Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot

A Critical Re-Imaging of the Body in Psychoanalysis

Fernanda Magallanes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138388420
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429750090
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot is a new radical departure in psychoanalytic exposition. An attempt is made to convey, in a language accessible for people from different disciplines, some of the most difficult processes that conform our subjectivity and our concept of difference and alterity.

Containing both significant theoretical material and applications of the theory to clinical psychoanalytic practice, this book offers the latest thinking on the importance of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and cultural theorists.

PART I

Body formation in psychoanalysis

1

Preliminary remarks on the body in psychoanalysis

To address the iterated problem of having a body, it is first necessary to elaborate the concept of the body used in psychoanalytic theory and the process by which this concept has been formed. Indubitably, the emergence of the body as a representation that is different from the biological body is a difficult subject, one that has been treated obscurely in the past. Psychoanalysts hold very different points of view about this concept. A neuropsychoanalytic approach to the body would be incompatible with the concept of body employed in this text. A body in psychoanalysis is not equivalent to a biological body. Although the term has been thought of in many ways, in this book, I used Paul Preciado’s definition of the body in his conference Somatheque (2012). In this conference he stated that the body is a sensorial-cultural archive containing images, narratives, and daily cultural practices; it is a somatic-psychic unity. This idea differs from previous definitions of bodies considered as merely the physical structure and material substance of an individual.

The body is explained through Freud’s work in terms of a sensorial-cultural archive: a surface of cultural inscription, an erogenous extension, a psychic apparatus, a mystic writing pad, a device that reproduces fiction, a scene of writing. He first wrote about this idea in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), where he described the infant’s primal hallucination or hallucination of the maternal breast.¹ The young infant cries as the breast is taken away, and then in response to that absence, the infant begins to represent what is no longer available to him. That absence of sensorial stimuli is the first bodily restriction which then prompts the infant to hallucinate. Hallucination provides satisfaction when the breast is not present. The hungry infant evokes the image of the maternal breast and for a short time, can wait for the mother to return. The young infant’s hallucinatory activity includes affects and ideas that reenact its previous bodily experiences.

This imaging defines thing-presentations that connect to sensation and affect and is the process by which the infant organizes the absent mother as a whole object. As the mother becomes that whole object, a difference between what is inside and outside appears. In the process of realizing that there is a difference between an object and oneself, the representation of the body as a whole object is created. This process allows the infant to become a body that is separate from the world. This body is no longer just biological but is a body immersed in the culture that sustains it. It is the primary caregiver who transmits to the infant the experience of its body being something different than the world. This experience is first represented by the mother, through her desires and her way of being in the world. So, in psychoanalytic theory, it is the mother’s restriction and absence and the resulting frustration and displeasure experienced by the infant that enable the infant to become a body immersed in culture. Therefore, it is by way of bodily sensations that culture is transmitted.

The concept of the body becomes even more intricate when we consider the Oedipal Complex.² In Freudian theory, it is not only the absence of the maternal breast and the frustration the infant experiences in its relation with the primary caregiver which establish the limits of the body, but also the re-edition of the primitive relationship that occurs via the Oedipal Complex. In the caregiver-infant relationship, the infant’s omnipotence is interdicted by the absence of the mother or caregiver, whereas in the Oedipal Complex, this proscription is due to the mother desiring something other than the infant. In From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), Freud named the infant’s vision of its mother desiring something other than itself; the Primal Scene. It is in this scene that the infant constitutes a subjective image of its body in relation to its parents. The infant assumes the interaction between its parents as a prohibition of incest (of not being the only thing the mother desires) and as a prohibition of killing the father (of killing that which the mother desires more than the infant). How a body forms and how it is limited and structured depends on the position that the infant takes regarding this scene.

Freud had the brilliant idea to listen to the bodies of his patients and conceived of a plot for those bodies using a Greek tragedy as the central image instead of thinking of their bodies as machines. He chose the Oedipal Complex that placed the prohibitions of parricide and incest as central to the formation of the body because it explained the symptoms of the bodies of his time. Freud’s sensibility led him to perceive symptoms as expressions of the agonies of a plot. This way of listening to bodies is very relevant in the history of thought because bodies experience the agonies of their time and bodies express those agonies through symptoms.

The Oedipal Plot reveals how infants become bodies in culture through the assimilation of certain prohibitions that set in motion mechanisms by which their bodies find its limitations. The bodies of mothers or caregivers are imprinted by culture; they then transmit that culture, imprinting it in the bodies of those in their care. However, the only prohibitions circumscribed by Freud are those of incest and parricide. He thought of incest and parricide not only as representations within the body as an archive but also as an architectural matrix that contours the perceptual and cultural limitations of that body.

As it is frequently observed in psychoanalytic practice, bodies today manifest different symptoms and psychic mechanisms than the bodies Freud observed in his day. The fact that symptoms today are different from the clinical manifestations documented in Freud’s time has forced analysts to come up with different interpretations. The variance in their interpretations has made evident a lack of consensus regarding the concept of body in psychoanalysis and has been a problem for the psychoanalytic field. My assertion is that many of us in this field have a resistance to write about the concept. This resistance points to a difficulty in assuming today’s epistemic crisis, and therefore we are challenged to understand the manifestations of somatic-psychic pain encountered in our practice. The body as an archive changes in time as images, narratives and cultural practices change. The idea of what a body is and what sexual difference means determine the legitimacy of a body in society. Those ideas are transforming, and bodies that appear to be different to a heteropatriarchal society are relegated as those operating outside the limits of legitimacy.

In separate approaches, authors Élisabeth Roudinesco and Paul B. Preciado posit that some of the body manifestations seen today announce a plot that does not correspond to the Oedipal Plot. In Inappropriate Bodies (2014), Preciado states that today we are seeing a new epistemic crisis of the body, and proposes a study of the genealogy of power implicit to the body. He also points to the need to create new myths concerning the body. In Por qué el Psicoanálisis se debe renovar? by El País (2015), Roudinesco says that the Oedipal Complex must be removed, and a new myth should be used to understand bodies and sexual difference today. She mentions that some contemporary analysts have argued that homo-parental families do not correspond to the Oedipal Plot. Combining the statements of both authors would imply the following: some bodies are abject from the norm that the Oedipal Plot inflicts, so the plot should be replaced to ensure the representability of those bodies.

However, my assertion is that Oedipus as a sign has already been thought of in a specific way within psychoanalytic theory, and the linguistic sign of Oedipus has already had a certain agency over bodies in the cultural realm. Therefore, dismantling the Oedipal Plot and the implications it has had would require more than just eradicating the concept or substituting it with another myth. As I mentioned previously, today’s bodies have been configured through this plot. So, if we are aware that the Oedipal Plot has been the agent that acts upon bodies, the abrupt substitution of this myth is not possible, as bodies have already been formed by it. Thus, even if today we were to replace the Oedipal myth with another myth, it would not change the effects that Oedipus as a linguistic sign has had on bodies. I think that the best use of the reiteration of Oedipus in psychoanalytic theory would not be to substitute another myth for Oedipus but to rethink Oedipus beyond the Oedipal Plot. Therefore, my proposal is supplementary to that of Preciado and Roudinesco, and that is to work with the iterability of Oedipus as a sign. Working with Oedipus in Sophocles could expand the range of themes that the Oedipal Plot offers for bodily formation, but doing so will require clarity regarding the concept of body being used and also that we recognize how the Oedipal Plot’s continued operation in our cultural realm is making some bodies abject.

In Bodies that Matter (1993), Judith Butler refers to abject bodies as those that become bodies through an exclusionary matrix where they become relegated. She poses that these bodies form part of an illegible domain of those where they do not enjoy the status of being a body and live under the sign of the unlivable. The unintelligibility of these bodies circumscribes the intelligibility of others. Taking into account Butler’s perspective on abjection in the cultural domain, I explore how abjection is sometimes reproduced within psychoanalysis as well. I contend that when the analyst describes a body as abject or unintelligible, in part they are doing so to maintain their identity as a psychoanalyst. Their interpretation of others as unintelligible reinforces their own intelligibility. This rigidity present in the illusory identity of the analyst bound to a specific interpretation of the sign of Oedipus may be interfering with our ability to understand other bodies. Alternative ways to listen have been proposed in psychoanalysis, but we still need to work more with the linguistic reiteration of Oedipus as a sign. I assert that it is irresponsible for an analyst to say that there are subjects that are impossible to analyze. Their inability to think outside of the confines of the Oedipal Plot makes bodies that don’t correspond to it abject.

To continue to theorize on the relation between the body and the Oedipal Plot, it is necessary to delve further into what a body is in psychoanalysis and how this body forms. The writings of Sigmund Freud, Françoise Dolto, Piera Aulagnier and Jean Laplanche are among the most representative of the process of subjectivation as a process of embodiment within psychoanalysis. These authors agree that the body cannot be reduced to its biological status. The following chapters in Part I present a critical reading of their works on this subject and is the starting point to reformulate how bodily formation, the image of the body and their relation to emplotments and alterity are thought of.

Notes

1 The term maternal breast refers to any object that enables the infant’s desire to feed or satisfy its physical needs. The term mother refers to the infant’s first caregiver, through which desire is transmitted to the infant irrespective of that person’s gender.

2 Oedipal Complex is a term used by Freud to describe the universal trend of humans to desire parricide and incest. It is a complex in the sense that Freud considered it to be an organized system that describes universal traits.

2

Hysteria

The agonies of an epistemic crisis of the body

This chapter will commence by exploring how a new concept of body emerged in the modern era. It was the study of hysteria that initiated a discussion about the definition of a body. This observation of hysterical patients marked the starting point for theorizing about the body and has traditionally been referred to as the beginning of psychoanalysis. The hysterical symptoms were what prompted in Jean-Martin Charcot and his students, including Freud, the necessary curiosity to rethink the concept of body, and then to write about it. Therefore, I will begin by giving an overview of this subject.

Much has been written about hysteria, as it is a millenary concept that has become polysemic in time. However, if we attempt to define hysteria, problems immediately arise as it is a word with a life of its own, one that escapes signification. Hysteria as a signifier has appeared distinctly over time, with different names and diverse symptoms. Sometimes it is conceived of as pathology, other times as a structure of personality, a simulation or a trick. In popular discourse, it is used to imply hyper-expressivity, ambivalence, theatricality and high emotion. According to Capellá (1996), hysteria has been seen through the lens of alternative paradigms of thought, including the supernatural/magic model and the scientific/rationalistic model. The second of these paradigms, the scientific/rationalistic model, sees this body from the perspective of an ostensibly superior reason that finds it pathognomonic. However, there is something about this manifestation that was not entirely captured by any of these paradigms, something that would explain why the symptoms seen in hysterical subjects are distinct in different eras. It is as though some bodies express what the world has not yet come to terms with. If psychiatric medicine only treats the symptoms of these patients, it fails to listen to what these bodies have to say. Jean-Martin Charcot founded the school of neurology in Paris at L’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière. The school was an acclaimed research center and teaching hospital where the recent advent of photography had been incorporated. Creating photographic records was highly encouraged at the school as an adjunct to the study of pathology. Hysterical women were the most photographed population of patients within the hospital. These photographs produced a visual record of bodies that are paralyzed, scattered, unstable, in a state of dreaming, unpredictable, contorted, whimsical, enigmatic, slippery, not apprehensible, difficult to explain. Bodies with symptoms beyond a biological explanation, erogenous and invaded by constraining looks: bodies exposed to the avid gaze of the doctors who were supposed to know what had befallen the patient, but ironically, it was the bodies of the hysterical subjects that were the carrier of such knowledge.

Charcot’s disciples studied hysteria thoroughly, and they described the phases of hysterical crisis as auras, an epileptic period, a period of grand movements, a phase of passional attitudes and terminal delirium. The pseudo-epileptic crises were given the name Charcotian crisis as though attempting to contain these bodies within the name of the master. Charcot later expounded that hysteria is caused by a physical trauma that gives place to symptoms only when there was psychic longing for the trauma to be processed. Doctors at L’Hôpital Pitié de la Salpêtrière in Paris were convinced that trophic disorders could be cured by hypnotic suggestion, so hypnosis was the technique most prevalently used on these patients by Charcot and his disciples.

The elaboration of theory concerning hysteria began by exploring its relation to the body. Pierre Janet theorized that hysteria is mainly a dissociation of a double consciousness. For him, a synthetic force formed by reason, reality and culture integrates the body, but that integrating force is reduced in hysteria. This reduction of consciousness leads to the emergence of those psychic forms he called “inferior” such as hyperemotionality, the instinctive and the demonic. These states were considered inferior, as they were associated with animal behavior.

During the same period that Freud studied hysteria, he was also describing and analyzing the laws of the psyche. His first theoretical approach on the subject was in his text On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (1893) where he stated a clear difference between a psychic body and a biological body (that from now on we will call soma to distinguish between the two). When explaining hysteria, Freud distanced himself from Charcot’s discourse and stated that hysterical paralyzes are not caused by trauma, not even by a dynamic injury. Instead of attributing a physical origin to the manifestations of the body he proposed a psychic one (originating from a world of representations). He posed that hysterical symptoms such as paralysis are caused when one representation is excluded from the ego because of an overload of affect. It is as if one state of the body (consciousness) remains unaware of the other state (unconscious).

According to Postel and Quetel (1983) Freud and Janet questioned how a part of the body could be paralyzed, in the absence of an organic disease that would explain the paralysis. They suspected that what was actually at the root of hysteria was the concept of the body held at that time. Thus, it was the symptoms of those who had been confined as hysterical subjects that introduced important questions about the body and initiated the formulation of the concept of the body in psychoanalysis. The bodies of these subjects struggled to communicate their difficulty to find a place in the modern world. These women were not conscious of the message their body was manifesting; they merely suffered the symptoms of the epistemic crisis of the body of that era. The unconscious discontents of civilization were acting through them. Induction into civilization necessarily entails that others imprint culture in us. Because of this, bodies as archives are never complete, and we are open to what the unconscious says through us.

In Inappropriate Bodies, Preciado (2014) stated that the body of women as a reproductive space is a political fiction specific to the modern era. Before the 18th century, the uterus was represented as a floating base in a vacuous space that belonged to the Pater Familias. Reproduction was thought to take place in the drop of sperm and not within the body, and the resulting infant was considered a product of men and God. So ontologically speaking a woman’s body was regarded as a failure. The belief that the Word of God sustained women’s uteri fell to immanence as God fell¹ and the idea of the uterus belonging to women emerged. After the fall of this modern fiction, some women found it difficult to appropriate their own bodies; it was this struggle that appeared symptomatically in hysterical bodies. Their symptoms were manifestations of an epistemic crisis of the body. Hysteria was announcing a new era for the concept of the body: a body with a flying uterus that could not yet be appropriated but that was no longer in the space of the Pater Familias.

It is frequently said that hysterical subjects are revolutionary in the sense that their bodies speak of a truth that is invisible to the consciousness of society. It is important to clarify here that it is not the subjects themselves that are revolutionary, but the return of the unconscious, which is acting through them. They are not consciously offering up their bodies to make a statement, but are seized...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Body formation in psychoanalysis
• PART II: Readdressing Oedipus
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index