Abstract
I was moved by and extend my sincerest thanks to you and your colleagues who were so willing to contribute to the February issue of JAPA, which offered me, above all, the intellectual joy of reading your texts.
Bonnie Litowitz’s introduction surely does justice to my work, including the research I have undertaken in diverse disciplines at the risk of solitude and existential questioning. It is indeed gratifying and stimulating to read a text so precise and free of prejudice coming from another psychoanalytic “family” in the Babel of our current multi-school and multinational theory. I should note at the outset that my recent work on “reliance” is meant to be provocative, recalling the “attacks on essence” (I’ll return to this) and the novelty that my approach to the “mother’s disappeared sexual body” represents. All of this is to say that before my trip to Israel this spring (to receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Haifa), where I presented the same reflections before an audience of Israeli psychoanalysts, I took the liberty of sending them Litowitz’s text as the “summary” my Israeli colleagues are were asking me for on this occasion!
Rachel Widawsky’s text is, to my mind, the most complexly detailed presentation of the diversity that constitutes my psychoanalytic thought. It is absolutely necessary to emphasize that my interdisciplinarity is not “mere eclecticism,” but “a journey among disciplines” (p. 61) and an innovative synthesis (in all modesty!). Widawsky demonstrates this with her reading of my notion of the “semiotic”: not a simple “addendum to structural linguistics” but “an endeavor to rethink the Freudian model of how the biological and the psychical articulate” (p. 62). Her reading, which moves from the Platonic Khora, passing through “the mother’s unconscious sexuality” and the Kleinian perspective of my notion of the “abject” as “precondition to the development of mental activity” (p. 63), is a journey accomplished with an exemplary pedagogical finesse. I am glad that she insisted on the two complementary movements: the maternal and the paternal, recalling my “remedy” to the “deficiency” of the paternal function, by way of the “imaginary father.” Finally, my concern for “patients in today’s world” (p. 65) and the role that I accord to interpretation are particularly important to me. Widawsky thus understands my interest in “ethical questions” against the “risk in normative healing” (p. 66), as well as my notion of the “herethical ethics” of maternity through to the “universal need for idealization [related] to the foundation of religious belief” (p. 66). A million thanks for this magnificent work, but just one little thing: when I arrived in Paris in 1966 (actually, Christmas 1965), I was twenty-five years old and not eighteen. And, yes, the years fly by, but, as Colette said, “to be reborn was never beyond my powers.”
It was a pleasure to discover the thought of Rosemary Balsam, whose other works I intend to read. I was enthusiastic about her insistence on the “forgotten body” of maternity (forgotten both in psychoanalysis and elsewhere). I am often accused of “essentialism” (!) by those who succumb to the metaphysical dichotomy of body and soul and refuse to accept its Freudian recasting: Freud’s notion of “drive” is already both psychic and somatic! Drives breach the flesh! The body, as a result, insofar as it is a speaking body, does not require any “essence” that would be exclusively biological or merely physical. This obeys biological laws as much as the laws of the unconscious, which opens up the possibility of working with (certain!) biologists, a possibility that those who treat me as an essentialist cannot even imagine. I like Balsam’s theoretical perspective, which comes through in her energetic style just as much as in her reevaluation of the history of psychoanalysis (particularly on page 93, in discussing the work of Margarete Hilferding). My integration of a “physical” semiotic into psychoanalytic theory is indeed a process of many stages: it is translinguistic, beginning with the “state of emergency of life” in the pregnant woman, as well as in the eroticism of the cohabitation of the mother-child that begins in utero, to the rhythmic-tonal-semiotic exchanges. Balsam interprets this with a finesse and originality that allows me to perceive the richness of our colleague’s clinical experience. Her interpretation of abjection, which would be at the basis of the rejection of the feminine (Freud speaks of an insoluble “taboo” of the feminine!), is innovative and should be developed as a complement to the Freudian idea that situates this phobia solely in the fear of castration. Arguably, one could also read in this passage by Balsam that the hold modern technology has on the woman’s body evidently brings relief to sterility (so much the better!), but it might also result in a real automation of the human species, which, in being fed by the abjection that is reified as horror of the maternal, produces humanoids with unforeseeable and fearsome destinies. I am very sensitive to the interest Balsam takes in the type of enunciation I use in approaching this “embodied mother”: not only does she propose new concepts (in the conviction that psychoanalysis has constituted itself as a recasting of metaphysical categories) and invite us to pursue this path, declaring their relevance to new social actors (mothers, adolescents, etc.); she also points to my often quasi-poetic style. What the “masters” of psychoanalytic thought who guide us do not dare do is, to my mind, quite simply to recognize the proximity to the unconscious that is imposed on us by “evenly suspended attention.” But taking this into account surely would favor an enunciation permeable to primary process. This explains why certain analysts feel the need . . . to write! Last, and most important, reliance does indeed not ignore the “potentially deadly forces pulled forward into life” (p. 95), this creative negativity of the passage between “Thing” and “One”: this is well grasped and clarified! Recalling the Stabat Mater and its resonance with Molly Bloom is an excellent way to bring out the fragility of the maternal experience: between dissolving jouissance and uprightness, 1 the mother “stands” (p. 97). “The woman is stalwart and unwavering”! To avoid unjust critiques of “essentialism,” I would suggest speaking not of a “female essence” (p. 87) but rather of “female experience.” The latter notion has the advantage of avoiding connotations of “origin” and “beginning” (which in “essence” returns to a sort of “physical pretension” blindly “metaphysical”), to the extent that “experience” implies a variation of beginnings (in the plural) occurring in diverse situations. (One is reminded that other sciences, up to and including modern cosmology, are confronted with analogous problems: how to reconcile the heterogeneous logical regimes (in cosmology, quantum theory and general relativity; for us psychoanalysts, the unconscious pre- or translinguistic drives, the “pre-predicative sphere” of the phenomenologists, the symbolic order of language).
The contributions of this subtle group of colleagues comes to a logical close with the commentary by Mitchell Wilson, who interprets reliance with respect to the Lacanian “Real.” It was necessary also that he note that reliance is inscribed in “thirdness,” notably in the “father of individual prehistory” (p. 101). I am taking the liberty of claiming that it was I who rehabilitated this Freudian notion, beginning in 1983 (see my Histoires d’amour), long before it gained currency in the French psychoanalytic literature. I fully agree with the interpretation of my theory as a “gradual differentiation between materiality and psychization” (p. 102), which leads from the “real” to symbolization, passing by way of the “Thing,” narcissistic union, abjection, and the semiotic. As a result, that interpretation is necessarily linked to research connecting “flesh” and “trauma”: the Lacanian analysis of “Irma’s Injection” is on point in this respect. Bravo for the courageous critique of certain “theory-building [shrinking] in the face of the real” (p. 105), of which we know the ready-made clichés, which prevents thinking-and-feeling “especially the real as flesh, the feminine, the maternal” (p. 105). I fully agree with the remark that my notion of maternal “eroticism” extends beyond maternal “passion.” On condition, however, that, as Wilson correctly notes, this eroticism “inhabit[s] an originary split” and “fix[es] the drives through the capacity for representation” (p. 106). Mother space, as “lacking” and “desiring,” as “not a full presence” (p. 107) generates—on this condition alone—the movement of psychization. On the contrary, the failure of dispassionateness leads to perversion and psychosis. Thank you for highlighting that “the mother . . . lives in the place of das Ding” (p. 108); she transforms it into what I call “the urgency of life.” Henceforth, because of this precise intersection, Wilson’s discussion of ethics according to Lacan is very rich, especially concerning the absolutes of desire and responsibility. Regarding reliance, it indeed obtains this “twist,” which Lacanian theory lacks, and which becomes for me a “passionate responsibility for . . . the patient” (pp. 109–110). Reliance, in short, coming to “the aid” of a specific ethics—the “herethics” of psychoanalysis: not a “morality,” nor any kind of moralism, but only the “necessary and emotionally risky” support offered to psychic life in its capacity to create living bonds (p. 110). The tragic example of Sophie is particularly well suited to let the threat of trauma resonate, which we not only do not ignore, but in fact make stronger in order to identify and alleviate it. Of course the extraordinary wager of psychoanalysis is—when it accompanies the limit-states of psychic life—to begin with the most basic: maternal reliance, in order to lead them to working through, sublimation, and symbolization.
As you can see, I am happy to have been part of a veritable flourishing of original and innovative contributions to feminine psychosexuality, which all of you on the basis of your clinical work, both individually and collectively, have produced in interpreting my work. These are but a few quick and scattered remarks, since I have read you all “loosely” in order to express my gratitude.
Thank you once again,