Abstract
In reading the seat of the father in Freud’s science as a construction of analysis, Rickels provides a summary of his theory of unmourning and the psychotic break. The chapter begins with Freud and closes on the transportable therapy setting that stabilized the break for performance artist Yayoi Kusama and performer Brian Wilson.
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Notes
- 1.
Both examples are dictated by recent work. Edmund Bergler is the supervising analyst of the third volume of my Critique of Fantasy subtitled The Block of Fame, Santa Barbara: punctum books, 2020. In my contribution to a forthcoming volume on Isabelle Huppert for Edinburgh University Press, I excavate Huppert’s performance of Elfriede Jelinek’s Erika Kohut via the other Kohut’s analysis of narcissistic rage.
- 2.
I am referring to the theory set forth in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie. Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups; precede de Fors par Jacques Derrida, Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1978. In Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), I offered only one bona fide cryptonymic analysis, therefore, namely my reading of the magic word in the corpus of Adalbert Stifter.
- 3.
“The poet who had taken this step and had in this way set himself free from the group in his imagination, is nevertheless able … to find his way back to it in reality. For he goes and relates to the group his hero’s deeds which he has invented. At bottom this hero is no one but himself.” In: Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In: Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, tr. James Strachey, ed. Anna Freud et al., 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XVIII: 67–144, here 136 (edition will be abbreviated SE).
- 4.
This is how I prefer to translate Freud’s title “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren,” which in Strachey’s translation in the SE goes by the title “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming.” See SE IX: 141–154.
- 5.
See my opening chapter, “Endopsychic Allegories,” in I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. By “modern” I mean the secular tendency to immerse the everlasting, the transcendent, in finitude, which Benjamin sees occupying center stage in the Baroque “mourning play.”
- 6.
I am referring to Jacques Derrida’s reading of “the defective cornerstone” in: Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man. (ser.) Wellek Library Lectures, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
- 7.
In his La Carte postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), Derrida made book on this tilt that undoes biology as biography and the proper death as the proper name. In Notebook Ten of my The Devil Notebooks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), I pursue the significance of Freud’s self-proclaimed role as Devil’s advocate (rather than as another uninhibited client).
- 8.
Eduard Hanslick, Die moderne Oper. Kritiken und Studien (Berlin: A. Hofmann, 1875), 81.
- 9.
Act 1, Scene 16; See www.operafolio.com (access March 2921).
- 10.
Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” SE IX, 147. Further page references are given in the text.
- 11.
Gotthard GĂĽnther, Die amerikanische Apokalypse, ed. Kurt Klagenfurt, Munich: Profil, 2000. Page references are given in the text.
- 12.
A legend to this mapping was provided by Melanie Klein, who forwarded the work of mourning to a new address: the “inner world” of identifications, internal objects, or ghosts, which we are forever retrofitting to withstand the impact of each new loss. See Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.” In: Klein, Love, Guild and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 344–69. In SPECTRE (Fort Wayne: Anti-Oedipus Press, 2012), I introduce the inner world (Klein’s “modification” of the melancholic crypt) into Ian Fleming’s construction of an underworld organization for the world of James Bond in preparation for the crossover into the film medium.
- 13.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt.” In: Schopenhauer, Sämmtliche Werke in fünf Bänden, Grossherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausgabe (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, n.d.), IV: 271–369. In Freud’s extensive survey of the literature on the dream in The Interpretation of Dreams, Schopenhauer’s essay is the only philosophical precursor that enters Freud’s theorization. The transfer goes through because the will translates as the unconscious in which the wish fantasies that the dream states reflect are on permanent record.
- 14.
I will be using John Osborne’s translation of Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels throughout this essay (London and New York: Verso, 1998). Page references are given in the text.
- 15.
Wilhelm Meier, Höchst merkwürdige Geschichte der magnetisch hellsehenden Auguste Müller in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler’schen Buchhandlung, 1818. Page references are to this edition and are given in the text.
- 16.
See the opening chapter of Diethard Sawicki’s Leben mit den Toten. Geisterglauben und die Entstehung des Spiritismus in Deutschland, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002. Contact with dead led to the updating of the afterlife as the prospect of continuity across Outer Space. Sawicki also documents the Enlightenment view of the enrollment of the dead in continuing education programs on alien planets.
- 17.
The date stamp of the Enlightenment in Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, nebst Nachträgen und einem Anhang über die Frage: “Unter welchen Voraussetzungen darf eine für geisteskrank erachtete Person gegen ihren erklärten Willen in einer Heilanstalt festgehalten werden?” (Leipzig: Mutze, 1903) lies in the book’s affinity with modern Spiritualism. At least the press, which specialized in books dedicated to communication with the other side, recognized Schreber’s Grundsprache (basic language).
- 18.
See my study The Psycho Records, New York: Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2016.
- 19.
I give a more complete account of this transvaluation in Chapter 3 of the first volume of my Critique of Fantasy (subtitled Between a Crypt and a Datemark).
- 20.
Hazal Bayar introduced me to Zulawski’s film while I was advising her European Graduate School dissertation, which offered a feminist analysis of horror in cinema and theory centered on a close reading of Possession.
- 21.
Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” SE VII: 1–122. Page references are given in the text.
- 22.
In Josef Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, SE II: 21–47.
- 23.
Sigmund Freud, “Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse,” Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1942–) V: 256, 261.
- 24.
Benjamin, “Bücher von Geisteskranken: Aus meiner Sammlung.” In: Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972–1989) IV: 615–619; here 616.
- 25.
Freud, Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), SE XII: 1–84; here 79.
- 26.
Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva,” SE IX: 1–96; here 51. Further page references are given in the text. His treatment of Dora was in 1900 and most of the 1905 publication was written already in 1901. The Postscript, however, bears the date mark of proximity to the Gradiva reading.
- 27.
Freud, Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, SE X: 155–249; here 176–77.
- 28.
The biographical information and the two photographs can be found online.
- 29.
Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens “Gradiva,” Gesammelte Werke VII: 31–125; here 118.
- 30.
Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens “Grradiva,” 111–14.
- 31.
Freud, “Absurd Dreams,” The Interpretation of Dreams, SE I: 430.
- 32.
In conversation with my former colleague John Bock, I obtained the information. On another occasion I asked him about the painting on glass that transpired in a performance installation I visited in a New York gallery. I was riveted to my souvenir of films that showed Picasso painting. He rejected this melancholic conceit. In the meantime I recalled that in Teorema the son in the household the Visitor enters and exits is inspired to pursue a breakthrough for his painting by swapping his former canvas for glass. The maid in the Pasolini household follows out the withdrawal of the Visitor into a phantasmagoria of miracles and self-immolation. Since Rebecca can be seen to follow her this is a good place to note that the innocent lightness of touch in Bock’s performance art and art cinema doesn’t belie the suffering but divests it of opposition (and the attendant symptoms of melancholic inhibition and nihilism).
- 33.
https://www.friesmuseum.nl/en/collection/icons/the-hindelooper-room (access March 2021). Benjamin shifted the setting and sense of modern allegory from the corpses on the Baroque stage to the commodities crowding the capital of the nineteenth century.
- 34.
Down the hall from the Hindelooper Room in the museum is the exhibit dedicated to the life of Mata Hari, dancer and spy, who was born in 1876 in Leeuwarden (as Margarethe Zelle).
- 35.
The screenplay was included in Bock, Meechfieber (Cologne: Walter König, 2013): 1119–1130; here 1122–23. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
- 36.
Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” 145–6.
- 37.
This is how J.R.R. Tolkien puts it in regard to unwholesome fantasy in his essay christening the Fantasy genre. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tree and Leaf/Smith of Wootton Major/The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (London: Unwin Books, 1975): 11–79; here 28.
- 38.
See Grady Turner’s 1999 interview with Kusama in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012): 111–13.
- 39.
To prepare for my stint as talking head in Christopher Dreher’s documentary Pop Odyssee – Die Beach Boys und der Satan (1997), I did a great deal of research on the Beach Boys, on which I base my account.
- 40.
D.H. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” International Review of Psychoanalysis 1 (1974): 103–07. The horror theater of Grand Guignol in Paris, which opened and shut its doors in sync with the history of psychoanalysis this essay traverses, kept elaborating the fear of going mad even as it is happening, even as it closes in on you and closes you in. Add to this the other focus of Grand Guignol’s horror entertainment, our forced adaptation to the latest in technologization, not only the mediatic extensions of the senses but also the latest interventions of surgery, and you have the archive of confirmation of Winnicott’s insight. That this insight was Roland Barthes’s favorite citational prop closes the loop.
- 41.
Freud, “Fetishism,” SE XXI: 152–57.
- 42.
Freud, “Introduction to Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses,” SE XVII: 207–210; here 209.
- 43.
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 155–194; here 175.
- 44.
Following Freud’s analysis of Schreber’s Memoirs and Viktor Tausk’s study of Natalija A. and her delusion of the influencing machine, Hanns Sachs gave a strong reading of the primary narcissism of the Ancients, which allowed them to skip the machine age. By advancing to secondary narcissism or by filling a psychotic break with a techno delusion, modern man by contrast seeks to separate the body from itself and thus forestall the crisis of uncanniness. See Sachs, “Delay of the Machine Age,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11, 3–4 (1933): 404–424. I’m suggesting that the digital relation of being in touch gets around the crisis (its last hurrah was the already dated “uncanny valley”).
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Rickels, L.A. (2022). The Planetary Father Function. In: Weissberg, L. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_11
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