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| 2007/01/22 15:28:50瀏覽459｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
THE INNER MOTHER AND THE DEPTH OF THOUGHT Klein never broached the subject of her impasse regarding the symbolic value of fatherhood. For proof of this, we need only reexamine the following reflection on the role of the father, which Klein likens to the role of a good mother: The gratification which a man derives from giving a baby to his wife [makes] up for his sadistic wishes towards his mother and making restoration to her….An additional source of pleasure is the gratification of his feminine wishes by his sharing the maternal pleasure of his wife.81 Although it is true that Klein acknowledges here the femininity of man, which others have chosen to ignore, it is also true that Melanie generally has little to say about men other than mentioning their dependence on the mother! In clinical practice, on the other hand, the impact of interpretation does in fact inscribe the paternal function. Through the relevance of what she says, Melanie endorses the role of the familial Other that is assumed by the father, and that the analyst describes through the understated truth of her words. By implicitly safeguarding the function of the father, Melanie thus holds herself out as an analyst and not as a provider of social or maternal assistance. At the same time, this implicit acknowledgment is accompanied by an unprecedented inquiry into the maternal function. The feminists have congratulated themselves on this alternative to Freudian male chauvinism and Lacanian phallocentrism. Other women, on the other hand, have expressed regret about what they consider to be Klein’s “normativism,” that is, her endorsement of the father-mother couple and of heterosexuality as preconditions for a creative development of the psyche. From that perspective, such feminists as Nancy Chodorow,83 Jessica Benjamin,84 and Dorothy Dinnerstein85 rely on Klein’s theory of the object relation to show that the Oedipus complex is not the subject’s only ordeal of autonomy, as was believed by Freud and Lacan, who are said to have used the primacy of Oedipus to suggest that woman exhibit inferior moral and libidinal development. But aren’t these theoreticians trying to replace the unconscious with the object relation and thus replace psychoanalysis with a preventative measure of mental well-being? A special issue of Women: A Gultural Review86 responds to the excess of dogmatic Freudianism and Lacanianism by advocating a “turn to Klein.” The most important contribution made by this rereading of Klein is its exploration of the early relationship between mother and baby—a relationship that is preoedipal in Freud’s sense and part of an early Oedipus complex in Klein’s sense. The authors seek to clarify the role played by the father in the primary logic of the fantasy, one in which the drive is nevertheless articulated in the context of a primary oral identification with a father desired by the mother.87 By focusing her inquiry on the mother (first on the mother’s hold on her child and then on the way the mother is put to death for the sake of symbolism), Melanie Klein the Oresteian situated herself, as I have said, at the heart of the crisis in modern values. Klein essentially contended that making reparation to the father and making restoration to our knowledge of reality are secondary goals of little concern because they have the potential for tyranny and cannot be actualized without the creation of a psychic life. No one has rejected more strongly than Melanie what Jean Gilbert has termed “the lowly desertion of the leader.” Lacking a leader, as the mother is not a leader but an object of fantasy-like power that is the keeper of anxiety, the Kleinian universe is, it turns out, a decentralized universe—the only caveat being that the self, as it loses the object of anxiety and works through that loss, is able to access the life of the mind that Winnicott called “transitionality.” In order for there to be transitionality, the bond with the mother—not with a phallic mother but with a mother consumed with the desire for the father in the form of the penis—is essential. For Klein, this bond is a terrifying one, one that the inevitably phobic child learns to retreat from (Freud’s Little Hans is the prototype of this) with the help of symbolization. To accomplish this, the sadistic-phobic baby relies on both his own capacity to experience pleasure and delight and his mother’s response to his anxieties, as long as she remains sufficiently benevolent and distant. Klein does not underplay desire; she demystifies it in parallel to her demystification of the death drive by showing that it can be thought—and is even a source of thought. The theoretical difficulties that the psychoanalyst encouraged along this path are metaphysical aporias that cannot be avoided by anyone familiar with the human being and its therapies. Such aporias enjoy the awesome privilege of placing us in the most withdrawn space we can imagine—a space that, when the promise of paternal protection that accompanies transcendental protection is taken away, the “thinking reed” that we are presumed to be must face the dramatic alternative that consists of the contemporary version of tragedy. This reduces us to wavering between a dissipation of the self and a contraction of identities, between schizophrenia and paranoia. And we can expect to be accompanied by a slew of paranoid, cruel, and fragile mothers. The analyst who presumes to lead us to the symbol is thus obliged to belong to it, to share this cruel and fragile paranoia in order to leave it behind more easily and, in this state of possession/ dispossession, to constantly relive—and to make us relive—depression as a precondition for creativity: the analyst’s own creativity, and his or her patient’s creativity as well. After joining Freud and Lacan in making eroticism our God and making the phallus the guarantor of identity, we are invited to join Klein as we return to the ambitions for freedom that lie within the coarsest and most archaic realms of our psyche, those in which the one (the identity) never manages to be. It is at this point that we realize that Melanie, despite her image as a matronly woman content to settle down in London to run her school, is our contemporary. Consider the objects of the modern imaginary, the exhibitions or other events that are woven from the fabric of postcoital despair: is it not a bazaar of “internal objects” made up of breasts, milk, faces, and urine, objects underneath words and images of fantasies that are quite cruel and quite defensive, paranoid-schizoid-manic fantasies when they are not simple depressive? This reverses the symbolization process, not to mention the video games whose violence terrifies the associations of parents of school-age children—because such children “project” (and they do project!) themselves onto the video screen until they can longer distinguish between the image and reality—in a modern world that appears to be engulfed by the phantasy in Klein’s retributive and realist sense of the word. What’s different about Melanie’s conception, though, is that in Kleinian practice the analyst accompanies this fantasy, articulates it, and interprets it so it is open to thought—and only then does the analyst get beyond it: not to forbid it, and not to prepress it. The consciousless killers from the American high schools, on the other hand, had only a television screen for a baby-sitter and, deprived of access to any speech that could have freed them from the grips of the imaginary, were the castaways of an incomplete depressive position, the classic victims of paranoid-schizoid regression. By predicting the emergence of such children before the Second World War, Melanie was neither snickering nor reveling, for she welcomed them with the compassion of an accomplice who makes us believe that it is not really so bad to play if playing is part of an effort to put the desire for death into words. She posited, however, that we can do so together, in an entirely different way. Therein lies the turn “politics” of Kleinianism, which still leaves unanswered a fundamental question of psychoanalysis: if it is so obvious that the implicit ideology in Klein’s observations provides a chapter of contemporary social philosophy, how does that inform the workings of her clinical practice? Has post-Kleinianism88 not already done all that it can do? Current psychoanalytic research is characterized by an ecumenism that draws from various schools of thought (Freudian, Kleinian, Bionian, Winnicottian, Lacanian, and so forth) and refines the precise way of listening appropriate for each patient by remaining concerned about offering interpretations that are sensitive to the new maladies of the soul, and without trying to construct novel systems for untold battles to come. This retreat from militancy is not necessarily a lull, nor does it indicate that psychoanalysis has run its course. Quite the contrary, in fact, psychoanalysis is being revived in two respects. First, it is exposing itself to other realms of human activity (society, art, literature, and philosophy) that it elucidates with an innovative mind-set, and it is thus expanding and unfolding the meaning of its own concepts outside the confines of clinical practice. Second, by honing in on specific symptoms, psychoanalysis is being stimulated and diversified, which improves its ability to understand and to care for each patient’s unique qualities while avoiding structural generalities—and which is pressing psychoanalytic intervention to the frontiers of signification and biology. As with many other domains, the era of “geniuses” and overarching systems has been replaced today with personal ventures and exchanges that form a network of ideas. Because of—and despite—Klein’s taste for power, which was encouraged by her era and her personal circumstances, as her core she was a forerunner of these two contemporary trends. Klein believed that the inside of the mother (which is invisible but which is thought to be filled with threatening objects, beginning with the father’s penis) imposed upon both sexes the most archaic anxiety situations: castration anxiety is only a part, admittedly an important one, of the more generalized anxiety that arises from the inside of the body itself. Klein also suggested that “good” object counterbalance “bad” ones. Finally, Klein contended that thought is what allows psychic interiority to take shape, a depth that is at first grieving, then relieving and joyful, and that it is only thing that can help us conquer our fear of this maternal interior. Form one interior to the next, and from anxiety to thought: the Kleinian topography is a sublimation of the cavity, a metamorphosis of the womb, and a variation on female receptivity. Klein transformed her closeness with an unnameable depth into a form of self-knowledge—before she persuaded us that this imaginary knowledge is viable for everyone, women as well as men. Through psychoanalytic interpretation, the incarnate fantasy of the maternal interior becomes a way of knowing the self: psychoanalysis, and no longer faith, provides the optimal path toward self-knowledge. With Melanie Klein, the fantasy connected to the mother lies at the heart of human destiny. In our Judeo-Christian culture, this important revaluing of the mother should not be underestimated. The fertility of the Jewish mother was blessed by Jahwe but removed from the sacred space that harbors the meaning of speech. The Virign Mother then became the empty core of the Holy Trinity. Two thousand years ago the Man of Sorrow, Christ, founded a new religion that lays claim to the father, without wishing to know what he shared in common with his mother. The Kleinian child, phobic and sadistic, is the inner double of this visible and crucified man, his painful inside that is consumed by the paranoid fantasy of an omnipotent mother. That fantasy is one of a killing mother who must be killed, of an incarnate representation of female paranoia in which we discovered the projected paranoid-schizophrenia of our primitive and feeble ego. The subject is nevertheless able to free himself from this mortifying depth, provided, that is, that he can work through it indefinitely until it becomes the only value we still have: the depth of thought. Like the analyst, but unknowingly so, the mother accompanies her child in this working through that causes him to lose her—and then to use words and thoughts to make reparation to her. The maternal function takes refuge in the alchemy that relies on the loss of self and the Other to attain and to develop the meaning of mortifying desire, but only through the love and gratitude that actualizes the subject. The bond of love with the lost object that is the mother—the mother from whom “I” distance myself—replaces matricide and takes on the aura of thought. It is hardly the least striking example of Melanie Klein’s genius that she used the negative to link the fate of the female with the preservation of the mind and the spirit. |
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