The Law of the Mother

An Essay on the Sexual Sinthome

Geneviève Morel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429788000
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The law of the mother is made up of words charged with pleasure and suffering that leave their mark on us in early childhood. In this groundbreaking book, Geneviève Morel explores whether it is possible for the child to escape subjection from this maternal law and develop their own sexual identity.

Through clinical examples and critical commentary, the book illustrates the range and power of maternal influence on the child, and how this can generate different forms of sexual ambiguity. Using a Lacanian framework which revises the classical idea of the Oedipus complex, the book is not only a major contribution to gender studies but also an invaluable aid to the clinician dealing with questions of sexual identity. The book avoids many of the moral and political prejudices that paralyse twenty-first century society, be they related to legislation on marriage, parentage or adoption, the status of "mental health", or the limits to the supposed ownership of the human body.

Insightful and revealing, The Law of the Mother will be of great interest to Lacanian psychoanalysts, as well as to researchers in the fields of gender studies and sexuality.

PART ONE


SYMPTOM, FANTASY AND PATHOLOGIES OF THE LAW

CHAPTER I


The law of the mother and the symptom that separates

Clearly, the law of the mother is based on the fact that the mother is a speaking being, and that is sufficient to legitimise my calling it the law of the mother. Nonetheless, this law, if I may put it this way, is an unsupervised, uncontrolled law.

Jacques Lacan¹

In Gangs of New York², rival gangs from the city re-group and start a bloody riot against the police because they refuse to accept poor people being drafted into the War of Secession, where they are bound to die in a combat that only benefits the ruling class. During this time, the hero, Amsterdam, looks for “The Butcher”, Will Cunning, who murdered his father before his very eyes when he was a child. “The Butcher” also severely mutilated Amsterdam, but that is not what motivates his revenge: “he is settling his father’s score”. Here is an example of a pathology of the law: turning away from the problems that afflict the city, and from politics, in order to devote himself to the law he has inherited from his own family, through the maternal or paternal line. This is what the Greek tragedies show us. Freud would have discerned a victory, at the level of the individual, in this heroic turning inward, of Thanatos over Eros, in their uncertain battle in which civilisation is at stake.

In this chapter I am going to introduce a number of functions of the symptom that are connected with the law of separation from the mother, while making an initial clinical approach to the knot of sexual ambiguity and the symptom. I will also sketch a preliminary and concrete notion of the sinthome, which I will explore theoretically in the chapters that follow.

My thesis is this: while we are still infans, we are confronted with our mother’s jouissance. In order not to become swamped by it, we have to separate ourselves from it – as it imposes itself on us with the force of a law, a strange and mad law which turns us into “subjugated subjects”. Our unconscious retains traces of this first subjugation for the rest of our lives. But separating from “the law of the mother” comes at a cost: we create separating symptoms which, in fact, are a cover for the only universal law recognised by psychoanalysis: the prohibition of incest. While not separating from one’s mother would constitute a most severe pathology, the symptom that separates us from her is another pathology, but a necessary and inevitable one.

Pathologies of the law are engendered by the subject’s first confrontation with the law. Here I do not mean laws in an institutional and juridical sense, but rather the existence of a primordial law linked to language. Is it necessarily the law of the father? No, first of all it is the law of the mother or her substitute, and sometimes it will be the only law. Indeed, we are bathed in language long before we appear in the world. This is why Lacan called us “parlêtres³”, “speech-beings”, or rather, beings who are “spoken” by the desires of those who have engendered us. However, we are also speaking beings, and we learn to speak in our mother tongue⁴. But how can this fact, in its universal banality, be conceived of as a law that we are given, or which is imposed on us? It is because, formed as we are, unawares, by this “bath” of language, at the same time as our mother was speaking to us (and we were speaking to her, as soon as we were old enough), the roots of our own desire and of hers became entangled. Throughout our lives, right down to the way we speak, our personal style, we bear the mark of her desire and the stigmata of her jouissance. These are the traces which by themselves can shape the outcome of a life, and even forge its destiny: if they remain unmediated by any other principle, they constitute the sort of strange law that concerns us here⁵.

I will use two examples to give an initial insight into this. The first is the case of a psychotic woman who tried to kill herself along with her three children; the second, a very brief case, is that of a neurotic woman.

The cause of an infanticide: a maternal imperative enacted

Certain cases highlight the extent to which a child coming into the world is an object, whether unconsidered, loved, greeted with indifference, or even hated. Lacan made the child a logical operator, the object a. Primarily, the child is an object of the parents’ desire. The child knows nothing of the real object he/she has been for the parents; and the parents do not know much about it either. But traces of this unconscious knowledge persist: the object leaves its mark in the unconscious. From then on, the child constructs a fantasy around the network of unconscious interpretations which he/she weaves around this real object. Lacan’s object a is a way of writing which, according to the context, may designate one or other of these objects: the object of the parents’ desire, or the object cause of desire in the subject’s fantasy. But the transformation of the real object of the parents’ desire into an object of the subject’s fantasy cannot take place without a prior delimitation and a separation from this primordial object and from the mother’s body (or that of her substitute). Sometimes, this primary separation does not take place, and it is only through a passage-to-the-act that the subject will attempt to recuperate this object – to which he/she is equivalent in the mother’s desire – from the body of the other.

Perhaps we can say that infanticide is the most cogent proof of the obscure status of the “child-object⁶” in the mother’s desire. I met Madame M. at the psychiatric hospital; 20 years earlier she had attempted suicide after having given poison to her two-and-a-half-year-old twins and to her third daughter. All four, suffering acute effects of the poison, just managed to survive; N., who was severely affected, had to be resuscitated over a long period of time. The psychiatrists who examined Madame M. at the time decided not to take the matter to court. She was sent home with some medication and psychiatric follow-up was put in place, which did not prevent her from further delusional episodes which required hospitalisation. A somewhat hasty diagnosis of hysteria was made, because Madame M. complained about her alcoholic husband’s impotence, and said she wanted to give birth to a son. She said she had poisoned her children after a marital row, so that they would not have to live without protection in the care of a father who was as much of an alcoholic as her own father had been.

What led Madame M. to make such a tragic gesture? Our only session echoed, more or less word for word, what she had said 20 years before, just after she had carried out the act – I was able to read the transcribed notes. Several times, Madame M. mentioned the words her mother had spoken when she was born, after a difficult labour, with a twin brother. She clung to these phrases tenaciously, and if she had needed to write them down, one really felt she would have done so without quotation marks: “We weren’t expecting her”; “She wasn’t expected”; “She shouldn’t have been there”; “She shouldn’t have lived”, her mother had said. This last phrase is equivocal, because we do not know whether the “shouldn’t have” is a straightforward statement linked to the dangerous circumstances of the birth, or rather a terrible maternal death-wish. This phrase certainly sealed the fate of Madame M. Or at least, she endowed it with this function by translating the phrase into acts in her own life. It is plain to see that the signification of a maternal condemnation to death prevailed over the more factual primary signification of the phrase.

When Madame M. was three years old, a little sister was born, and she “fell from her pedestal”, as her mother put it at the time. Indeed, her father dropped her in favour of her pretty younger sister. When she was 12, she lost the only person whom she loved, her godmother. She barely recovered from this loss; her mother derisively nicknamed her “mater dolorosa”. When she was 14, her mother pulled her out of school so that she could stay at home as a servant; at this point, she lost all social contact, and was persecuted by her mother, who prevented her from having a boyfriend. Finally, aged 17, she met her future husband. She complained that her marriage was a failure from the start. A month before, she had had an operation for appendicitis, following which she had begun to put on weight: she had then become bulimic. Taking over from her own mother as her persecutor, her mother-in-law sided with her husband against her. Her first pregnancy, with the twins, was difficult, and was followed by a severe depression; the following year, she gave birth to N. At that point, she could recall having thoughts of vengeance worthy of Medea: let the little one die in order to hurt her husband! This birth, which was a repetition of the birth of her little sister following the birth of twins (of which she was one) was the trigger for the passage-to-the-act: it was six months later that she attempted suicide/infanticide. Was she not carrying out on her own children the maternal death-wish ("They shouldn't have lived") that had accompanied her own birth? Was she not conforming to the name her mother had given her back then, mater dolorosa? For while her neighbours and family treated her as a poisoner, it was indeed the mater dolorosa she now incarnated, withdrawn in her grief.

Like her mother, little N. seemed to be identified with the prophetic words of her maternal grandmother: as soon as she had learnt to walk, and before she could speak, she threw herself downstairs on a number of occasions, falling from her own pedestal, and blindly repeating the suicidal gesture of the mortal destiny that had struck her so early on. Thus the equivocal words spoken by a mother to a daughter ricocheted down two generations, ending up as a fatal curse. The object a, whatever the child represents in the desire of the Other (Madame M. for her mother, and then N. for Madame M.) is the signification incarnated in the real by this fatal phrase. The object a is the agent of the act. There was no subject, even 20 years later, to assume this passage-to-the-act: Madame M. had nothing more to say about it. She had remained a “subjugated subject”: overcome by a destiny that she could not even glimpse, alienated by a delusion of persecution, she could only quote her mother, both then and now.

As we have seen, her passage-to-the-act was the post hoc realisation of her mother’s ambiguous words at the time of her birth, which she was still quoting 20 years after her own act, as if they had the force of law: “She shouldn’t have lived.” She had interpreted the equivocal nature of her mother’s desire as being against her, and when she in turn became a mother, she passed the deadly curse on to the next generation.

A mother’s dissatisfaction, a daughter’s neurosis

My second example is much shorter. It shows how a mother’s neurosis can affect the subject very early on, and may have the force of law where the future is concerned. I have selected this case because of the effect of destiny linked with learning to speak. It is a far less dramatic case than that of Madame M., and concerns a neurotic analysand who told me how her mother had taught her to speak (obviously her mother had told her about this at a later date). Her mother had been prevented from pursuing her study of literature because she married very young. Furthermore, the unenthusiastic reception by her in-laws made her severely depressed; and so she would shut herself and her baby in a kitchen cupboard, and, isolated from the world, would speak to the baby, listing the different types of food, one by one. The young woman attributed her severe problems with bulimia to this peculiar introduction into language; she continued to suffer from bulimia, as well as from the difficulties of the lifestyle she had chosen, as a writer.

It might be objected that this is not a case of what psychoanalysis would call “the law”. Indeed, these are only words, which the subject in a sense drank in with her mother’s milk, and which later alienated her by producing rules for living, or by becoming a fantasy lodged in a compulsive symptom. But what I want to emphasise here is precisely that there is no universal entity in the unconscious that could be described as “The law”; it is simply that there have been certain law-making words, some of which have inscribed themselves in order to form a symptom. This requires a definition of the symptom, and an explanation of its relation to the law.

Symptom and law

The doctrine of psychoanalysis places the Oedipus at the centre of psychical reality. For Freud, it was a question of situating the mythical murder of the primal father [“père jouisseur”] as the principle of the law. But, according to Lacan, the Oedipus was merely a mythical frame of reference which allowed the setting into place of the limits for the analytic operation⁷, in other words, the role played in it by a certain number of concepts: the father, the mother, the division of the subject, the object cause of desire, etc. This was a structuralist point of view, and not a moral norm which psychoanalysts, transformed into judges and missionaries, should refer to during treatment or in society when they consider that something does not conform to it.

The development in Lacan’s interpretation of the Oedipus shows a certain shift away from Freud. In fact, the way he was reading the Oedipus during the 1950s – which is often the only one his lazier detractors know about – is that of a substitution, called the “paternal metaphor⁸”, for the signifier of the “Name-of-the-Father” (which represents the law in the unconscious structured like a language) for another signifier, which he calls “the Desire of the mother”. The latter, the first term of symbolisation for the child, is produced by the mother’s absence: in some sense, as she comes and goes, leaving the child alone for a moment, she signifies to the child that she desires elsewhere, something other than him/her. Thus Lacan re-interprets the alternation of absence and presence of the mother in a structuralist way, punctuated by the phonemic opposition fort-da, which Freud noticed in his grandson⁹. The substitution invests the desire of the mother with phallic signification: “so that was what she found so interesting apart from me”.

The signifier of the desire of the mother, signifier of an absence which would become a lack, needs to be distinguished from these maternal words which have the force of law, and which rather testify to an excess of presence, as in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE SYMPTOM, FANTASY AND PATHOLOGIES OF THE LAW
• PART TWO LACAN AND THE SINTHOME
• PART THREE THE SINTHOME AND THE RELATION TO THE OTHER – FILIATION, TRANSMISSION, SEXUATION
• PART FOUR THE AMBIGUOUS MAN, HIS MOTHER AND HIS SINTHOME
• CONCLUSION The sinthome is sexual
• REFERENCES
• INDEX