Mycenaean period before ancient Greece, an attachment that is experienced as a sort of idyllic, self-sacrificing osmosis. And yet we now know, thanks to Melanie Klein and subsequent observers, that Oedipus I, as a consequence of the death drive, is heavily laden with an anxiety and aggression that taints the effects of dependence and reassuring protection with the fear of corporeal and psychic catastrophe for both the daughter and her mother. Oedipus I, which is always forthcoming although it lacks speech, is dominated by sensation: mouth to nipple, mouth to mouth, skin to skin, and sounds and smells that bathe the “between-women” that leave indelible traces, for better or worse. Oedipus I is at first consumed with orality, and then with anality along with urethral drives and an early perception of the vagina that results from an ambivalence toward the woman who is not yet an object, but an ab-ject, a magnet of gratification and repulsion. At the same time, when the mother’s care is optimal, this sensory intensity is turned into an act of sublimation that appeases the erotic and thanatotic goals of the affects while treating them with great tenderness. As the zero degree of an act of sublimation that will return in the form of female sexuality’s tendency toward amorous or aesthetic idealization, sensuality, along with affects filtered into tenderness, can serve as a starting point for repression. Such repression is a symptom of hysterical excitability, which means it is a malleable repression ridden with sensuality, if not sentimentality. Through the depressive position, the little girl is able to deem the absence of the mother to be a lost whole object. During the phallic phase, the girl changes objects and lays the foundation for her “Oedipus II.” What Klein neglects to mention about this process, of course, is that the little girl identifies with her father just as the boy does, although the girl does so in a different way—a way that evinces a type of splitting. On the one hand, the girl identifies with the father as a Phallus, as a symbolic occurrence that exerts power on the mother through its absence and presence just as it contains a visible and detachable object: the penis. The little girl sees a penis on her own father or perhaps on her brother, and the penis itself becomes an object of desire that is no longer an object inside the mother but an external object of desire for both the mother and the daughter. As the daughter detaches from the mother, she projects hateful feelings toward the female parent—a castrated mother—who did not deprive her of that organ. By tainting the link to the mother with depression, this devaluing of the female encourages the abandonment of the mother as an object of desire in exchange for phallic identification. In the girl, phallicism is preceded by her love and envy of the mother during Oedipus I. At this point, during the phallic stage, and motivated by the detachment from the mother that accompanies the depressive position, this phallicism appears under the form of an investment of signs and thought. The girl appreciates the function of the father, whose authority goes beyond the sensory realm of daily life, and she learns as a result to see her male parent as the primary referent of invisible power, the power of thought. The phallic stage thus orchestrates a surprising encounter between the perception of the father’s symbolic authority, the symbolism of language, and the male organ’s characteristic qualities of being detachable, “guilty,” susceptible to loss, present and absent, turgid and flaccid, and so forth. The logic of the symbolism based on presence and absence and on the binomial O/I tests itself out in the realms of eroticism as well as of representation, with the penis becoming the support for this meaning-generating difference, that is, the organic factor in our psychosexual computer. The child becomes a subject once she separates herself from the object: it is here, during the phallic stage of the Oedipus complex that solidifies the depressive position, that we can properly speak of an “object” for a “subject,” as well objects signify a subject. At the same time, the father’s function is submitted to authority and absence, and the phallus’s function is submitted to the battle between power and castration. The result for the subject is that the phallic stage joins sexuality and thought in a way that melds together the unity of its structure as a structure of desire and inquiry and as a quest for libidinal gratification and thinkable curiosity. Still, although the little girl plays along with the game of this phallic identification—a game that is so decisive for her becoming a subject—she, unlike the boy, feels distant from its dynamic. The girl, for her part, lacks the penis that provides a focal point for the phallic encounter that structures the thinking subject: the clitoris offers only a small-scale equivalent of the penis, and, whatever pleasure it may give her, it remains invisible and unrecognizable. Accordingly, in the phallic-symbolic world that brings on the depressive position, the little girl—the woman—remains an exile. She projects herself onto that world, but she “does not belong to it”: she does not believe in it, or, rather, she pretends to “belong to it” and to believe in it. She experiences all this “belonging” or “belief,” of course, as a sort of masquerade, costuming, disguise, and state of nonbeing. A stranger to the phallic-symbolic universe, she relies on her memory, which becomes increasingly unconscious because it is repressed, of Oedipus I, a Mino-Mycenaean memory of love-and-hatred toward the maternal ab-ject. Estranged from the realm of fathers and the communal social bond that is a symbolic bond, she is the “eternal irony of the community” that Hegel described, a more or less avowed nonbeliever, surely a mystic, loyal and disloyal. And, because she often experiences her ambiguous appearance through her sadomasochism, she is also a stranger to the phallic-symbolic law of the fathers, one of which she partakes without ever being a part. That said, and even as the girl remains with the phallic-symbolic side of things in order to become a subject who speaks and thinks like the others (and often even more rigorously than boys, inhibited as they are by their rivalry with their fathers), she changes objects. Although the girl is a subject of the phallic law and of language and thought, she chooses the penis as an object of desire. Her choice is no longer the mother who contains the penis (as was the case during Oedipus I) but the penis of the man himself (which marks her Oedipus II). Heterosexuality is the consequence of this new choice, one that the girl acquires if she is able to get beyond her envy of her father and to detach herself from her Oedipus I. During Oedipus II, then, the girl desires to take her mother’s place, that is, to reap a child from her father just as her mother had once obtained a child from him. Oedipus I (love-hatred for the mother who possesses the penis), followed by the dual movement of Oedipus II (phallic-symbolic identification and a desire for the father’s own penis): what Freud called psychic bisexuality, which he believed was more pronounced in women than in men,27 is shaped in and is explained by the ambiguity of the the changes in psychic posture that occur throughout the woman’s development. This complex movement helps explain the uncanny maturity exhibited by certain women who manage to achieve psychic bisexuality, in contrast to the immaturity of men who remain attached to their mothers. But it also helps explain the psychosexual difficulties that most women experience and the multiple failures that keep them inside the excitability of hysteria, the throes of depression, or, most commonly, frigidity. Freud, who remained baffled by all this, asked, “What does a woman want?” it is true that, from the maternal ab-ject through phallic-symbolic identification and to the change in object that makes the woman choose the father instead of the mother as an erotic partner, one might very well ask, “Where might we find a woman’s object of desire?” Melanie never posed this question, as she believed that female desire, more than any other desire if such a thing were even possible, is dominated by anxiety. Motherhood forces the woman to confront a new way of experiencing the object: the child, her first real presence, is neither an ab-ject (the Mino-Mycenaean mother) nor an object of desire (the penis/phallus), but the first Other. Or at least the child is capable of being such, as he encourages his mother’s tendency toward sublimation that was already enhanced by the symbolic side of the phallic phase through its inhibiting the goal of the drive and directing it instead toward language and culture. From that point on, the child becomes a harbinger of an alterity that provides female narcissism one last chance to abandon its focus on the self and the mother and to devote itself instead to the Other, that is, to the joys and sorrows of motherhood. It is true that the mother runs the risk at this point of closing herself off in the omnipotence of an androgynous matron (because she has captured the father’s penis to make her own child, and even more so if that child is a boy!) who imagines herself to be fulfilled for the first time through the power that she exerts over her weak child—a child who will no doubt enable her to finally become “actualized.” But she may also find herself forever weakened when she finally discloses her psychic bisexuality (which is nothing less than her incompleteness, the opposite of androgyny) by constantly experiencing her vulnerability with respect to the Other that she has delegated to the world, an Other who is separated from the start and is inherently impossible to master: her child, her love. The piteousness of this maternal mind-set should not prevent us from acknowledging its civilizing tendencies: this compassion toward the Other that allows the drive to renounce its goal of separation and to grant itself not an other goal, but an Other: simply put, a concern for revealing the Other. The child is the first other, and the experience of motherhood is its requisite appendage. It is an interminable experience that is utterly lacking and, for that reason alone, utterly sublime. As the woman fulfills this maternal function, she comes back to her memory of her archaic bond with her mother as well as to her Oedipus I: she recalls her dependency on the other woman and her rivalry with her, and she recalls sensory communication and its primary sublimation, which make eroticism and anxiety its paramours. Motherhood—and, more broadly, the paternal function—from the basis of the caring attitude that transforms the erotic-thanatotic drive, that fundamentally sadistic desire that flings us toward the other, into the solicitude whose only goal—and it should not have any other goal—is to allow one to live in peace.28 Among all the therapists of human misery, the psychoanalyst is the one who most shares this maternal vocation, for he hears psychic pain in the suffering subject. The soul that emerges in the psychoanalytic experience, far from being an abstraction, is a soul of the desiring and hating body. To hear that soul, the act of listening must make itself a paramour of desire and anxiety, thought by de-eroticizing the analysand who transports such desire and anxiety in order to create an Other: the patient is my “different,” a different who lies at the edge of the very indifference that allows him to think about his truths rather than to merge with them. As a constant creation of alterity, psychoanalysis is also an alchemy that transforms anxious eroticism into tenderness. A tenderness with respect to what? To the truths of the Other in which I project myself and yet extricate myself, because those truths are other. As a man of science of law, Freud spoke not of “tenderness” but of “benevolence,” and Melanie, for her part, invoked the sublimation that frees up intelligence and that explicitly formulates the logic of the drives that allows access to thought. In this dynamic, a female analyst who does not censor her own female sexuality remains consumed by the psychic bisexuality mandated by both Oedipus I and Oedipus II. Such an analyst activates within herself—and hears in her analysand—a complex mixture of both the mother’s sensuality and the eroticism/thought imposed by phallic identification as well as by its transformation into a feminine position that takes in the father’s penis in order to obtain a child. The maternal archaic—the archaic of her own relationship to the maternal ab-ject and the archaic of the motherly role she plays for her child—allows her to access the complexity of psychic life as well as the space between drives and words, between thought and the sense. When a woman so constructed listens to or “thinks about” her patient, she is neither applying a system nor making a calculation. The logical process behind what has emerged as a phallic and symbolic computer with its O/I grid, does not dominate here; instead, a striking imaginary coloring permeates our knowledge of transference and countertransference. Only then can the analyst be reborn and enable her analysand to be reborn. Psychic experience as a rebirth requires such access to all the domains of the psychic apparatus, including the transverbal maternal realm. Does this force a regression to the archaic? It would be more accurate to call it an access to the translinguistic primary realm. A psychoanalyst—whether male or female—who claims to restore the psyche not as a system or structure but as the psychic life of the Other, is necessarily confronted with the feminine, even with the maternal inside him or her—the feminine and the maternal that the Kleinian phantasy constantly exposes the analyst to because of its heterogeneous configuration as a “metaphor” incarnate. Melanie’s forays into the archaic laid bare this necessity, and her most creative students understood it as well: were Bion, Winnicott, Tustin, and others not watchful for the feminine and the sensory in them, as well as in us? |
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