The Place of The Parents in Psychoanalytic Theory

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Referncias Colman, L. (1988). The place of the parents in psychoanalytic theory. Free Associations, 1(12), 92-125. 
The place of the parents in psychoanalytic theory Linda Colman, author, is a painter and printmaker. She studied Comparative Literature at Stanford University, California, and at the University of California at Berkeley where she also taught. From 1983 to 1984 she participated in the Observation Course at the Tavistock Clinic, London. She is currently taking care of her two-year-old daughter; 1912 California Street, Berkeley, California 94703, USA In this essay I juxtapose leinian conceptions especially those of Wilfred Bion to those of a leading Freudian psychoanalyst, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. I do so by reflecting upon a recent book of her essays gathered under the title Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche (New York University Press, 1986, 159 pages, plus index). In her essay !The paradox of the Freudian method: from the abolishment of otherness to the universal law", Chasseguet-Smirgel shows how comprehensively an Enlightenment metaphor for thinking has contributed to Freud's ideas about the mind. As well as placing Freud in a cultural historical context itself characterized by opposition and dichotomy (German Romanticism and Judaism), Chasseguet-Smirgel demonstrates that much of psychoanalytic thinking, including her own theory of the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, is still very much an expression of this Enlightenment understanding of how the mind works. Throughout her book Sexuality and Mind, Chasseguet-Smirgel discloses the important role of the father as the signifier of separation and division (the father separates the infant from the mother by means of his embodiment of the incest barrier and his unique ability to satisfy and procreate with the mother) and argues that the father is identified in the psyche with thought and ultimately with reality itself.
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Chasseguet-Smirgel quotes a letter from Arnold Zweig to Sigmund Freud at the beginning of her chapter on the Freudian method, a chapter in which she makes explicit the cultural derivatives of Freudian metapsychology. In his letter Zweig defines Freud's work as !Apollonian accounts of what is taking place in the primitive abyss of Dionysos". Zweig's image has a spatial and topographical dimension which aptly characterizes Freud's thinking: the unconscious is a Dionysian abyss, a cavity in the depths of earth which Freud will generally approach with the metaphorical tools provided by excavation and archaeology. Congruent with this spatial dimension there is implicit, in Zweig's figure of speech, an Enlightenment image of light into darkness; this image is made explicit by Chasseguet-Smirgel's own gloss on the figure in which she hails the Freudian project as !an Apollonian flood of light" (p. 129). Chasseguet-Smirgel defines the paradox of the psychoanalytic method as !the opposition between the subject matter the unconscious, the primitive abyss of Dionysos, and its project". In his 1922 section on psychoanalysis in !Two encyclopaedia articles" Freud defines the psychoanalytic project, method and scientific discipline (Freud, 1922, p. 235), and Chasseguet-Smirgel's citation of this essay points to the central importance for Freud of the use of logical thought processes. As she puts it: !The aim is to direct an Apollonian flood of light into the enigmatic depths of Dionysos" (p. 129). Leaving aside the idea of the flood of light, an elemental image for what is supposed to be the activity of reason, her description maintains psychoanalysis very much in the tradition of Enlightenment thinking about mind and reality and, from the standpoint of metaphor, suggests that psychoanalysis continues the Enlightenment mode of apprehension rather than presenting a new way of understanding mental processes. Although she uses the word !paradox" in the title of her essay, there is really nothing paradoxical about her metaphor for the Freudian project. The image of casting light on an obscure area is familiar and occurs often in figures of speech. Paradox is defined as: !That which is contrary to received opinion: that which is apparently absurd but which is or may be really true: a selfcontradictory statement" (Chambers, p. 960). An image which is frequently used rhetorically cannot be contrary to received opinion: rather, it signals an accepted way of viewing reality. The fact that the Enlightenment metaphor of light into darkness has assumed an almost stereotypical character might alert us to look for ways in which psychoanalysis could present a more evolved perhaps truly paradoxical picture of the mind. What Chasseguet-Smirgel does most effectively in her essay is to establish Freud firmly in the cultural historical context of German Romanticism and Judaism, two coexisting but mutually exclusive cultural systems with two irreconcilable views of reality. She shows very well the implications of each system in terms of alliance with primary- or secondary-process mental functioning and in terms of the place in the psyche which each Weltanschauung allots to mother and father, id and ego (her book is, after all, called Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche). German Romanticism, which made the psychic depths available to Freud, is described as a movement in which man loses his individuality by merging with what
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Chasseguet-Smirgel has termed the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex that is, the prenatal mother, the womb, the sea. Its cosmos offers the possibility of the dissolution of the self and of complete undifferentiation, chaos: !There is, then, a unity, a possible fusion between man, God and nature. An anti-religious idea, a gnostic conception of the world" (p. 130). And: !The father, in his role as the third person who separates the mother from the child, has disappeared" (p. 132). Chasseguet-Smirgel quotes Thomas Mann's remarks on German Romanticism in this essay, and indeed quotes Mann frequently throughout Sexuality and Mind. The epigraph to her book is taken from Mann's !Die Bume im Garten" ( !The Trees of Eden",1930) which contains a number of Enlightenment !equations"; thus: The world of the day, of the sun, is the world of the mind At least half of the human heart does not belong to this world, but to the other, to that of the night not a virile, generative world, but a cherishing, maternal one, not a world of being and lucidity, but one in which the warmth of the womb nurtures the Unconscious. Mann himself takes up the polarity of Apollonian and Dionysian in !Death in Venice", a fatalistic tale in which Dionysian consciousness can only bring about deterioration and death, though in classical Antiquity myths about Dionysos often contained complex resolutions of ecstatic experience and excess balanced by learning through experience, which bring about new configurations such as that of primal autistic experience (rhythmic swinging) in an appropriately containing setting (ritual, festival); Mann, however, sees the Dionysian only as a celebration of !the darkness of the soul, the Mother-chthonic, the holy procreative underworld" (p. 132). As the language of !The Trees of Eden" suggests, Mann adopts only those aspects of the myth of Dionysos which he can correlate to Enlightenment polarities. Unaware of the possibility of the containment of the Dionysian by the internal tensions inherent in the myth and its rituals, Mann, like Freud, sees the Dionysian as something which must be repressed or controlled by a counterforce: the intellect. The fact that Chasseguet-Smirgel refers to Mann in this connection is itself significant, for he gives an interpretation of German Romanticism from an Enlightenment point of view rather than viewing the two movements from a historical perspective. In delineating the role of Jewish culture in Freud's thought, Chasseguet-Smirgel quotes a statement by Freud concerning his hopes for the hegemony of reason. The quotation is taken from his New Introductory Lectures: !Our best hope for the future is that intellect the scientific spirit, reason may in the process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man" (Freud, 1933, p. 171). It may well be asked why reason, with its evident powers of persuasion, needs to establish a dictatorship [die Diktatur] in mental life rather than a democratic form of government. Although, at the desperate point in history when Freud delivered his lecture, the destructive powers of the unconscious were indeed raging out of control, this view of the intellect as necessarily defensive against id impulses is as typical of Freud's thought generally as is his uneasy reaction to the notion of the oceanic feeling discussed in Civilization and its Discontents.
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For Freud this complex of feeling is !wrapped in obscurity", and Chasseguet-Smirgel postulates a repressed part in Freud, suggesting that its cultural component is German Romanticism while its psychic component is the tie of the infant to the pre-oedipal mother and the infant's longing to fuse with her. Freud's optimistic projection of the progress of human understanding towards reason in The Future of an Illusion is !consistent with the spirit of the Enlightenment to which Freud claimed he was heir" (Chasseguet-Smirgel, p. 135). Freud's projection follows the inevitable progress from a mythological mode of apprehending reality to a logical-philosophical one, whose triumphant upward sweep is illustrated in German works of the 1940s such as Bruno Snell's Die Entdeckung des Geistes (The Discovery of the Mind) and Wilhelm Nestle's Vom Mythos zum Logos, which could be translated as From Mythical Thinking to Reasoning. While Freud does not use the word !thinking" to denote the primary process, his distinction between primary and secondary process bears the stamp of Enlightenment epistemology: both systems posit a progression from a primitive mode of mental functioning said to belong to myth, poetry and dream to a kind of thinking and reasoning superior by virtue of reality testing. In view of the polarized quality of these modes of mental functioning, it might be useful to consider to what extent such polarization grew out of contradictions in German culture between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. It seems significant also that the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, whose context is English and to an extent Anglo-Indian culture, is able, perhaps because of a less polarized cultural (and personal) background, to transmute psychoanalysis into a more complex, post-Enlightenment way of viewing reality and to think about the mind in an entirely new way. Bion's metapsychology is described by James S. Grotstein in his introduction to the Bion Festschrift Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?. In discussing Bion's special use of language, Grotstein mentions some important landmarks in his own understanding of Bion's difficult and enigmatic style of expression: My next clue came from the Nobel Prize speeches from the medical laureates who spoke of the rationale for the CAT Scan (computerized axial tomography). Many different views of the object are taken from a variety of vertices around a perimeter which rotates in multiple planes if need be. In order to obtain a focus on a specific target object, say, in the interior of the body, everything around it (the obvious) must be obscured so that the hitherto obscured area can be illuminated all the more clearly. When this happens, the surfaces are blanked out !by a beam of intense darkness", to quote Bion. The CAT Scan is a paradigm for Bion's method of thinking, speaking and writing (Grotstein, 1981/83, p. 10) Although it is not clear from Grotstein's description whether the use of this image as metaphor is Bion's or his own, the reference to vertices surely suggests the vertices of Bion's grid, while the quotation of Bion's phrase !by a beam of intense darkness" indicates that Bion was responding imaginatively to the CAT Scan image and relating it to his own manner of perception. Grotstein apparently considered the metaphor significant enough to illustrate the complexity of Bion's
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thought in the introduction to the Bion Festschrift, and shares it with the reader in such a way as to emphasize its importance in his personal evolution. It is useful to compare in detail the CAT Scan metaphor with the Enlightenment metaphor of shedding light into the depths of the unconscious. In this metaphor, light from above is projected into the depths below. The polarities light and dark, above and below, which psychoanalysts from Freud to Chasseguet-Smirgel have linked to father and mother, conscious and unconscious, show a characteristic of thought which belongs to logic, with its emphasis on dichotomy, as well as to mythical thinking. Anthropologists such as Claude Lvi-Strauss and Edmund Leach have devoted much effort to documenting and explicating the binary nature of myth. And while Snell's study of the Greek origins of the Western mind a chapter of which bears the title: !From Myth to Logic" portrays the change from poetry to philosophy as a progress from imaginative to logical thinking, it is Snell who points out a limitation of logic. In contrast to the world of natural forms, !Logic knows only dichotomy, the division into two; a certain thing either is or is not tertium non datur" (Snell, 1948/60, p. 192). Thus logic stands apart from actuality, while the binary systems of mythical thinking allow for a representation of the natural world which includes resolution of conflict in the form of mediation. The Freudian Enlightenment metaphor which is supposed to express the victory of rational forces over the irrational, and by implication to denote the activity of the mind revives the archaic polarities of some of the earliest cosmological systems as seen in the creation myths of Hesiod and the Near East. Polarization is a key feature of early cosmological thinking, which explains the origin of the world as the joining and division of !opposites" in nature (in Hesiod's Theogony the Earth and the Sky, in the ancient Mesopotamian Enma elish the fresh and the salt waters). These opposites are typically characterized as male and female, analogizing the origin of the world to human conception. While the natural opposites may vary according to their identification as male or female in the diverse cosmologies, and while different natural features are chosen in different cosmologies to represent the primal parents, a constant factor is the perception of nature in terms of polarities along with the perception of those polarities as anthropomorphically male or female. Thus the Freudian Enlightenment metaphor shares with archaic cosmology its central thought mechanism of polarization, in addition to an associative logic which links male and female anthropomorphically to natural phenomena. As in the early cosmologies, the polarities of the Enlightenment metaphor exist in a balance which implies a tension between them. In Enlightenment cosmology that tension is resolved within an order that is strictly hierarchical. This polarization of light and dark, above and below, father and mother (as internal objects) in Enlightenment psychoanalysis is explicated by Chasseguet-Smirgel in terms of her theory of the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex: because of the infant's desire to merge with the primal mother, and the consequent threat to the boundaries of the individual who still experiences this infantile wish, the world of fusion with the mother and its associated primaryprocess functioning must be separated off from in order to be understood and controlled by
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the world of the intellect and the father. For Chasseguet-Smirgel this separation can only, apparently, take the form of polarization. Significantly, the process of thought depicted here is unidirectional: the father as internal object aids in the understanding of the unconscious and of primary-process experience, which is associated with the mother. Chasseguet-Smirgel, following Freud, does not see the pre-oedipal mother as having any mental qualities which would aid the infant in understanding either his internal world or the world of the father. Chasseguet-Smirgel's argument concerning the role of the father as incest barrier is based on her discovery in her perverse patients of a phantasy which the analyst locates as anterior to the Oedipal phantasies of destroying the contents of the mother's belly, described in the work of Melanie Klein. The pre-oedipal phantasy discovered by Chasseguet-Smirgel is the wish of the infant or infantile adult to merge with the mother; the phantasy is expressed destructively as the wish of the individual to have exclusive access to a smooth maternal belly, so the contents of the mother's belly (other babies, father's penis) must be eliminated. While this summary does not do justice to the complexity of this phantasy, nor to its ramifications concerning reality testing, I believe it is sufficient for the purpose of indicating some limitations of the theory. Melanie Klein herself saw the mother as performing an important function for the infant, a function which has been summarized as !Melanie Klein's emphasis on the baby's relationship to the breast and the mother as the great modulator of mental pain which enables the baby to proceed with its development" (Meltzer, 1983, p. 42). The destructive phantasies which Klein located in the earliest stages of the Oedipus complex by implication find their expression within the context of an actual mother-infant relationship and take form according to the mother's ability to modulate the anxieties elicited by those phantasies. The mother is not simply the passive object of wishful or destructive phantasies, but can be seen as intuitively responding to them. What is more, the mother's earliest role in the infant's psyche is not only as the object or even partobject of id impulses but as the first ally for the infant's rudimentary thought processes, the first being to help the infant think about his feelings. Bion's notion of maternal reverie and his theory of maternal containment emphasize the intuitive and empathetic capacities of the pre-oedipal mother (Bion, 1962/1984; 1967/1984, pp. 114-15). The mother's ability to take in the baby's projections, think about them and return them to the baby in a modified form, and the baby's ability to introject the capacity to think about feelings, must alter the shape of all infantile phantasies, including the most primitive. One wonders if the perverse patients whose reality- and thought-obliterating phantasies are described so convincingly by Chasseguet-Smirgel could have been adequately contained in this way by their mothers. Or perhaps as infants these patients were incapable of fully projecting their destructive feelings, or of introjecting their mothers' modifications of those feelings. I believe one can conclude, from applying Bion's insights about maternal containment to the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, that it is the interactional context of each mother-infant pair which will determine the outcome for the infant of his passage through the era of primary-process phantasying. Whether the experience of this passage produces a perverse adult, or a normal adult whose thought processes are distorted and limited by unconscious phantasying (Chasseguethttp://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery?sid=3bea31c0-6cc7-4792-b49d-2e72c5ecb953%40sessionmgr11&vid=2&hid=1 Page 6 of 27
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Smirgel's utopian thinkers) or an adult for whom early phantasying is but a rudiment of largely reality-orientated thinking all must depend very much on the way in which both mother and infant deal with the evocation of phantasy inherent in the relationship. An important aspect of Chasseguet-Smirgel's argument and one which leads her to the polarized view of mind referred to above is the identification of the father, as incest barrier and obstacle to the return to the womb, with reality itself and with the secondary-process thinking which institutes and legitimates his role in the psyche. Thus for her perverse patients !the destruction of the contents of the mother's belly, aiming to make it smooth and perfectly accessible, represents the destruction of reality itself" (p. 81). Although she mentions that such patients frequently attack the analyst's maternal creativity and thinking, it does not occur to her that this phantasized attack on the contents of the mother's belly is also an attack on the mother's ability to contain these contents: it is an attack on the mother's capacity to think. Attacks on the mother-analyst's capacity for thought have frequently been noted by psychotherapists interpreting the behaviour and phantasies of their child patients. In some vividly related case histories several analysts record persistent features such as resentment of dependence on a thinking object and envy of the mother's richness and fertility, and detail a variety of motivations on the part of their child patients for testing and sometimes attacking the motheranalyst's ability to contain the analytic situation by helping the child to think about his feelings (Meltzer, 1983, pp. 185-202). While Chasseguet-Smirgel does note the importance of maternal qualities in the analyst, her failure to give sufficient weight to the mother's active role in the psyche as container and transformer of projected feelings means that this analyst must in essence return to a Freudian conception of mind and accept the Freudian polarities. In a chapter in her book, entitled !The Femininity of the Analyst in Professional Practice", Chasseguet-Smirgel defines a !maternal aptitude" which she feels endows both sexes with the ability to communicate with patients in a preverbal or subverbal way (p. 33). She sees an analogy between this aptitude and the mother's ability to create an environment for her infant, but the actual wording of her paraphrase of Ferenczi's picture of neonatal life is revealing: Ferenczi (1913) showed that the child's environment tends to recreate for him, after his birth, conditions which are as close as possible to the intrauterine situation: the cradle, soft blankets, cushions, protection from visual and auditory stimuli that are too intense, rocking, soft voices and lullabies all re-create a certain number of characteristics of prenatal life and turn the child's environment into a projection of the womb. (pp. 31-2) According to Chasseguet-Smirgel it is the baby's environment which by some mysterious tendency achieves this projection of the womb, rather than the mother who creates that environment by thinking at many different levels about the needs of her infant. This phrasing, which obscures who it is who puts this environment together, is in marked contrast to Bion's notion of maternal reverie.
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Perhaps cultural imagery offers the most striking examples of just how deeply intertwined are the mother's provision of a physical environment and her thoughts about the identity and futurity of her child. While Bion uses the word reverie in a very specific sense, a more general association of reverie with the mother's preparation of an environment is familiar from paintings of the Virgin such as the image of the Seamstress Madonna. It is, or should be, common knowledge that a mother does a great deal of productive thinking of both a direct and an indirect kind while creating an environment for her child, but perhaps we need these reminders from cultural imagery of the significance of what is so familiar. A more modern but equally vivid image of maternal reverie is a quilt made by the painter Sonia Delaunay for her baby. A patchwork utilizing traditional Slavic elements, the quilt contains features of rhythm, line and colour which make it the predecessor and prototype of Sonia Delaunay's collages and paintings: !Au-del de l'objet utilitaire, Sonia vient de crer la premire oeuvre abstraite" (Molinari, 1985). While the importance of this quilt is heightened by the fact that it became the kernel for the work of a great painter, it could legitimately stand for the creativity of all mothers in planning and piecing together a world for their infants. The creativity of the mother-analyst is no more limited to communication with the patient on unconscious or preconscious levels than is the fruitfulness of the mother limited to the biological facts of pregnancy and birth. An attack in phantasy upon the mother's belly must represent not only an attack upon the father as internal object, as the !reality" which the belly contains, but an attack upon the mother's very capacity to hold together her internal world and the internal world of the infant by intertwining creative phantasying and reality-based thinking in a fruitful way. Let us now look more closely at the metaphor which is used to describe Bion's thought and which could equally have been used by Bion to describe thought, the image of multiple vertices recalling his choice of the imagery of vertices to describe perspective and recalling also his grid organizing different levels of primary- and secondary- process mental functioning. It is interesting to note that the one phrase directly attributed to Bion in the description of this metaphor is indeed a paradox one which has appeared in poetry (the !darkness visible" of Milton), though it is unfamiliar in common speech. To return to the definition of paradox quoted above, Bion's !beam of intense darkness" is an idea apparently absurd but really true: it is a reality figured forth in a sophisticated form of medical technology, something in this scientific context which is really possible. A technologically much simpler version of the !beam of intense darkness" in a two-dimensional world has long been known to artists who intensify the darks around an area which they wish to appear bright, and is based on an understanding of dark and light as in a dynamic relation rather than as static polarities. It is the range and intensity of the dark tones in Rembrandt's etchings of the descent from the cross and in Goya's prints of The Disasters of War which heighten the illumination in the lighter parts of the pictures. The process of etching can itself suggest to the artist the use of dark to create light, and in Rembrandt 's Descent from the Cross by Torchlight (1654) the torchlight of the title is in fact a beam of intense darkness: a deep blackening around the central group of figures some of whose
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features, passing from darkness into light, are modified by delicate hatching. Rembrandt's figures are neither static nor painstakingly rendered; the artist emphasizes their collective action by making the main area of illumination coincide with the diagonal direction of the shroud. Similarly in an etching of 1892 by Odilon Redon, Passage d'une me, diagonal arcs of light are created by a deeply darkened surround and delicate hatching of partially obscured human features at the transitional edge between the intense dark and glowing light of the picture. Again movement and direction are emphasized. Black and white are relational, are percepts, just as the colour of the moderns becomes a percept rather than a symbolic or realistic entity. It seems relevant that in the black and white work mentioned above, as in Bion's metaphor, the dynamic relation of dark and light is more apparent when the focus is on tones or intensities of darkness as an oblique approach to illumination. Even without Bion's three-dimensional interior with its multiple vertices, this is already a more complex perceptual world than the relatively static one in which light from above is projected into the abyss below. It is important also that in the CAT Scan image there is a definite distinction between dark and light, and the qualities of separation and division which Chasseguet-Smirgel has termed paternal are very much in evidence. Here light and dark are separate and relational, though not polarized in a cosmology or in a philosophical system which sees with the naked eye. Rather, this technological eye is closer to being a kind of inner eye capable, if it is used sensitively, of revealing far more about the complexities of the inner world than would otherwise be possible. In Bion's metapsychology the traditional and archaic polarities have been superseded in favour of a more complex inner world which can be investigated with greater care and precision. The paternal principle is evident not in a polarization of opposites but in the growing capacity of the mind, not only to perceive but to do so with increasing ability to distinguish and discriminate capabilities which, while less dramatic than the bold division of night from day, involve the paternal quality of separation more deeply and more extensively. The CAT Scan metaphor presents a world in contrast to the polarized cosmos of tradition, for while light and dark are seen in complementarity, they are no longer paired with above and below; nor does the activity of perception imply a spatial-hierarchical separation of light and dark along with the direct and unidirectional movement of light into the dark abyss. Rather than the abyss, there is the interior of the human body (mind); rather than a beam of light dispelling darkness, it is a beam of darkness which indirectly produces illumination by darkening the areas around the obscure object. Because Bion's model emphasizes the relationship between light and dark as the factor allowing for more accurate, multivalent, nuanced perceptions, light and dark and the target objects which they reveal are no longer seen primarily as entities, but in their interrelatedness. Lucidity is not the gift of light alone, but of light in conjunction with darkness. It is important too that the interrelatedness imaged here is not a fusion or a merging. There is no threat of engulfment by the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, no dissolution of the ego (perceptual apparatus) in oceanic
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feeling. This interrelatedness maintains firm though multiple and varying boundaries (as the target object changes, so presumably does the location of the beam). Division and separation are very much a part of this model, in the form of the ability to distinguish and discriminate. By comparison the Enlightenment metaphor of mind would appear to be more defensive in nature (more an operation of secondary-process alone than of secondary-process in concert with primaryprocess functioning). The primitive side of Enlightenment thinking is seen in the fact that both the imagery of opposed nexuses and the mechanism of polarization are basic to the cosmologies of the creation myths and to the Enlightenment metaphor which presumes to embody reason. Like the primitive cosmologies, the Enlightenment project defends the ego against its longing for and fear of fusion with the pre-oedipal mother. The CAT Scan metaphor is neither an expression of the wish for fusion nor its defensive negation. It posits a different (variable) position for the ego in relation to its internal world and objects. From its multiple vertices the self, with its beam of darkness, is better equipped to see all its objects especially the archaic matrix, which it neither fears nor wishes to subdue by a dictatorship of the intellect. Freud himself seems to have had particular difficulty in interpreting the importance of the pre-oedipal mother for patients such as Dora and for cases which he wrote about or commented on, such as those of Little Hans and Anna O. The fact that a number of modern reinterpretations of these cases have seen confusion about and ignorance of the important role of the pre-oedipal mother to be Freud's particular blind spot may refer back to the defensive nature of Freudian metapsychology. If dark and light symbolically represent the parents, then in the primal scene posited by Bion's metaphor they are not viewed in a sadomasochistic relation, as they would be from the vertex of Freud's anal stage. Nor are the parents to be viewed in terms of power and domination, as they would be even from the vertex of Freud's developmentally more advanced genital stage. Bion's metaphor implies no context of hierarchy or domination in the interrelationship between opposites. Rather it is that the presence of the percept of darkness (mother), with its attendant qualities, defines and delimits that of light (father), which defines and delimits in its turn. Bion sees the mother in the psyche, as well as the introjected father, as having mental qualities which contribute to a fuller understanding by the individual. This conviction is expressed in his theoreti#al writings as well as being implicit in the metaphor described above. In particular his theory of container and contained and his writing about the commensal relationship illustrate the beneficially interactive roles of the parents in the psyche. Bion's views on the parents are to an extent rooted in his personal situation: his mother's empathetic understanding had a great impact on him, and his father's lack of just this quality seems to have alerted him to the importance of the relation between empathy, communication and knowledge. There is much that is problematic about Freud's assumption that secondary-process thinking, by virtue of its problem-solving function, is closer to reality than are the workings of the primary process, an assumption appropriate to the ideology of the Enlightenment and one which does not
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include a vision of the two kinds of mental function working in concert. Equally problematic is the polarization of the two modes of mental functioning along developmental lines in both Enlightenment thinking and Freudian psychoanalysis. Bion's metapsychology refutes both the privileged position of secondary-process cognition in relation to reality and the assumption that the clearest form of reality testing occurs when secondary-process thinking is operating divorced from the primary process. Bion's position on reality testing is described by Donald Meltzer in !Container and contained the prototype of learning", a chapter in his book on the clinical significance of Bion's work. In this chapter Meltzer investigates whether Bion has succeeded in laying the foundations for a theory of the emotions in psychoanalytic thought, something which psychoanalytic theory needed to complete the work of Freud and Klein. Meltzer outlines Bion's revision of the theory of reality testing as established by Freud: The idea of the importance of !binocular vision" as a verification of the perception of reality is elaborated upon in a recent work on the use of metaphor in language: Metaphor: A Psychoanalytic View, by Robert Rogers. Rogers defines primary and secondary process in terms of their appearance in language and proceeds to explore reader response to these different kinds of diction. According to Rogers, words belonging to the !id-laden, wishfulfilling" primary process comprise !symbolic diction, diction which may paradoxically be said to have a preverbal quality' (Rogers, 1978, p. 27). By contrast: !Secondary-process words are adult words. They tend to be abstract, have a defensive function, and be ego and superego orientated" (p. 27). While he states that secondary-process words !are geared to problem-solving, reality-testing cognition" (p. 27), he distinguishes his own view from that of theoreticians who have described a regression to primary-process mental functioning in poetry and have viewed that regression pejoratively. According to Rogers: !Such regression operating synergistically with higher ego functions is a vital aspect of the creative process and the responses it evokes" (p. 49). One can see that this approach involves an important amendment to the theory of reality testing which, in Freud's writing, was not given substance, was merely a fact. It is never really touched upon in Mrs Klein's work for she was concerned almost exclusively with the differentiation of the two main areas of reality, internal and external. At the time of her writing, because the phenomena being examined were those related to confusion rather than disorders of thought, her clarification of this geography of mental life seemed to give adequate substance to the problem of reality testing. She went a great distance in demonstrating how different were the laws governing the internal and external worlds. As she was no theoretician of the mind it did not occur to her to relate this to Freud's ideas of primary and secondary process. But truly this addendum to analytical theory did not really fill out a concept of reality testing and nowhere in her work will one find reference to any psychic entity such as a lie. Bion's myth of alpha-function is intended to provide an apparatus which can afford the personality the kind of experience from which comes a !feeling of confidence" at discerning the truth, analogous to the confirmation of sense data by shared experience with others or confirmation by more than one sense (what Bion calls !common sense"). This feeling of confidence, he suggests, is made possible by the elaboration of the !membrane" of
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the !contact barrier" between essentially conscious and essentially unconscious representations of the emotional experience being worked on by alpha-function. The alpha-elements are not the experience of the thing-in-itself but an abstraction and representation of it, while its being thus represented both in conscious and unconscious forms simultaneously gives the personality a !binocular vision" of the experience from which the !feeling of confidence" in its reality is derived. (Meltzer, 1978, pp. 48-9) and external worlds. As she was no theoretician of the mind it did not occur to her to relate this to Freud's ideas of primary and secondary process. But truly this addendum to analytical theory did not really fill out a concept of reality testing and nowhere in her work will one find reference to any psychic entity such as a lie. Bion's myth of alpha-function is intended to provide an apparatus which can afford the personality the kind of experience from which comes a !feeling of confidence" at discerning the truth, analogous to the confirmation of sense data by shared experience with others or confirmation by more than one sense (what Bion calls !common sense"). This feeling of confidence, he suggests, is made possible by the elaboration of the !membrane" of the !contact barrier" between essentially conscious and essentially unconscious representations of the emotional experience being worked on by alphafunction. The alpha-elements are not the experience of the thing-in-itself but an abstraction and representation of it, while its being thus represented both in conscious and unconscious forms simultaneously gives the personality a !binocular vision" of the experience from which the !feeling of confidence" in its reality is derived. (Meltzer, 1978, pp. 48-9) Here Rogers comes close to Bion's notion of binocular vision, and touches upon a complex view of reality in constant interplay with unconscious phantasy which the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal believes to be part of the individual's continuing experience, as Rogers believes it is essential to full experience of the creative process by writer or reader. It is interesting to read Rogers's theory of aesthetic experience against the background of the theory of reality itself as put forth by Segal. Thus one can see, inversely, the connection between the kind of aesthetic theory which comes unrevised from Freudian psychoanalysis and understands the creative process as issuing from primary-process mental functioning in a way similar to myth or dream, and a view of reality, Freudian and rooted in the Enlightenment, according to which the apprehension of reality occurs optimally when the rational faculties are operating apart from the emotions, bearing few or no traces of phantasy activity. This kind of separation, expressed by Freud in his definition of phantasying as a split-off form of thought-activity kept free from reality testing, is in Segal's view impossible, for !thought is not only contrasted with phantasy, but is based on it and derived from it" (Segal 1982, p. 23). Segal suggests a definition of thinking as the modification of unconscious phantasy, and sees the origin of thought in the infant's early testing of phantasies !in a reality setting" that is, in the communication of these phantasies to the mother (p. 23). Expanding upon his idea of the synergistic operation of regression together with higher ego functions, Rogers says: For the !artist" on a high-wire in a circus, the greater the danger, analogous to involvement, the
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greater the need for control. This combination of deep involvement with high control offers the greatest satisfaction for the identifying, empathizing audience. In poetry, similarly, deep regression is not necessarily separate from but may occur alongside or accompanied by a high degree of ego control (distance, detachment). Expressed in modal terms, poetry may exhibit a high degree of primary- and secondary-process mentation more or less simultaneously. Here is the difference between sheer phantasy as in dreams and art: dreams are almost pure primary process whereas art is characterized by a combination of primary and secondary process. Good metaphor epitomizes this combination. (p. 67) The importance of the inclusion of emotional and even archaic phantasy-level processes to the experiencing of art is very close to Bion's notion concerning the need for !binocular vision" in the testing of reality. As Meltzer puts it: From the Freud vertex, reality testing depends on experiences of satisfaction; from the Kleinian, on experiences of security; but from Bion's point of view reality testing depends on !feelings of confidence" that one is seeing the truth, not of the thing-in-itself, but of one's own emotional experience of it by virtue of binocular vision; simultaneous conscious and unconscious vertices. (1978, p. 50) The emphasis which Bion places on the individual's emotional experience is central and grows out of his model for the mind as expressed in the CAT Scan metaphor. For it is just here that the mental qualities of the mother are of crucial importance: it is the pre-oedipal mother whose active reverie her taking in of the infant's projections, thinking about them and returning them to the infant in a modified form becomes the basis for the individual's capacity for the kind of knowledge, and confidence in knowledge, which Bion is talking about. As, over time, the infant introjects not only the mother's modifications of projections (Klein's !modulator of mental pain") but her very capacity to think about these experiences, the infant and later the child and the adult become capable of performing this operation for themselves, and hence of learning through experience. It is the mental qualities of both parents which must optimally be introjected by the child: just as, in the beam-of-darkness image, maximum illumination is achieved by the dynamic interaction of darkness and light. It is fascinating to see how these two metaphorical descriptions of the process of envisioning link up with a number of ideas concerning thinking, seeing and the place of each of the parents in the psyche, ideas whose complex interrelation form very different metapsychologies in the thought of Freud and Bion. Because the ideas of each concerning thinking and reality relate intimately to conscious and unconscious images and phantasies about the parents, it is suggestive to consider not only their different cultural environments but also their different !family cultures". Much has been written about Freud and the father, $not least by Freud himself. But while Bion's self-analysis is available as autobiography in The Long Week-End and in All My Sins Remembered and as autobiographical fiction in A Memoir of the Future, Freud's more famous selfhttp://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery?sid=3bea31c0-6cc7-4792-b49d-2e72c5ecb953%40sessionmgr11&vid=2&hid=1 Page 13 of 27
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analysis remains the missing Ur-text which must be reconstructed from the available secondary material. In a paper of this kind it would be impossible to do justice to the subject of Freud and the father. Perhaps it will suffice to say that the figure of the powerful father, formidable rival to the son in the oedipal stage, is repeatedly evoked in the case histories in a variety of guises: the sympathetic father of Little Hans, the persecutory superego of Schreber, and the object of intensely ambivalent feeling and phantasy on the part of the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. Additionally, the father in his mythological dimension is the focus of theoretical works such as Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo. By contrast Freud writes little about the patients' mothers in his case histories. His characterization of them tends to be thin and with one exception, the treatment of Elisabeth, he does not form therapeutic alliances with the mothers of his patients as he does either in reality or imaginatively, through identification with several of the fathers. The mother in Freud is always a shadowy figure. Some contemporary readings of !Anna O." and !Dora" see a lack of understanding of the pre-oedipal mother and her importance to the patient as a serious flaw in Freud's interpretation of !Anna O." and treatment of Dora (see Rosenbaum and Muroff, 1984; Bernheimer and Kahane, 1985). For Freud the oedipal mother is the object of desire or rivalry. Perhaps because of her importance for the feelings which she elicits, she is not well developed in his work. Since this view of the mother is Freud's exclusive emphasis he is ill equipped to investigate the mental and emotional qualities of the mother herself and their place in the individual psyche. As the object of desire or rivalry, Freud's oedipal mother is exclusively the object of projections and is not seen as helping the child to deal with those projections. A significant part of Bion's culture was his family culture. Grotstein, in his introduction to the Bion Festschrift, says of Bion's mother that !her qualities of empathy and warmth were to make the profoundest impression on him" (Grotstein, p. 2). Although Bion's autobiography The Long WeekEnd(1982) shows some of his mother's limitations in this area (the lap suddenly cold and frightening, the mother's denial of her sadness), the lack of understanding which Bion experiences as a child is primarily associated with his father's lack of empathy and often inability to understand what the child Bion is saying. Anecdotes in The Long Week-End about the child Bion's fantasies and consequent !misunderstanding" of words turn out to be really about the colossal misunderstanding by the insistently reasonable adult of the world of phantasy in which the child is often immersed. In addition to Bion's feelings about his mother, his experience of his own maternal qualities in his work as an analyst must have contributed to his theory of container and contained, the prototype of which is maternal reverie. One could speculate that the lack of empathy in Bion's father, which Bion understands as a lack of mind, led him to theorize about the importance of the pre-oedipal mother. His mother also misunderstands him (in the autobiography) but he seems on the whole to have experienced her as an empathetic person. Her inability to understand her child's questions is most often expressed as puzzlement, while lack of understanding on the part of the child's father expresses itself as anger.
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The mother more frequently allowed Bion to !remain in the question", while the father punished inquiry of a kind he could not comprehend. Yet Bion did not !place his father to one side", as Chasseguet-Smirgel characterizes the mental activity of her perverse patients (p. 91); such a negation of the father's role as statute is not the only alternative to the acceptance of a universe of traditional polarities as reality based. Bion, like many an artist and poet, took on his parental identifications in a fruitful and a very complex way. He saw and took in differing capacities in both his parents for understanding and communicating about reality. Bion's portrait of a father who fails to understand him is accompanied by a picture of an eruptive, sometimes violently emotional man. Incapable of containing his own scarcely comprehended feelings, the father can hardly contain those of his sometimes anxiously inquisitive son. The child's confusion of the word !electricity" with the vision he has of a marvellous Electric City initially prompts Bion's father to engage in the only dialogue between the two that the book records, but when the father fails both to uncover the phantasy of an Electric City which underlies his son's questions and to detect in his son a convincing understanding of electricity, disappointment followed by silence ensues on both sides. In a second instance Bion's father at first endeavours to be patient in understanding a fight between the children, but when Bion cannot explain his actions (fear seems to have paralysed him) the father simply erupts and turns punitive. Bion expresses the figure of the eruptive father poetically in the image of Arf Arfer. !Arf Arfer Oo Arf in Mphm" says the child Bion in a mocking version of The Lord's Prayer that is still expected to be propitiatory: !please make me a good boy" (Bion, 1982, p. 9). Arf Arfer is the Father Almighty whose presence offers no solace, and Bion's father when he laughs explosively, often at the children. The bursts of meaningless laughter frighten the children, and Bion dreams of Arf Arfer as a jackal. When the father and his grown-up companions laugh at Bion and his sister, the children try to deal with this defensive amusement at their expense by imitating the grown-up laughter, uttering the apotropaic formula: !Arf Arfer in Heb'n". This formula signals both the terror which the children feel in their confrontation with Arf Arfer and the distorted way in which paternal and patriarchal values are to be internalized by the children of such a father: the parody of The Lord's Prayer suggests that these values will be internalized with an accompanying taint of mockery and terror. The explosive Arf Arfer image is the poetic and visceral expression of that same quality which shows itself in the father's inability to comprehend the rich life of phantasy which lies behind his son's many questions about the world. Bion's anecdotes of incomprehension are stories not about incomprehensibility but about inadequate containment by the child's interlocutor, the parent. Bion the adult later understands the logical genesis of his own misunderstandings. Really fantasies about the world of the grown-ups, the misunderstandings illuminate to a significant degree the Victorian world of Bion's father. The child's fantasies circle around evening hymns, conventional phrases of Victorian piety and an electric train which his father presents to him on his birthday, a gift in which the father clearly has a strong emotional investment which he does not understand as
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such (Waddell, 1984). In reconstructing his own early !misunderstandings" as childhood fantasies which have a peg in reality (the misinterpreted word) as well as a real and deeper basis in the unconscious meaning which these words have for the !rational" adult whose words they are, Bion shows them not really to have been misunderstandings, but interpretations through phantasy of correctly perceived (though incompletely understood and disastrously communicated) aspects of the adult world. This view of the authenticity of the child's world of supposed misunderstandings is similar to that expressed in the semiautobiographical novel Kotik Letaev by the Russian Symbolist poet Andrei Bely. Bely validates the child's world in a way similar to Bion's by demonstrating that not only the misunderstanding of words has its pretext in the similar sounds of the words which the child confuses but that the connections which the child makes invariably have some basis in an unconsciously perceived reality which the reasonable grown-ups have repressed or denied. To give only a few examples, the child Bely confuses words which have similar sounds (in Russian) but whose meanings are associatively linked in the child's mind: !seas" and !mothers"; !university" and !universe": !Papa would rarely be around; in his absence I would conceive of him as some sort of fiery-mouthed being he is flying into the apartment from the University (the University is the universe!)" (Bely, 1971, p. 41). In another instance the child Bely has a nightmarish experience of boundlessness and the word which he finds !to scream about Anaximander" (infinity) combines and confuses the Greek word for madness, !afrosyne", and the name of the family's cook, !Afrosinya", whom the child has heard quarrelling in the kitchen (p. 38). While Bely's poetic technique leads him to telescope different time periods in his life, sometimes attributing the knowledge of the adult poet to the imaginative child, the mechanism of association which he describes, a kind of mythopoetic intuition, validates the reality of the child's perceptions. Bion describes the same mechanism not by cascading the reader with lyricism but by the use of a technique of double perspective: he uses rational prose to describe very acutely the feeling-world of the child. The two perspectives converge when Bion directs us to link words: words which, though they seem to have been misapplied, actually touched upon a reality of which the grown-ups were unaware. When the birthday train breaks down the atmosphere of failure surrounding the would-be initiation rite is emphasized by the remark of the boy's sister: !Full top?" (1982, p. 16). Earlier, when the boy contemplates Arf Arfer and his connection with religion, the child's misunderstanding of biblical text discloses a shrewd perception of his relationship with his father: !Nor did I feel sure of God whose attribute seemed to be that he gave his only forgotten son to redeem our sins" (p. 13). In addition to its validation of the perceptual world of the child, KotikLetaev demonstrates the complex process for the creative individual of internalizing the parents in a beneficial way. In this connection Gerald Janecek, the translator of the English edition of Bely's novel, makes an introductory statement describing the character of the poet in terms of archaic male and female polarities: !the mother is closely associated with the word roi (swarm, connoting chaos) and the
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father with stroi (form, connoting order) mother represents the physical side of man, father the mental side" (Janecek [Bely, 1971], p. viii). While many verbal associations in the Russian do support this interpretation, the poet's understanding does not grow by comprehending these opposed categories. In fact one could say that for Bely, as for Bion, there is confusion in the child because his own experience does not correspond to such culturally instituted or archetypally understood polarities. Thus, while Bely's father is linked to form and order through wordplay derived from references to his profession as a mathematician, the man as an individual is experienced by the child as a terrifying !firebreathing Papa". Like the father of the child Bion, he is experienced as emotional and eruptive: Or, our Papa would say:!The earth is a sphere " This I understood, as I in general understood circularities, and I was afraid of them: after all, I myself was sphered; and Papa held sway by fear, becoming Papa Notpapa, a kind of Vulcan, sprinkled only for appearances with the black cinder of a jacket; under it everything seethes: firebreathing Papa! (p. 39) While the chaos of the maternal principle is represented by Bely's references to !mothers" and !seas", there is equally a chaos of the paternal principle, a dissolution of the ego by fire. Much of Bely's poetic imagery is devoted to presenting the father as a daemon of fire (he is Vulcan in a smoking jacket; Hephaestos forging lightning rods) and sometimes as the embodiment of fiery destruction itself: In attempting to understand the place of the parents in the psyche from the vantage point of the child-poet it becomes clear that the process of internalizing the mental qualities of the father will be a very complex one, for his father's mental qualities include the lack of containment which characterizes his own behaviour and his relation to his son and is experienced by the boy as a threat to existence. The poet Bely does not seem to find this quality of containment in his mother, a society woman, but finds a measure of security with his nanny who, like Bion's ayah, retains her identity while appearing meek in the face of his father's rage. Bely quotes a phrase which seems to be a joke of his father's: !Now he sits upon a mat/Pale and very mute" (p. 39), applying it to the nanny and to himself. He has learned to imitate the nanny, who remains pale and silent while the father rages. The child-poet's identification with his self-contained nanny and with !the muteness of the man sitting on the mat" (p. 39), possibly a reference to meditation, enables him to withstand the lava of his father's words. By virtue of the child's associative linking of the muteness of the nanny with his own silence and with that of the man who sits on the mat, the child's rug becomes a place of safety and the locus of his integrity: !on the mat both space and time are conquered; beyond the mat is the incandescent world" (p. 39). Papa though begins to notpapatate in the vicinity; and he threatens with aged rage:
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!Colours of fiery hue I throw upon my palm That he might appear in an abyss of light As red as if a flame !" A further clue to the complex way in which the creative individual may internalize aspects of the parents can be seen in a passage from an autobiographical work by another Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. In !The noise of time" Mandelstam eulogizes the language of his two parents as the source of his literary creativity: !The speech of the father and the speech of the mother does not our language feed throughout all its long life on the confluence of these two, do they not compose its character?" (Mandelstam, 1965, p. 90). But eulogy quickly becomes sharp characterization as Mandelstam describes the !rag and bone shop" origins of his gift: The speech of my mother was clear and sonorous without the least foreign admixture, with rather wide and too open vowels the literary Great Russian language. Her vocabulary was poor and restricted, the locutions were trite, but it was a language, it had roots and confidence. Mother loved to speak and took joy in the roots and sounds of her Great Russian speech, impoverished by intellectual clichs. Was she not the first of her whole family to achieve pure and clear Russian sounds? My father had absolutely no language; his speech was tongue-tie and languagelessness. The Russian speech of a Polish Jew? No. The speech of a German Jew? No again. Perhaps a special Courland accent? I never heard such. A completely abstract, counterfeit language, the ornate and twisted speech of an autodidact, where normal words are intertwined with the ancient philosophical terms of Herder, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, the capricious syntax of a Talmudist, the artificial, not always finished sentence: it was anything in the world, but not a language, neither Russian nor German. (p. 90) Although the sonorous !pure" aspect of the poet's language is seen as coming from the mother, the language of both parents is portrayed as differentiated and idiosyncratic. The mother's language is intellectually trite, but as a language it is coherent. The father's language strives to embody the intellect but fails to be coherent and bears the stigmata of artifice and counterfeit; it is a speech of tongue-tie and languagelessness, and by implication of a significant degree of mindlessness. Yet while Mandelstam mercilessly caricatures his father's speech as abstract and counterfeit, !the ornate and twisted speech of an autodidact", the well-educated and fluent son has taken up some of these very features and incorporated them into his poetry: the complex, intentionally artificial syntax, the ornate word, the abstract word (though he must use it very precisely). Rather than !placing the father to one side", the creative individual has selectively introjected important aspects of both parents. It would have been disastrous for the poet Mandelstam to have introjected the !counterfeit" aspect of his father's language, just as Bion the psychoanalyst strove to avoid taking in or identifying with the false side of his father's character (and culture) which was
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associated with a lack of empathy and with denial and evasion. The actual fathers of these creative individuals could not be taken in as representations of mind without serious consequences: the poet needed coherence and meaningfulness in language, just as the psychoanalyst-philosopher needed empathy and authenticity. Because of the actual !family cultures" of both men, identification processes could not fortunately for the worlds of poetry and thought proceed along traditional lines of Enlightenment-type polarization. While neither man sought to abolish differences (both confronted the harsh terms of reality: Bion in his work on thought disorders, Mandelstam by confronting the harsh reality of Soviet oppression in his poetry), the philosopher and the poet created helpful and fruitful internal parents by realistically (and painfully) assessing the real parents, not according to traditional ideas of male and female attributes but according to what they really were, selecting and taking in those qualities from each parent which were to prove most beneficial. In Thomas Mann's novella !Tonio Krger" there is also a description of the writer's creative personality in terms of the internalized mental and emotional qualities of the parents. The name of the writer Tonio Krger expresses the split at his origins, and his artistic personality derives from the personalities of a foreign, probably Mediterranean mother and a German father. In !Tonio Krger" there is a conventional polarization of the parental qualities: the father is puritanical, solid and correct, his one !emotional" quality being a tendency towards melancholia; the mother is the very embodiment of emotion, if emotion of a superficial (unthinking) kind: sensuous and passionate, she leaves her husband and son and runs away with a musician. To emphasize the polarization of qualities along male and female lines Mann describes the father as a northern type and the mother as stereotypically southern. The result of this union is an artist with a bad conscience, a bourgeois manqu. Tonio Krger idealizes the blond, blue-eyed Germans whom he fails to see in a realistic manner, and for all his fame he envies them; by the end of the novella he has failed to use his art to heal his splits. Tonio Krger would seem to be too limited a figure to represent Thomas Mann himself and it is interesting that the author presents this product of Enlightenment duality as in a way unfinished, as though some further work of integration needed to be done for him to become a real writer. Tonio's last statement in a letter to his friend, an artist, is an evaluation of his work as !as good as nothing" and a promise to do better. He seems to have an artistic potential which is blocked by a stubborn idealization of the German bourgeoisie: I am looking into a world unborn and formless, that needs to be shaped; I see into a whirl of shadows of human figures who beckon to me to weave spells to redeem them But my deepest and secretest love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace. (Mann, 1903, p. 132) What will be apparent from the foregoing examples from psychoanalytic and literary autobiography and biographical fiction is that in every case the internalization of the qualities of the parents by the
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creative individual is influenced to a striking degree both by the particular personalities of the parents and by the cultural historical context within which the individual's development took place. In her essay on the Freudian method, Chasseguet-Smirgel details the place of German culture and that of Jewish culture in the thought of Freud: German culture and particularly German Romanticism she equates to a pantheistic religion of the mother, while the Jewish culture which she describes is patriarchal and based on law. Thus she takes into account the historicity of the polarization of the parents in Freud's thinking, disclosing his ideas about the parents as a cultural historical phenomenon. But in spite of the in-depth historical treatment given to the development of Freud's ideas about the place of the father and the mother in the psyche, Chasseguet-Smirgel treats the parental qualities which she presents in her own theory and the process of internalizing these qualities on the part of her patients as timeless and unchanging. It is to be hoped that psychoanalytic theory will make use of the vertices of Bion's CAT Scan metaphor, particularly the vertex of history. The habit of viewing male and female qualities in terms of polarization is itself historical. This could be set against the intuition of bisexuality which appears in Freud's notion of the complete Oedipus complex and flourishes in the cultural imagery of historical periods characterized by tolerance and heightened creativity. The historical nature of the habit of viewing male and female qualities as polarities can be seen by comparing the kind of polarization present in early cosmologies with the adaptation of these polarities by more sophisticated, utilitarian systems of thought typical of the Enlightenment. Thus in the writings of Francis Bacon the polarization of male as mind and female as nature is used to validate the exploitation of nature by man (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979, p. 4). What began in early cosmology as the religious expression of projected primitive defence mechanisms becomes by the seventeenth century an ideology and a political programme. In assessing the dialectic of internalization in the autobiography of Wilfred Bion, a literary biographer would want to look at the specifically historical aspects of the parents' marriage. These included Bion's Anglo-Indian culture and the father's Huguenot family lineage which had produced several generations of missionaries and puritans !made in a formidably robust and uncompromising mould" (1982, p. 15). Bion hints at the importance of this history when he follows the above epithet with a tale about a hat which had belonged to his mother: Uncle Harry had disapproved the wearing of the hat to church and had declared Bion's mother an !abandoned woman". But the child is on his mother's side: !I was most fond of this hat which was of wide diameter and decorated with bunches of bananas and pears and other luscious fruits rather like the trays which Indians had striven to present to my father" (p. 15). The comparison of the hat with the trays offered by Indians as gifts, and always refused, is suggestive. The patriarchal culture of Bion's father sees both hat and trays as unacceptable. But the child Bion was fond of the hat and particularly coveted the grapes which adorned it, hoping his mother would leave them to him in her will. He wished for something fruitful and lush, extravagantly fertile and associated in his mind with foreign gods rather than the Father Almighty of the ruling-class Victorians.
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It would appear that in the culture in which Bion was raised this female lushness was, if not prohibited, at least inhibited in its expression in both sexes. Bion's tale of the hat provides an example of how a feminine attribute may be defined and internalized (or not if the prohibition is too strong) in a particular way in a particular historical period. History sets the limits of the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex. Similarly, in reading the Bely novel a literary historian would want to consider the historical character of the parents' marriage, the marriage of a mathematician and a society woman, and the cultural institution of the nanny which was used to supplement the parents' involvement in their child's upbringing. In addition, the anthroposophic movement influenced the way Bely understood the qualities of his parents and the conflicts which they engendered in him. He began writing Kotik Letaev in October 1915 while a member of Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophical circle in Dornach, Switzerland. Bely's translator points to important links between Steiner's philosophy which he sees as expressing abstractly conflicts which Bely took over from his parents and the personalities of the parents themselves. For Osip Mandelstam there was also a strong historical aspect to the poet's internalization of his parents' !linguistic personalities". Mandelstam's situation was deeply influenced by the way in which the Russian language was acquired successively, over the generations, by his incompletely assimilated Jewish family. Mandelstam was one of the foremost Russian poets, yet his paternal grandparents spoke only Yiddish; in !The noise of time" he recalls a childhood memory of an occasion when his mother !rescued" him from the grandparents' attempts, as he saw it, to impose this alien language and culture on him. The poet's ideas about language are bound up with his attitudes to the Russian and Russo-Jewish cultures and their representation in the parents. In order to do an analysis of the dialectic of internalization in Thomas Mann's fictional account of Tonio Krger, the critic would need to look at the positions of the German bourgeoisie and of the outsider in German culture. It would also be necessary to differentiate the fictive outsider, the writer Tonio Krger with his vaguely foreign blood, and the actual outsider, Thomas Mann, a Jew writing in the early part of this century. It would be important in this context to assess whether the Mann character's idealization of the German bourgeoisie, associated in the story with the puritanical character of the father, is in some way defensive, and whether the distortion of reality implicit in this idealization is presented by the author uncritically, or with a full understanding of its meaning. I am speaking now of the dialectic of internalization, rather than of the role of the parents in the psyche, in order to emphasize a conceptual distinction between Bion's model of mind as disclosed in the CAT Scan metaphor and the possibilities for understanding introjective identification associated with that model, and the Freudian model which does not posit identification processes in a dialectical manner. For dialectical thinking must be !doubly historical" and must exercise an awareness not only of historical material, but of the concepts with which that material has been
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understood (Jameson, 1974). It is just this limitation which one sees in Chasseguet-Smirgel's reconstruction of the cultural determinants of Freud's thought. Thus she can describe Freud's understanding of male and female, father and mother, as the resolution of one individual's oedipal conflict but adopts, in her own argument, Freud's categories as absolute: !It can be seen that it is the conjunction of the two cultures which enables Freud to explore the Unconscious the Mother's body and to send a flood of light into its dark depths, without lurching himself into the abyss" (p. 138). This writer's recognition that !The special manner in which the Oedipus complex has been resolved probably plays a decisive role" (p. 139) nevertheless fails to challenge the conceptual equation of the unconscious with the body of the mother and, by implication, the perceiving, investigating mind with the father. The equation of the unconscious with the mother's body is problematic because the unconscious phantasies, including infantile phantasies about the mother's body and its contents, are potentially modifiable by the child's introjection of maternal reverie: the unconscious itself contains and includes the modificatory influence of the mother's mental qualities. For example, paranoidschizoid phantasies may be modified by maternal containment in the early months of the infant's life, if this is successfully introjected by the infant (Segal, pp. 13-14). Chasseguet-Smirgel's theory of the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, resting as it does on an appreciation of Freudian psychoanalysis as Enlightenment science, does not take into account this dialectical phenomenon of introjective identification on the part of the child. One could speculate that the perverse patients whose psychopathologies form much of the basis for her theory are themselves defective in the capacity to achieve identification introjectively with the mental qualities of both parents. Chasseguet-Smirgel relates the difficulties which her male patients have in achieving introjective identification with the father (pp. 87-8), but perhaps their inability to achieve identification introjectively is a more comprehensive defect. Freud's resolution of the Oedipus complex and, by implication, Freudian psychoanalysis are described thus: !The interest in the mother's body (the Unconscious) is not given up; it is sublimated in an interest for scientific research whose instruments (through identification with the father) are neither destructive, nor in too great a danger of being destroyed" (p. 139). In the effort to avoid engulfment by an unconscious which German Romanticism has opened up to him, Freud, armed with his identification with Judaism, approaches the unconscious and !seeks to pin it down, to master it intellectually" (p. 138). This is an important insight, but instead of seeing this !it" as including inevitably Freud's own projections and feelings about his rejected or repressed area of experience (Romanticism, the pre-oedipal mother), the Freudian analyst mistakenly takes this equivalence of the unconscious and the mother's body as accurately defining both the unconscious and the mother herself. Thus the mother's metaphorical representatives are accused of threatening to engulf the subject: !The Freudian enterprise is not a celebration of the Unconscious. Freud sought to subdue the nocturnal, subterranean powers that so strongly pervade German culture, not to delight in them" (p. 134). Again the language of domination reveals a defensive posture, a partial insight. It is the mother whom Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis
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has declared equivalent to the sum of infantile phantasy projection on to her, so that the infantile wish to merge is converted into a threat of engulfment by the mother. In this formulation of Freudian psychoanalysis the infantile phantasies are indeed merged with, rather than being properly separated from, their object and it is the mother, now truly an almost transparent container of these phantasies, whom the Enlightenment investigator wishes to master and subdue. The theoretical consequence of not separating the mother from the phantasies about her is ironically that it is the very activity of the unconscious, no mere reservoir of infantile phantasies, which is not being taken into account. It is as though with one part of his mind the Freudian subject tells himself that here are phantasies capable of being investigated and with another, locked-off part of his mind says, !No, this is really the Mother whom I fear and must subdue." Because Freud's own Oedipus complex was so partially resolved it cannot, in its incomplete form, be taken as the basis for a complete psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalysis contains the same fatal flaw which T.W. Adorno and Max Ho%kheimer attribute to the Enlightenment: it has no ability to criticize itself; it is self-oblivious, taking Freud's and his culture's resolution of the Oedipus complex as the final form of that resolution and prescribing it as the only possible normal outcome. Just as Freud failed to think about the interplay of his own phantasy projections with the unconscious which he unconsciously equated with the mother's body even as he investigated it, so Freudian psychoanalysis fails to think about its own thought processes while thinking about the dynamics of the unconscious. The limitations of such thinking contrast with the rich potentialities of a psychoanalysis amended by Bion's model of the mind and his deep understanding of internalization processes. Bion's thinking is dialectical, while the thinking of Freud and his followers has been conventionally scientific, a distinction made in this critique of the scientific disciplines: For in these the thinking mind itself remains cool and untouched, skilled but unselfconscious, and is able to forget about itself and its own thought processes while it sinks itself wholly in the content and problems offered it. But dialectical thinking is a thought to the second power, a thought about thinking itself, in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinking suited to it must be held together in the mind at the same time. (Jameson, p. 45) Perhaps this description of dialectical thinking presents something which is in fact very difficult to achieve within psychoanalysis, but the degree to which Freud failed to be dialectical in his thinking about his method, his unconscious equation of the unconscious with the mother's body and of the father-identified self with mind, and his lack of provision of a place in his theory for the unconscious phantasies of the investigating subject limits and distorts the ability of Freudian psychoanalysis to understand internalization processes in a dialectical manner. The limitations of Freudian metapsychology are seen equally in the fact that in its historical form Freudianism is wedded to the assumptions of Enlightenment thinking. Thus Chasseguet-Smirgel describes a Freudian tenet of her theory of the archaic matrix: !Reason is a representative of the
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Father and of the Law. Its decline, a sign that the father has been defeated, indicates that a process of merging with the archaic mother is taking place" (p. 134). However true this may be in the case histories of her perverse patients and in the cultural parallels which she relates, it has been demonstrated by Adorno and Horkheimer in their analysis of the Enlightenment that the destruction of reason comes also from within the tendencies of Enlightenment itself. Adorno and Horkheimer show that, without ever colluding with a romantic longing to merge with the mother indeed, by its very opposite: by a progressive distancing of the investigating subject from its object the reason of the Enlightenment in the form of science becomes self-destructive (pp. xi, xii, 11). Perhaps this argument fills out a conceptual dimension of what is expressed mythically by Bion in his image of Arf Arfer and by Bely's picture of the firebreathing mathematician-Papa. The Adorno essay argues that rationality divorced not only from emotion but from the understanding of qualities leads to another chaos of undifferentiation not the chaos of the archaic matrix of the Romantics but the chaos of philosophical undifferentiation and homology, and of the systems of social violence which ensue. Chasseguet-Smirgel's description of Freud's resolution of his Oedipus complex takes the form of a double metaphor intended to praise Freud not only as a thinker but as a completer of his own system: Freud is said to have achieved !this happy marriage uniting the realms of Apollo and Dionysos [which] is also that of the olive tree and the fig tree, the two Trees of Eden as Thomas Mann says, the union between the mind and the soul" (p. 144). Chasseguet-Smirgel points to a number of words in different languages for soul which are feminine in gender, but in Freud's writing there does not seem to be a place for a feminine conception of soul. Freud never made use of the Jungian archetypes in his thinking, and in this account of the resolution of his oedipal conflicts it is clear that the femininity which Freud wrote about was at least partly his own. Chasseguet-Smirgel shows how Freud's preoccupation with the death instinct, related to the discovery of his own illness, coincided with his major writings on femininity and gave them what could be called a depressive colouring. Freud saw femininity as !obscure, uncanny, disquieting, as though it lay enveloped in a mournful shadow" (p. 139). He queried the anima at a time when it was already overcast by his impending death. Nor was Freud's view of femininity ever freed from the distortions of his depressive conflicts. In Freudian psychoanalysis there can be no !happy marriage" of the internal parent because the mother is denied her mental qualities, equated in the unconscious with the body, investigated with ambivalence and never fully accepted into the self so that the subject is free from fear and from the wish to subdue all that she represents.
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References 3 Adorno , T.W. and Horkheimer , M. (1979) !The concept of enlightenment", in Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. Verso . ( 1979 ).
4
Bely , A. (1971) Kotik Letaev, Gerald Janecek, trans. Ann Arbor: Ardis .
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Bion , W.R. (1962/1984) Learning from Experience. Maresfield Reprints . (ZBK.003.0001A)
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Bion , W.R. (1982) The Long Week-End 1897-1919: Part of a Life. Abingdon: Fleetwood Press , 1985 ; Free Association Books , 1986 .
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Chasseguet-Smirgel , J. (1986) Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche, New York/London: New York University Press .
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Freud , S. (1922) !Two Encyclopaedia articles", in James Strachey, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Hogarth , 1957-73 . vol. 17 , p. 235. (SE.017.0217A)
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Freud , S. (1932) !The question of a Weltanschauung", in New Introductory Lectures, 1933 , SE 22 , pp. 158-182.
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12
Grotstein , J. , ed. (1981/1983) Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?: A Memorial to Wilfred R. Bion. Maresfield Reprints .
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Jacobsen , T. (1978) The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven/London: Yale University Press .
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Jameson , F. (1974) Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press . Leach , E. (1969) Genesis as Myth and Other Essays. Jonathan Cape .
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Mandelstam , O. (1965) !The noise of time", in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, Clarence Brown, trans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
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Mann , T. (1903) !Tonio Krger", in Stories of Three Decades, H.T. Lowe-Porter, trans. New York: The Modern Library , 1936 .
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Mann , T. (1911) !Death in Venice", in Stories of Three Decades, H.T. Lowe-Porter, trans. New York: The Modern Library , 1936 .
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Meltzer , D. (1978) The Kleinian Development Part III: The Clinical Significance of the Work of Bion. Perthshire: Clunie .
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Meltzer , D. (1983) Dream-Life: A Re-examination of the Psycho-Analytical Theory and Technique. Perthshire: Clunie .
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Meltzer , D. , Milana , G. , Maiello , S. and Petrelli , D. (1982) !The conceptual distinction between projective identification (Klein) and container-contained (Bion)", Journal of Child Psychotherapy 8 : 185-202.
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Molinari , D. (1985) !Sonia et Robert Delaunay", Beaux Arts 24 : 42-57.
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Nestle , W. (1940/1975) Vom Mythos zum Logos: Die Selbstenfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates. Stuttgart: Alfred Krner Verlag .
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Snell , B. (1948/1960) The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought T.G. Rosenmeyer, trans. New York/Evanston: Harper & Row , 1960 .
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This publication is protected by US and international copyright lawsand its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. Free Associations, 1988; v.1 (12), p92 (34pp.) FA.001M.0092A
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The Place of The Parents in Psychoanalytic Theory

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Bion , W.R. (1962/1984) Learning from Experience. Maresfield Reprints . (ZBK.003.0001A)

Molinari , D. (1985) !Sonia et Robert Delaunay", Beaux Arts 24 : 42-57.

Segal , H. (1982) Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. Hogarth .

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