Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan

On and Off the Couch

Stephanie Swales, Carol Owens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138328440
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429828348
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Taking a deep dive into contemporary Western culture, this book suggests we are all fundamentally ambivalent beings. A great deal has been written about how to love – to be kinder, more empathic, a better person, and so on. But trying to love without dealing with our ambivalence, with our hatred, is often a recipe for failure. Any attempt, therefore, to love our neighbour as ourselves – or even, for that matter, to love ourselves – must recognise that we love where we hate and we hate where we love.

Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has claimed that to be in two minds about something or someone is characteristic of human subjectivity. Owens and Swales trace the concept of ambivalence through its various iterations in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to question how the contemporary subject deals with its ambivalence. They argue that experiences of ambivalence are, in present-day cultural life, increasingly excised or foreclosed, and that this foreclosure has symptomatic effects at the individual as well as social level. Owens and Swales examine ambivalence as it is at work in mourning, in matters of sexuality, and in our enjoyment under neoliberalism and capitalism. Above all, the authors consider how today's ambivalent subject relates to the racially, religiously, culturally, or sexually different neighbour as a result of the current societal dictate of complete tolerance of the other. In this vein, Owens and Swales argue that ambivalence about one's own jouissance is at the very roots of xenophobia.

Peppered with relevant and stimulating examples from clinical work, film, television, politics, and everyday life, Psychoanalysing Ambivalence breathes new life into an old concept and will appeal to any reader, academic, or clinician with an interest in psychoanalytic ideas.

Chapter 1

The tensions of ambivalence

It seems to us that in our contemporary times, experiences of ambivalence and of the tensions of ambivalence are increasingly foreclosed. We are, it appears, no longer expected to be “in” or “of two minds” about anything. Moreover, not only are we not expected to be ambivalent about figures, objects, or places in our lives, but in fact it is as if ambivalence itself has become an unsuitable psychical position or experience. Being ambivalent is increasingly and rather negatively interpreted for what it belies; that is, a less than unitary or singular response to someone or something. But as the great British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips remarks, we can be ambivalent about anything or anyone; our ambivalence reveals what matters to us, and indeed it is often the way we recognise that someone or something has become significant to us (Phillips, 2015, p. 87).

Our biggest claim in this respect – and one we will come back to a good deal throughout this book – is that although ambivalence is an essentially human lived experience and psychical operation, there are few places outside of the psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic consulting room currently where such experiences are taken seriously and given the chance to be worked through. This means that for the most part, we rely on other methods for the management of our ambivalence, and this is why in this book we write a lot about television shows (TV) and movies. We have, we believe, come to rely heavily on TV and film in order to know how and when to feel ambivalent and what to do about that. But as we rely upon cultural products such as TV and film in this way, we cannot ignore that prevailing ideologies and their complicated relationships with power and politics govern their production and as such instruct us in the ways of our ambivalence with a heavier hand than we might care to imagine. This is, of course, another way to say that some ambivalence is hard at work behind the scenes in the very writing of a show, or in the production of a film.

We want to trace some of the slippery, behind-the-scenes activities of ambivalence, especially as we believe that it has been repressed or excluded from much contemporary discourse, tied as it increasingly is to two prevailing but contradictory ideals. On the one hand there is the ideal that we should all get along with our “neighbours” (fellow workers, peers) even if we cannot stand them; this is of course the “love thy neighbour” full tolerance of the other which is thoroughly implicated in discourses and practices of anti-racism and other types of non-discrimination. On the other hand, under neoliberalism, our neighbour (fellow worker, peer) is also often our biggest competition or rival and it would serve us better to stand on their head for an advantage. These two ideals are commonly distilled and condensed onto situations where encounters with difference (other races, ethnicities, genders, classes, sexualities, etc.) are staged. In this way all the fighting (and perhaps much of the loving as well as the hating) takes place on the TV. This of course was not always the case. For it is one thing to see how TV (or film) may “reflect” our deeper, inner, psychical operations and processes, and even does a bit of work on our behalf by helping us to understand our conflictual tensions of ambivalence; however, it is an entirely different thing to understand the seemingly voracious appetite for opportunities to cathect these psychical experiences and seek out the possibility of their cathexes on the small or big screen. We happen to think that the latter fails considerably. For while cultural products unsurprisingly convey, represent, and otherwise indicate the psychical activities of their spectators, they do not, except incidentally, treat them. It seems to us that whilst TV and film show us our ambivalence, they do not help us to manage the tensions of our ambivalence. And we happen to believe – in the best psychoanalytic tradition – that what gets repressed, excluded, or foreclosed pops up elsewhere.

We will jump right in and invite you to reflect a bit on King Henry VIII in this light. The fantastically compelling 2007–2011 TV series “The Tudors” (Hirst) focuses on the infamous political and religious trials and tribulations during the reign of King Henry VIII, arising out of his determination and passion to have a male heir. At the height of his frustration regarding what was referred to as his “great matter” – the euphemism for his wish to marry Anne Boleyn and have her recognised by the Roman Catholic church as his legitimate Queen – he had banished his Spanish Queen Catherine of Aragon from court and martyred Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher because they would not sign allegiance to his governance of the church above God. Meanwhile, he continued to have to endure the evidence of diminishing loyalty among his subjects and their audible disdain for his new wife Anne Boleyn, and had to suffer rejection by the French King Francis I of his proposal to have his and Anne’s daughter Elizabeth betrothed to his son in marriage. At the very high point of his crisis, in this version of history, his secretary Thomas Cromwell comes up with an interesting idea. In order to counter the negative effects of the ambivalence among his subjects towards Anne, he suggests writing a series of plays to be performed throughout the kingdom in which the very drama causing all the tension at Court is staged in a humorous manner: the heads of the Catholic Church are depicted as bumbling and foolish, whereas the head of State is depicted as tolerant and benign. Whether or not it is true that Cromwell ever wrote or staged such plays, what all the historians agree upon was that he was at once architect and engineer of the tides of opinion which he controlled in order to bring about the King’s wishes. If indeed he was also the playwright and stage director of the received version of the King’s various crises, he merits the attention given to him by historians and writers alike. In recent times, Hilary Mantel’s 2009 best-selling, Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall is dedicated to following Cromwell’s inventiveness and ingenuity in spinning the web which sustained Henry at the epicentre. What is most interesting from our point of view is that the “dramas” of King Henry VIII’s life and marriages in all its versions, whether written up as literary fiction (Gregory, 2015; Mantel, 2010, 2015), as history (Wooding, 2015), staged (Anderson, 1948; Shakespeare, 1613/1997), or filmed (1933; 1953; 1966, 1969, 1971, 1998, 2008), for the big screen as well as for the small screen, testify that the now 500-year-old history of his life and his marriages are as interesting for contemporary audiences as they had been in whatever epoch they have been portrayed hitherto. And we note that almost every decade of the twentieth and now twenty-first century have produced at least one film or TV version of Henry VIII’s life. But why might this be? What is it that is “put on stage” that is of such interest to contemporary and older audiences alike?

One of the elements that makes Henry’s life so fascinating is that regardless of to whom he is married, the figure of the wife in question at first charged (hyper-cathected) with value – libidinal and/or political – later becomes emptied of it. She stands first for what he desires and is the very embodiment of his fantasy (to sire his heir, to consolidate his diplomatic position vis-à-vis the Catholic Church, or France, or indeed, his own kingdom and subjects), but this changes as she is revealed as blocking this desire in some way (whether through her own inability to bear a son/child, or some other factor which comes to the fore). The old ditty that helps school-children remember the destinies of each of his wives – “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” – can be seen as naming the effects of Henry’s ambivalence around his wives but also capturing the essence of this history as a sequence. Each marriage fails to bring about the desired outcome and in order for that marriage to be brought to an end, Henry has to undergo and stage a complete reversal of his position that led so strongly to the securing of the marriage in the first place. He moves, and builds a case for moving, from one pole of his ambivalence to another: each wife is emblematic first of his absolute love and passion, and then of his absolute hatred and vitriol (with the exception of his last wife Catherine Parr, only by virtue of the fact that she succeeds him). Even as Head of the church in England, as Head of State, and as having the final word in the Law courts, Henry still had to justify his decision of wanting to end each marriage, and since the times he lived in were penalised by anything other than absolute congruity and agreement with the King’s position (whatever that position was at the time, and regardless of the King’s own oscillations): any “difference” in opinion to that position normally ended up on the scaffold, or upon the executioner’s block. And here we have a clue as to another element that continues to make Henry’s life so fascinating to twentieth and twenty-first century audiences. In a manner picked up by Lewis Carroll in his portrayal of the whimsical and dangerous Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland whose throaty cry “off with their heads” signals the occurrence of even a trivial misunderstanding with one of her subjects, so too, did Henry VIII stage over and over his disappointments when his wives – or indeed any of his other subjects – differed from his point of view. The TV drama detailed in horrific realism each and every one of the executions Henry ordered. No expense was spared in capturing the appetite for a “good execution” on the part of his ordinary subjects; the myriad of details surrounding the executions – from the skill and championship of a certain swordsman to the bribing of another for a bungled and therefore most painful execution. These details – no doubt accurately observed from the historical records – fascinate us in the same way that zombie film killings and massacres appear to do. In the time of the Tudors, the conditions for staging the tensions of the King’s ambivalence were both legitimated and anchored as custom, ritual, and tradition in the symbolic order of the period: if you fell from the King’s love to his hatred, it could only end badly.

In our time (and in most of our places), the public execution has left the stage (notwithstanding the enactment of the death penalty in the presence of witnesses where that act is still practised). We recognise of course that the conditions for staging ambivalence are not the same as they were for our blood-thirsty ancestors. For this we can be indeed thankful. On the other hand, most Millennials know the best way to kill a zombie, and judging by the sheer volume of zombie films in production, our sense is that the appetite for a good execution has not diminished much. We shall speculate further about zombie executions in Chapter 2.

To be clear, our argument is absolutely not that we need an execution in order to purge ourselves of our hostile impulses, but rather that as the conditions for staging what we experience as the tensions of ambivalence themselves undergo change from epoch to epoch, the ways in which ambivalence is expressed also changes. And since in our time ambivalence is increasingly foreclosed from the social bond, there is nowhere for the normal, natural antagonism that accompanies human relations to go. So what are these conditions for staging the tensions of ambivalence? How are they constituted differently in each epoch? What can we learn from the variation of these stagings?

The benefits of tragedy

The Tudors were not the only ones who knew how to stage(-manage) their ambivalence. In Truth and Method (2004), Gadamer comments that Aristotle, in his scrutiny of the Attic tragedies, was struck by how the representation of the tragic action had a specific effect on the spectator, which he called catharsis. The representation worked through the affects of Eleos and Phobos. Eleos and Phobos are commonly translated as pity and fear respectively, although Gadamer finds something lost in these translations since in his view Aristotle is referring particularly to the overwhelming aspects of these emotions. Eleos should rather denote the misery that comes over us in the face of what we call miserable, and Phobos is the very thing we feel when our blood runs cold, and we shudder. For Aristotle, these “effects” were purifying. Why so? Because being overcome by misery and horror was supposed to involve the spectator as he came to recognise himself in the play and affirm something essential:

What does the spectator affirm here? Obviously it is the disproportionate, terrible immensity of the consequences that flow from a guilty deed that is the real claim on the spectator. The tragic affirmation is the fulfilment of this claim. It has the effect of a genuine communion.

(Gadamer, 2004, p. 128, our emphasis)

Aristotle had defined catharsis as the “purging of the spirit of morbid and base ideas or emotions by witnessing the playing out of such emotions or ideas on stage” (Aristotle, 1941/2001, 1458). For Aristotle, the effect of catharsis induced in the spectator of the Attic tragedy established this drama form as a drama of balance, which provided the opportunity for the mind of the spectator to arrive at a state of balance. His proposition from the Poetics that tragedy through the arousal of pity and fear brings about a relief of these emotions is usually interpreted as indicating that just as tragedy arouses powerful feelings in the spectator, it also has a salubrious effect: after the storm and climax there comes a sense of release from tension, and of calm (Aristotle, Poetics, 1449b). Through witnessing the tragedy and suffering of the protagonist (commiserating with him/her, shuddering at the thoughts of what s/he was going through), such emotions and feelings in the spectator are purged. The purging of emotions therefore creates the conditions for feeling relieved, and the spectator emerges in better moral, ethical, and psychological shape than s/he was in before. However, it is not just any random act which can properly lead to the kind of fear or pity which overwhelms the subject and brings about the conditions for catharsis; in Aristotle’s comments regarding the circumstances that strike fear or pity in the spectator he observes that:

when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near or dear to one another – if, for example, a brother kills, or intends to kill, a brother, a son his father, a mother her son, a son his mother, or any other deed of the kind is done – these are the situations to be looked for by the poet.

(Aristotle, ibid., 1453b)

In other words, the poet who would write the successful cathartic tragedy would do well to reflect something of the ambivalence inherent in the very closest of human bonds.

The German philologist Jacob Bernays’ ground-breaking study on Aristotle and catharsis is regarded as having “overturned the dominant moral reading of tragedy” (Billings & Leonard, 2015, p. 8). In his close study of Bernays’ essay, James Porter argues that Bernays caused upheaval in the academic world of tragedy because he disputed the established idea of catharsis which hung on the single widely quoted sentence from Aristotle’s Poetics (Porter, 2015). Bernays disagreed with the notion that catharsis entailed a purification of tragic emotions – a common misreading of Aristotle in his view – claiming that such a misreading had turned the Aristotelian interpretation of tragedy into a “moral house of correction” (Bernays, 1857/2015, p. 4). Initially Bernays underscored the medical meaning of the term elsewhere in Aristotle’s work emphasising the purgative aspects of catharsis (i.e., a process that involved a violent bodily discharge such as orgasm, vomiting, evacuating …), while claiming that certain purgative effects although therapeutic are not essentially transformative, nor in the least bit morally so. Later, however, Bernays built what we could call a psycho-social theory of catharsis. He argued that the drama Greek audiences observed on the Euripidean stage offered them an opportunity to share in what he called the suffering “in the face of a collapsing old-world order” and a delicious “fear and shuddering at the prospect of a fast-approaching age” (Bernays, 1857/2015, p. 46). Indeed, he further claims that social life with its “never ending reversals” offers an all too ready supply of “cultural objects” that can create the conditions for the experience of cathartic disturbances, pinned as these objects are to cultural pressures and cultural shifts (Bernays, 1857/2015, p. 46). This view examining the cathartic frenzy in representations of moments of social change and unrest on stage in ancient Greece is one that links very well for us to the arguments zombie film scholars articulate about the rise and ris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Foreword
• 1. The tensions of ambivalence
• 2. Why the zombies ate my neighbours
• 3. Raising the dead: Mourning and ambivalence
• 4. On letting the right one in: Heisenberg and vampires
• 5. Guilty secrets (Walter White, Walter Mitty, and the Manosphere)
• 6. Guilt, shame, and jouissance (and by the way, why your superego is not really your amigo …)
• 7. Extimacy, ambivalence, xenophobia
• 8. The jouissance of ambivalence: We are not racists, but …
• Afterword
• Index