Thursday 5 September 2019

ISLANDS, HOLES, LACKS: towards a psychoanalytic cartography.




 Maestro dell’Osservanza, Burial of Monica at Ostia and departure of Augustine to Africa (c. 1430). Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum


yet was I constrained to conceive Thee ... as being in space,
whether infused into the world, or diffused infinitely without it.
Because whatsoever I conceived, deprived of this space,
seemed to me nothing,
yea altogether nothing,
not even a void as if a body were taken out of its place,
and the place should remain empty of any body at all,
of earth and water, air and heaven,
yet would it remain a void place, as it were a spacious nothing.......

........whatsoever was not extended over certain spaces, nor diffused, nor condensed, nor swelled out,
or did not or could not receive some of these dimensions,
I thought to be altogether nothing.

 Confessions Book 7 Translated by E B Pusey




HOLES, ISLANDS, LACKS
towards a psychoanalytic cartography

How many spaces are there in a hole?

This might seem a strange question; but  naive and seemingly daft questions are decisively important and greatly welcome in the practice of psychoanalysis. From a non-analytical stance  interrogations like this are obviously stupid   or -even worse- childish.

There is an almost unending seam of rich associations about negotiating holes or spaces using words like penetrating, exploring, trapped and , a favourite of mine, “falling”  .. especially falling in love or falling from grace. From where does one fall? Does one fall into something ready made? How far does one fall and can one return to the position one fell from.  Perhaps a phantasy can be invented about some reassuring place to land. Maybe it is the act of falling itself that is important: whether a free-fall lacking  parachute and safety net, or  alternatively, an unknown emptiness into which one is being sucked. Conceivably one may be falling into some sort of hole.

It is frequently claimed that Freudian theories suggest that “unconscious” (whether noun, adjective, or proper noun) lacks the ordinary qualities associated with time: chronology, biology, history, geology. Freud himself felt  the unconscious did not want to know anything of death and therefore believed itself to be immortal. Jung too of course, postulated an immortal unconscious; however it was far more of a social network than the Freudian unconscious ever dreamt of. Freudian belief in endless survival seems to have functioned primarily as a necessary protection helping sentient biological entities survive the shocks of infancy, childhood, as well as the constant hazards from outrageous fortune. Jung by contrast believed deathless unconscious to be real. It constituted an immortal collectivity. 

If the unconscious functions in ways that ignore chronological or biological time, it can -indeed must- function with spaces that are associated, then dissociated, with varied experiences time.

This is particularly evident in Freud’s fascinating theories of trauma which became increasingly rich and complex. His theories suggested that emotional shocks can be nachtraeglich  (pulled backward). I would like to add that such trauma are also cable of being vortraeglich (pushed forward), as well as nichtraeglich (cast away in denial, postponement, disgust). There are several other more modalities in addition to these three that will de-sequence usual parameters of experience. Most of these ingenious modalities therefore revise, reverse, and bend times; but as well they reconfigure the cartography of spaces.

Back in the nineteen sixties Melzter and Blick suggested that the “life-space” of children was structured by several different geographies.

The geography of the life-space of the child and the unconscious is really in four layers. There is (1) the outside world, (2) the inside of his objects in the outside world, (3) the inside world, and (4) the inside of his objects in the inside world. In order to understand the child’s material thoroughly, we must distinguish whether the object relationship we are seeing is going on inside an object or outside it, and whether that  􏰜field of action is in the inner or outer world (Meltzer & Bick, 1960, pp. 39– 40).


Later Meltzer was to add a fourth spacial co-ordinate: the ‘nowhere’ of delusional spaces. Then in 1992 these speculations reached a climax with Meltzer’s  Claustrum; an aspect of which one writer characterised as “The Dungeon of Thyself”  (Roger Willoughby 2001) This work begins a cartography of entrapments, rich in content and worthy of more attention. The poet John Donne had another melancholic space well before Meltzer: at times his body was his grave.

Now it would be slightly silly to dismiss Meltzer on the grounds that he is not a Lacanian or -from another perspective- because he was not an Independent. Be that as it may, his theorising need not be tied to object-relations, however those may be conceived. It is quite legitimate to interpret some of Meltzer’s spatial co-ordinates in terms of phantasies about bodies and their geographies -one’s own body, its living and phantasy spaces, its entrances and exits, as well as the bodies of others with their exits and entrances. The notion that the body may occupy a prison-space is an idea well known in the West from antiquity. In these "nether regions" the individual is subject to seemingly capricious chances and changes of outrageous fortune, daemons, jinns,  gods, or aliens. Living in such punitive spaces, will naturally signal anxieties, fears, desperations. Beings inhabiting such spaces (whether imaginary or real)  begin to define themselves as criminals, victims, or rejoicing in a "perverse" sort of way at being damned for the glory of a god, a state, an ideology.

As well as entrapments, spaces may offer the opposite. They are ex-trapments. Nowhere is there a place to be held and be holden. At its most radical the subject free falls with no abiding objects or supports. As an alternative to falling, there are meandering trajectories within spatial mazes leading to many nowheres, repetitions, returns.

One space that both entraps and releases its subjects is the island that likes to be visited. This is utterly different from the popular TV programme Love Island or Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island. In a drama entitled Mary Rose, by J M Barrie, Mary Rose is a character who suffered the great misfortune of having vanished, not once, but twice. As a child Mary Rose disappears on a remote Scottish Island whilst on holiday with her father. Barrie’s stage directions demand the space of the stage should be turned into an eerie spectacle.

All of this room's past which can be taken away has gone. Such light as there is comes from the only window, which is at the back and is incompletely shrouded with sacking. For a moment, there is a mellow light, and if a photograph could be taken quickly we might find a disturbing smile on the room's face, perhaps like the Mona Lisa's, which came, surely, from her knowing only what the dead should know. Scotsman 2008

The seemingly unfortunate Marie Rose disappears whilst her dad is fishing in a rowing boat. The entire tiny island is searched, but no little girl is found -dead or alive. Several weeks later the child miraculously reappears alive and well, but completely lacking any recollection of her disappearance: whether of duration or location. Ordinary time and space were absent from her and she from them. Later Mary Rose, now a wife and young mother herself, yearned to visit the Island once more. She persuades her husband to take the small family on holiday there -just as her father had done previously. Inexplicably history repeats itself; the entranced wife and mother disappears, just as before. On this occasion she was not absent for a just few weeks. Marie Rose did not reappear again for several decades. Like the previous disappearance, she had no recollection whatsoever of of her absence. Neither had she aged biologically in-between-times. Her once infant son was now older than Mary Rose when his mother reappeared.



The Scotsman published a fine article to mark the 2008 revival of Mary Rose in Edinburgh. Its Sitz-im-Leben of the play was 1919, written immediately after the Great War, when themes of loss and disappearance were inescapable realities for battle-decimated Europe. 

Long before critiques of arrogance, orientalism or anachronism, Barrie’s play rejected firmly Victorian ideals about the civilising mission of the West throughout time and space. Industrial progress, railway timetables, standardised Greenwich Mean Time, maritime gazettes were dispensable; as were the countless bodies lost on the battlefields of the Somme. Urban myths rumoured that certain of these bodies temporarily reappeared in etherial seances of spiritualist mediums after 1919, catering to the needs of grief-stricken parents, wives, lovers and siblings. The mere possibility of there being parallel times and spaces, was certainly a comfort. It was also an irritating torment too -like the knowledge of death Barrie attributed to the smile of Mona Lisa.

The notion of ageless bodies still remains a national emblem in the United Kingdom repeated every year in its solemn Remembrance Day:


They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

In the sixth stanza of Binyon’s war poem, the bodies of those killed in battle appear to enjoy some sort of physical transcendence:

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

The lost bodies have their own being in a space hidden from sight. Barrie’s play about Marie Rose entertains similar hopes. Though her two disappearings were shocking, unexpected and frightening, Marie’s body strangely retained an ageless identity; in between times she seems to have entered states of rupture, enthralment, and maybe rapture.

Barrie himself loved the countless rough islands surrounding his beloved Scotland which had been his holiday haunts. Other characters created by Barrie -like Peter Pan, Tinker-bell, the Lost Boys- also live on an island. This island is called “Neverland” -a name perhaps, recalling one of Meltzer’s  delusional spaces.

“Island” is an important trope in both of these works by Barrie. It is a motif calculated to exploit several sets of liminalities. For example, a local native who rows Marie and her husband to the Island is whole-heartedly Scots Presbyterian; indeed he is preparing for ordination. Strange though, he is wary of presences on and rumours about the Island: as if the pre-Christian Celtic world was somehow still alive there. The island is liminal geographically as far as the mainland is concerned; and no human beings live there. In both play and novel, islands also become metaphors for liminal times and spaces. Bodies on the Island resemble the Dasein of Heidegger, the Island itself a das Sein that dictates time and being according to its own capricious rules of presence and absence. It loves to be visited; but the love of this liminal space is unreliable and unstable. Anybody who loves visiting it is in great danger. The love the Island has for its own visitors is seductive, capricious, cruel. It's "love" seems to veer towards perverse, atavistic, allurement.

So far this essay has mentioned several liminal geographies with strange spacial co-ordinates: an island of childhood adventure, the body  imprisoned, the delusional spaces of Neverland, and an ageless home for fallen warriors. In addition to the multiple spaces of Meltzer's psychology, the poet John Donne, felt his body to be a living in grave during a bout of melancholy; his body eventually became its own grave, whilst the ceiling of his study was the roof of his tomb. The tract, Biathanatos, written in 1608, though published later, was a radical revision of legal and religious rationales prohibiting suicide. Biblical figures like Sampson, Saul, and Judas Iscariot had willingly practised what he called Self-homicide. Indeed Jesus himself may of practised it too. The Christ of scripture and tradition, seemed hell-bent on going to Jerusalem in order to provoke mayhem and his own martyrdom. 

Less heavy are the stories about Alice, who it is well known, fell into a rabbit hole encountering a very different, strange, world of Wonderland. Although Wonderland offered its unique pleasures and encounters, it was not a world of pure escape and ease. Perplexity, suffering, anxiety, uncertainty, and capriciousness were gnawing presences. In this world bodies, measurements, logic, moralities, times and spaces defy common sense because they have their own rules. For example the amount of time spent in school decreases each day because the signifier  "lesson" dictates that they should.  Human babies may turn into piglets. Characters lack body parts. The Cheshire Cat smiles but disappears until nothing is left but its grinning orifice.




public domain: the remains of a Cheshire cat -its smile

As Dodgson remarked Alice has often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat. One is entitled to interrogate the space(s) inhabited by the grin -or may be it was the other way around. The cat's space had become distributed maybe; the grin a remainder.

Perhaps then, both grin and head present parameter -namely the contractable/expandable parameters of an orifice- (Or/I/Face). Such face/space may become its own black hole space or an innard-tripe space that desires to devour, be devoured, or both. Perhaps the cheshire cat was playing the ultimate game of hide and seek: preserving its own absolute difference and laughing out loud at the compliance and fixity of Others.



Actor Lisa Dawn in Becket’s one mouth play Not I 

To hear and watch the discourse open


This space, orifice/Or-I-Face/gap might want to scream, shout, overwhelm,  suck in empty air, vomit out its own monologue -as Samuel Beckett well understood. Words, whatever they be elsewhere, in this space are as physical as the body they stream, splutter, fall from, burst out. They resemble remainders; like the grins of the cat.


When I ask how many spaces are there in a hole, I am also wondering whether holes, emptinesses, lacunae, are irreducible word-entities that defy further association. For example I might say “as a human being I lack”. But I can also ask myself “what is it that I lack”?, “what shape is the lack?” “where is it located?” “perhaps I have many lacks and not just one?”.

With reference to spaces varied by my sundry temporal organisations,  I may feel compelled to enquire whether my gaps or lacks change in quantity, quality, intensity, or content. Perhaps they oscillate. 

In other words lack and lacks -like gap and gaps- are not necessary identical. Neither should it ever be assumed that everybody-else is bound to have the same lacks (and in the precisely the same way) as oneself. They are like bubbles: every one is different.




Above is an image of a hand with a hole in it. The hole here is structured. May be it is spun like a web perhaps to entice and entrap the curious or unwary. Maybe it is a vortex. Perhaps it is a sinister sign of body fragility, penetrability, defencelessness. It could be an image representing the celebrated syndrome of Cotard. Inside the body is a life-less subject.

Yet holes -along with gaps, lacunae, empties- are not always Gothic structures to scare but also spaces for recreation, hiding, fun, and play.






NOTES

R Willoughby 2001 ‘THE DUNGEON OF THYSELF’: The Claustrum as Pathological Container Int. J. Psychoanal. (2001) 82, 917

J M Barrie 1921 THE PLAYS OF J. M. BARRIE: MARY ROSE: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS. Scribner Uniform Edition 1924


Scotsman Thursday 23 October 2008 JM Barrie's Mary Rose - Imagining death away 

Another Island is the Love Island that has become very popular in the UK commercial TV channels. A BBC Radio Four programme broadcast an interesting discussion about the ethics of Love Island. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0007621


Perhaps the character-mouth of Samuel Beckett’s Not I  is speaking Lalangue?

Donald Meltzer 1992. The Claustrum: An Investigation of 

Claustrophobic Phenomena. Karnac.  At a colloquium in London Meltzer referred to an analysand of his living in three different compartments/spaces

 the compartment where he worked, which happened to be the basement of the big local 
hospital; the room that he lived in, which was his masturbation chamber, overlooking 
the deer park of Magdalen College; and my consulting room, which he experienced, 
looking out the window, as if he was - which was rather strange, because it looks 
into a rather scruffy back garden and chimneys and slate roofs - but he experienced 
it as if it was a kind of heavenly panorama, and he enjoyed his analysis in a most 
lotus eater's sort of way.

https://archive.org/stream/TheClaustrumMeltzerTRANSCRIPT The_Claustrum_Meltzer_TRANSCRIPT_djvu.txt

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