Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life

Durations of the Unconscious Self

Jan Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781583911785
• eBook ISBN: 9781135480004
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Is psychoanalysis a narrative of self-knowledge, or a movement of lived time and the body?

Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life examines the relationship between therapy and the time of life, presenting an original and thought-provoking re-reading of psychoanalysis in relation to questions of lived time.

Jan Campbell investigates the early work of Freud, Janet, Breuer and Ferenczi, linking their ideas to the philosophy of Bergson. The link between psychoanalysis and the question of time connects these early debates with current issues that are central to our global society. Questions considered include:

• is the unconscious based on representation or affect?
• is the Oedipal Complex hysterical?
• how is therapy related to the time of our life?
• what is the role of hypnosis, in relation to psychoanalytic theory and transference?
• Freud conceptualised the unconscious as timeless space, but what would it mean to think of the unconscious as the very essence of psychic bodily time?

This book draws on the fields of traditional psychoanalysis, philosophy, neuroscience, and trauma studies providing a valuable new perspective on familiar concepts such as identity and consciousness. It will be of interest to students across the humanities and social sciences, and practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Chapter 1
Dora

Dora is Freud’s famous case history of hysteria. Entitled ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, this clinical case study is also a late Victorian melodrama dramatising all the politics and power relationships of the heterosexual romance implicit in the family, feminism, medicine and science. Studies in Hysteria is the acknowledged origins of psychoanalysis. It is a study of the hysterical symptoms and romantic longings of Victorian women, whom Freud originally thought were suffering from real sexual traumas. He then replaced this seduction theory with his famous discovery of infantile fantasy and the unconscious Oedipal Complex.

But how removed are the romantic fantasies of the hysteric from the Oedipal Complex? In Freud’s Oedipal theory hysteria becomes the generational love and hostility for the mother and father. Incestuous love must be demolished through the law of the father. The hysteric fails to repress desire for the mother, ‘she’ fails, therefore, to internalise the prohibition on paternal incest. In Freud’s famous case history of Dora, he analyses her hysteria as essentially identification with her father. Dora becomes her father in order to be successful in her love—with the woman her father loves. Freud’s Oedipal explanation frames hysteria as the conversion into bodily symptoms of a repressed fantasy or wish. Dora or Ida Bauer (her real name) was understood to negatively refuse her heterosexuality or love for Herr K, her father and Freud. She was unable consciously to accept this Oedipal love and in common psychoanalytic parlance this refusal of paternal law and prohibition, this refusal of the place of the father, is also a refusal of castration, sexual difference and a mature acknowledgement of genital love. Such a refusal marks the idealised romance of the hysteric who wishes to live an ideal transcendental union of mother and babe, and who cannot integrate violence with love. ‘She’ cannot accept the break-up of the infantile dyad. In other words she cannot accept maternal desire or her own, as this desire is what will travel beyond both mother and child to become symbolised in the paternal phallus.

This of course raises interesting questions as to the nature of desire. For Freud it is, first, the trauma caused by real heterosexual child abuse, and second, unconscious heterosexual fantasies of the child, for the real father. For Lacan, desire is not so much sexual passion for the literal father but a symbolic desire for what lies beyond the mother-child dyad, i.e. language, subjectivity and culture.

But what if desire for the father, whether that desire is literal, a fantasy or symbolic, is just as hysterical as the child’s desire for the mother? Christopher Bollas’s (2000) fascinating book Hysteria still adheres to the Freudian framework where the father’s position is to negotiate the child’s passage to the outside world. Oedipal sexuality and love for the father (for the girl), or identification with him (for the boy) is then the route to the social, whereas the mother holds sway over the child’s narcissistic, primary needs of being and being nurtured.

Bollas agrees with the criticism put forward by French psychoanalysis against psychoanalysis elsewhere, that current emphasis on hysteria, within an object relations framework, desexualises psychoanalysis. In this latter framework, hysteria is compared with borderline disorders which emphasise an ultimately narcissistic aetiology. Definitions of hysteria become inescapably merged with pre-Oedipal preoccupations and thus the crucial arena of sexuality as a route out of childhood innocence, towards maturity and negotiation of a more adult world is missed. The problem of course with this essentially Oedipal reading of hysteria is that it posits heterosexuality as somehow more mature. We can move beyond this, as some Lacanian feminists have done, offering the paternal place as something not attributed to the literal father, and indeed this is Bollas’s position too. The symbolic father, then, becomes a third term potentially open to lesbian mothers, or to a paternal function operant within the single mother. However, there still remains a problem with the whole Oedipal and pre-Oedipal binary, where the Oedipal represents language, culture, sexuality and complex, mental identity. The pre-Oedipal, on the other hand, remains the arena of primary needs and narcissistic being associated with the maternal body.

This binary between being and sex, mother and father, supports a dualism that in many ways Bollas’s book on hysteria rejects. Hysterical characters in this work walk on in every guise and under every diagnostic definition. They are, however, essentially pre-Oedipal entities, locked in self-idealisation: the innocent solution and defence against complex sexuality and object love for the other. Hysteria is where we become narcissistically stuck in the ego ideal as a perfect reflection of the self.

The child who will become a hysteric will sustain a rigidly pure ideal that specifically targets its sexual life as degrading, and will seek to transcend such contamination by continually asserting the presence of an ideal self through testimonial good behaviour or ascetic removal from all relation.

(Bollas 2000:21)

Hysteria begins for Bollas with the lack of maternal sexual desire for the child. It begins with a mother who cannot celebrate her child’s genital sexuality and who transmits to the child a horror of sexuality, confining the hysteric to an auto-erotic sexuality, a sacrificial love and identification with the virgin mother. This is a pure love untrammelled by the necessary sexuality, needed to break up and separate the hysteric from the mother, and set him or her on a journey towards future destiny.

Bollas then rereads Dora’s case, pointing out how her flight from sexuality and the father is to reassert a desexualised self. Let us remind ourselves of this story. Dora, an intelligent and attractive 18-year-old girl, is referred to Freud by her father, on finding her suicide note. In analysis Dora reveals the cause of her distress, the sexual advances of a middle-aged man Herr K—a friend of her father. This man, who kissed her when she was 14 and attempted a more serious seduction beside a lake when she was 16, is married to Frau K, her father’s lover and Dora’s one-time mentor. Dora is furious at being exchanged in sexual barter for her father’s mistress, and this pain is intensified on learning that her father’s insensitivity and his abandonment of her have been initiated by the very woman whom Dora has unconsciously loved. The woman with whom Dora could identify and feel an ideal love was different from her own disappointing mother, who suffered from ‘housewives’ psychosis’.

Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s case arises from his new Oedipal theory of fantasy elicited through dream interpretation. He analyses Dora’s unconscious desire for the father and Herr K through her loss of voice, fainting fits and nervous cough. Only later on, through the failure of the analysis and Dora’s departure, does Freud rewrite this heterosexual narrative in a series of famous footnotes, acknowledging Dora’s even deeper unconscious homosexual desire for Frau K.

In the first dream Dora is woken by her father and finds the house on fire. Although her mother wants to save her jewel case, her father says, ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel case’ (Freud 1905:64). Dora’s associations with the dream are jewellery bought for her mother, by her father, and her mother’s distress at being bought a bracelet, instead of the pearl earrings she wants. Furious at the money spent on something she did not want, Dora’s mother tells her husband he might as well give it to someone else. Dora also remembers being given jewellery she does not want from Herr K. Freud points out that the jewel case refers to Dora’s genitals and that her father is saving her from masturbatory activity, signified by her continual bedwetting as a child. The dream reveals unconscious desires for her father, Herr K and Freud himself. When Dora refuses these interpretations Freud replies there is no smoke without fire, and then links the fire in the dream to the three men she supposedly desires, who are all smokers.

For Bollas this is only half the story and misses the significance of how Dora wants to retreat from her sexuality in an assertion of her mother’s innocence and virginity. He points to the significance of Dora’s second dream. Here, Dora finds herself wandering in unknown streets. Finding where she lives, she comes across a note from her mother telling her that as Dora had left home without parental knowledge, she does not know her father has been ill, but now she was writing to say that he is dead and Dora could return home if she wished. Dora sets out for the station and asks a hundred times, where is the station? The answer is always five minutes, but on entering a thick wood she meets and asks a male stranger, who tells her it will take two and a half hours. He offers to accompany her but she refuses and carries on alone. She sees the station in front of her but cannot reach it and has the anxiety of a dream that cannot move forward. On arriving home she is told that her mother and the others are already at the cemetery.

Freud urges Dora to associate in relation to the strange man and she remembers refusing the company of a male cousin on a visit to a Dresden art gallery. Going alone, she becomes rapt before Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Freud’s interpretation of this is that the young man signifies the threat of defloration and Dora’s anxiety becomes soothed by the picture of the Madonna. Bollas spells out what is hinted at by Freud, that Dora takes refuge in the Virgin Mother as a retreat from her sexuality and the father who embodies it.

In these readings Dora’s dilemma is either an unconscious sexual and Oedipal wish for the father, or a retreat from that sexuality into a pre-Oedipal narcissism of innocent transcendence with the mother. Although Bollas’s reading is persuasive, like Freud it puts the emphasis on sexuality—either too much or too little. As many feminists have pointed out, this reading makes a pathology of Dora and ignores the ideological constraints of her context in a Victorian, patriarchal society. Therapy has to take seriously the issue of immanent desire or the lack of it in relation to the client, but it also has to focus on the context. I want to suggest that one of the ignored themes of the Dora case is time. Dora’s family is in many ways simply dysfunctional. She has a loved father infected by syphilis who embarks on an adulterous relationship with the woman whom Dora has set up as the ideal replacement for her own destroyed and collapsed mother. Moreover, her father barters Dora in exchange for Frau K, with the repulsive Herr K. Repulsive to Dora because his need for sex seems identical to the polluting sexuality that has deprived Dora of a protective father and an ideal mother.

The father’s gift of jewellery to the mother is unwanted. His unwanted bracelet that might as well be given to someone else—Frau K—is matched by the mother’s preferred jewels, the pearl ear drops that signify her complete lack of desire. Likewise, Dora does not want anything to do with the sexuality or expensive jewels that Herr K proffers. Sexuality is not just polluting in this family drama because it threatens the ideal mother-child bond in the shape of the father. It contaminates the family because it is a real signifier of the family’s dysfunction and because it represents the inability of both parents to provide Dora with the desire and the context necessary to leave them behind. The gift of jewellery by the father is one which is rejected by the mother and accepted by his mistress Frau K. These jewels figuring sexual desire also signify Dora’s betrayal by her father and his lover. Dora admires Frau K’s jewels and is given some identical ones by her father, but eventually realises in sorrow that they have been purchased by Frau K.Dora feels humiliated and ignored as she recognises how she is being managed and used by the two people she loves. The father’s syphilitic unfaithfulness, rendering him literally impotent, is matched by Dora’s mother, a figure of psychic destruction, suffering from ‘housewives’ psychosis’. Sexuality for Dora’s parents is either too much or too little, figuring their own hysterical escapes, his philandering and her obsession with housework.

Dora’s father is the seductive, if needy, parent whose constant illnesses and affairs (one is the excuse for the other) take him away from her. This disappointment is made unbearable for Dora because it also takes away from her Frau K, who embodied for Dora the ideal mother and model of womanhood she wanted to be. Frau K is a route out to the world for Dora, away from her family and the conflict of sexuality between her parents, represented by the unwanted jewels her father wants to give and the jewels her mother insists on keeping for herself.

Freud’s line of interpretation puts Dora back into repressed Oedipal desires for her father and it is not surprising that she is furious with him in suggesting that she carries the same repellent sexual desires that have been the source of her parent’s dysfunctional relationship. Dora finds herself incapable of leaving her family because her parents’ unresolvable conflict renders her unable to use creatively any of the Oedipal identifications available to her: fantasies which would enable her to move forward in time.

The father, in the first dream, who wants to save her from the fire, and the conflict of the jewel case, is the ideal father Dora wants, one who will protect her and not abandon her to the advances of Herr K. Likewise, in the second dream in her walk through the woods, the man who offers to accompany Dora in her search for the station is obviously Freud. The second dream represents the issue of time. Dora asks a hundred times where the station is and is told five minutes. When she comes across the thick wood she is told it will take her two and half hours, by the man and therapist, who represents the route towards the station and out of the family romance. Whereas Freud insists on associating the station with a box and then the female genitals, I suggest that the station is symbolic of a place in time, one which will either return her to her family or set her on a road to her future. Dora refuses the man’s offer because this offer is flawed. Freud does not recognise Dora’s need to leave the Oedipal romance in relation to her father and mother behind.

The associated story of Dora’s rapt immersion in the picture of the Madonna is not simply a retreat into pure pre-Oedipal transcendence with the mother. Bollas emphasises the Madonna as the hysteric’s pathology, contrasting it with his ‘ideal’ of the Oedipal moment where narcissism is swapped for object choice. If the Oedipal phallus is symbolically ideal, why not the pre-Oedipal mother? What about the creative possibilities of the Madonna?¹

In Dora’s rapt admiration of the Madonna she finds what has been removed by her father’s affair. The Madonna is the ego ideal, previously symbolised by Frau K. As such she is more than a retreat into pre-Oedipal fantasy, and figures as a route out for Dora in imagining herself as the longed-for adult woman. The Madonna is the ultimate cipher and projection, she is anything we want her to be, and for Dora she represents a creative future self as well as an idealised past one. This reading does not cancel out either Freud’s Oedipal, or Bollas’s more pre-Oedipal, interpretation of the Dora case. Repression of Oedipal desire for the father or an idealised bond with the mother are valid readings of the case, but they both take Dora back into an infantile romance from which there is no escape. No escape, because the hysteria of both Dora’s father and her mother prevent her from finding a route out from the family to the outside world. We are told repeatedly in psychoanalysis that the father represents the route out to society, and in Bollas’s account this route is one where the child can internalise sexual desire and separation. But in Dora’s case the father is as hysterical in his sexuality as the mother is hysterical in her sacrificial role. He is the one who retreats into illness and health resorts and has to make his sexuality into a sordid dirty secret; one that, like his syphilis, renders impotent a more life-affirming father who can be sexual and protective, both seductive and ideal. Dora’s second dream is all about her need to kill off her father in fantasy so she can remake her relation with him and leave him for her future.

But this of course also begs an interesting question of what is Oedipal sexuality and fantasy. I suggest that the Oedipal romance is symbolic and imaginary. It is fixed as a representation or myth, but it is also imaginary and as such is synonymous with so-called pre-Oedipal fantasy. These infantile fantasies are regressive, the fantasies of our past that we flee into, but they are also all the possible creative desires and identifications of whom we can be. Oedipal and pre-Oedipal fantasies are our escape within therapy, dreams and everyday life, but they are also the fantasies that we select, to consciously embody and remake in our movement towards future possibilities and selves. Too much fantasy, like too much sexuality, can be as bad for us as not having enough. We all flee into the family romance of fantasy whether that is personified by the ideal mother or the sexual father, but we can only move forward in time when we select the fantasies we choose to embody and make creatively real in terms of future identities. The Oedipal Complex, as Freud realised in later years, is simply a repeat of the relation to the early mother. The sexual father and the ideal mother are fantasies and fictions; they are the myths of psychoanalysis. Recognising psychoanalysis as myth does nothing to diminish its power.

Bollas talks interestingly of how the hysteric wants to retreat into a pure transcendent world of maternal/child innocence, and such hysterics, quite often female ones, are indeed recognised characters in clinical therapy. But hysterics also turn up as characters who seem too lost in enacting a powerful sexuality; a melodrama, where ordinary everyday matters seem dull and dead by comparison. Perhaps one of the hallmarks of hysteria is that it splits the body from language, the carnal from the transcendental and identification with the father from identification with the mother. Of course in this reckoning nothing is more hysterical than the Oedipal Complex, or Dora’s family romance, where the mother is the pre-Oedipal body and the father is the symbolic marker of language and desire (Freud and Lacan). Or where the mother is ideal transcendence and the father is the embodied seat of complex sexuality (Bollas). These two readings are not exclusive, as Bollas (2000) demonstrates. For him, the father represents sexuality and a desiring identification with the outside world. And Bollas is acute enough to recognise that in order to leave the ideal mother we also have to acknowledge her sexually desiring body.

However, as feminist theory has made clear, acknowledging the mother’s sexually desiring body is a contradiction within Oedipal psychoanalysis where the phallus is ideal. Phallic psychoanalysis separates the mother from the father and the transcendental from the carnal. As Luce Irigaray (1991a) has shown us, the Oedipal Complex privileges a masculine transcendental or symbolic realm and leaves the realm of the maternal to the realm of the abject, unmediated body. She calls it the ‘one-way mirror’. Irigaray challenges Oedipal theory and practice as a system of representation, accusing it of projecting violence and castration onto the body of the woman. For her the imaginary and symbolic value of the phallus becomes all-powerful precisely because in Lacan’s account there is no sexual relation in the real. She asks ‘whether the real might not be some very repressed-censored-forgotten “thing” to do with the body’ and suggests ‘there is no question of underestimating the real if we interpret its effects’ (Irigaray 1991a: 86). Irigaray is suggesting here that we must not cut off or castrate the relation to the maternal ‘pre-Oedipal body’, because we need that relation to the body in order to move and create. She suggests that an exclusively analytic/ representational perspective on the transference destroys the potential to imagine and create. Whereas writing and language seek to contain and repress bodily identity, a more figurative imagination linked to the senses can express it. Transference, in other words, cannot be resolved simply by deconstructing the analysand in relation to knowledge and language. Whereas, within a system of Oedipal representation, the hysteric occupies a mental imaginary that is at war with the real as death drive, a more creative imaginary can provide analysis with imaginative power to paint the senses and recreate the self.

Irigaray’s solution to the mental fragmentation of the hysteric is to encourage her to paint her senses in relation to images and dreams within the therapeutic encounter. Now, for Irigaray, this painting will equalise space-time perception because it ‘will spatialize perception and make time simultaneous’, so building bridges between past, present and future (Irigaray 1993:155). I will argue in Chapter 2 for a perspective where space and time are made to move in relation to each other through a lived time or duration.

Let us consider for one last time Dora’s dilemma and the professed need in her dreams to move forward in time, her yearning for a protective father and a mother who is also a subject. Parents in other words who don’t split off either their sexual needs or their adult responsibilities and can thus allow Dora ideal desires and depressive compromises, so she can move forward to future, possible identities. For Bollas, Dora’s rapture in front of the Madonna is her hysterical refusal of the sexual paternal order where Oedipal exchange seduces the child away from auto-eroticism. In this account successful Oedipal exchange enables the child to replace narcissism with object love and joins sexual passion with romantic love. Such union allows deferral and sacrifice of gratification until the arrival of adolescence. The non-hysteric thus moves into a sexual future, whereas the hysteric like Dora remains stuck in auto-erotic fantasies which idealise the parents as asexual figures. This argument depends on a division between, on one hand, a primary maternal order of being and non-verbal reception and on the other, an active Oedipal paternal order associated with language, the law and sexuality. According to Bollas, mothers and fathers inhabit both orders and help or hinder the child in their necessary struggle to move from pre-Oedipal narcissism to the sexual seductions of Oedipal exchange.

We could argue that Bollas substitutes the ideal asexual hysteric with the equally ideal and romantic sexual couple. For why make such a distinction between these two orders? In Oedipal theory these two orders are the necessary result of repression, where limits to narcissism are brought by the prohibition and law...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Dora
• Chapter 2: Time, affect and the unconscious
• Chapter 3: Hysteria and hypnosis
• Chapter 4: Death, life and the double
• Chapter: 5 Trauma
• Chapter 6: Psychoanalysis and the time of life: In an age of globalisation
• Notes
• References