First Things

Reading the Maternal Imaginary

Mary Jacobus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781317959304
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In First Things Mary Jacobus combines close readings with theoretical concerns in an examination of the many forms taken by the mythic or phantasmic mother in literary, psychoanalytic and artistic representations.

She carefully explores the ways in which the maternal imaginary informs both unconscious processes and signifying practices at all levels. Her fierce analysis of specific texts and paintings raises questions about the the symbolic and biological maternal body and how they relate to each other in literary and psychoanalytic terms. The invocation of writings by Kleist, Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Malthus and de Sade, along with analysis of French revolutionary iconography and Realist and Impressionist paintings by Eakins and Morisot, make this wide-ranging text a truly interdisciplinary study.

First Things sees literary theory and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating practices. The work of Freud, Klein, Kristeva and Bion shape an inquiry into such topics as population discourse, surrogate motherhood, AIDS, mastectomy and psychoanalysis itself. In addition, Jacobus elaborates on Freud's oedipal preconceptions, Klein's missing theory of signs, memory, melancholia, narcissism and maternal reverie.

Part I


Preconceptions

1


Freud’s Mnemonic

Screen Memories and Feminist Nostalgia

There is a joking saying that “Love is homesickness.” Whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: “this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,” we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body.

— Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919 (SE 17.245)

But in fact we were always like this,

rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.

Birth stripped our birthright from us

so early on

and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears

like midges, told us nothing, nothing

of origins, nothing we needed

to know, nothing that could re-member us.

—Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Étude.”¹

JOKING APART, in what mythic place could we at once re-find the maternal body and re-member ourselves? In his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud compares childhood memories to the memories preserved in a nation’s myths (SE 11.83–84). While myths may be a means of access to what childhood memories screen, they may also be said to produce and structure memory itself. Freud’s writing on screen memory reminds us that memory is a form of representation, and that representations reproduce sexual ideology (historically determined myths), just as “woman” is itself an ideologically determined representation. In Freud’s writing, woman serves not only as a mnemonic for sexual difference, but as a reminder of an oedipal “case” or story that is Freud’s own. What part is played by the memory of a woman—specifically, the mother—in the Freudian representation of sexual difference? The workings of memory, as Freud himself put it, are always “tendentious.” What, then, is the relation between the myth of psychoanalysis and the representations we call “memories”—between the theory of sexual difference produced by Freudian psychoanalysis and the childhood memories it uses to buttress this theory? Finally, another question arises: Is the feminist attempt to recover the memory (specifically, memory of the mother) beneath the myth—the contemporary feminist excavation of what Freud himself called the “Minoan-Mycenaean” or preoedipal phase screened by the Hellenic oedipal—a form of nostalgia?² In its desire to ground femininity on the bedrock not of Freudian penis envy but of the body of the mother, some versions of feminism may have risked forgetting that every theory is grounded on a fictional moment and that nostalgia itself is a form of Nachträglichkeit or retroactive construction. The statement that “this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,” would then gesture not so much toward a lost mother country as toward the myth that has also sustained feminist revisions of Freudian theory—the “memory” of imaginary oneness with the body of the mother, a feminist myth of origins whose function, in Rich’s phrase, is to “re-member us.”

i: “The difference between m and n”

In Freud’s writing about “screen memory,” memory and the mother are intimately associated from the start. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud devoted a chapter to the topic of “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” which he later substantially revised to include some of his own memories. By “screen memories,” he means memories that preserve, associatively, not an ostensible “content” but something that is “screened off” or unavailable to consciousness. This associative link always involves a chronological distortion. Either the manifest content derives from a later (unconscious) experience—the “memory” being in this case retroactively recovered or retrospectively constructed—or a recent experience serves to inscribe repressed content dating back to earliest childhood, and, as it were, “displaced forward” (SE 6.43–44). Alternatively, a screen memory may hide something that is contemporary or contiguous in time. Either way, the status of memory is put in question. Instead of being a recovery of the past in the present, it always involves a revision, reinscription, or re-presentation of an ultimately irretrievable past. The past ceases to be the proper referent of memory; rather, memories “refer” (improperly—that is, metaphorically or metonymically) to the unconscious. Memory, then, becomes a mode of “reproduction” (Freud’s term) like any other, one that resembles dreaming not only in its distortions and displacements but in its paradoxical relation to a forgetting that is always, though unconscious, deliberate and purposive. Just as a dream represents the fulfillment of a repressed wish, so a memory represents a contradictory desire—not the wish to remember, but the wish to forget.

In his correspondence with Fliess, which provides a running commentary on the self-analysis carried on with particular intensity between May and mid-October 1897, Freud specifies that the element responsible for repression “is always what is feminine.” “In every instance,” he insists, “repression starts from the feminine aspect.” ³ We might translate this as follows: “What gets repressed is femininity.” At stake in these memories (Freud’s own) is nothing less than childhood sexuality, which for Freud is always oedipal rather than preoedipal; hence, we might say that these memories preserve the repressive inscription of sexual difference. What gets repressed is precisely “the feminine” or the child’s bisexuality—if you like, the mother’s desire in him as well as his desire for the mother. Freud tells us that he was first alerted to “the tendentious nature” of memory by the striking fact that memories preserved from earliest childhood appear to be (his term) “indifferent.” The word “indifferent” recurs in his account of “Screen Memories” with troubling insistence. What is an “indifferent” memory? Could it be one in which the inscription of sexual difference has been elided or repressed, and along with it not simply sexuality but what Freud terms “the feminine”? This infantile amnesia is for Freud the “strange riddle” that (no less than the riddle of femininity) perplexes the analytic self-interpreter. The key to it, he claims, may unlock our understanding of other amnesias, those purposive forgettings which provide the basis for all neurosis.

To prove his point, Freud tells an anecdote which turns on the displacement of sexual difference onto the ostensibly indifferent scene of writing:

A man of twenty-four has preserved the following picture from his fifth year. He is sitting in the garden of a summer villa, on a small chair beside his aunt, who is trying to teach him the letters of the alphabet. He is in difficulties over the difference between m and n and he asks his aunt to tell him how to know one from the other. His aunt points out to him that the m has a whole piece more than the n—the third stroke. There appeared to be no reason for challenging the trustworthiness of this childhood memory; it had, however, only acquired its meaning at a later date, when it showed itself suited to represent symbolically another of the boy’s curiosities. For just as at that time he wanted to know the difference betweem m and n, so later he was anxious to find out the difference between boys and girls, and would have been very willing for this particular aunt to be the one to teach him. He also discovered then that the difference was a similar one—that a boy, too, has a whole piece more than a girl; and at the time when he acquired this piece of knowledge he called up the recollection of the parallel curiosity of his childhood. (SE 6.48)

In this classic representation of sexual difference (”The m has a whole piece more than the n”), binary opposition leads to asymmetry; m has something that n lacks, “a whole piece more,” or an extra “member,” although to be without it is to be less than whole. That this asymmetrical structure—the minimal difference between two adjacent characters, a difference characterized as feminine lack—determines the entire phallocentricity of the Freudian inscription of sexual difference hardly needs underlining, though Freud’s own italics place the emphasis there. Figuring sexual difference as a hierarchy of plus or minus underlines the castrating cost for women of “the third stroke.”

But why the imbrication of sexual difference in the scene of writing? At the very point where the possibility of self-inscription arises, and with it the self-division and self-dispersal figured by writing itself, anxiety about sexual differentiation enters in. Freud implies that the difference between m and n only becomes significant (no longer “indifferent”) for the boy at a later stage, when his sexual curiosity and desire have become aroused and focused on his aunt (an obvious mother substitute). But to write is already to have acceded to the inscription of sexual difference—to the Oedipus complex and to the anxieties about loss of wholeness that Freud calls castration anxiety. La plume de ma tante, in Lacanian terms at least, would have it that all subjects are “castrated,” whether avant or à la lettre, irrespective of anatomical gender. Inscription can never be regarded as indifferent, any more than the screen memories of childhood can. Rather, the scene of writing “screens” not only castration anxiety, but the differentiating ban on the mother and the traumatic discovery (for both boys and girls) that the mother lacks a penis. When it comes to the phallic signifier, lack is the lesson taught to all subjects. This anxious discovery is managed in Freud’s asymmetrical account by placing femininity on the side of lack, just as the stories boys tell themselves manage castration anxiety by projecting the loss of what they still possess onto what little girls have never had.

Freud’s overdetermined anecdote turns out to be an exemplary “mnemonic” for the child’s passage through the Oedipus and castration complexes. The hidden story of screen memory is nothing other than the inscription of sexual difference. In this scene, the swift reconsolidation of masculine identity occurs by reference to a woman (an aunt) who stands in for the always-absent mother, and hence for the structure of oedipal desire (rivalry with the father for possession of the mother). The aunt lacks what the boy wants; she teaches him his own desire. At this point it may be instructive to follow Freud’s own trajectory in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, moving via his preliminary “mnemonic” (notice how aptly, by an accident of language, m and n figure in this term) to Freud himself. In his 1907 revisions to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the subject of screen memory initiates a series of autobiographical memories that uncover Freud’s own earliest childhood encounters with sexual difference. These recollections specifically concern his mother. Preceding the ostensibly “indifferent” scene of writing by many years, they prove to be of particular significance for Freud himself, since they lead to the momentous “discovery” of the Oedipus complex on which Freud’s entire theory of sexuality comes to depend. In these autobiographical memories, what is forgotten or repressed, and thereby rendered “indifferent,” turns out to be not only sexual difference or the oedipal ban on desire for the mother, but theoretical desire—the founding desire of psychoanalysis.

“Shut up already” (words apocryphally attributed to the Jewish mother) could serve as a mnemonic for the repressed inscription of the mother in Freud’s writing. Desire for the mother must give way to the law of the Father in the Freudian account of the universality of the Oedipus and castration complexes. Yet these crucial “memories” reveal an intriguing interpretive structure. When the forty-two-year-old Freud turns to his (now elderly) mother for an explanation of certain childhood memories involving her and his old nurse, she provides unexpected illumination (”threw a flood of light on the childhood scene,” as Freud puts it; SE 6.51). Her symbolic confinement, it turns out, has served to screen from memory her reproductive capacity, her maternal “confinement.” “Mother” becomes the name for closet-memory, in the sense that we speak of “closet-drama”—the unacted drama that has its life in the mind, or on the page of the unconscious where memories (whether of past or present) are inscribed. “Mother” is the ostensible referent of these closet memories, yet it is only by making an extra-textual appeal to her as an entirely contingent witness that Freud is able to establish the universal structures at work in screen memory. What is the status of the mother? Is she a content, or rather, as he seems to imply, an interpretative structure? We might suspect that Freud’s mnemonic is a reminder, not of a “what” (the mother) but of a “how”—the process whereby sexual difference gets inscribed in the prehistory of the subject.

In a recollection that circumstancial evidence dates back to his third year, Freud sees himself “standing in front of a cupboard [‘Kasten’— in his first translation, he calls it a wardrobe, ‘Schrank’] demanding something and screaming, while [his] half-brother … held it open. Then suddenly [his] mother, looking beautiful and slim, walked into the room, as if she had come in from the street” (SE 6.50). These, Freud makes clear, were his own words for describing the scene. He does not know whether his half-brother (his senior by twenty years) wanted to open or shut the cupboard, why he himself was crying, or what the arrival of his mother had to do with the brouhaha. Only after considerable analytic efforts does he bring to light the fact that he had “missed his mother, and had come to suspect that she was shut up in this wardbrobe or cupboard.” When he discovers that the cupboard is empty, he begins to scream: “This is the moment that my memory has held fast; and it was followed at once by the appearance of my mother” (SE 6.50). How, Freud wonders, did the child get the idea of looking for his absent mother in the cupboard? The answer seems to lie in the dreams that Freud had during the period of self-analysis occupying him in 1897 and that he recorded in his contemporary correspondence with Fliess.

The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I Preconceptions
• Part II Melancholy Figures
• Part III The Origin of Signs
• Part IV Theory at the Breast
• Index