Abstract
Chapter 3 continues the examination of how our adaptation to the real world brings with it a transition from an initial state of timelessness to one of time. Loss is a precondition of this adaptation to the external world, one which promotes a transition from pleasure principle functioning, where we hallucinate what we desire, to secondary process functioning which inserts a delay in the system so that reality testing can take place. The author examines Freud’s 1917 seminal paper on loss, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, and draws out the temporal aspects: our response to a significant loss can be one of successful mourning, the painful path to a conscious understanding that the object which was there once, in the past, now is not and never will be again; or one of melancholia, an unconscious process, which has a timeless quality in its endless search to refind the lost object through unconscious identification with it. Completing her review of the Greek myth of origins, the author looks at the myth of Gaia, the ideal mother who forms a perfect and exclusive union with her child, which permits partial fulfilment of the timeless wish to refind something which is, in reality, lost forever; Kronos, who castrates his father and eats his own children; and Zeus. Freud made use of the Kronos myth in the context of the castration complex, an integral part of the Oedipal scenario. The myth permits examination of the distinction to be made between loss and lack in Freud’s theory, a distinction which permits the inference that time in Freud’s theory has a gendered dimension.
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Notes
- 1.
It was from his early observations of hysterical and obsessive states that Freud developed his principle of neuronal inertia in the ‘Project’ (Freud 1950, p. 297) which becomes the pleasure principle and, beyond that, the death drive. Fechner introduced the principle of the conservation of energy into psychology in 1873, deriving an equivalent of Freud’s pleasure/unpleasure principle from it. Helmholz, whose lectures Freud attended, wrote a treatise in 1847 on the principle of the conservation of energy, and Brücke applied the principle in 1874 to all living organisms. Freud openly acknowledged Fechner’s influence in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he states that Fechner’s 1873 derivation of the pleasure principle from the principle of constancy anticipated Freud’s own theory on the subject (Freud 1920, pp. 8–9).
- 2.
‘Dream-symbolism extends far beyond dreams: it is not peculiar to dreams, but exercises a similar dominating influence on representation in fairy-tales, myths and legends, in jokes and in folklore. It enables us to trace the intimate connections between dreams and these latter productions. We must not suppose that dream-symbolism is a creation of the dream-work; it is in all probability a characteristic of the unconscious thinking which provides the dream-work with the material for condensation, displacement and dramatization’ (Freud 1901b, p. 685).
- 3.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud 1921), Freud looks at the difference between being and having in the context of other being the father, through identification, and having the father, by taking him as an object choice. He refers to his earlier case study of Dora (‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (Freud 1905a)) where Freud takes Dora’s imitation of her father’s cough as confirmation of her identification with him: ‘we can only describe the state of things by saying that identification has appeared instead of object-choice, and that object-choice has regressed to identification’ (Freud 1921, p. 106, his emphasis).
- 4.
The more general preservative aspects of melancholia have been taken up in some contemporary writing, in particular, that of Judith Butler (Butler 2004). My point here is that the enduring popularity of the Greek myths might be explained by the fact that we can all return to them again and again to refind there, collectively, an element of what each of us has, in reality, lost forever.
- 5.
Freud’s treatment of the castration complex, and the Oedipal scenario of which it is part, has been subject to a rigorous critique for its assumed imposition of a phallocentric perspective on female sexual identity and development. Freud famously found female sexuality difficult to fathom, it being ‘veiled in an impenetrable obscurity’ (Freud 1905b, p. 151), and ‘a ‘dark continent’ for psychology’ (Freud 1926b, p. 212). Horney (Horney 1924), Jones (Jones 1927), Deutsch (Deutsch 1930), Klein (Klein 1928), and Lampl-de Groot (Lampl-De Groot 1928) each took serious issue with some of Freud’s notions raised in his ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (Freud 1925c), in particular, Freud’s refusal to consider that girls may have an unconscious awareness of the vagina and the inside of the mother’s body. Freud comments specifically on certain of their points in his follow-up paper six years later, on ‘Female Sexuality’ (Freud 1931), concluding that: ‘We believe we are justified in assuming that for many years the vagina is virtually non-existent and possibly does not produce sensations until puberty’ (Freud 1931, p. 233). Frosh provides an enlightening account of the dissenting views in Part III of his The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory (Frosh 1999).
- 6.
Freud locates penis envy in both sexes: he sees evidence of it not only in the woman’s compensatory wish for a baby; but in the male struggle against feminine passivity: ‘Both in therapeutic and in character-analyses we notice that two themes come into especial prominence and give the analyst an unusual amount of trouble … The two [corresponding] themes are, in the female, an envy for the penis—a positive striving to possess a male genital—and, in the male, a struggle against his passive or feminine attitude to another male’ (Freud 1937, p. 250, as cited in Steiner 1999, p. 176). Steiner convincingly argues that penis envy represents an over-valuation of masculinity which follows from our primal envy of the source of goodness offered by the breast and the mother. Defending ourselves against this envy leads to a devaluation of, and attack on, femininity.
- 7.
A bronze statue of Athena was one of Freud’s favourite items, and is now housed in the Freud museum in London. This is the statue which Freud asked Marie Bonaparte to take out of Austria, one of only three items smuggled out when his collection was threatened. HD relates in her Tribute to Freud that, in one of her sessions with Freud in Vienna in 1933 or 1934, he gave the statue to her to hold: ‘This is my favourite. […]. She is perfect,’ he said, ‘only she has lost her spear’ (Doolittle 1971, p. 74, her emphasis).
- 8.
Freud’s clinical assessment of boys’ fears manifest through this regressive aspect of the castration complex is in evidence in the Wolf Man case study (Freud 1918, p. 32). The theory is confirmed in ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’, where Freud clarifies not only that, through regression to the oral phase, the fear of castration transforms into a fear of being eaten by the father; but also connects the period of dependence on the mother of both girls and boys with the fear of being devoured, suggesting a transformation of the child’s oral aggression against the mother into a fear of being devoured by the father (Freud 1931, p. 227; p. 242).
- 9.
In swallowing Metis, Zeus is also able to represent the phantasy that men can bear children. Metis, having been pregnant when she was swallowed by Zeus, makes armour for her daughter inside Zeus. Her hammering gives Zeus a dreadful headache which is relieved only when Hephaestus cracks open his skull allowing Athena to spring out, adult and armed. Zeus not only carries a goddess representing intellect; when one of his human partners, Semele (Cadmus’ daughter), is 6-months pregnant, Semele, maliciously encouraged to do so by Hera, asks Zeus to reveal himself, withholding sex until he does so in a storm of thunder and lightning which destroys Semele. Hera, feeling guilty, rescues Semele’s foetus, sewing him into Zeus’ thigh where he remains for another 3 months until delivered by Hera. The baby was Dionysus. The anatomical diversity of the location of babies within Zeus (and Kronos and Gaia) illustrates the representation in myth of the variety of children’s theories of birth discussed by Freud in Three Essays (Freud 1905b, p. 196).
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Noel-Smith, K. (2016). Loss, Lack and Refinding. In: Freud on Time and Timelessness. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59721-2_3
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