“Sensuality, desire, greed and the quest for love”

The Osmothèque inside Jean Baptiste Grenouille.
Patrick Süskind's "Perfume"

The Egyptians considered the nose to be the most important orifice in one’s body and handled it with great care during mummification, just as they maliciously sliced off the nose of an enemy’s face to prevent his survival in the Land of the Dead. Their ancient linkage of the nose with life finds an echo in the discovery, in modern times, which the brain evolved from a pair of primitive olfactory sensors at the upper end of the spinal cord, establishing the antecedence of scent over the now predominant sight and hearing. (Taschen, 2010. P.165.)

Among humans, the nose can detect 10,000 more flavors than the incorrectly credited tongue, the nose is nevertheless associated with highly nuanced instinctual and intuitive functions, like associating romance with a musky perfumed vapors to find “the right chemistry” or tracking down the scent of a crime. The Egyptians understood that the breath passing through a goddess’ nostrils to give eternal life to a deceased kind would impart a fundamental reality, for the nose is like a forgotten portal to the archeology of the psyche. (Taschen, 2010. P.362).

The nose of Jean Baptiste Grenouille is peculiar and one of a kind; it can smell almost anything and has the capacity of memorize the scent of whatever it smells. The way his early life is presented, odors that related to him were disgusting and sickening to the human nose, but not to Grenouille, recognizing them immediately, embracing them and actually incorporating them to his own memory. Symbolically, rotten smells are traditionally associated with the vaults of hell, the moral sewers of life, while paradise is scented with rose and lotus, and the mere memory of a past love, like Flaubert, preserving his lover’s perfumed slippers in his desk drawer, is fondly brought back to life by a single whiff.

Let’s begin with the meaning on the name “Grenouille”, which means frog in French. A frog is an ancient Egypt leaning forward in a balanced squat, its skin moist-looking, its head tilted upward, the protruding eyes focused, that it seems its tongue will suddenly dart out of its wide mouth and pull an insect in or the long hind legs, in a nimble leap, carry it to another part of the pond. Grenouille “leaps” from person to person on his journey to create the perfect perfume. Frogs are also the first to let us know when nature is drastically out of balance (one of the reasons why, perhaps, in fairy tales they bring in what’s missing). Currently one of the most threatened groups of animals on earth, they are an accurate indicator of a traumatized biosphere and of a future that might be woefully absent of their mosquito and fly-catching, their brilliant colors, their fervent forms of every size and knobby embellishment, and their raucous song of espousal. (Taschen, 2010. P.190). Frogs are cold-blooded, hibernate and survive on what they’ve stored within themselves, which hints at Grenouille’s surviving on his olfactory memories for seven years in that cave.

Only things that smell had meaning for Grenouille, language lacked this refinement for communicating the richness of his olfactory world. He created new smells in his mind by combining the ones that he already knew and he had the capacity to smell these through his own imagination. In a way he appears to effectively shut out the world he lives in, he has forgone love in favor of survival, and something he is very good at is surviving. He has made his decision “vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be” (Suskind, 1986. P.25)

The author possesses a very keen and vivid awareness with the most elemental and basic emotional and sensory states, it is a representation of every significant aspect of the mind and it’s repercussions through the process of life. Odor is a powerful signifier of Grenouille’s earliest memories and perceptions; it’s primitive, archaic, almost invisible and totally neglected.

Grenouille’s birth and primal experiences have provided him a vulnerability to following environmental failures while at the same time giving him an exact and unique method of survival. The first part of the book presents Grenouille as an unwanted child, “dead meat”, an inconvenience to his mother and to society that must immediately be discarded and forgotten. Although his mother conceives him he is never actually conceived of by her. The perfume of decay in that marketplace is what first welcomed Grenouille into the world. His first contact wasn’t a caring and nurturing mother, but the smell of death. His identity is established right in that precise moment, in the very start of his existence, both within and immediately after the womb.

His mother’s own narcissistic desires became true, Grenouille was born to be inconspicuous around all these conspicuous odors, and he was without a doubt invisible, to her and to the world, in other words, odorless.

Grenouille starts to create a fantasy world primarily out of scent in it’s most primitive way in which he immerses himself, a form of protecting himself against this premature awareness of this great terror and intolerable psychological pain related with abandonment and neglect. That is why Grenouille is capable of surviving constant rejection and great traumatic experiences and abuse.

Grenouille finds no relief when he is with his foster mother, Madame Galliard. Although he is given some physical care, it lacks emotional value. He becomes a “tick”, abandoning all human relations; he emits nothing and is impenetrable. In the hands of Grimal, he is abused and suffers psychological traumas from which apparently makes him even more immunized against death.

Grenouille’s first encounter with the “perfume” that may be representing the essence of goodness and innocence occurs during these same days. This “goodness” is transformed into a smell of a virginal girl, which may seem as a cliché but it’s also purity and innocence and this women who have been with no one, untouched, unpolluted, unstained. There may be a strong implication that the “perfume” is related to the idealized maternal object and an innocent baby (Grenouille) in a symbiotic and undifferentiated early state.

But why death is the only answer to preserve the scent for himself? Perhaps experience has taught him that objects must be frozen or somehow immobilized in order to keep them from exerting their own will and eventually and inevitably abandoning him. For the first time, Grenouille experiences the bliss of atonement and discovers a reason to live, a desire to move on; the creation of beautiful scents. (the “essence” of the idealized mother)

Twice, with Grimal and Baldini, he experiences this psychosomatic breakdown that may be related to the extreme of physical abuse and psychic decomposition. After this two episodes he is “born again” with a growing sense of grandiose omnipotence. This grandiosity is represented in the relationship with Baldini, in scenes where he magically reproduces and invents scents surpassing those of his master’s imagination.

Even as he is exploited, Grenouille is able to achieve something similar to a life of his own. When he leaves Baldini, he stays isolated in an inhabited cavern for seven years, which symbolically represents a “womb like” environment and this ideal of an olfactory peace. He recovers his primal experience, this pre birth experience of “being the only human being in the world” of the maternal body. There are many symbols of fetal existence from the “virgin” tunnel, to the umbilical snakes that nourish him and the uterine wall (rocks) that he licks to obtain moisture. He is re-living the smells of his past as a way of protecting himself from the terrifying awareness of his vulnerability.

Finally, a dream penetrates Grenouille’s mind, making him feel sick and suffocated. “He was deathly afraid, his whole body shook with a raw fear of death…he sat there shivering and trying to gather his confused, terrified thoughts, he knew one thing for sure: he would change his life, if only because he did not want to dream such a frightening dream a second time. (Suskind, 1986. P.164) This is just a reaction to this long process of introspection, a reaction to this awareness that he was nobody.

He leaves the cave; he wants human contact once again. He now has a new obsession: creating and possessing a “superhuman scent” in order that he might inspire love. An important part is that Antoine Richis (Laura’s father) provides the necessary insight for understanding Grenouille’s motivation. He believes that the murderer’s aim is not to destroy but to collect, and he is not trying to attack beauty but to conserve beauty for himself.

Grenouille’s triumph is empty, as always he couldn’t find reciprocity for his emotional states. Just as his overflowing love and his craving for attachment have been met in the past with hatred, so now his overwhelming hatred begets only love. Once again, was overcome by the “fog of his colorlessness”; the feeling of desintegration. He is filled with terror that constitutes the final and devastating realization of the agreement between his internal and external realities.

In the end, Grenouille grows increasingly maddened by this uncaring world, he is defeated by despair by this painful realization that he might never been seen and loved for himself: that he might never become himself. Once again he seeks an experience of being “one” with the body of the mother.

Toward the end, he provokes the band of homeless people to a cannibalistic ritual and is finally “taken in”, eaten in an act of “love”. Of course, this is the ultimate act of love; in concrete terms is the baby’s experience of being introjected by the maternal object; an experience, which the baby must have in order for him to be able to incorporate a sense of a containing object.

All the deaths of all those beautiful innocent girls, with their hair shaved off, stripped of their clothing and robbed of the very “essence” of their being is a reenactment of Grenouille’s infancy. He had also been robbed of his own essence; his innocence, long ago sacrificed for the sake of his own human survival. All this deaths represent those horrible experiences of an abandoned and dying baby.

The story of Grenouille conveys the purest form of trauma, maybe it is an extreme personification but it reflects how society and human beings mold themselves in order to persevere. Perfume is the story of a murderer, but it is also the story of an artist. There is something luring in the dissonance between the evil deeds Grenouille commits and the beauty he ultimately created. He can’t be dismissed as a moral failure: he is also an artist of precise dedication, passion and skill. He is obsessed with maintaining and possessing beauty for all time, and not concerned with transitory life, not even his own. He is not terrifying because he is evil, but because his evil deeds just slide off him as though he were coated with Vaseline. If we cheer for his artistic success, even just out of curiosity, we are being part of his crimes. Do we all have a Grenouille-like coating that keeps us from feeling the pain? Is the passion that drives this murderous artist alive in us as well?

The ending is really what makes the book a masterpiece. It becomes clear then that what Grenouille was trying to do was create a physical distillate of love. Neither sex nor beauty; Love. He made the perfect match of feelings of love, both emotional and physical; a love with perfect eroticism. They absorbed him entirely; he became part of them, just as a person in love wished to become part of his lover. But this is the omnipotent part, he represented the very concept of love and his physical absorption by the people represents their ultimate adoption and understanding of that concept.

Another important aspect is the objectification of women. Of course in reality “beautiful” women, whether young or not, virgin or not, don’t necessarily smell any better than anyone else. The reason to make them represent this perfect scent is related to this long societal tradition based on puritan male fantasies. Objectification of women is all about reducing them into objects to be used in fantasy. Grenouille does this literally in creating his perfume from them that induces fantasies. The metaphor for his dehumanization in the book is death since it’s the only way to reduce them to the essence of their scent.

Since the moment of Grenouille’s birth, survival skills and his relation to society evolved and fought in opposite directions. He survived this very hard adolescence, without any sexual discovery of this awkward phase. He inhaled the scent of more than 20 women. He was a despicable, emotionless and heartless scoundrel capable of producing artistic works of sublime beauty. There are many unanswered questions about Grenouille, and about the book itself. What is beauty worth? And should we place greater value on transitory life or lasting art?

Perfume is a story about identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit, it can be seen as an allegory, expressing the most basic realities about human existence and also a parable, separating and highlighting certain attitudes and characteristics that are very relevant to conform a clinical study.

So, what is the scent of love? It may be too costly to gain that secret unless there’s an appreciation of love first.

Embrace our Madness.

Reference.

Taschen. (2010). The Book of Symbols. Cologne, Germany: Florian Kobler.

Suskind, P. (1986). Perfume: the story of a murderer. New York: Random House.

The yearning for space becomes telepathic.

Space; a third entity that exists only in the presence of two or more objects with a relative position and direction. Physical space can be understood when seen in a linear way, parallel with time, which forms part of this substance.

Dimensions are important when space is discussed; there are plenty of fibers that aren’t visible to the naked eye but nonetheless present. “Object permanence” accounts for these dimensions in early development by stating that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. [1]

All these underlying structures that conform this universe make the relationship between objects exist. However, one could disagree over whether space is a presence, a relationship between absences or part of a whole system.

Space has been discussed in the philosophic field for ages; many of these questions are still being formulated in order to understand where we come from.

If we believe Newton’s perception of space, in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there was any matter in it, we would have to accept that us humans come in second, and are just living through this matter.

Now, many other philosophers believed that space is an accumulation of connections between objects. Kant thought that neither space nor time could be analytically perceived, these are elements of a systematic framework that humans use to structure all experiences.

Kant’s arguments demonstrate that, on the contrary, space is an “a priori” intuition. In order to learn things outside of me, I need to know that they are outside of me. But that shows that I could not learn about space in this way: how can I locate something outside of me without already knowing what “outside of me” means? Some knowledge of space has to be assumed before I can ever study space empirically. [2]

Theorists have essentially batted between many ideas of what space really is. But whether it’s an entity that’s independent or a collection of special relations, it is unavoidable to accept that space exists.

If space has its own language this must mean that it is breathes, therefore it’s not an absence but a presence, generating a gap between two magnetic beings waiting to be reunited; a longing to merge.

Us human beings are living in two different spaces, physical and mental. As Winnicott (1971) said “the place…where we most of the time are when we are experiencing life” (p.122). But he argues that there are three human states rather than two. This third, intermediate zone he terms “potential space”, a space that is “neither inside the individual nor outside in the world of shared reality” (p.129)

This “potential space” can be seen as the field between fantasy and reality, a transitory vehicle that interchanges the “fusion with the mother” with “a separated identity”. [3] Defining this space in terms of what is tangible can be a quest but that is the point exactly in searching for this “space”, more than anything else, it defines where we are when we are experiencing life, for it is only here that we find “..the experiences of the individual person…in the environment that obtains” (1971, p. 125.)

If this so called “potential space” is basically the transition that holds the key to a separation, whenever the person is longing to blend with the object it forcefully needs to return on the same path.

Telepathy, being this “path”, conveys an intense feeling, a state in which the person experiences both gain and loss, trying to soothe the constant psychic tension in which the struggle between the life and death instincts persists throughout life.

If we understand telepathy as “the action of one mind on another at a distance and without communication by means of the senses.” (Walker, 1910) then thoughts and images are being transferred from one person’s mind to another without the vehicle of the distinguished organs of sense, that knowledge may enter the human mind without being communicated in any known way.

It is known that certain molecular movements in the brain accompany the action of thought, and here we have physical vibrations capable from their extreme minuteness of acting direct upon individual molecules, while their rapidity approaches that of the internal movements of the atoms themselves.

There can be no doubt that our psychical force creates a movement of the ether, which transmits itself afar like all movements of ether, and becomes perceptible to brains in harmony with our own. The transformation of a psychic action into an ethereal movement, and the reverse, may be analogous to what takes place on a telephone, where the receptive plate, which is identical with the plate at the other end, reconstructs the sonorous movement transmitted, not by means of sound but by electricity. (Walker, 1910)

If every human being is a dynamic center that is in constant movement, this motion becomes reconstructed according to the medium it chooses to travel in. Motion tends to multiply itself. Therefore when we see any work; mechanical, electrical or psychic disappear without any effect, then, of two things, one happens, either a transmission or a transformation. [4] Where does the first end, and where does the second one begin?

Telepathy is that unsaid gap between two people, or even between the conscious and unconscious. It is a function of the deeper mind, both as to the sending and the receiving of messages. Thoughts sent by the unconscious come to the conscious of the sender only incidentally by a pathway where minds communicate without any of the ordinary senses.

This intermediate and intermediating zone; “occurring between two extremes or in the middle of a range” may be amplified by emotional needs, these new insights creates a good deal of narcissistic satisfaction because of the feeling of being empowered with such forces. [5]

The problem with telepathy is subjectivity; as psychoanalysts trying to comprehend this phenomenon we are trying to separating science and the paranormal in order to get a concrete answer.

As a problem of science, this antithesis has become evident in the following words of Külpe: “Without the subjective method we would not know anything about the qualitative nature of the psychical processes, and without the objective method we would have no knowledge of the effects and laws of these processes.” (Buckingham, W., Burnham D. 2011)

According to Freud telepathy consists 

… In a mental act in one person instigating the same mental act in another person. What lies between two mental acts may easily be a physical process into which the mental one is transformed at one end and which is transformed back once more into the same mental one at the other end. If there is such a theory of telepathy as a real process, we may suspect that, in spite of its being so hard to demonstrate, it is quite a common phenomenon (Freud, 1933, p. 55)

After Freud’s explanation, telepathy is even more connected to space, claiming that this process requires a “physical process” to achieve the channel, this empty space belongs to both ends of the communication, has substantial material that for some reason cannot be communicated any other way but by this telepathic phenomenon.

Distance is required in order to achieve this exchange, distance in the analytic situation seems particularly common between analyst and analysand and in often times the need to re-connect is imperative for transferential purposes and the way to do it is “that kind of psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy” (Freud, 1933, p. 36).

There are two different kinds of paranormal communication in analysis; empathic and telepathic, each of them serves a similar purpose but in empathic communication occurs mostly when the analysand is at a distance from his own unconscious, while telepathic communication occurs mostly in psychotic states where the analysand seems to have more direct access to the analyst’s unconscious. [6]

To understand telepathic communication it is required to have a communication, a relationship with another and a wish to connect. A person with “telepathic powers” uses them when necessary; this isn’t a one-dimensional revelation but a reaction to absence.

It has been proven that some patients that experience telepathic communication experienced in early childhood an emotional absent mother, generating a void filled with needs. This primary deficit was inscribed in the person creating a

… Fixation on a nonverbal, archaic mode of communication. The patient’s telepathic dreams are formed as a search engine when the analyst is suddenly emotionally absent, in order to find the analyst and thus halt the process of abandonment and prevent collapse into despair of the early traumatization. Hence, the telepathic dream embodies an enigmatic “impossible” extreme of patient/analyst deep/level interconnectedness and unconscious communication in the analytic process” (Eshel, O., 2006). 

What is absence? The complete loss of the concept of presence happens through the realization of the ultimate void. One void is closed and another one reappears. There is a continuous force between presence and absence in which for the first time a complete discontinuance of the sense of self is attained. 

In the state of absence one can understand presence, where there is no consciousness, no presence and no functioning. Then, consciousness is experienced as a warm presence automatically coming into light in the voidness of the absence. And precisely this is the essence of a person.

Until this moment the person cannot realize itself, when there is a realization of absence is when the feeling of “I” as an entity starts to evolve.

Instead of being an object, in absence one experiences to be a real subject. One is fully aware and not an observer or a co-pilot but recognizes itself as an absence, the unknown and unknowable.

… The moment you allow the negative relationship to go, the mental relationship to go, the ego starts freaking out, starts disintegrating, disappearing, and the aloneness will be felt as some sort of emptiness, some kind of absence of self. So when the mental relationship goes, the part that is relating to it goes, too, and you start feeling the absence of self, an emptiness which will be felt as an aloneness. When the aloneness is accepted and tolerated, it is then possible for real contact to happen, and not before that.” (A.H. Almaas. , 2000).

How can telepathy be constructive in the analytic space?

Psychoanalysts have recently used telepathy as a way to unconsciously connect with their analysands, becoming part of this “analytic third” in which

…The individuals engaged in this form of relatedness unconsciously subjugate themselves to a mutually generated intersubjective third for the purpose of freeing themselves from the limits of whom they had been to that point. (Ogden, T.H., 2004)

It’s been proved that telepathic material has been helpful in the analytic environment by creating a road between both languages. This space is eventually perceived and desire, ready to be communicated will eventually be brought out into surface (telepathically or verbally) and it’s in hands of the analyst to convey this conversation into the conscious field. [7]

Our experiences of things in space are a feature of our sensibility. A thing –in itself-

Embrace our Madness.

References.

Major, R., Miller, P. (1981). Empathy, Antipathy and Telepathy in the Analytic Process. Psychoanal. Inq., 1:449-470.

Eshel, O. (2006). Where are You, My Beloved?: On Absence, Loss, and the Enigma of Telepa... Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 87:1603-1627.

Lazar, S.G. (2001). Knowing, Influencing and Healing: Paranormal Phenomena and Implications f… Psychoanal. Inq., 21:113-131.

Freud, S. (1922). Dreams and Telepathy. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 3:283-305.

Ogden, T.H. (2004). The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique. Psychoanal Q., 73:167-195.

Mayer, E. (2001), On “telepathic dreams?”: an unpublished paper by Robert Stoller. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 49:629-657.

Civin, M., Lombardi, K.L. (1990). The Preconscious and Potential Space. Psychoanal. Rev., 77:573-585.

Piaget, J. (1973). The Affective Unconscious and the Cognitive Unconscious. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 21:249-261

Walker, W. (1910). Telepathy: its theory, facts and proof. Cosimo Classics.

A.H. Almaas. (2000). Diamond Heart, Book one: elements of the Real Man. Shambhala Publications.

Buckingham, W., Burnham D. (2011) The Philosophy Book. DK Publishing.

Buckingham, W., Burnham D. (2011) The Psychology Book. DK Publishing.

Charles Bukowski > try.

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”

Embrace our Madness.

Love in psychoanalysis, is transference.

The very concept of love, its questions an unsolved riddles, in psychoanalysis, is aimed towards the concept and complications of transference so that love seems to be just a displacement.

Love feels unauthentic. “I love someone because I’m really in love with somebody else”. It seems that psychoanalysis underestimates love, reducing it to just a tool of information.  To be in love is to get lost, through the paths of love you lose your own path, losing yourself. Yet, analysis follows this path, challenging it until something hidden is released.

There is no analysis without transference, the analyst must hold back from any interpretation until transference is established. Of course the analyst’s job emphasizes and exploits the natural aspect of love.

Identifying the patient’s desire and observing him fell love is one aim of analysis. Freud called this “the condition of love” (Liebesbedingung). “Liebe” is a term which overlays both love and desire, although occasionally we see the conditions of love separated from those of sexual desire.

This is how Freud isolates the type of man who cannot love where he desires and who cannot desire where he loves. In love at first sight, there, in an instant, a subject meets his condition of love as if this possibility has been suddenly intertwined with necessity.

One aim of psychoanalysis is overcoming resistances to love in the experience of the patient’s subjectivity. Sometimes controlling love brings out conflicts of dominance, submission, abandonment, separation and independence that play a big part in every relationship.

Transference love creates an emotional relationship, determined by the analytic situation, of which the object is the analyst; the task of the analyst in this circumstance is to trace the relationship back, without either satisfying or smothering it, to its primitive roots.

Freud found that we all have motives; reasons of which some are connected with being in love and others are particular expressions of resistance. In analysis there may be a desire to destroy the analyst’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover and gain a hidden promise.

A patient's passionate attachment to the analyst should indeed never be treated as evidence of the physician's personal irresistibility, but rather as an effect of the analytic situation itself.

Clearly, the analysis of the counter-transference is necessary so as to prevent the analyst's personal feelings, complexes or inner resistances from slowing down the progress of the treatment. The excitation provoked in the analyst by the patient's demands and transferential projections, and notably the erotization of the transference, certainly put the analyst's superego to the test, but at a more fundamental level they challenge their relational skills and capacity for symbolization as well as mastery over their own desire for reparation.

Resistance, on the other hand is acting as a provocation; it heightens the patient’s state of being in love and more empathically, by pointing to the dangers of this situation.

The transference follows the vicissitudes of love. When it is negative, hostile, or governed by repressed erotic impulses it constitutes resistance. According to Freud, the "transference of friendly or affectionate feelings" which are "unobjectionable and admissible to consciousness" can contribute to a successful cure. (1912)

Transference-love is provoked by the analytic situation; it is intensified by resistance and lacks the reality principle, less sensible, less concerned about consequences and more naïve. All of this resembles quite well to the feelings of being in love.

"It represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions" (Freud, 1914)

If we observe love as part of transference we must first give description to this concept. In Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria he defines the transference situation in the following way:

“What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and phantasies, which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the physician at the present moment.” (1905)

Freud (1915) acknowledged, "We have no right to dispute that the state of being in love which makes 

its appearance in the course of analytic treatment has the character of a 'genuine' love." In fact transference love was no different from any other kind of love, for there is no such state [of being in love] which does not reproduce infantile prototypes" 

What is repeated in transference love is frustration, a demand not heard, never answered, which leads the patient to reassume the position of a child with respect to the analyst. Behind the exacerbated demand for love and reparation that is seen in passionate transferences lie developmental deficits and failures of the primary environment that have distorted the patient's self.

According to Klein (1952), The comfort and care given after birth, particularly the first feeding experiences are felt to come from good forces. Objects entitled as “good” or “bad”. The infant directs his feelings of gratification and love towards the “good” breast and his destructive impulses and feelings of persecution towards what he feels to be frustrating, the “bad” breast.

Now, the Oedipus phase makes it a bit harder for the infant. For anxiety and guilt increase the need to externalize bad figures and to internalize good ones; to attach desires, love, guilt, and reparative tendencies to some objects, and hate and anxiety to others; to find representatives for internal figures in the external world.

Love and hatred dominate since early infancy, there’s a connection between positive and negative transference and by exploring love and hate the analyst and the patient can understand more the origin of the patients wishes.

What about narcissistic love? The self, according to Kohut (1966) may expand far beyond the borders of an individual, or it may shrink and become identical with a single one of his actions or aims.

The antithesis to narcissism is not the object relation but object love. Idealization plays an important part in love, mostly in narcissistic love, it may be actually an aspect of narcissism, of the original bliss, power, perfection, and goodness which is projected to the parent figure during a phase when there qualities become gradually separated into perfection pertaining to pleasure, or power, or knowledge, or beauty, or morality.

The idealized parent imago is partly invested with object-libidinal cathexes; and the idealized qualities are loved as a source of gratification to which the child clings tenaciously.
During the preoedipal period there is a gradual loss of the idealized parent imago, while the massive loss during the Oedipal period contributes to the formation of the superego.

Now, the Narcissus myth gives us an idea of autoerotism. Some emotions are lost in self-admiration; it is an ordinary stage of sexual development that is now commonly associated with erotic feelings aroused in a person by his own body and personality. Also, a sensation of exclusiveness coming from the mother makes the child feel omnipotent and powerful.

Spotnitz (1961) mentions “The person whose development is favorable behaves only briefly like someone in love with himself”. But even after he has formed good object-relations, he persists in narcissistic activity to some extent and generally increases it late in life.

Love does not prevent hatred and other negative emotions from invading a relationship, Spotnitz says. There is a clear denial of “bad” emotions when it comes to a relationship because it’s a constant reminder of failure and weakness. Attempting to conceal them is always destructive to the relationship.

Unrecognized hate can easily diminish love and sometimes kill it but a certain amount of battling between a man and a woman is always involved in the normal sexual relationship.

Bion (1958) would agree that a patient feels obstructed by the presence of feelings of impotence together with feelings of hatred and envy towards the sexual parents who are thought by him to possess, and to deny him the use of, the potent breast or penis that makes the possessor potent in the expression of love.

This picture is further complicated because, although it is true to say the patient feels free to love, at least in intention, the violence of the explosion leaves him denuded also of his feelings of love. It is important to be aware that a relationship will be a replica of the infantile love, which is the prototype of the valid love object in puberty when the release from the parents should take place.

In “General Theory of Neuroses”, Ferenzci (1920) states that

…The neurotic cannot effect this release; the son remains under the authority of the father the whole of his life and cannot transfer his libido from his mother to a strange sex object.”

There are two kinds of love regression, the reoccupation of the libido with the first incestuous love object and the return of the entire sexual organization to an earlier stage.
In hysteria, the primary incestuous love object shows the repression of the libido, the sexual organization of the hysteric continues undisturbed to the full development of the genital zone, but this last function is repressed.

On the contrary, in compulsion neuroses, the libido regresses to the anal-sadistic stage and at the same time regression of the love object takes place.  The amount of ungratified libido that a man can endure has its limits; the more incomplete the sexual organization is, the stronger and more numerous will the fixations be on love objects. (Ferenzci, 1920)

An adult love, or a “later object” love has always a threshold stage, the narcissistic, when all libido belongs to the Ego, and where the Ego itself is the object. Falling in love creates an aim for the libido to grow; the object is filled with it while the Ego is practically empty.

Freud’s article on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) states that the disposition to melancholia predominates in the narcissistic type of love object, and that the refusal of food that is a characteristic of the complaint can be traced back to a regression to the oral stage of the libido.

Self-reproaches actually are reproaches against persons with whom the patient feels identified. There is an undoubtable pleasurable self-torture in melancholia that is a gratification of sadistic and hate impulses against an object, but by inversion it gets directed against the self.

It seems like all psychology schools understand each other in terms of a primary caretaker being the educator of what love means. Love is safety and emphasizing on love and those first moments of life means that we all need to feel close to someone in order to start creating a functional ego structure that can resist future traumas and rejection.

Love is a very complicated subject to hold on to because it is constantly changing within objects. It’s important to acknowledge that even though primary caretakers didn’t do the best job in giving the child what he needed at that point that nothing is written in stone, there are many ways to re educate this person and become more productive when it comes to love.

“In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?”

Gautama Buddha.

Embrace our Madness.

References.


Freud, S. (1915). Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, 157-171.

Klein, M. (1952). The Origins of Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 33:433-438.

Kohut, H. (1966). Forms and Transformations of Narcissism. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 14:243-272.

Spotnitz, H. (1961). The Narcissistic Defense in Schizofrenia. Psychoanal. Rev., 48D:24-42.

Spotnitz, H. (1977). Problems of the Marriage Parnership. Mod. Psychoanal., 2:4-14.

Bion, W.R. (1958). On Hallucination. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 39:341-349.

Ferenczi, S. (1920). General Theory of the Neuroses. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1:294-296.

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258

“The identity is the negative of our desiring fantasies” (Bersani)

Pornography is a discourse; therefore it is constantly emitting sentences to us, the readers.

This discourse creates an imaginary knot without taking into consideration the form. The pornographic are the “poorly taken” pictures, the ugly, the obscene, explicit scenes approaching natural orifices and shameless demonstrations of what’s missing.

“The concept of lack from Lacanian discourse suggested that the woman’s body is fetishized in film because it produces anxiety in the male viewer, to whom the female body represents castration.” (Gabbard, 2001)

Shame, precisely, is this passion that connects the imaginary knot and keeps a distance between what’s public and private. Distance that’s there, maybe just in appearance, tossed up in the pornographic. [1]

A part object discourse, which is visibly common in a pornographic scene; a shot of a woman moaning, another shot of a penis penetrating the vagina, another penis ejaculating.

Every mock up is epically created reaching a supposed pleasure. The woman that is staring directly to the camera while opening her legs is mimicking the audience’s gaze.

“The Lacanian approach to film criticism centers on how the perspective of the camera creates a “gaze” on the events of the film’s narrative.” (Gabbard, 2001)

The sexual organs of the actors show much more character than their own faces, the relaxed veins of their penises speak of integrity of a hard working heart, but in their faces there’s vaguely any content.

Does pornography care about aesthetics?

Does beauty have the same meaning in all films?

A film that captures a societal shock is Bertolucci’s ”Last Tango in Paris”; This so called “artsy porn” captures both indecent and elegant styles at the same time making them dance together the same way as the tango; an invitation to let loose in this wave of seduction and yearning.

What’s essential in this movie is how the experience is structured; simply an anonymous and clandestine affair that is approachable to any spectator. This erotic encounter is always aimed at transgressing given everyday identities. [2]

The pathetic side of the pornographic discourse is that the subject keeps enunciating his next move while at the same time disappears in his narrative.

Showing “everything”, the pornographic discourse just demonstrates the divorce between narrative, the act and the utopic corporeal unity. In porn there needs to be three; There, in that room, the lovers are in this almost epistemic relationship where the Other’s gaze is placed.

What’s revealed isn’t the sexual relationship - this doesn’t mean that couples don’t have sex- but the encounter with the other sex that certifies the irrepresentable of the sexual relationship.

This is what porn-o-graphy provides, it doesn’t limit itself by showing the sexual act, doesn’t stop by just installing these scopic devices, but shows, in reality, the absence of complementarity.

Two people in a bedroom dancing or having sex isn’t porn. This is erotism or intersubjective relationship. It’s precisely the introduction of this Other- a third- the gaze, that makes the pleasure itself innocent, private and without interruptions always impossible.

Sex by itself is an exhibitionist act because it relies on the gaze of the Other, sex is pornographic.

Back to the movie, we see in what way the uncovering of the scenes of penetration feeds the ghostly side of Paul generating questions of what does it mean to be a man. On the other side, a woman, placed in a position of desire, exhibits her own castration, a microscopic look of the receptor that will decide the meaning.

This movie is born in a state of unbalance; surrounded by excess, filmed by a director that exposes mistrust (who knows more about cinematographic critique than poetic images); for some incomprehensible reason Bertolucci gave us this hint about imperfect beauty.

Last Tango tells the story about two loners in a city that will never be the one of love. Paris creates pain, Paul the despair and Jeanne the body; filming with pornographic treachery intimate acts of love and a savage rape, penetrating into the hidden and occult of two people that believe in being acknowledged.

Jeanne searches for a father that can tell her stories, while he vomits all his truths about the world; she is waiting to be asked to dance while he forces her through the dance floor; she wishes for a goodnight kiss while he covers her ass with butter and, above all, Jeanne loving him and him corresponding.

Stroller argues that:

The overall structure of erotic excitement … is similar in most everyone, (that) it is not (hostile) dynamics that differentiate perversions from the lesser perversions, those states that others call normal or normative behavior, but whether the erotic excitement brings one toward or away from sustained intimacy with another person. (Stoller, 1985, pp. vii-viii)

This film is full of dichotomies; male and female, life and death, America and France, but the interesting part is that these don’t seem to contradict each other, but work as complementary forces, despite the chemistry and friction between two characters whose identities and desire connect.

Being humiliated is a strong factor in perversion and also the core of excitement in general. A man that desexualizes women, acts with hostility and desires to harm is more characteristic of the sexual fantasies and practices of his gender, since “perversion” as well as actual and fantasized sexual violence, abuse, and rape, seem more widespread among men than women. [3]

Paul’s cruelty may not be justified and perhaps it is exactly what attracted Jeanne in the first place (she is the one who first looks at him at the beginning of the film- very rare in cinema for a woman to give the “gaze”.) His hatred and desire to humiliate Jeanne seeks revenge and triumph over his own supposed childhood traumas, forming the basic fantasy script in perversion and pornography. [4]

Mostly all scenes in the film are emotionally charged, very provocative and give the spectator a wide range of feelings.

Paul never asks Jeanne a direct question but constantly frames her into his next move while assaulting her, humiliating her and pushing her over the edge.

Her desire is formed through idealizing Paul while alienating herself, choosing a submissive-masochistic role and borrowing his subjectivity.[5]

Bertolucci simultaneously mocks and mourns the human yearning for love and companionship. This film is a requiem for unreturned love and a testament to the tendency of humans to refuge love with lust when trapped in a mixture of depression, displeasure and sorrow.

Bertolucci’s purpose is not to praise carnality as a virtue or to despise it as a vice, but to use it as an instrument to accredit the actual existence of a dark, ugly, and bestial side of humanity, which is so often repressed and hypocritically denied in similar works on the subject.

Sadomasochistic role-play reflects the growing social significance of the ability to change roles and to tolerate conflicts in roles. This desire to harm leads us to differentiate “perverse” from “non-perverse” sexuality, but not according to the gender of the object in relation to the self. [6]

The use of the characters are sort of an uncanny medium to immerse into unexplored areas of human psyche while projecting them as objects of desire, disgust and depravity. The “asymmetry” in desire, its intertwining with a spectrum of dominance and submission, starts to show its defensive features and symptomatic nature.

We are being showed the dynamics of the inner self being corrupted because of the cultural influence. How love is a code for “using”; an a-ddiction, Paul becomes the man who uses Jeanne and then shows his hidden vulnerability, also shoes how common miser is in all western societies, nice cinematographic sets and gloomy atmospheres reflect the human unconscious.

The human being is a cultural magnet, we understand ourselves through culture and either destroys or fortifies the self.

Embrace our Madness.

References.


Gabbard, G. (2001), Introduction. Psychoanalysis and Film. G. Gabbard, ed. New York: Karnac Books. pp. 1-16.

Chodorow, N.J. (1992), Heterosexuality as a compromise formation: reflections on the psychoanalytic theory of sexual development. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 15:267-304.

Woltersdorff, V. (2011), Paradoxes of precarious sexualities: sexual subcultures under neo-liberalism. Cultural Studies, 25(2):164-182.

Dines, G. (1997), Pornography: The production and consumption of inequality. Routledge. Great Britain.

“I simply am not there”

Dissecting the man who dissects girls.
American Psycho.


“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. Although I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable. I simply am not there.” (Mary Harron.)

Patrick Bateman portrays himself as the ultimate pleasure seeker, a man that has it all. “The libido has been withdrawn from the external world, has been directed to the ego and thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism” (Freud, 1925).

How can narcissism be defined in this character? Bateman is a perfectionist, a man without a visible flaw; every detail in his routine is planned perfectly. He has a strict schedule, which has helped him as a defense. In other words, his physique is his own defense.

He uses his body to soothe his inner pain, but in the inside there is a void, an empty space without any emotional content. He speaks about not being in touch with his own emotions, being inhuman or unable to feel. “I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.

"Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.” (Mary Harron).

He is tormented on the inside but stands out as a very strong, intellectual reliable narrator. He uses some prefabricated phrases in his own speech, which are not his own thoughts or words, he picks them up from outside, like the newspaper, radio show or magazines.

Although when someone interrupts him he loses track and his inner thoughts like “murders and excecutions” instead of “mergers and adquisistions” come into surface. “There then was the patient’s suppressed aggression, the most extreme manifestation of which had thus far been his death wishes” (Reich, 1919).

When someone asks Bateman what are some important subjects that people should be worried about he responds “Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.” (Mary Harron)

All this discourse is empty, filled with lifeless interactions with people but ironically what is secretly being discussed is his own hate. For example “homeless, racial discrimination and equal right for women” are three subjects that eventually he destroys.

He is part of this social hierarchy of New York City, maybe a metaphor for his own megalomania and omnipotence. He hates minorities, homosexuals, poor/homeless people and women especially with some power. He introjects all his hate and in his speech he uses a reaction formation defense to present himself as this correct and centered person.

“In these patients there’s a most pronounced narcissism, emphasizing the hostility and defiance hidden behind an apparent eagerness to cooperate” (Rosenfeld, 1971).

With this type of comments he preserves a status, being on top of his other colleague who are all racists and misogynistic, Bateman in public acts carefully so he won’t stain his appearance.

What is the symbolic meaning of this characters he hates?

Paul Allen is one of Bateman’s coworker in B&B who is a big threat for him. He is the manager of the most lucrative account there is, a bright, young, handsome man who is the first character to visibly reject Bateman, by mistaking him for another associate in the firm and the only way Bateman can be near him is to pretend he is the other character.

“This identification is connected with fantasies of replacing an admired object in order to profit therefrom by taking over the admired person’s rights and properties” (Brenner, 1974).

He feels powerless and vulnerable when Paul Allen is in the room, regressing to his own infantile development, this “power figure” represents a very punitive, strong, restrictive character; his father.

“The essential task confronting such narcissistically tainted personalities is that of maintaining and restoring the infantile self esteem which derives from the reunion of a grandiose self–representation with and omnipotent object representation” (Rochlin, 1973).

This may be the primary source of his break with reality, there is a conflict between needing some affiliation to give life definition and also rebel from this predetermined life by his father’s choice. He feels he doesn’t own his life and can’t quit his job because as he says “I want to fit in”, there is a clear rejection not only from Paul Allen but also from his first object of love.

“Projection and distortions of reality follow upon this process which support the patient’s embattled sense of self and self-esteem, justify his rage and hostility, and allow him to maintain these affects in support of inner narcissistic needs” (Meissner, 1979).

Another objects he tries to exterminate are women, his relationship with women lack affect. He is resistant in being with only one person, a clear fear of being in symbiosis with his first love object and therefore abandoned afterwards. Women are the desired object but also another threat for Bateman, they are the antithesis of success and power. He manipulates women in order to make them become just an object, an emotionless being, and an accessory that fits in his life of appearances.

Women are disposable for Bateman, there’s just one object he’s directing this behavior to: his first love object. He commits violent and sexual acts in the same way, by constantly replicating the horror of his own castration. He has a fragmented idea of a woman, not entirely joined, a woman represents the “lack of’. These women are terminated by savage aggressions, using a phallic device in order to destroy by an overcompensation of his own male impotence.

“Aggression is a failure to fit between the child’s need for absolute dependence and the response of the mother, hatred serving as a barrier to protect the ego from ‘people who do not love us’” (Fonagy et al., 1993).

He has intercourse with women in a very stereotyped way, he masters the process, he even styles himself and looks at the mirror while having sex with them, a clear narcissistic focus on image (his own) and a superficial intercourse.

He degrades and devaluate women to the point that he not only kills them violently during sex but also dissects them and finally eats their remains. This is a maladaptive need to introject an object into the self. Just as a person in love wishing to become part of his lover.

“There may, in addition, be specific narcissistic dynamics that are played out in the interactions of projection and introjection themselves, over and above their reference to the objectives of self preservation” (Meissner, 1979).

This is a way for him to feel preserved and contained over the terrifying loss of an object, he releases tension by being sexually potent, misogynistic, impulsive and powerful over his victims.

“There’s a constant struggle between an irrepressible urge to destroy their objects and a desire to preserve them” (Klein, 1958).

Bateman has a fragmented ego, a lack of balance between these three structures; ego, superego and id. There is vagueness between fantasy and reality; he doesn’t consider himself real and complete.
“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory” (Mary Harron).

He understands his inappropriate behavior and observes reality, but can’t be inside it, he can’t control himself. There is a strong disinhibition of the id, filled with depraved fantasies and sadistic violence, in this way he releases all his tension by destroying others.

While he loses a connection with reality the id becomes more noticeable. “The most primitive patients, functioning on a pre-self level, maintain hallucinations that promise discharge” (Meadow, 1989).

Patrick Bateman is a man that is devoted to get rewards from external things, money, power, fame, status and recognition. He is surrounded in the world of finance; this environment is controlling, overpowering and hyper-masculine, where presentation is the most important part of a name and therefore; success. All his energy is encapsulated in his own business card; this small paper with ink is what embellishes his persona.

His own rules aren’t differentiated from stock market rules; eliminating the enemy is his priority. Killing the other who may be more powerful is what keeps Bateman satisfied.
“My need to engage in homicidal behavior on a massive scale cannot be corrected but, uh, I have no other way to fulfill my needs.” (Mary Harron).

Bateman’s identity throughout the whole movie is unclear; he is repeatedly recognized as someone else, this may represent his own inability to know who he is. He acts aggressively towards others who threaten his inner psyche and make him feel vulnerable and shameful.

“The patient is plagued by the negative narcissistic qualities of a sense of humiliation, embarrassment and mortification” (Meissner, 1979).

Bateman imagines doing and saying violent things to people throughout the whole movie but in reality he doesn’t; it’s all in his mind. So this fantasy might be a narcissistic defense, projection as a defense mechanism takes on its character as it “reinforces and preserves the sense of grandiose entitlement around which the pathological sense of self sustains itself. (Meissner, 1979).

Patrick Bateman has built a protecting cover between his own self and the terrible truth of his own reality. This mask is, one the one hand, his acquired hallucinatory identity as a serial murderer, and, on the other, the perfect appearance as a Wall Street banker. This two different identities function as a cover to Bateman and as an opposite magnet between two forces: the identity of a serial murderer personifies what the other refuses to accept in society.

“The grandiosity serves to mask and counter there underlying negative narcissistic components” (Meissner, 1979). This is why there is so much anxiety; one’s identity causes the other to live with fear of his own existence.

Bateman begins to be immersed more and more into insanity, his own hallucinations start to slip and his own self begins to disappear. “At the grossest and most distorted level of psychotic grandiosity, which is so frequently a dimension of paranoid thinking, the grandiose delusion one possesses special powers, is transparently compensatory and serves to redress the narcissistic imbalance reflected in feelings of worthlessness, vulnerability, weakness and inadequacy” (Meissner, 1979). When he realizes that he isn’t a serial killer, his whole identity that has projected onto the external world vanishes and his whole structure collapses.

Patrick Bateman invests most of his time and effort in improving his self-image, feeling compenstated for his underlying feelings or worthlessness. There is an unbalance in the dual force system, it seems like his own repetition compulsion is similar to what Freud (1920) explains at this “existence of a force in human nature that operates against the pleasure principle and its imperatives of human self-preservation and gratification.” In other words; death drive.

There are some formulations relating drives and primary processes that fit perfectly into Bateman’s character. “The tendency to immediate gratification (discharge of cathexis can be shifted from it’s original object in the event that these are blocked or innaccesible and can instead be discharged by a similar, or even by a rather different route.” (Freud, 1974).

Bateman portrays a person who is incapable of any delayed gratification, his urge to conceive satisfaction is so predominant that he can’t wait until an actual discharge, he has to immerse himself into his own fantasy, and treat himself as this “sexual object”, who looks at it, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains a complete satisfaction.” (Freud, 1914)

Patrick Bateman is a man with apparently no soul, he walks with this cruelty around his mouth, with a chilling smile, and perfection accomanies him everywhere. All his actions have the shallowness of his business cards and the disgusting taste of his self-awareness.

He has a blurred image throughout the movie, a depersonalization that makes his whole surroundings unnoticeable. All his crimes, being graphic and brutal are the representation of a mixture of aggressive libido and death drive joined together with repression of an overpowering superego, preventing him to realize that he is a pathetic boy who empowers himself with murders and knowledge.

“There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.” (Mary Harron).

“The destructive omnipotent parts of the self often remains disguised or they may be silent and split off, which obscures their existence and gives the impression that they have no relationship to the external world” (Rosenfeld, 1971).

Embrace our Madness

References.

American Psycho. Dir. Mary Harron. Perfs. Christian Bale. Film. Lionsgate Films, 2000.

Rosenfeld, H. (1971) A Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Life and Death Instincts: An Investigation Into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism. Int J Psycho-Anal., 52:169-178

Freud, S. (1914) On Narcissism: An Introduction. Standard Edition. London: Hogarth Press, 14: 67-105

Meadow, P. (1989), Object relations in a drive theory model. Modern Psychoanalysis, 14: 57-74.

Meissner, W. (1979), Narcissism and Paranoia. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 15:527-538.

Fonagy,P., G.S. Moran, & M. Target. (1993), Aggression and the psychological self. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74:471-485

Rosenfeld, H.S. (1971), A Clinical approach to the psychoanalytic theory of the life and death instincts: an investigation into the aggressive aspects of narcissism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 52:169-178.

Brenner, C. (1974), The Psychic apparatus. An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis. New York: Anchor Press, pp. 31-56

Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge

 By studying particular things, we are constantly gaining insight into this universal, ageless nature.

It is said that in ancient Greece Plato and his followers gathered one day and asked this question; “What is a human being?” After a great deal of thought, they came up with an answer: A human being is a featherless biped.

Everyone was happy with this definition until Diogenes burst into the conversation with a live plucked chicken, shouting, “Behold! I present you with a human being.”

After all this commotion, the philosophers gathered again and refined their definition. A human being, they said, is a featherless biped with broad nails.

This is a very curious story that shows the kind of difficulties philosophers have been facing all along when attempting to give abstract, general definitions of what is to be human.

Even with no intervention from Diogenes, it seems pretty clear that describing ourselves as featherless bipeds does not really capture much of what it means to be human.

Heidegger was concerned with this question also; he came to answer it in a way that was strikingly different from many other people before him. Instead of attempting an abstract definition that looks as human life from the outside, he attempted to provide a much more concrete analysis of “being” from what could be called an insider’s position.

He said that since we exist in the thick of things (in the midst of life) if we want to understand what it is to be human, we have to do so by looking at human life from within this life.

If we want to know what it means to say that something exists, we need to start looking at the question from the perspective of those beings of whom being is an issue.

We can assume that although cats, dogs and lions are beings, they do not wonder about their being: they do not stress over these questions; they do not ask, “What does it mean to say that something exists?” But humans do. So whenever we want to explore questions of being, we have to start with ourselves, by looking at what it means to exist.

Now, we exist through the realms of desire, human beings are moved by inertia; controlled by time and others desire. Perhaps, one should extend this to the very definition of humanity: What ultimately distinguishes man from animal is not a positive feature (speech, tool-making, reflexive thinking, or whatever), but the rise of a new point of impossibility, the impossible-real ultimate reference point of desire.

The often mentioned evolutional difference between humans and apes acquires here all its weight; when an ape is confronted with an object beyond its reach which it repeatedly fails to obtain, it will abandon it and move on to a more modest object (maybe a less attractive partner), whereas a human will persist in its effort, remaining fixated by the impossible.

This must be why the subject as such is hysterical; the hysterical subject is precisely a subject who poses enjoyment as an absolute; he or she responds to the absolute of pleasure in the form of an unsatisfied desire. Such a subject is capable of relating to a term that is off limits; even more radically, it is a subject that can only exist insofar as it relates to a term that is “out of play”. Hysteria then, must be this elementary “human” way of installing a point of impossibility in the absolute pleasure principle.

To understand impossibility we must first be aware of what exactly do we want to conquer.  There is a difference between part-object love and primary object love; the former being the breast and the latter being the mother.

This may be a good way to explain the two-step process whereby the subject is constituted and desire is established.

The earliest sexual object is the breast, and the earliest source of satisfaction for the sexual instinct is the encounter between two partial objects, the infant's mouth and the mother's breast.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud explained that the breast becomes a lost object  "just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs" (p. 222).

Loss of the object of the oral instinct is thus a precondition of access to the total person as a possible love object. At the same time, however, this loss opens the door to autoeroticism for the infant as the infant assumes a complete body image. The infant, though in a passive position, is active with regard to a part of its own body, and this enables the infant to find a source of satisfaction that is the first substitute for the breast.

Later the lost object becomes the "whole person". Here separation from the object is addressed in two ways: either the child expresses an impulse to master the object by breaking it, casting it aside, or incorporating it in fantasy (and so working it over in the psyche ), or the child bypasses the need for the object by regarding it as a lost object beyond the reach of the self.

With the recognition of the absence of the object, therefore, the child makes a transition, as a result of working over in the psyche, to a capacity to do without the object.

When the subject does not recognize the object as lost, as in melancholia,  the object is incorporated in fantasy, where it maintains a silent existence within the subject.  Freud described this process in "Mourning and Melancholia." 

Object loss can also provoke anxiety, mourning, or pain. Do we feel those three elements when we aren’t able to grasp an impossible object?

The difference between humans and animals is clear now, humans experience a loss when it comes to separation and will try to fill this void thought their life by repetitions.

I believe there’s a feeling of impossibility within ourselves and hasn’t been completely conquered. It’s being externalized and that is the reason we will never find a cure. But, what is this impossible? Is it a yearning for this un-castrated being? Oneness with a supposed “perfect” object?

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated (castrated) or missing (since birth?) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. The missing limb causes pain and can be made worse by stress, anxiety, and traumatic experiences. This pain is usually intermittent. The frequency and intensity of attacks usually declines with time.

This may be an odd comparison but when seen this way it appears as if we where walking with a missing limb, an imaginary extension of ourselves that we crave for in fantasy.  This appears as a constant reminder of how loss feels and how damaging it can be to the psyche.

As Erich Fromm once said “Life is fraught with anxiety and powerlessness because of our separation from nature and from one another.”

These feelings can be overcome through searching out and devoting ourselves to the discovery of our own abilities and ideas, embracing our personal uniqueness and developing our capacity to love.

Man’s main task is to give birth to himself. In doing so, he frees himself from confusion, loneliness, and apathy.

 Embrace our Madness.

 References.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,7:123-243.

Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE,14:237-258.

Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,18:1-64.

Winnicott, D.W. (1962), Ego integration in child development. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press. pp. 56-63

Zizek, Slavoj. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, UK.

Murray, Craig. (2010). Amputation, Prosthesis Use and Phantom Limb pain. Springer, UK.

Fromm, Erich.(1999). Erich Fromm; His life and ideas. Rainer Funk, NY.