The Place of the Parents in Psychoanalytic Theory

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ReferênciasColman, L. (1988). The place of the parents in psychoanalytic theory. Free Associations, 1(12), 92-125.

The place of the parents in psychoanalytic theoryLinda Colman, author, is a painter and printmaker. She studied Comparative Literature at StanfordUniversity, California, and at the University of California at Berkeley where she also taught. From1983 to 1984 she participated in the Observation Course at the Tavistock Clinic, London. She iscurrently taking care of her two-year-old daughter; 1912 California Street, Berkeley, California94703, USAIn this essay I juxtapose leinian conceptions — especially those of Wilfred Bion — to those of aleading Freudian psychoanalyst, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. I do so by reflecting upon a recentbook of her essays gathered under the title Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and theMother in the Psyche (New York University Press, 1986, 159 pages, plus index).

In her essay ʻThe paradox of the Freudian method: from the abolishment of otherness to theuniversal lawʼ, Chasseguet-Smirgel shows how comprehensively an Enlightenment metaphor forthinking has contributed to Freud's ideas about the mind. As well as placing Freud in a culturalhistorical context itself characterized by opposition and dichotomy (German Romanticism andJudaism), Chasseguet-Smirgel demonstrates that much of psychoanalytic thinking, including herown theory of the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, is still very much an expression of thisEnlightenment 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 anddivision (the father separates the infant from the mother by means of his embodiment of the incestbarrier and his unique ability to satisfy and procreate with the mother) and argues that the father isidentified 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 herchapter on the Freudian method, a chapter in which she makes explicit the cultural derivatives ofFreudian metapsychology. In his letter Zweig defines Freud's work as ʻApollonian accounts of whatis taking place in the primitive abyss of Dionysosʼ. Zweig's image has a spatial and topographicaldimension which aptly characterizes Freud's thinking: the unconscious is a Dionysian abyss, acavity in the depths of earth which Freud will generally approach with the metaphorical toolsprovided by excavation and archaeology. Congruent with this spatial dimension there is implicit, inZweig's figure of speech, an Enlightenment image of light into darkness; this image is madeexplicit by Chasseguet-Smirgel's own gloss on the figure in which she hails the Freudian project asʻan Apollonian flood of lightʼ (p. 129).

Chasseguet-Smirgel defines the paradox of the psychoanalytic method as ʻthe opposition betweenthe subject matter — the unconscious, the primitive abyss of Dionysos, and its projectʼ. In his 1922section on psychoanalysis in ʻTwo encyclopaedia articlesʼ Freud defines the psychoanalyticproject, method and scientific discipline (Freud, 1922, p. 235), and Chasseguet-Smirgel's citationof this essay points to the central importance for Freud of the use of logical thought processes. Asshe puts it: ʻThe aim is to direct an Apollonian flood of light into the enigmatic depths of Dionysosʼ(p. 129). Leaving aside the idea of the flood of light, an elemental image for what is supposed to bethe activity of reason, her description maintains psychoanalysis very much in the tradition ofEnlightenment thinking about mind and reality and, from the standpoint of metaphor, suggests thatpsychoanalysis continues the Enlightenment mode of apprehension rather than presenting a newway of understanding mental processes.

Although she uses the word ʻparadoxʼ in the title of her essay, there is really nothing paradoxicalabout her metaphor for the Freudian project. The image of casting light on an obscure area isfamiliar and occurs often in figures of speech. Paradox is defined as: ʻThat which is contrary toreceived opinion: that which is apparently absurd but which is or may be really true: a self-contradictory statementʼ (Chambers, p. 960). An image which is frequently used rhetorically cannotbe contrary to received opinion: rather, it signals an accepted way of viewing reality. The fact thatthe Enlightenment metaphor of light into darkness has assumed an almost stereotypical charactermight alert us to look for ways in which psychoanalysis could present a more evolved — perhapstruly paradoxical — picture of the mind.

What Chasseguet-Smirgel does most effectively in her essay is to establish Freud firmly in thecultural historical context of German Romanticism and Judaism, two coexisting but mutuallyexclusive cultural systems with two irreconcilable views of reality. She shows very well theimplications of each system in terms of alliance with primary- or secondary-process mentalfunctioning and in terms of the place in the psyche which each Weltanschauung allots to motherand father, id and ego (her book is, after all, called Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father andthe Mother in the Psyche). German Romanticism, which made the psychic depths available toFreud, 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 prenatalmother, the womb, the sea. Its cosmos offers the possibility of the dissolution of the self and ofcomplete undifferentiation, chaos: ʻThere is, then, a unity, a possible fusion between man, Godand nature. An anti-religious idea, a gnostic conception of the worldʼ (p. 130). And: ʻThe father, inhis role as the third person who separates the mother from the child, has disappearedʼ (p. 132).

Chasseguet-Smirgel quotes Thomas Mann's remarks on German Romanticism in this essay, andindeed quotes Mann frequently throughout Sexuality and Mind. The epigraph to her book is takenfrom Mann's ʻDie Bäume im Gartenʼ ( ʻThe Trees of Edenʼ,1930) which contains a number ofEnlightenment ʻequationsʼ; thus:

The world of the day, of the sun, is the world of the mind … At least half of the human heartdoes 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 ofthe womb nurtures the Unconscious.

Mann himself takes up the polarity of Apollonian and Dionysian in ʻDeath in Veniceʼ, a fatalistic talein which Dionysian consciousness can only bring about deterioration and death, though in classicalAntiquity myths about Dionysos often contained complex resolutions of ecstatic experience andexcess balanced by learning through experience, which bring about new configurations such asthat of primal autistic experience (rhythmic swinging) in an appropriately containing setting (ritual,festival); Mann, however, sees the Dionysian only as a celebration of ʻthe darkness of the soul, theMother-chthonic, the holy procreative underworldʼ (p. 132). As the language of ʻThe Trees of Edenʼsuggests, Mann adopts only those aspects of the myth of Dionysos which he can correlate toEnlightenment polarities. Unaware of the possibility of the containment of the Dionysian by theinternal tensions inherent in the myth and its rituals, Mann, like Freud, sees the Dionysian assomething which must be repressed or controlled by a counterforce: the intellect. The fact thatChasseguet-Smirgel refers to Mann in this connection is itself significant, for he gives aninterpretation of German Romanticism from an Enlightenment point of view rather than viewing thetwo movements from a historical perspective.

In delineating the role of Jewish culture in Freud's thought, Chasseguet-Smirgel quotes astatement by Freud concerning his hopes for the hegemony of reason. The quotation is taken fromhis New Introductory Lectures: ʻOur 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 manʼ (Freud,1933, p. 171). It may well be asked why reason, with its evident powers of persuasion, needs toestablish 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 destructivepowers of the unconscious were indeed raging out of control, this view of the intellect asnecessarily defensive against id impulses is as typical of Freud's thought generally as is hisuneasy reaction to the notion of the oceanic feeling discussed in Civilization and its Discontents.






For Freud this complex of feeling is ʻwrapped in obscurityʼ, and Chasseguet-Smirgel postulates arepressed part in Freud, suggesting that its cultural component is German Romanticism while itspsychic component is the tie of the infant to the pre-oedipal mother and the infant's longing to fusewith her. Freud's optimistic projection of the progress of human understanding towards reason inThe Future of an Illusion is ʻconsistent with the spirit of the Enlightenment to which Freud claimedhe was heirʼ (Chasseguet-Smirgel, p. 135). Freud's projection follows the inevitable progress froma mythological mode of apprehending reality to a logical-philosophical one, whose triumphantupward sweep is illustrated in German works of the 1940s such as Bruno Snell's Die Entdeckungdes Geistes (The Discovery of the Mind) and Wilhelm Nestle's Vom Mythos zum Logos, whichcould be translated as From Mythical Thinking to Reasoning.

While Freud does not use the word ʻthinkingʼ to denote the primary process, his distinctionbetween primary and secondary process bears the stamp of Enlightenment epistemology: bothsystems 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 ofthe polarized quality of these modes of mental functioning, it might be useful to consider to whatextent such polarization grew out of contradictions in German culture between the Enlightenmentand Romanticism. It seems significant also that the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, whose context isEnglish 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-Enlightenmentway 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 BionFestschrift 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 andenigmatic style of expression:

My next clue came from the Nobel Prize speeches from the medical laureates who spoke of therationale for the CAT Scan (computerized axial tomography). Many different views of the objectare 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, everythingaround it (the obvious) must be obscured so that the hitherto obscured area can be illuminated allthe more clearly. When this happens, the surfaces are blanked out — ʻby a beam of intensedarknessʼ, to quote Bion. The CAT Scan is a paradigm for Bion's method of thinking, speaking andwriting … (Grotstein, 1981/83, p. 10)

Although it is not clear from Grotstein's description whether the use of this image as metaphor isBion's or his own, the reference to vertices surely suggests the vertices of Bion's grid, while thequotation of Bion's phrase ʻby a beam of intense darknessʼ indicates that Bion was respondingimaginatively to the CAT Scan image and relating it to his own manner of perception. Grotsteinapparently considered the metaphor significant enough to illustrate the complexity of Bion's




thought in the introduction to the Bion Festschrift, and shares it with the reader in such a way as toemphasize its importance in his personal evolution.

It is useful to compare in detail the CAT Scan metaphor with the Enlightenment metaphor ofshedding light into the depths of the unconscious. In this metaphor, light from above is projectedinto the depths below. The polarities light and dark, above and below, which psychoanalysts fromFreud to Chasseguet-Smirgel have linked to father and mother, conscious and unconscious, showa characteristic of thought which belongs to logic, with its emphasis on dichotomy, as well as tomythical thinking. Anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach have devotedmuch effort to documenting and explicating the binary nature of myth. And while Snell's study ofthe Greek origins of the Western mind — a chapter of which bears the title: ʻFrom Myth to Logicʼ —portrays the change from poetry to philosophy as a progress from imaginative to logical thinking, itis Snell who points out a limitation of logic. In contrast to the world of natural forms, ʻLogic …knows only dichotomy, the division into two; a certain thing either “is” or “is not” — tertium nondaturʼ (Snell, 1948/60, p. 192). Thus logic stands apart from actuality, while the binary systems ofmythical thinking allow for a representation of the natural world which includes resolution of conflictin the form of mediation.

The Freudian Enlightenment metaphor — which is supposed to express the victory of rationalforces over the irrational, and by implication to denote the activity of the mind — revives thearchaic polarities of some of the earliest cosmological systems as seen in the creation myths ofHesiod and the Near East. Polarization is a key feature of early cosmological thinking, whichexplains the origin of the world as the joining and division of ʻoppositesʼ in nature (in Hesiod'sTheogony the Earth and the Sky, in the ancient Mesopotamian Enûma elish the fresh and the saltwaters). These opposites are typically characterized as male and female, analogizing the origin ofthe world to human conception. While the natural opposites may vary according to theiridentification as male or female in the diverse cosmologies, and while different natural features arechosen in different cosmologies to represent the primal parents, a constant factor is the perceptionof nature in terms of polarities along with the perception of those polarities as anthropomorphicallymale or female. Thus the Freudian Enlightenment metaphor shares with archaic cosmology itscentral thought mechanism of polarization, in addition to an associative logic which links male andfemale anthropomorphically to natural phenomena.

As in the early cosmologies, the polarities of the Enlightenment metaphor exist in a balance whichimplies a tension between them. In Enlightenment cosmology that tension is resolved within anorder that is strictly hierarchical. This polarization of light and dark, above and below, father andmother (as internal objects) in Enlightenment psychoanalysis is explicated by Chasseguet-Smirgelin terms of her theory of the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex: because of the infant's desireto merge with the primal mother, and the consequent threat to the boundaries of the individual whostill experiences this infantile wish, the world of fusion with the mother and its associated primary-process functioning must be separated off from — in order to be understood and controlled by —




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 isunidirectional: the father as internal object aids in the understanding of the unconscious and ofprimary-process experience, which is associated with the mother. Chasseguet-Smirgel, followingFreud, does not see the pre-oedipal mother as having any mental qualities which would aid theinfant 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 herdiscovery in her perverse patients of a phantasy which the analyst locates as anterior to theOedipal phantasies of destroying the contents of the mother's belly, described in the work ofMelanie Klein. The pre-oedipal phantasy discovered by Chasseguet-Smirgel is the wish of theinfant or infantile adult to merge with the mother; the phantasy is expressed destructively as thewish of the individual to have exclusive access to a smooth maternal belly, so the contents of themother's belly (other babies, father's penis) must be eliminated. While this summary does not dojustice to the complexity of this phantasy, nor to its ramifications concerning reality testing, Ibelieve it is sufficient for the purpose of indicating some limitations of the theory. Melanie Kleinherself saw the mother as performing an important function for the infant, a function which hasbeen summarized as ʻMelanie Klein's emphasis on the baby's relationship to the breast and themother as the great modulator of mental pain which enables the baby to proceed with itsdevelopmentʼ (Meltzer, 1983, p. 42). The destructive phantasies which Klein located in the earlieststages of the Oedipus complex by implication find their expression within the context of an actualmother-infant relationship and take form according to the mother's ability to modulate the anxietieselicited by those phantasies. The mother is not simply the passive object of wishful or destructivephantasies, 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 part-object of id impulses but as the first ally for the infant's rudimentary thought processes, the firstbeing to help the infant think about his feelings. Bion's notion of maternal reverie and his theory ofmaternal 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 introjectthe capacity to think about feelings, must alter the shape of all infantile phantasies, including themost primitive. One wonders if the perverse patients whose reality- and thought-obliteratingphantasies are described so convincingly by Chasseguet-Smirgel could have been adequatelycontained in this way by their mothers. Or perhaps as infants these patients were incapable of fullyprojecting 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 thearchaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, that it is the interactional context of each mother-infant pairwhich will determine the outcome for the infant of his passage through the era of primary-processphantasying. Whether the experience of this passage produces a perverse adult, or a normal adultwhose thought processes are distorted and limited by unconscious phantasying (Chasseguet-






Smirgel's utopian thinkers) or an adult for whom early phantasying is but a rudiment of largelyreality-orientated thinking — all must depend very much on the way in which both mother andinfant deal with the evocation of phantasy inherent in the relationship.

An important aspect of Chasseguet-Smirgel's argument — and one which leads her to thepolarized view of mind referred to above — is the identification of the father, as incest barrier andobstacle to the return to the womb, with reality itself and with the secondary-process thinking whichinstitutes and legitimates his role in the psyche. Thus for her perverse patients ʻthe destruction ofthe contents of the mother's belly, aiming to make it smooth and perfectly accessible, representsthe destruction of reality itselfʼ (p. 81). Although she mentions that such patients frequently attackthe analyst's maternal creativity and thinking, it does not occur to her that this phantasized attackon the contents of the mother's belly is also an attack on the mother's ability to contain thesecontents: it is an attack on the mother's capacity to think.

Attacks on the mother-analyst's capacity for thought have frequently been noted bypsychotherapists interpreting the behaviour and phantasies of their child patients. In some vividlyrelated case histories several analysts record persistent features such as resentment ofdependence on a thinking object and envy of the mother's richness and fertility, and detail a varietyof motivations on the part of their child patients for testing and sometimes attacking the mother-analyst'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 maternalqualities in the analyst, her failure to give sufficient weight to the mother's active role in the psycheas container and transformer of projected feelings means that this analyst must in essence returnto a Freudian conception of mind and accept the Freudian polarities.

In a chapter in her book, entitled ʻThe Femininity of the Analyst in Professional Practiceʼ,Chasseguet-Smirgel defines a ʻmaternal aptitudeʼ which she feels endows both sexes with theability to communicate with patients in a preverbal or subverbal way (p. 33). She sees an analogybetween this aptitude and the mother's ability to create an environment for her infant, but theactual 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 andlullabies all re-create a certain number of characteristics of prenatal life and turn the child'senvironment into a projection of the womb. (pp. 31-2)

According to Chasseguet-Smirgel it is the baby's environment which by some mysterious tendencyachieves this projection of the womb, rather than the mother who creates that environment bythinking at many different levels about the needs of her infant. This phrasing, which obscures whoit is who puts this environment together, is in marked contrast to Bion's notion of maternal reverie.




Perhaps cultural imagery offers the most striking examples of just how deeply intertwined are themother's provision of a physical environment and her thoughts about the identity and futurity of herchild. While Bion uses the word reverie in a very specific sense, a more general association ofreverie with the mother's preparation of an environment is familiar from paintings of the Virgin suchas the image of the Seamstress Madonna. It is, or should be, common knowledge that a motherdoes a great deal of productive thinking of both a direct and an indirect kind while creating anenvironment for her child, but perhaps we need these reminders from cultural imagery of thesignificance of what is so familiar. A more modern but equally vivid image of maternal reverie is aquilt made by the painter Sonia Delaunay for her baby. A patchwork utilizing traditional Slavicelements, the quilt contains features of rhythm, line and colour which make it the predecessor andprototype of Sonia Delaunay's collages and paintings: ʻAu-delà de l'objet utilitaire, Sonia vient decréer la première oeuvre abstraiteʼ (Molinari, 1985). While the importance of this quilt is heightenedby the fact that it became the kernel for the work of a great painter, it could legitimately stand forthe 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 onunconscious or preconscious levels than is the fruitfulness of the mother limited to the biologicalfacts of pregnancy and birth. An attack in phantasy upon the mother's belly must represent notonly an attack upon the father as internal object, as the ʻrealityʼ which the belly contains, but anattack upon the mother's very capacity to hold together her internal world and the internal world ofthe 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 whichcould equally have been used by Bion to describe thought, the image of multiple vertices recallinghis choice of the imagery of vertices to describe perspective and recalling also his grid organizingdifferent levels of primary- and secondary- process mental functioning. It is interesting to note thatthe one phrase directly attributed to Bion in the description of this metaphor is indeed a paradox —one which has appeared in poetry (the ʻdarkness visibleʼ of Milton), though it is unfamiliar incommon speech. To return to the definition of paradox quoted above, Bion's ʻbeam of intensedarknessʼ is an idea apparently absurd but really true: it is a reality figured forth in a sophisticatedform of medical technology, something in this scientific context which is really possible. Atechnologically much simpler version of the ʻbeam of intense darknessʼ in a two-dimensional worldhas long been known to artists who intensify the darks around an area which they wish to appearbright, and is based on an understanding of dark and light as in a dynamic relation rather than asstatic polarities. It is the range and intensity of the dark tones in Rembrandt's etchings of thedescent from the cross and in Goya's prints of The Disasters of War which heighten theillumination 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 inRembrandt 's Descent from the Cross by Torchlight (1654) the torchlight of the title is in fact abeam of intense darkness: a deep blackening around the central group of figures some of whose




features, passing from darkness into light, are modified by delicate hatching. Rembrandt's figuresare neither static nor painstakingly rendered; the artist emphasizes their collective action bymaking the main area of illumination coincide with the diagonal direction of the shroud. Similarly inan etching of 1892 by Odilon Redon, Passage d'une âme, diagonal arcs of light are created by adeeply darkened surround and delicate hatching of partially obscured human features at thetransitional edge between the intense dark and glowing light of the picture. Again movement anddirection are emphasized. Black and white are relational, are percepts, just as the colour of themoderns becomes a percept rather than a symbolic or realistic entity. It seems relevant that in theblack and white work mentioned above, as in Bion's metaphor, the dynamic relation of dark andlight is more apparent when the focus is on tones or intensities of darkness as an obliqueapproach 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 fromabove is projected into the abyss below.

It is important also that in the CAT Scan image there is a definite distinction between dark andlight, and the qualities of separation and division which Chasseguet-Smirgel has termed paternalare very much in evidence. Here light and dark are separate and relational, though not polarized ina cosmology or in a philosophical system which sees with the naked eye. Rather, thistechnological eye is closer to being a kind of inner eye — capable, if it is used sensitively, ofrevealing far more about the complexities of the inner world than would otherwise be possible. InBion's metapsychology the traditional and archaic polarities have been superseded in favour of amore complex inner world which can be investigated with greater care and precision. The paternalprinciple is evident not in a polarization of opposites but in the growing capacity of the mind, notonly to perceive but to do so with increasing ability to distinguish and discriminate — capabilitieswhich, while less dramatic than the bold division of night from day, involve the paternal quality ofseparation more deeply and more extensively.

The CAT Scan metaphor presents a world in contrast to the polarized cosmos of tradition, for whilelight and dark are seen in complementarity, they are no longer paired with above and below; nordoes the activity of perception imply a spatial-hierarchical separation of light and dark along withthe direct and unidirectional movement of light into the dark abyss. Rather than the abyss, there isthe interior of the human body (mind); rather than a beam of light dispelling darkness, it is a beamof darkness which indirectly produces illumination by darkening the areas around the obscureobject.

Because Bion's model emphasizes the relationship between light and dark as the factor allowingfor more accurate, multivalent, nuanced perceptions, light and dark and the target objects whichthey reveal are no longer seen primarily as entities, but in their interrelatedness. Lucidity is not thegift of light alone, but of light in conjunction with darkness. It is important too that theinterrelatedness imaged here is not a fusion or a merging. There is no threat of engulfment by thearchaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, no dissolution of the ego (perceptual apparatus) in oceanic



feeling. This interrelatedness maintains firm — though multiple and varying — boundaries (as thetarget object changes, so presumably does the location of the beam). Division and separation arevery 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 primary-process functioning). The primitive side of Enlightenment thinking is seen in the fact that both theimagery of opposed nexuses and the mechanism of polarization are basic to the cosmologies ofthe creation myths and to the Enlightenment metaphor which presumes to embody reason. Likethe primitive cosmologies, the Enlightenment project defends the ego against its longing for andfear of fusion with the pre-oedipal mother. The CAT Scan metaphor is neither an expression of thewish for fusion nor its defensive negation. It posits a different (variable) position for the ego inrelation to its internal world and objects. From its multiple vertices the self, with its beam ofdarkness, is better equipped to see all its objects — especially the archaic matrix, which it neitherfears nor wishes to subdue by a dictatorship of the intellect. Freud himself seems to have hadparticular difficulty in interpreting the importance of the pre-oedipal mother for patients such asDora and for cases which he wrote about or commented on, such as those of Little Hans and AnnaO. The fact that a number of modern reinterpretations of these cases have seen confusion aboutand ignorance of the important role of the pre-oedipal mother to be Freud's particular blind spotmay 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'smetaphor they are not viewed in a sadomasochistic relation, as they would be from the vertex ofFreud's anal stage. Nor are the parents to be viewed in terms of power and domination, as theywould be even from the vertex of Freud's developmentally more advanced genital stage. Bion'smetaphor 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 qualitieswhich contribute to a fuller understanding by the individual. This conviction is expressed in histheoretićal writings as well as being implicit in the metaphor described above. In particular histheory of container and contained and his writing about the commensal relationship illustrate thebeneficially interactive roles of the parents in the psyche. Bion's views on the parents are to anextent rooted in his personal situation: his mother's empathetic understanding had a great impacton him, and his father's lack of just this quality seems to have alerted him to the importance of therelation between empathy, communication and knowledge.

There is much that is problematic about Freud's assumption that secondary-process thinking, byvirtue of its problem-solving function, is closer to reality than are the workings of the primaryprocess, an assumption appropriate to the ideology of the Enlightenment and one which does not



include a vision of the two kinds of mental function working in concert. Equally problematic is thepolarization of the two modes of mental functioning along developmental lines in bothEnlightenment thinking and Freudian psychoanalysis. Bion's metapsychology refutes both theprivileged position of secondary-process cognition in relation to reality and the assumption that theclearest form of reality testing occurs when secondary-process thinking is operating divorced fromthe primary process.

Bion's position on reality testing is described by Donald Meltzer in ʻContainer and contained — theprototype of learningʼ, a chapter in his book on the clinical significance of Bion's work. In thischapter Meltzer investigates whether Bion has succeeded in laying the foundations for a theory ofthe emotions in psychoanalytic thought, something which psychoanalytic theory needed tocomplete the work of Freud and Klein. Meltzer outlines Bion's revision of the theory of realitytesting as established by Freud: The idea of the importance of ʻbinocular visionʼ as a verification ofthe 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 secondaryprocess in terms of their appearance in language and proceeds to explore reader response tothese different kinds of diction. According to Rogers, words belonging to the ʻid-laden, wishfulfillingʼprimary process comprise ʻsymbolic diction, diction which may paradoxically be said to have apreverbal quality' (Rogers, 1978, p. 27). By contrast: ʻSecondary-process words are “adult words”.They tend to be abstract, have a defensive function, and be ego and superego orientatedʼ (p. 27).While he states that secondary-process words ʻare geared to problem-solving, reality-testingcognitionʼ (p. 27), he distinguishes his own view from that of theoreticians who have described aregression to primary-process mental functioning in poetry and have viewed that regressionpejoratively. According to Rogers: ʻSuch regression operating synergistically with higher egofunctions is a vital aspect of the creative process and the responses it evokesʼ (p. 49).

One can see that this approach involves an important amendment to the theory of reality testingwhich, in Freud's writing, was not given substance, was merely a fact. It is never really touchedupon in Mrs Klein's work for she was concerned almost exclusively with the differentiation of thetwo main areas of reality, internal and external. At the time of her writing, because the phenomenabeing examined were those related to confusion rather than disorders of thought, her clarificationof this geography of mental life seemed to give adequate substance to the problem of realitytesting. She went a great distance in demonstrating how different were the laws governing theinternal and external worlds. As she was no theoretician of the mind it did not occur to her to relatethis to Freud's ideas of primary and secondary process. But truly this addendum to analyticaltheory did not really fill out a concept of reality testing and nowhere in her work will one findreference to any psychic entity such as a lie. Bion's myth of alpha-function is intended to providean apparatus which can afford the personality the kind of experience from which comes a ʻfeelingof confidenceʼ at discerning the truth, analogous to the confirmation of sense data by sharedexperience with others or confirmation by more than one sense (what Bion calls ʻcommon senseʼ).This feeling of confidence, he suggests, is made possible by the elaboration of the ʻmembraneʼ of




the ʻcontact barrierʼ between essentially conscious and essentially unconscious representations ofthe emotional experience being worked on by alpha-function. The alpha-elements are not theexperience of the thing-in-itself but an abstraction and representation of it, while its being thusrepresented both in conscious and unconscious forms simultaneously gives the personality aʻbinocular visionʼ of the experience from which the ʻfeeling of confidenceʼ in its reality is derived.(Meltzer, 1978, pp. 48-9) and external worlds. As she was no theoretician of the mind it did notoccur to her to relate this to Freud's ideas of primary and secondary process. But truly thisaddendum to analytical theory did not really fill out a concept of reality testing and nowhere in herwork will one find reference to any psychic entity such as a lie. Bion's myth of alpha-function isintended to provide an apparatus which can afford the personality the kind of experience fromwhich comes a ʻfeeling of confidenceʼ at discerning the truth, analogous to the confirmation ofsense data by shared experience with others or confirmation by more than one sense (what Bioncalls ʻcommon senseʼ). This feeling of confidence, he suggests, is made possible by theelaboration of the ʻmembraneʼ of the ʻcontact barrierʼ between essentially conscious andessentially 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 andrepresentation of it, while its being thus represented both in conscious and unconscious formssimultaneously gives the personality a ʻbinocular visionʼ of the experience from which the ʻfeelingof confidenceʼ 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 ofreality in constant interplay with unconscious phantasy which the psychoanalyst Hanna Segalbelieves to be part of the individual's continuing experience, as Rogers believes it is essential tofull experience of the creative process by writer or reader. It is interesting to read Rogers's theoryof 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 comesunrevised from Freudian psychoanalysis and understands the creative process as issuing fromprimary-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 occursoptimally when the rational faculties are operating apart from the emotions, bearing few or notraces of phantasy activity. This kind of separation, expressed by Freud in his definition ofphantasying as a split-off form of thought-activity kept free from reality testing, is in Segal's viewimpossible, for ʻthought is not only contrasted with phantasy, but is based on it and derived from itʼ(Segal 1982, p. 23). Segal suggests a definition of thinking as the modification of unconsciousphantasy, and sees the origin of thought in the infant's early testing of phantasies ʻin a realitysettingʼ — 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 egofunctions, Rogers says:

For the ʻartistʼ on a high-wire in a circus, the greater the danger, analogous to involvement, the






greater the need for control. This combination of deep involvement with high control offers thegreatest satisfaction for the identifying, empathizing audience. In poetry, similarly, deep regressionis not necessarily separate from but may occur alongside or accompanied by a high degree of egocontrol (distance, detachment). Expressed in modal terms, poetry may exhibit a high degree ofprimary- and secondary-process mentation more or less simultaneously. Here is the differencebetween sheer phantasy — as in dreams — and art: dreams are almost pure primary processwhereas art is characterized by a combination of primary and secondary process. Good metaphorepitomizes this combination. (p. 67)

The importance of the inclusion of emotional and even archaic phantasy-level processes to theexperiencing of art is very close to Bion's notion concerning the need for ʻbinocular visionʼ in thetesting 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 ʻfeelings ofconfidenceʼ that one is seeing the truth, not of the thing-in-itself, but of one's own emotionalexperience 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 outof his model for the mind as expressed in the CAT Scan metaphor. For it is just here that themental qualities of the mother are of crucial importance: it is the pre-oedipal mother whose activereverie — her taking in of the infant's projections, thinking about them and returning them to theinfant in a modified form — becomes the basis for the individual's capacity for the kind ofknowledge, and confidence in knowledge, which Bion is talking about. As, over time, the infantintrojects not only the mother's modifications of projections (Klein's ʻmodulator of mental painʼ) buther very capacity to think about these experiences, the infant and — later — the child and the adultbecome capable of performing this operation for themselves, and hence of learning throughexperience. It is the mental qualities of both parents which must optimally be introjected by thechild: just as, in the beam-of-darkness image, maximum illumination is achieved by the dynamicinteraction of darkness and light.

It is fascinating to see how these two metaphorical descriptions of the process of envisioning linkup with a number of ideas concerning thinking, seeing and the place of each of the parents in thepsyche, ideas whose complex interrelation form very different metapsychologies in the thought ofFreud and Bion. Because the ideas of each concerning thinking and reality relate intimately toconscious and unconscious images and phantasies about the parents, it is suggestive to considernot only their different cultural environments but also their different ʻfamily culturesʼ.

Much has been written about Freud and the father, ńnot least by Freud himself. But while Bion'sself-analysis is available as autobiography in The Long Week-End and in All My SinsRemembered and as autobiographical fiction in A Memoir of the Future, Freud's more famous self-




analysis remains the missing Ur-text which must be reconstructed from the available secondarymaterial. In a paper of this kind it would be impossible to do justice to the subject of Freud and thefather. Perhaps it will suffice to say that the figure of the powerful father, formidable rival to the sonin the oedipal stage, is repeatedly evoked in the case histories in a variety of guises: thesympathetic father of Little Hans, the persecutory superego of Schreber, and the object ofintensely 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 asMoses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo.

By contrast Freud writes little about the patients' mothers in his case histories. His characterizationof them tends to be thin and with one exception, the treatment of Elisabeth, he does not formtherapeutic alliances with the mothers of his patients as he does — either in reality orimaginatively, through identification — with several of the fathers. The mother in Freud is always ashadowy figure. Some contemporary readings of ʻAnna O.ʼ and ʻDoraʼ see a lack of understandingof the pre-oedipal mother and her importance to the patient as a serious flaw in Freud'sinterpretation of ʻAnna O.ʼ and treatment of Dora (see Rosenbaum and Muroff, 1984; Bernheimerand Kahane, 1985). For Freud the oedipal mother is the object of desire or rivalry. Perhapsbecause 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 themental and emotional qualities of the mother herself and their place in the individual psyche. Asthe object of desire or rivalry, Freud's oedipal mother is exclusively the object of projections and isnot 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 BionFestschrift, says of Bion's mother that ʻher qualities of empathy and warmth were to make theprofoundest impression on himʼ (Grotstein, p. 2). Although Bion's autobiography The Long Week-End(1982) shows some of his mother's limitations in this area (the lap suddenly cold andfrightening, the mother's denial of her sadness), the lack of understanding which Bion experiencesas a child is primarily associated with his father's lack of empathy and often inability to understandwhat the child Bion is saying. Anecdotes in The Long Week-End about the child Bion's fantasiesand consequent ʻmisunderstandingʼ of words turn out to be really about the colossalmisunderstanding by the insistently reasonable adult of the world of phantasy in which the child isoften immersed. In addition to Bion's feelings about his mother, his experience of his own maternalqualities 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 ofmind, led him to theorize about the importance of the pre-oedipal mother. His mother alsomisunderstands him (in the autobiography) but he seems on the whole to have experienced her asan empathetic person. Her inability to understand her child's questions is most often expressed aspuzzlement, while lack of understanding on the part of the child's father expresses itself as anger.






The mother more frequently allowed Bion to ʻremain in the questionʼ, while the father punishedinquiry of a kind he could not comprehend. Yet Bion did not ʻplace his father to one sideʼ, asChasseguet-Smirgel characterizes the mental activity of her perverse patients (p. 91); such anegation of the father's role as statute is not the only alternative to the acceptance of a universe oftraditional polarities as reality based. Bion, like many an artist and poet, took on his parentalidentifications in a fruitful and a very complex way. He saw and took in differing capacities in bothhis 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 comprehendedfeelings, the father can hardly contain those of his sometimes anxiously inquisitive son. The child'sconfusion of the word ʻelectricityʼ with the vision he has of a marvellous Electric City initiallyprompts Bion's father to engage in the only dialogue between the two that the book records, butwhen the father fails both to uncover the phantasy of an Electric City which underlies his son'squestions and to detect in his son a convincing understanding of electricity, disappointmentfollowed by silence ensues on both sides. In a second instance Bion's father at first endeavours tobe 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. ʻArf Arfer Oo Arfin Mphmʼ says the child Bion in a mocking version of The Lord's Prayer that is still expected to bepropitiatory: ʻplease make me a good boyʼ (Bion, 1982, p. 9). Arf Arfer is the Father Almightywhose presence offers no solace, and Bion's father when he laughs explosively, often at thechildren. The bursts of meaningless laughter frighten the children, and Bion dreams of Arf Arfer asa jackal. When the father and his grown-up companions laugh at Bion and his sister, the childrentry to deal with this defensive amusement at their expense by imitating the grown-up laughter,uttering the apotropaic formula: ʻArf Arfer in Heb'nʼ. This formula signals both the terror which thechildren feel in their confrontation with Arf Arfer and the distorted way in which paternal andpatriarchal values are to be internalized by the children of such a father: the parody of The Lord'sPrayer suggests that these values will be internalized with an accompanying taint of mockery andterror.

The explosive Arf Arfer image is the poetic and visceral expression of that same quality whichshows itself in the father's inability to comprehend the rich life of phantasy which lies behind hisson's many questions about the world. Bion's anecdotes of incomprehension are stories not aboutincomprehensibility but about inadequate containment by the child's interlocutor, the parent. Bionthe adult later understands the logical genesis of his own misunderstandings. Really fantasiesabout the world of the grown-ups, the misunderstandings illuminate to a significant degree theVictorian world of Bion's father. The child's fantasies circle around evening hymns, conventionalphrases of Victorian piety and an electric train which his father presents to him on his birthday, agift in which the father clearly has a strong emotional investment which he does not understand as




such (Waddell, 1984). In reconstructing his own early ʻmisunderstandingsʼ as childhood fantasieswhich have a peg in reality (the misinterpreted word) as well as a real and deeper basis in theunconscious meaning which these words have for the ʻrationalʼ adult whose words they are, Bionshows them not really to have been misunderstandings, but interpretations through phantasy ofcorrectly perceived (though incompletely understood and disastrously communicated) aspects ofthe adult world.

This view of the authenticity of the child's world of supposed misunderstandings is similar to thatexpressed in the semiautobiographical novel Kotik Letaev by the Russian Symbolist poet AndreiBely. Bely validates the child's world in a way similar to Bion's — by demonstrating that not onlythe misunderstanding of words has its pretext in the similar sounds of the words which the childconfuses but that the connections which the child makes invariably have some basis in anunconsciously perceived reality which the reasonable grown-ups have repressed or denied. Togive 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: ʻseasʼ and ʻmothersʼ; ʻuniversityʼand ʻuniverseʼ: ʻPapa would rarely be around; in his absence I would conceive of him as some sortof fiery-mouthed being … he is flying into the apartment from the University — (the University isthe universe!)ʼ (Bely, 1971, p. 41). In another instance the child Bely has a nightmarish experienceof boundlessness and the word which he finds ʻto scream about Anaximanderʼ (infinity) combinesand confuses the Greek word for madness, ʻafrosyneʼ, and the name of the family's cook,ʻAfrosinyaʼ, 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, sometimesattributing the knowledge of the adult poet to the imaginative child, the mechanism of associationwhich 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 atechnique of double perspective: he uses rational prose to describe very acutely the feeling-worldof 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-upswere unaware. When the birthday train breaks down the atmosphere of failure surrounding thewould-be initiation rite is emphasized by the remark of the boy's sister: ʻFull top?ʼ (1982, p. 16).Earlier, when the boy contemplates Arf Arfer and his connection with religion, the child'smisunderstanding of biblical text discloses a shrewd perception of his relationship with his father:ʻNor did I feel sure of God whose attribute seemed to be that he gave his “only forgotten son” toredeem our sinsʼ (p. 13).

In addition to its validation of the perceptual world of the child, KotikLetaev demonstrates thecomplex process for the creative individual of internalizing the parents in a beneficial way. In thisconnection Gerald Janecek, the translator of the English edition of Bely's novel, makes anintroductory statement describing the character of the poet in terms of archaic male and femalepolarities: ʻthe mother is closely associated with the word roi (“swarm,” connoting chaos) and the






father with stroi (“form,” connoting order) … mother represents the physical side of man, father themental sideʼ (Janecek [Bely, 1971], p. viii). While many verbal associations in the Russian dosupport this interpretation, the poet's understanding does not grow by comprehending theseopposed categories.

In fact one could say that for Bely, as for Bion, there is confusion in the child because his ownexperience 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 tohis profession as a mathematician, the man as an individual is experienced by the child as aterrifying ʻfirebreathing Papaʼ. Like the father of the child Bion, he is experienced as emotional anderuptive:

Or, our Papa would say:-

ʻThe earth — is a sphere …ʼ

This — I understood, as I in general understood circularities, and I was afraid of them: after all, Imyself 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 ʻmothersʼ andʻseasʼ, there is equally a chaos of the paternal principle, a dissolution of the ego by fire. Much ofBely's poetic imagery is devoted to presenting the father as a daemon of fire (he is Vulcan in asmoking jacket; Hephaestos forging lightning rods) and sometimes as the embodiment of fierydestruction itself: In attempting to understand the place of the parents in the psyche from thevantage point of the child-poet it becomes clear that the process of internalizing the mentalqualities of the father will be a very complex one, for his father's mental qualities include the lack ofcontainment which characterizes his own behaviour and his relation to his son and is experiencedby the boy as a threat to existence. The poet Bely does not seem to find this quality of containmentin his mother, a society woman, but finds a measure of security with his nanny who, like Bion'sayah, retains her identity while appearing meek in the face of his father's rage. Bely quotes aphrase which seems to be a joke of his father's: ʻNow he sits upon a mat/Pale and very muteʼ (p.39), applying it to the nanny and to himself. He has learned to imitate the nanny, who remains paleand silent while the father rages. The child-poet's identification with his self-contained nanny andwith ʻthe muteness of the man sitting on the matʼ (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 ofthe muteness of the nanny with his own silence and with that of the man who sits on the mat, thechild's rug becomes a place of safety and the locus of his integrity: ʻon the mat — both space andtime are conquered; beyond the mat is the incandescent worldʼ (p. 39).

Papa though begins to notpapatate in the vicinity; and — he threatens with aged rage:




ʻColours of fiery hueI throw upon my palmThat he might appear in an abyss of lightAs red as if a flame … !ʼ

A further clue to the complex way in which the creative individual may internalize aspects of theparents can be seen in a passage from an autobiographical work by another Russian poet, OsipMandelstam. In ʻThe noise of timeʼ Mandelstam eulogizes the language of his two parents as thesource of his literary creativity: ʻThe speech of the father and the speech of the mother — does notour language feed throughout all its long life on the confluence of these two, do they not composeits character?ʼ (Mandelstam, 1965, p. 90). But eulogy quickly becomes sharp characterization asMandelstam describes the ʻrag and bone shopʼ origins of his gift:

The speech of my mother was clear and sonorous without the least foreign admixture, withrather wide and too open vowels — the literary Great Russian language. Her vocabulary was poorand restricted, the locutions were trite, but it was a language, it had roots and confidence. Motherloved to speak and took joy in the roots and sounds of her Great Russian speech, impoverished byintellectual clichés. Was she not the first of her whole family to achieve pure and clear Russiansounds? 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 aspecial Courland accent? I never heard such. A completely abstract, counterfeit language, theornate and twisted speech of an autodidact, where normal words are intertwined with the ancientphilosophical terms of Herder, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, the capricious syntax of a Talmudist, theartificial, not always finished sentence: it was anything in the world, but not a language, neitherRussian nor German. (p. 90)

Although the sonorous ʻpureʼ aspect of the poet's language is seen as coming from the mother, thelanguage of both parents is portrayed as differentiated and idiosyncratic. The mother's language isintellectually trite, but as a language it is coherent. The father's language strives to embody theintellect but fails to be coherent and bears the stigmata of artifice and counterfeit; it is a speech oftongue-tie and languagelessness, and by implication of a significant degree of mindlessness. Yetwhile Mandelstam mercilessly caricatures his father's speech as abstract and counterfeit, ʻtheornate and twisted speech of an autodidactʼ, the well-educated and fluent son has taken up someof these very features and incorporated them into his poetry: the complex, intentionally artificialsyntax, the ornate word, the abstract word (though he must use it very precisely).

Rather than ʻplacing the father to one sideʼ, the creative individual has selectively introjectedimportant aspects of both parents. It would have been disastrous for the poet Mandelstam to haveintrojected the ʻcounterfeitʼ aspect of his father's language, just as Bion the psychoanalyst strove toavoid taking in or identifying with the false side of his father's character (and culture) which was




associated with a lack of empathy and with denial and evasion. The actual fathers of thesecreative individuals could not be taken in as representations of mind without seriousconsequences: the poet needed coherence and meaningfulness in language, just as thepsychoanalyst-philosopher needed empathy and authenticity. Because of the actual ʻfamilyculturesʼ of both men, identification processes could not — fortunately for the worlds of poetry andthought — proceed along traditional lines of Enlightenment-type polarization. While neither mansought to abolish differences (both confronted the harsh terms of reality: Bion in his work onthought 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 (andpainfully) assessing the real parents, not according to traditional ideas of male and femaleattributes but according to what they really were, selecting and taking in those qualities from eachparent which were to prove most beneficial.

In Thomas Mann's novella ʻTonio Krögerʼ there is also a description of the writer's creativepersonality in terms of the internalized mental and emotional qualities of the parents. The name ofthe writer Tonio Kröger expresses the split at his origins, and his artistic personality derives fromthe personalities of a foreign, probably Mediterranean mother and a German father. In ʻTonioKrögerʼ there is a conventional polarization of the parental qualities: the father is puritanical, solidand correct, his one ʻemotionalʼ quality being a tendency towards melancholia; the mother is thevery embodiment of emotion, if emotion of a superficial (unthinking) kind: sensuous andpassionate, she leaves her husband and son and runs away with a musician. To emphasize thepolarization of qualities along male and female lines Mann describes the father as a northern typeand the mother as stereotypically southern. The result of this union is an artist with a badconscience, a bourgeois manqué.

Tonio Kröger 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 healhis splits. Tonio Kröger would seem to be too limited a figure to represent Thomas Mann himselfand it is interesting that the author presents this product of Enlightenment duality as in a wayunfinished, as though some further work of integration needed to be done for him to become a realwriter. Tonio's last statement in a letter to his friend, an artist, is an evaluation of his work as ʻasgood as nothingʼ and a promise to do better. He seems to have an artistic potential which isblocked 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 ofshadows of human figures who beckon to me to weave spells to redeem them — But my deepestand secretest love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, andcommonplace. (Mann, 1903, p. 132)

What will be apparent from the foregoing examples from psychoanalytic and literary autobiographyand biographical fiction is that in every case the internalization of the qualities of the parents by the




creative individual is influenced to a striking degree both by the particular personalities of theparents 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 andthat of Jewish culture in the thought of Freud: German culture — and particularly GermanRomanticism — she equates to a pantheistic religion of the mother, while the Jewish culture whichshe describes is patriarchal and based on law. Thus she takes into account the historicity of thepolarization of the parents in Freud's thinking, disclosing his ideas about the parents as a culturalhistorical phenomenon. But in spite of the in-depth historical treatment given to the development ofFreud's ideas about the place of the father and the mother in the psyche, Chasseguet-Smirgeltreats the parental qualities which she presents in her own theory and the process of internalizingthese 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 Scanmetaphor, particularly the vertex of history. The habit of viewing male and female qualities in termsof polarization is itself historical. This could be set against the intuition of bisexuality which appearsin Freud's notion of the complete Oedipus complex and flourishes in the cultural imagery ofhistorical periods characterized by tolerance and heightened creativity. The historical nature of thehabit of viewing male and female qualities as polarities can be seen by comparing the kind ofpolarization present in early cosmologies with the adaptation of these polarities by moresophisticated, utilitarian systems of thought typical of the Enlightenment. Thus in the writings ofFrancis Bacon the polarization of male as mind and female as nature is used to validate theexploitation of nature by man (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979, p. 4). What began in earlycosmology as the religious expression of projected primitive defence mechanisms becomes by theseventeenth century an ideology and a political programme.

In assessing the dialectic of internalization in the autobiography of Wilfred Bion, a literarybiographer would want to look at the specifically historical aspects of the parents' marriage. Theseincluded Bion's Anglo-Indian culture and the father's Huguenot family lineage which had producedseveral generations of missionaries and puritans ʻmade in a formidably robust anduncompromising mouldʼ (1982, p. 15). Bion hints at the importance of this history when he followsthe above epithet with a tale about a hat which had belonged to his mother: Uncle Harry haddisapproved the wearing of the hat to church and had declared Bion's mother an ʻabandonedwomanʼ. But the child is on his mother's side: ʻI was most fond of this hat which was of widediameter and decorated with bunches of bananas and pears and other luscious fruits rather likethe trays which Indians had striven to present to my fatherʼ (p. 15). The comparison of the hat withthe trays offered by Indians as gifts, and always refused, is suggestive. The patriarchal culture ofBion's father sees both hat and trays as unacceptable. But the child Bion was fond of the hat andparticularly coveted the grapes which adorned it, hoping his mother would leave them to him in herwill. He wished for something fruitful and lush, extravagantly fertile and associated in his mind withforeign gods rather than the Father Almighty of the ruling-class Victorians.





It would appear that in the culture in which Bion was raised this female lushness was, if notprohibited, at least inhibited in its expression in both sexes. Bion's tale of the hat provides anexample of how a feminine attribute may be defined and internalized (or not if the prohibition is toostrong) in a particular way in a particular historical period. History sets the limits of the vicissitudesof the Oedipus complex.

Similarly, in reading the Bely novel a literary historian would want to consider the historicalcharacter of the parents' marriage, the marriage of a mathematician and a society woman, and thecultural institution of the nanny which was used to supplement the parents' involvement in theirchild's upbringing. In addition, the anthroposophic movement influenced the way Bely understoodthe qualities of his parents and the conflicts which they engendered in him. He began writing KotikLetaev 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 hesees as expressing abstractly conflicts which Bely took over from his parents — and thepersonalities of the parents themselves.

For Osip Mandelstam there was also a strong historical aspect to the poet's internalization of hisparents' ʻlinguistic personalitiesʼ. Mandelstam's situation was deeply influenced by the way inwhich the Russian language was acquired successively, over the generations, by his incompletelyassimilated Jewish family. Mandelstam was one of the foremost Russian poets, yet his paternalgrandparents spoke only Yiddish; in ʻThe noise of timeʼ he recalls a childhood memory of anoccasion when his mother ʻrescuedʼ him from the grandparents' attempts, as he saw it, to imposethis alien language and culture on him. The poet's ideas about language are bound up with hisattitudes 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 ofTonio Kröger, the critic would need to look at the positions of the German bourgeoisie and of theoutsider in German culture. It would also be necessary to differentiate the fictive outsider, thewriter Tonio Kröger with his vaguely foreign blood, and the actual outsider, Thomas Mann, a Jewwriting in the early part of this century. It would be important in this context to assess whether theMann character's idealization of the German bourgeoisie, associated in the story with thepuritanical character of the father, is in some way defensive, and whether the distortion of realityimplicit in this idealization is presented by the author uncritically, or with a full understanding of itsmeaning.

I am speaking now of the dialectic of internalization, rather than of the role of the parents in thepsyche, in order to emphasize a conceptual distinction between Bion's model of mind as disclosedin the CAT Scan metaphor and the possibilities for understanding introjective identificationassociated with that model, and the Freudian model which does not posit identification processesin a dialectical manner. For dialectical thinking must be ʻdoubly historicalʼ and must exercise anawareness not only of historical material, but of the concepts with which that material has been



understood (Jameson, 1974). It is just this limitation which one sees in Chasseguet-Smirgel'sreconstruction of the cultural determinants of Freud's thought. Thus she can describe Freud'sunderstanding of male and female, father and mother, as the resolution of one individual's oedipalconflict but adopts, in her own argument, Freud's categories as absolute: ʻIt can be seen that it isthe conjunction of the two cultures which enables Freud to explore the Unconscious — theMother's body — and to send a flood of light into its dark depths, without lurching himself into theabyssʼ (p. 138). This writer's recognition that ʻThe special manner in which the Oedipus complexhas been resolved probably plays a decisive roleʼ (p. 139) nevertheless fails to challenge theconceptual equation of the unconscious with the body of the mother and, by implication, theperceiving, investigating mind with the father.

The equation of the unconscious with the mother's body is problematic because the unconsciousphantasies, including infantile phantasies about the mother's body and its contents, are potentiallymodifiable by the child's introjection of maternal reverie: the unconscious itself contains andincludes the modificatory influence of the mother's mental qualities. For example, paranoid-schizoid phantasies may be modified by maternal containment in the early months of the infant'slife, if this is successfully introjected by the infant (Segal, pp. 13-14). Chasseguet-Smirgel's theoryof the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex, resting as it does on an appreciation of Freudianpsychoanalysis as Enlightenment science, does not take into account this dialectical phenomenonof introjective identification on the part of the child. One could speculate that the perverse patientswhose psychopathologies form much of the basis for her theory are themselves defective in thecapacity to achieve identification introjectively with the mental qualities of both parents.Chasseguet-Smirgel relates the difficulties which her male patients have in achieving introjectiveidentification with the father (pp. 87-8), but perhaps their inability to achieve identificationintrojectively is a more comprehensive defect.

Freud's resolution of the Oedipus complex — and, by implication, Freudian psychoanalysis — aredescribed thus: ʻThe interest in the mother's body (the Unconscious) is not given up; it issublimated in an interest for scientific research whose instruments (through identification with thefather) are neither destructive, nor in too great a danger of being destroyedʼ (p. 139). In the effortto avoid engulfment by an unconscious which German Romanticism has opened up to him, Freud,armed with his identification with Judaism, approaches the unconscious and ʻseeks to pin it down,to master it intellectuallyʼ (p. 138). This is an important insight, but instead of seeing this ʻitʼ asincluding inevitably Freud's own projections and feelings about his rejected or repressed area ofexperience (Romanticism, the pre-oedipal mother), the Freudian analyst mistakenly takes thisequivalence of the unconscious and the mother's body as accurately defining both theunconscious and the mother herself. Thus the mother's metaphorical representatives are accusedof threatening to engulf the subject: ʻThe Freudian enterprise is not a celebration of theUnconscious. Freud sought to subdue the nocturnal, subterranean powers that so stronglypervade German culture, not to delight in themʼ (p. 134). Again the language of domination revealsa defensive posture, a partial insight. It is the mother whom Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis









has declared equivalent to the sum of infantile phantasy projection on to her, so that the infantilewish to merge is converted into a threat of engulfment by the mother. In this formulation ofFreudian psychoanalysis the infantile phantasies are indeed merged with, rather than beingproperly separated from, their object and it is the mother, now truly an almost transparentcontainer 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 isironically 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 subjecttells himself that here are phantasies capable of being investigated and with another, locked-offpart of his mind says, ʻNo, this is really the Mother whom I fear and must subdue.ʼ BecauseFreud's own Oedipus complex was so partially resolved it cannot, in its incomplete form, be takenas the basis for a complete psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalysis contains the same fatal flawwhich T.W. Adorno and Max Hoŕkheimer attribute to the Enlightenment: it has no ability to criticizeitself; it is self-oblivious, taking Freud's and his culture's resolution of the Oedipus complex as thefinal 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 theunconscious which he unconsciously equated with the mother's body even as he investigated it, soFreudian psychoanalysis fails to think about its own thought processes while thinking about thedynamics of the unconscious. The limitations of such thinking contrast with the rich potentialities ofa psychoanalysis amended by Bion's model of the mind and his deep understanding ofinternalization processes. Bion's thinking is dialectical, while the thinking of Freud and his followershas 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 thecontent and problems offered it. But dialectical thinking is a thought to the second power, a thoughtabout thinking itself, in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as withthe material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinkingsuited 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 toachieve within psychoanalysis, but the degree to which Freud failed to be dialectical in his thinkingabout his method, his unconscious equation of the unconscious with the mother's body and of thefather-identified self with mind, and his lack of provision of a place in his theory for the unconsciousphantasies of the investigating subject limits and distorts the ability of Freudian psychoanalysis tounderstand internalization processes in a dialectical manner.

The limitations of Freudian metapsychology are seen equally in the fact that in its historical formFreudianism is wedded to the assumptions of Enlightenment thinking. Thus Chasseguet-Smirgeldescribes a Freudian tenet of her theory of the archaic matrix: ʻReason is a representative of the



Father and of the Law. Its decline, a sign that the father has been defeated, indicates that aprocess of merging with the archaic mother is taking placeʼ (p. 134). However true this may be inthe case histories of her perverse patients and in the cultural parallels which she relates, it hasbeen demonstrated by Adorno and Horkheimer in their analysis of the Enlightenment that thedestruction 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 withthe mother — indeed, by its very opposite: by a progressive distancing of the investigating subjectfrom 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 expressedmythically by Bion in his image of Arf Arfer and by Bely's picture of the firebreathingmathematician-Papa. The Adorno essay argues that rationality divorced not only from emotion butfrom the understanding of qualities leads to another chaos of undifferentiation — not the chaos ofthe 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 adouble metaphor intended to praise Freud not only as a thinker but as a completer of his ownsystem: Freud is said to have achieved ʻthis happy marriage uniting the realms of Apollo andDionysos [which] is also that of the olive tree and the fig tree, the two Trees of Eden as ThomasMann says, the union between the mind and the soulʼ (p. 144). Chasseguet-Smirgel points to anumber of words in different languages for soul which are feminine in gender, but in Freud's writingthere does not seem to be a place for a feminine conception of soul. Freud never made use of theJungian archetypes in his thinking, and in this account of the resolution of his oedipal conflicts it isclear that the femininity which Freud wrote about was at least partly his own. Chasseguet-Smirgelshows how Freud's preoccupation with the death instinct, related to the discovery of his ownillness, coincided with his major writings on femininity and gave them what could be called adepressive colouring. Freud saw femininity as ʻobscure, uncanny, disquieting, as though it layenveloped in a mournful shadowʼ (p. 139). He queried the anima at a time when it was alreadyovercast by his impending death. Nor was Freud's view of femininity ever freed from the distortionsof his depressive conflicts. In Freudian psychoanalysis there can be no ʻhappy marriageʼ of theinternal parent because the mother is denied her mental qualities, equated in the unconscious withthe body, investigated with ambivalence and never fully accepted into the self so that the subject isfree from fear and from the wish to subdue all that she represents.





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The Place of the Parents in Psychoanalytic Theory

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