THE PHANTASY AS A METAPHOR INCARNATE
THE REPRESENTATIVE BEFORE REPRESENTATION
No matter how far back Klein reaches into childhood, she always discovers a fantasizing ego. A sundry entity made up of verbal and nonverbal representations, sensations, affects, emotions, movements, actions, and even concretizations, the Kleinian phantasy is a wholly impure theoretical construct that defies the purists as much as it fascinates clinicians, particularly those who specialize in children, psychosis, or the psychosomatic disorders. And yet Melanie Klein never explicitly reconciled her various approaches to the term phantasy—in fact, it was an article written by her disciple Susan Isaacs that pursued that subject and rendered it credible.1
As a way to highlight the originality of Klein’s concept in the context of the famous Controversial Discussions that shook up the British Psycho-Analytical Society between 1941 and 1945,2 Susan Isaacs proposed the spelling “phantasy” in order to denote the psychic activity preceding the repression that interested Klein and to differentiate the phantasy from the daydreams, conscious or repressed, that psychoanalysts have traditionally placed under the rubric of “fantasy.” In Isaac’s view, “phantasy is (in the first instance) the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct. There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy.”3
Freud believed that fantasies did not begin before the second or third year of life, and he in fact conceived of fantasies in terms of his model of the dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a model of the psychic apparatus that describes it as a “locality” and compares it to a “photographic apparatus” that produces an image.4
Between the twin markers of perception and motivity, the psychic apparatus is made up of three types of memories: unconscious memories (the deepest and oldest ones), preconscious memories (the verbal and intermediary ones), and conscious memories. The dreamlike reverie known as the fantasy has what Freud considers to be a regressive character: the stimulation regresses to it and follows a retrograde path such that, rather than moving toward an extreme motivity, it approaches sensory extremity. “We call it ‘regression’ when in a dream an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived.”5 Although Freud emphasized that vision and the visual memory are particularly appealing to unconscious thoughts and thus enable them to be expressed, he never forgot that the totality of sensory domains is what is mobilized in the dream and, by extension, in the fantasy. Freud even expressed regret that his own dreams “are in general less rich in sensory elements than I am led to suppose is the case in other people.”6 Perhaps that explains why his notion of fantasy does not really incorporate these sensory elements.
By staging our unconscious desires, Freudian fantasies are fantasies of desires (Wünschen), with the first desire being the hallucinatory investment of the memory of gratification. To those fantasies Freud adds “primal phantasies”7 that are more enigmatic and that contain prehistoric truths that the individual does not necessarily experience himself, but that unconsciously reappear in him to fill in the holes (as well as the fantasies of the primal scene, of castration, or of seduction).
The richness and multilayered meanings of Freud’s insights here have been extended in various ways. Lacan was drawn to the visual side of the fantasy; he developed, through his notion of the mirror stage, an optic model that encompassed his own theory of the fantasy—which he claimed was faithful to Freud’s—and implicitly disagreed with Klein’s theory of the fantasy during a seminar devoted to a critique of her work.8 Lacan considered the eye to be the symbol of the subject, one that emerges before the birth of the ego. He described the onslaught of fantasies that spawned Klein’s interpretations in her case study of little Dick9 as “grafts”10 that functioned through the analyst’s speech: Mrs. Klein’s “signifier,” which proposes equivalences (of the sort “the train is your father”), is what stood the subject Dick in good stead and allowed him to see his unconscious desires and to travel down the path of speech.
This Lacanian critique is helpful because it illuminates one of the ways in which Klein’s method is effective: Lacan highlights the effect of verbalization on the unconscious fantasy. For a child who understand language but who does not yet know how to speak—that is, a child who has language but not speech—the analyst’s naming of his fantasies helps him shift from a mental universe based on identities (the identity of the father and the train, as suggested by Dick’s playful actions) to a universe based on similarities (the similarity between the father and the penis, as was believed and put into words by the analyst)—and thus places the child in the realm of the imaginary.11 In treatment, this shift in domain (from identity to similarity) occurs with the help of the analyst’s speech. In Lacan’s view, Klein’s speech had the effect of facilitating Dick’s access to play, which until that point had remained rudimentary at best; Klein also exposed him to the domain of the symbolic, that is, to the domain of the thought that she articulated. The imaginary and the symbolic were therefore able to rise to the level of the young patient’s drive-based real—in the same way that, in the mathematical logic of the optical realm, the real and the imaginary become one, which must be stated explicitly. Though this visionary critique is thorough and appealing, it says nothing about the sundry nature of the fantasy, at least not in the context of Klein’s own conception as she projects herself onto her own regressive unconscious before giving it a sort of name—in a mythical way, it turns out, and in a way that is heavily laden with the drives.
It is true that the term projection, as it is used here, reflects the optical excess that Lacan correctly highlighted as part of his emphasis on the role of the eidos—of the idea—in the appearance of the drive in the fantasy, a role that had been neglected by his predecessors’ naïve empiricism. Lacan’s refocus on the metaphysical foundations of representation comes at the cost, however, of retreating from the world of the Kleinian fantasy/phantasy.
“At first,” as Susan Isaacs puts it, “the whole weight of wish and phantasy is borne by sensation and affect.”12 It is true that if we read closely, as does Jean-Michel Petot, the first analyses of children that Klein recounted in The Psychoanalysis of Children, we will be inclined to agree with Isaacs’s conclusion. The unconscious or preconscious fantasy is present in all psychic activities and behaviors, so much so that the fantasy is an “active presence of fantasy scenes.”13 Such a fantasy is, strictly speaking, bound up with motivity, taste and food aversions, the sharpness of the perception (particularly the visual perception) of the primal scene, the image of the body, voice-song-and-speech, sporting activities, concert-show-and-film attendance, educational and intellectual activities, neurotic symptoms, and, in the end, the entire organization of the personality. Not only is the totality of psychic life impregnated with fantasies, but in the children whom Klein listened to and analyzed, the fantasy—that is, the fantasy that precedes repression—is united with psychic life because this fantasy and this life, “the representatives of the earliest impulses of desire and aggressiveness, are expressed in and dealt with by mental processes far removed from words and conscious relational thinking.”14
This brings up one of the most difficult problems in psychoanalytic theory, one that Klein’s clinical approach addressed creatively without theorizing the concept as such, thereby leaving it to her successors to explore a subject that is the focus of current psychoanalytic inquiry: what is psychic representation? Or, put another way, what are the psychic representations?
Because Klein returned to the “whole weight of sensation and affect” in the primary fantasy, she could justly boast of her faithfulness to Freud’s thought. Isn’t it true that Freud, a few pages after he compares the psychic apparatus to a photographic apparatus in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), outlines the regressive “trace” of sensation? Similarly, the Kleinian “phantasy” includes by implication the memory traces described in “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” (1925)15 without being identical with them, and her “phantasy” adds such traces to the “photographic apparatus” in the sense of a model of psychic representation. Still, as compared with the amalgam of diverse domains of representation that define the Kleinian phantasy (sensations, affects, gestures, actions, verbal and nonverbal representations, and even the concretizations themselves to which fantasies and psychotic suffering are sometimes reduced—and that is just the beginning), Freud’s notion of the “representation” of the drive in the psychic apparatus connotes a meaning that is far more “diplomatic”16 than is Klein’s. Put another way, the Kleinian phantasy includes elements that emerge before representation or without it altogether, elements that her followers would seek to conceptualize. Lacan, for his part, adopted a decidedly Greek approach by shifting psychic representation toward the appearance and toward the visibility of the eidos. Psychoanalysis today focuses on this clinical and conceptual exploration of the transverbal archaic realm that Melanie brought to our attention, a realm that belies ideal or visual representation.17
It is true that both Isaacs and Klein use the term fantasy, a term whose etymology clearly evokes appearance-presence-and-vision, but both women distance the term from its Greek etymological and metaphysical origins and saturate it instead with the reality of drives and with such primary “contained” contents as greed and envy. What is more, the sensation of a drive in the psychic apparatus is automatically associated with the fantasy of an object that is appropriated to it, with each incitement of the drives having its own corresponding fantasy (the desire for food, for example, is associated with the affect of hunger and the breast object). From the moment of birth, the drive engages in a binary expression: sensation/affect18 and the object both coexist, and the presentation of the object clings to sensation. The Kleinian phantasy is the mechanism of this juncture, of the drives’ destiny to be both inside and outside: it is an “object-seeking” drive.19
Fantasies are not content simply to incite the drives, for they also play a defensive role by producing feelings of gratification that are independent of reality—and that may even deteriorate reality. Such feelings reinforce the omnipotence of the ego and allow it to defend itself against its own destruction (in this sense, the fantasy of being attacked by the “bad” breast is a defense against the feeling of destroying oneself by attacking the “good” breast).
Because of this protopresence of the fantasy and this protopresence of the ego, the destiny of the drive is not circumscribed by the conditions of an external reality. This brings up a central feature of Klein’s theory: with regard to psychic life, fantastical fear and anxiety have a greater impact than does the real separation between mother and child, regardless of whether such separation is enduring, dramatic, or neither of the two. The fantasy—by representing not reality, but the duo of “drive and internal object” and “sensation/affect and object,” and by anticipating the future while overestimating the threats that future poses—transforms deprivation into frustration. From that point on, a degree of negativity informs the fantasy-like activity, one that goes through several stages before it accesses the capacity to symbolize through language and thought. According to the whims of the object relation, such reinforced negativity generates a series of fantasies: sadistic, paranoid-schizoid, manic, and depressive fantasies that pave the way for an optimal representation of the drives by working through them, that is, by integrating split-off objects and the reinforcement of the ego. In Klein’s view, the fantasy is still wholly bound up with the constants of the unconscious: anxiety, greed, and gratitude.
Is the fantasy a metaphor? It most certainly is, in the sense that it replaces one object by another or condenses one object into another. Still, Melanie Klein was not enamored of the simple rhetorical trope of the metaphor, nor was she drawn to plays on words. Instead, she preferred the axis of similarity that provides a space for the sort of metaphoric substitution that occurs in the fantasy (for example, the “train” as a replacement for “papa” and the “penis”). The therapist posited, in fact, that a comparable anxiety of destruction comes on the heels of a repressed libido: the same sort of anxiety latches on to “papa,” the “train,” and the “penis” and permeates the entire sequence or condensation of the series of objects and words that are fungible in the child’s imaginary. This logical process stems from the omnipresence of an Oedipus conflict in which the desire for the mother and the feelings of rivalry toward the father are fused together by the death drive.20
Furthermore, when Melanie Klein interpreted her patients’ fantasies—in both children and adults—she was simply describing to them the Oedipus myth as embellished by a primordial and destructive sadism. As a result, the meaning of the fantasy that she “grafted” upon them is not a random “signifier” that symbolizes the more or less dichotomous chaos of drives by introducing them into the tripartite structure of linguistic signs. On the contrary—and this point is important—the goal is to inscribe the fantasy in an oedipal container that surrounds the autonomy of the subject as well as in the prevalence of the death drive, whose ambiguity never failed to impress Klein because it is clearly destructive but also, under certain conditions, highly constructive. It should come as no surprise, then, that the theorist does not speak of “primal fantasies”: no matter how diverse Kleinian phantasies may be as they respond to the various “positions” that they reflect, they are intrinsically “primal” and are brought about by an extremely early Oedipus conflict and by the permanence of the death drive.
Interpretations by the analyst herself, which are bound up in transference and countertransference, are an integral part of the fantasy under analysis. Interpretation is the upper psychic face of the fantasy—its symbolic elaboration into a myth or a body of knowledge (as myths are our archaic bodies of knowledge, and our bodies of knowledge concerning human essence can never be completely separated from myths). In the end, in fact, through the uncanny encounter that occurs in treatment between the child’s fantasy-play (or the adult patient’s associative fantasy) and the analytic interpretation moored in the Oedipus complex and the death drive, the fantasy adopts all the features of a metaphor incarnate.
“PRENARRATIVE ENVELOPES” BETWEEN ANXIETY AND LANGUAGE
Recent studies inspired by cognitive science appear to confirm Klein’s hypothesis of a proto-fantasy in the baby in the sense of a quasi-narration that articulates the drive and desire and that hones in on the object (the breast, the mother) to ensure the survival of the phobic and sadistic young ego.
In children under a year old, it is true that one can observe “generalized event representations,” “story schema,” or “cognitive affective models” that, from the beginning, adopt the form of a “prenarrative envelope.”21 Such an envelope reflects a subjective reality that is primarily affective and that displays the logical properties of the drive: desire (or motivation), an aim, its realization, an unraveling in time, repetition, an association of memories, a line of dramatic tension tantamount to a primal story, and so forth. As an emotional, physical, and already subjective experience that bases itself on drives that function in an interpersonal context, this prenarrative envelope is thus a mental construction that emerges from the “real” world; it is an “emergent property” of thought. Under this framework, various “centers” tasked with controlling a host of mental processes (sensations, the needs of the drives, motivity, language, place, time, and so forth)—also known as parallel distribution processing, or PDP—are able to coordinate themselves at a higher level by integrating with a unified event whose structure is similar to the structure of narration.
Just as generative grammar theory posited the existence of innate linguistic competence (with a limited matrix for each utterance: subject-verb-object) that is manifested later on in the form of grammatical performances that follow the rules of a given language, our current understanding is that a basic, if not innate, narrative structure begins to take shape from the moment of the newborn’s first drive-based interactions. From that perspective, “prenarrative envelopes” are accompanied by “cognitive representations” that are neither a pure experience nor a pure abstraction but intermediaries between the two. The fantasy, then, is a cognitive representation of a narrative envelope experienced in real time.
This theoretical insight is quite appealing, but we must keep in mind that the analytic experience that it draws upon also reveals that the fantasy (and thus the narrative envelope itself) is inscribed in an emotional context that must precede any realization of the fantasy sequence. More specifically, the fantasy acts in this way through the oral-anal-genital destructive drives to which it is inextricably linked. Put another way, the prenarrative sequence that characterizes the formal logic of the fantasy depends on the possibility of expressing—or of not expressing—this destructiveness. On the one hand, the child manifests such destructiveness, and on the other hand, the mother recognizes it through its conduit, which is the death drive. The famous case study of young Dick demonstrates this point brilliantly.
Kleinian and post-Kleinian clinical practice, which has proved that a narrative thought is contained in the protofantasy, is founded not upon the locus of early narrative logic but on the locus of the primary anxiety that is a precondition for thought, provided that the object acknowledges it and rejoices in it (by way of the mother, or, even better, the analyst).
We also witness such excessive anxiety when we encounter modifications in the canonical narrative scheme, whether they be in a patient’s free associations or in a novelist’s technique. At the same time, moreover, the psychoanalytic experience shows us that the protofantasy, as a “prenarrative envelope” of an “emergent property” requires the speech of the other before it can become a fantasy. Although it is true that Klein emphasized the preverbal and affective side of the narrative envelope known as the fantasy, she also linked it—through the very intervention of the analytic frame-work—with the analyst’s verbal interpretation, which in turn, through the help of the analyst’s own words, guides prenarration toward the narrated fantasy itself. Indeed, the narrative that consists of the therapist’s named fantasy, which interprets the protofantasy enacted by the child, raises the child’s emergent thought to a third level: a level that shall be termed symbolic, one in which primary anxiety, recognized and restored as such in the narrative of interpretation, encounters optimal conditions for the child’s own narration to prevail before other forms of thought even enter the picture.
Although the notion of the Kleinian phantasy as a metaphor incarnate allows us, as we have seen, to appreciate the uniqueness of both the childlike fantasy and the psychotic fantasy and to appreciate their heterogeneity—its representations and “concretizations”—this notion also presents risk. And they are significant ones: in analytic treatment, the danger is in underestimating the metaphoric meaning of the fantasy—to see only the reality of substantiated objects and to ignore the role of metaphor, that is, to ignore this imaginary metaphoricity and to remain stuck in a psychological realism. In that case, the analyst would succumb to the symbolic equations of psychosis and might even run the risk of encouraging psychosis itself because he has deprived himself of the necessary means to transform those equations into an effective symbolization.
The Controversial Discussions22 highlighted these pitfalls, and a close reading of the Kleinians’ rebuttal suggests that both Melanie and her followers were cognizant of this possibility. The Kleinians distinguish between the patient’s imaginary and the analyst’s imaginary, the latter being quite fruitful, in their estimation, because it is the privileged material of analytic work as practiced with varying degrees of grace in the space between the boundaries of psychotic concretizations, and because it reflects predisposition to adapt to a normative reality. The Controversial Discussions also appear to have arrived at just the right time to usher in this enlightenment, an enlightenment that would not have occurred without the intervention of the debates—even if these dangers still endure, and even if many practitioners still confuse the domains of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, which Lacan later distinguished with much fervor.23
Other analysts have taken the precaution of distinguishing the various interpretive domains of analytic treatment in the light of the regressive psychic movement toward the drive and the senses. This demand for rigor is reflected in the work of Bion, who supported an analytic theory rooted in a metaphoric language that describes psychic reality. Because Bion feared that such a language might itself induce people to confuse the domains, he relied on such abstract notions as L, H, and K: “(1) X loves Y; (2) X hates Y; and (3) X knows Y. These links will be expressed by the signs L, H and K.”24 Motivated by a similar concern, Winnicott emphasized that psychic phenomena are processes, a notion he insisted upon to the point of abusing the gerund form: being, living, dreaming, fantasizing…. At root, however, both men remained loyal to Klein’s conception of a primary—if not primitive or primal—psychic functioning that is manifested in the mental experience of the baby and of the psychotic through such terms as Winnicott’s “primitive retaliation” and Bion’s “nameless dreads,” or through what they both considered to be formlessness or a “thing-in-itself.”
Did the confrontation with this fantasy-like primary universe result from the psychoanalyst’s regression? Did it stem from a theoretical deficiency that was compensated for by the imagination of the therapist, who became troubled by the enigmatic functioning of a baby or of a psychotic who resists verbalization? Or, on the contrary, did Klein’s empirical forays reflect the intrinsic need for analytic listening because the fantasy is the one true object of every analyst? It is only by accompanying the analyst’s own fantasy with an image of itself that the analyst can guide the patient, always incompletely, toward psychic truth and encourage the patient’s encounter with reality. That process does not, for all that, inspire a skepticism about the knowledge of the human experience but, rather, the certainty that the imaginary is the very locus of truth, without which truth would be bound up with repression.
On the other hand, those who try to ignore the fantasy—either by vitiating it by contracting it or by undervaluing the imaginary—are doomed to be unable to hear the unconscious material whose only means of appearing is in the fantasy itself. At best, such analysts can listen to the material in their clinic, but they will resist it through their religiously purified theories. It is worthy of note that it was women (Klein, Isaacs, and Heimann) who had the courage in this debate to emphasize the role of the fantasy in the process of knowledge, while men such as Bion, Winnicott, and, in his own way, Lacan were left using the symbolic to curb the imaginary. Not only did Klein work on the imaginary (of the child) and in the imaginary (of the analyst), but her work was so deep and intense that the interaction between the two imaginaries (the child’s and the analyst’s) as they focus on bodies and their acts can only give the impression that we are digging into our guts in the manner of “an inspired gut butcher,” as Lacan once quipped.
Perhaps we should seek a more empathetic approach to Klein’s fantastical forays into fantasies. By placing herself as close as possible to frustration—rather than to gratification, Klein did not fail to substantiate the unconscious, which from a certain perspective she could be accused of doing. On the contrary, she reclaimed this anamorphosis of the body into the mind, of sensations and affects into signs, and vice versa—an anamorphosis in which the word “imaginary” remains far too one-dimensional, but also one for which Christianity has invented the term incarnation. “Melanie Klein was able to give life to the unconscious, and metaphor absorbs its incarnate features.”25
And yet Klein rejected the idealist and idealizing tendencies of the version of Christianity that uses the logic behind incarnation to repress the body and sex in the name of spirituality. In its place, she revived flesh within the word, and she privileged the body of drives and passions within the imagery and symbolism that weave patients’ fantasies together.
Among all the tributes to the genius of Christianity that have accompanied the advent of its third millennium, one tribute has been ignored: by situating itself in the space in which the Word is turned into flesh, and vice versa, the Christian experience has embarked on a journey to the end of night in which words and things become one. Is this a mystery of the unintelligible or rather an acknowledgment of psychosis? Because Christianity was established on the frontier between the two—a frontier that it subsequently reflected upon—it can lay claim to a certain universalism and can subsume the other religions. Psychoanalysis may well be the only thing that acknowledges this challenge to Christianity, for psychoanalysis is based on a model of the psychic apparatus that incorporates sexuality and acts through transference love.
What is known as Freud’s “Copernican” revolution does not reside solely in the wound that Freud struck at the heart of man-God by ousting our mastery of consciousness through the unconscious logic of desire. Even more radically, psychoanalysis seeks to inscribe language and thought in the sexual drive, including in its biological substratum. The Kleinian phantasy hastens this recasting of the dualism between body and soul. By positing that flesh-and-soul are forever linked in the heart of the human being, psychoanalysis surpasses its strictly clinical and sometimes excessively ideological strains. Even if it is difficult for us to admit, psychoanalysis partakes in an indispensable strain of modern thought that has endeavored, for more than a century, to effect a gradual and yet audacious dismantling of metaphysics, beginning with its dichotomous categories (body and soul, subject and object, space and time, and the like). From that perspective, the way Klein listens to the fantasy and then interprets it appears to reflect this deconstruction of metaphysics that is of particular interest to the post-Catholic debate between psychoanalysis and metaphysics. We still must acknowledge, however, that the myth of Christian incarnation has already attempted to reorganize metaphysical dualism: the body of the Man of Sorrow is a soul, and the soul is a body in the dynamic of transubstantiation. By rendering Freud radical, Klein relies on all of her therapeutic sense to transform this myth and its deconstruction into care and respect for the other. The fantasy seems indeed to be both the object (the patient’s fantasy) and the Archimedean point (the analyst’s fantasy) of this experience.
Despite these formal psychoanalytic and philosophical advances, however, we still have a long way to go before we can describe how the analyst’s verbalized fantasy, which is shared through transference and countertransference, encourages the subsequent modification that transforms the prenarrative envelope into a named and playful fantasy. Through the narrative recounted by the child, it also frees up the internal logic of narration—as well as the internal logic of nonnarrative, scientific, and theoretical manifestations.
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 exclusively 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 facile and unfortunately all too common organicist complacency, can serve as the driving force for an analysis conceived as psychic rebirth.
At 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 0/1 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 all 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 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—form 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, though 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 0/1 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?