M. A. Newton Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s
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The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (1995), Sándor Ferenczi describes a case in which a little girl’s Oedipal incestuous desires are initiated by the father, which causes her to have an unnatural incestuous fixation on him. In this particular case, the girl’s father was feeling unhappy in his relationship with the mother and sought comfort in his daughter, going so far as to gaze passionately at her and get into her bed at night. With regard to the gaze, Ferenczi states that it is a ‘shock’ to the child, who can either ‘perish for lack of love’ or ‘adapt … to the wishes of the attacker’ (175). This girl’s father would also send her mixed messages. After her mother left, the father stressed that she was now the head of the household in place of her mother and that he can sleep in her bed but that she was not to be sexual. In this case, Ferenczi observes that the little girl’s ‘incestuous fixation does not appear as a natural product of development but rather is implanted in the psyche from the outside, that is to say, is a product of the superego’ (175). In other words, Freud’s incest barrier inhibits the little girl’s transference of her Oedipal incestuous desires onto an acceptable external love object in place of her father (175).
16 Jane Dunn makes this observation but not of its presence in The Lost Traveller. In Dunn’s Antonia White: A Life, ‘hell’ is written as ‘Hell’ (18). 17 This is a scene I address in my paper, “‘A Conspiracy of Twos”: Sexual Trauma in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Novels Using Freudian Theory’ (21-22). 18This incident is purely fictional but serves to aid in forthcoming analyses of interior characterisations. 19The Electra complex refers to Jung's version of Freud's Oedipus complex as it pertains to the little girl. Jung coined the term Electra-complex in The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1915): ‘Electra took revenge on her mother for the murder of her husband, because that mother had robbed her of her husband’ (69). 20 A similar situation is given in ‘Femininity’ (1933), 155-156. 21 Jeanne Flood makes an interesting observation that Archie’s own impotence ‘makes him most suitable as Clara's husband, for the object of her marriage is to preserve her Oedipal ties to her father and to expiate her crime of boy-killing. Thus Clara sees her marriage as an act that restores her to her father’ (141). Indeed, it seems that by marrying Archie, Clara also gains a brother: ‘in marrying Archie she had perhaps made up to [her father] for all the times she had disappointed him in the past ... henceforth the three of them were bound in a new tie from which her mother was excluded. She thought how passionately Claude had wanted a son; how passionately she had wanted a brother’ (The Sugar House 128). 22 Note that An Autobiographical Study (1925) also addresses this on pages 20, 44, and 54. In this work, flight into psychosis was also known in more general terms as a ‘flight into illness’ (59). 23 Although this was certainly the case in 1893, by 1889, Freud was becoming increasingly sceptical of inducing hypnoid states due to the problem attached to ideas of suggestion, as expressed in Studies on Hysteria (138-139). 24 The wording in my Studies of Hysteria edition is: ‘a tendency to such a dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness … is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis’ (46). 25 Interestingly, Ferenczi does not broach the subject of sexual trauma until six pages into his paper, which then begins with the following statement ‘Now allow me to report on some new ideas ...’ (161). This suggests that Ferenczi is aware of the delicate nature of broaching the subject of sexual trauma in a psychoanalytic forum that had already supported Freud’s decision to denounce his seduction theory. 26 27 In ‘On the Definition of Introjection’ (1912), Ferenczi writes that introjection is when an ‘object love’ is ‘an extension of the ego’ (316). This means that should an object of love feel pain, the person who has introjected his or her love object will feel the same pain; this is an act of transference (317). By Ferenczi’s rationale, introjection also extends to the love object having feelings of love, as illustrated in ‘Confusion of Tongues’ (1933). 28 See footnote to ‘Confusion of Tongues’, 156. In The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psycho-analysis, Phyllis Grosskurth also observes that ‘Ferenczi was grateful when Jones agreed to publish it in the International Journal (213). The fact that ‘Confusion of Tongues’ is dated 1933 and not 1949 suggests that it was published during the earlier year. 29 From On Autobiography (1989). 30 A seemingly insoluble problem. 31 From Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. 32 Most literary criticism in the first half of the twentieth century engaged with poetic works, but the criticism on the depiction of personality and experience can be applied to any literary genre. 33 The debate on mimesis goes back to Book X of Plato’s Republic and the artist’s moral obligation to produce works that aspire to impart justice and virtue into the hearts of men. In his debate with Glaucon, the speaker Socrates explains that the poet imitates the appearance of an imitation of an object, which is inferior to cognition of the object itself as a source of understanding. The imitated object, therefore, is not to be taken as a bearer of truth. What the reader needs to guard against is the potential corrupting influence of art, particularly with regard to virtue. The flaw, according to Socrates, lies not in art itself but in man’s mistaken responses to it: ‘Poetry, such as we have described, is not to be regarded seriously as attaining to the truth; and he who listens to her, fearing for the safety of the city which is within him, should be on his guard against her seductions and make our words his law’ (qtd. in Richter 29). 34 Although primarily a movement associated with American literary criticism between the 1920s and 1960s, its presence was felt in Britain in the works of, for example, F. R. Leavis. As expressed in The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis stresses the centrality of rigorous critical analysis, but he urges this not simply for technical or aesthetic reasons but because it has the closest relevance to the spiritual crisis of modern civilization and the need to withstand a rapidly growing mechanised and commercialised society. Artists ‘not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but … they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’ (603). 35 Although the New Critics are often perceived as creating a new form of literary criticism, I would like to stress that this is not strictly true. Besides, for example, Eliot’s literary influences from the Renaissance period, in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864), Matthew Arnold already posited a reactionary view to the Romantics’ one. He viewed literary criticism as a conservative socializing force in a world of declining religious belief. Contact with the finest specimens of arts and letters would bring humanity together in a system of values that could transcend the interests of self and class into ‘its best spiritual work; which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things’ (404). It is this trend away from what is, as implied in his statement, the egotistical self that informed the major figures in both literary and psychoanalytic circles in the early to mid-1900s. 36 Woolf does, however, later provide a contradictory remark: ‘fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners … when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle , one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in’ (qtd. In Burke 200). 37 By the 1960s, questions of the author function became a central feature in literary criticism that was to lay a path for movements in reader response, feminist criticism, and gender politics. In Criticism & Truth (1966), for example, Roland Barthes is conflicted about how readers should approach a text: ‘It is true that reading a work should be done at the level of the work; but … one cannot see how, once the forms have been laid down, one could avoid finding content, which comes from history or the psyche, in short from that “elsewhere”’ (54; emphasis in original). Later, in works such as ‘Death of the Author’ (1967), he advocates for readers’ interpretative strategies to defy attaching singular meanings to the text once the ‘author has been found’ (para. 7), which led to his deconstruction of ambiguity itself in Image – Music - Text (1977). By 1980, with his publication of The Preparation of the Novel, however, Barthes was gaining a deeper appreciation of the author-function. In a classroom session on January 19, 1980, in an attack essentially on structuralist thinking upon reflection of ‘Death of the Author’, he writes, ‘Neocriticism repressed the author, or at least deprived him of consciousness; the opening paragraph of a little book by Bellemin-Noël testifies to this: “Everything […] comes out of a lack of curiosity with regard to authors. For me, this is of the order of fact, I am not touched, drawn to, even less am I mobilised by the lives or the personalities of the writers…”; a good quote (even if today I take the completely opposite view) because it uses the right expression: lack of curiousity with regard to the author → Death, Lack of Curiousity → return of the author’ (‘The Work as Will’, 208). 38 In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states that the latent content of the dream is the interpretation of the dream once its mask has been removed, and the manifest content of the dream is what one is made privy to (140). 39 In contrast, in his essay, ‘Psychology and Literature’ (1933), the same year in which Frost in May is published, Carl Jung reinforces T. S. Eliot’s notion, which became a modernist mindset, by stating that a great work of art ‘draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors’ (98). This view is central to Jung’s position on the collective unconscious, which is a creative act made conscious for the benefit of touching the souls of mankind in an informative and didactic manner. According to Jung, ‘the artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realise its purposes through him … a “collective man”, a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind’ (101). As Jung was to shortly thereafter describe in ‘Ulysses: A Monologue’ (1934), ‘what frees the prisoner of a system is an “objective” recognition of the world and of his own nature’ (121). 40 I draw on this description in ‘The House of Clouds’ (41) as a lead-in to Freud’s theory on paranoia to set up the distinction between his theory on sexual trauma and opposing theories provided by, for example, Sándor Ferenczi. 41 At this point in time, while Freud has an opinion on psychosis, he does not have much experience with psychotic subjects themselves besides Sergei Pankejeff (the Wolf Man), whom he started treating during his analysis of Schreber’s memoirs. 42 At the center of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language. The unconscious, he argues, is not a primitive part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, as ego psychologists like Heinz Hartmann would argue, but a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. Because the unconscious is structured like a language, however, the self is denied any point of reference to which to be ‘restored’ following, for example, trauma or ‘identity crisis’ (‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’, Écrits). In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is a challenge to the ego psychology that Freud himself opposed. Furthermore, the ego is also split in Lacanian theory, so one never has a true relation to their ego because it is an illusionary relationship to an ideal image, a product of the unconscious itself. 43 In his medical report for the court in 1902 on Schreber, Dr. Weber gives a detailed synopsis of the characteristics of paranoia that still apply today: ‘It is characteristic of paranoia that delusions develop, frequently in connection with hallucinations and false memories, without the patient’s mood being primarily much affected, soon become fixed and elaborated into a persistent, uncorrected and unassailable delusional system, side by side with the presence of mind, unimpaired memory, orderliness and the logic of thought…. It is characteristic that the center of these delusional ideas is always the patient’s own person, and that usually ideas of influence, particularly of persecution on the one hand and megalomanic ideas on the other combine, and that mostly―at least for some time―the delusional ideas are limited to a definite group of ideas, while other spheres remain relatively intact’ (Schreber 392). 44 In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the other/Other is a complex concept. The ‘other’ refers to the self’s perceived specular image, most notably demonstrated in Schema L in relation to his theory on the mirror stage. This is the stage in which the young child identifies with its own specular image (seen in either a mirror or in the parent caring for it). This stage occurs anywhere from six to eighteen months of age. According to Lacan, this act of identification marks the primordial recognition of one's self as ‘I’, situated in what he has termed the imaginary order (relation to the specular ego or ‘imago’). Situated in the symbolic order, which differentiates itself from the imaginary order by a focus on linguistic structures that relate to social laws, as opposed to dual relations, the ‘Other’ denotes the separate subject. 45 In ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’ (1923), Freud suggests that Schreber’s God was the father-figure who attempts to emasculate him. Schreber could not reconcile this notion with God being all good and consequently fell ill. He translates it as a ‘revolt against castration’ that he must give up in order to recover from his illness, which he does (91-92). This recovery also signifies the transfer from the father-figure perceived as the threatening Devil to the nurturing God that encapsulates earlier Oedipal ambivalences the child feels for the father. 46 This is a question I address in my paper, ‘The Paradoxical Notion of Sexuality in Antonia White’s Frost in May’. Clio’s Psyche: Creative Lives Part II: Psychobiographic Approaches 18.4 (March 2012): 396-400. Print. 47 Although it is not categorically stated that Cecil Botting belonged to the Church of England before his conversion, I infer this is the case based on his being married in St. Andrew’s Church, Fulham, London, which is a Church of England Parish (Dunn 16). 48 Age of entrance and exit differ. In As Once In May, White states that she entered Lippington (Convent of the Five Wounds) and the fictional counterpart to the Sacred Heart when she was eight (151). Most sources cite the entrance as being nine and exit being fourteen, given what is written in Frost in May. If White left the Sacred Heart on her birthday in 1914, she would have been fifteen, as Dunn observes in Antonia White: A Life (46). 49 The conger-eel is a predatory eel. Reaching serpent lengths of six-feet, it is known to attack human beings (Enda Dowling, Irish Independent, 2013). The allusion to the serpent in Eden is, I suggest, implied in this scene. 50 In 1574, although Queen Elizabeth I was tolerant of Catholicism, many of her advisors were not; they condemned as heretics anyone who practiced Catholicism and did not convert to Protestantism. 51 Puritanism was established by minorities (later associated more commonly with Calvinists) as an activist faction of Protestantism during the reign of Elizabeth I to purify the Church of England of Catholics. At a time when Elizabeth was promoting religious tolerance, Puritanism often clashed with ideals of the Church of England. For more information, a good source is http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Puritanism.aspx 52 Freud refers to this term as the ideal ego in ‘On Narcissism’ (1914), in which the subject initially displaces his or her self-love and desires onto an external love-object in order to retain an image of a perfect self (94-95). 53 Sándor Ferenczi is known to have coined the term ‘introjection’ in ‘Introjection and Transference’ (1909). Freud also uses it, namely in ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915) and ‘Negation’ (1925) where food is used in concrete and symbolic terms to denote the state of pleasure/unpleasure in the oral phase of his or her psycho-sexual development, i.e., consuming what is good and spitting out what is bad. 54 Refer to Graceful Exits: Catholic Women and the Art of Departure by Debra Campbell for an interesting interpretation of Nanda’s transgressions, in which she observes, as I do, that Nanda’s transgressions manifest themselves in friendships and ‘reading and writing forbidden works of literature’ (34). She describes Nanda’s transgression of writing her novel, however, as due to the expulsion of her friend, Monica, after an exercise book filled with dog caricatures was found (36). 55 In Michael. J. Lochemes’ Outline of Catholic Pedagogy, he documents the consequences of Adam and Eve’s transgression:
56 Indeed, even in Outline of Catholic Pedagogy, the following statement is made: ‘Pedagogy (from the Greek words pais = child, boy, and agein = to lead to guide) is a systematic presentation of the principles and rules of education and instruction’ (Lochemes 1). The omission of the word ‘girl’ glaringly depicts Catholic patriarchal values. 57 Refer to David Seelow’s text for an in-depth socio-medical historical analysis of the shift from Victorian to Modernist ideals on sexuality. His larger focus is on how sexuality was disseminated from the perspective of a Victorian biological paradigm as a scientific extension of abstract religious fears of sexuality to the modernists’ detachment of biological sexuality from its moral context in a radical move towards sexual liberation. 58 An interesting background account that informs my assertion here is in ‘The History of Modern Dance’ by Ballet Austin. 59 As a result of containing what were perceived as obscenities, Ulysses (1922) was banned in the UK until 1930. D. H. Lawrence, with his publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which was banned in the UK until 1960 is, in my opinion, a novel that embraces the spiritual side of sexuality more keenly than any other novel of its type in the English speaking language. One need only turn to the love scenes between Mellors and Constance to be swept up in a torrent of passion, one in which the very beauty of language itself is also elevated: ‘She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty’ (Lawrence 131). 60 I also address this scenario in my paper, ‘“Conspiracy of Twos’: Sexual Trauma in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Novels Using Freudian Theory’. 61 This quote also appears in Chapter One, 57-58. 62 As illustrated in Chapter One, White possibly uses her fictional characters to ‘explain things in daddy’ (Broe 44; Broe’s emphasis). 63 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality primarily goes into great depth about the latency period and its impact on human sexuality, as Strachey observes (180). 64 It should come as no surprise that Jones would hold his view, given his own sexual indiscretions, if true, as asserted in Elaine Westerlund’s article, ‘Freud on Sexual Trauma: An Historical Review of Seduction and Betrayal’(306). 65 As I observe in Chapter One, Freud’s rationale for making a statement like this is to prove that the child’s original caregivers, typically women, are, as described in the same letter to Fliess, the ‘primary originators’ of sexual trauma (268). Freud is not stating, however, that the sexual abuse was conscious on the part of his caregiver, but an unconscious traumatising factor for the child nonetheless. 66 Refer to Westerlund’s essay, 306. 67 Ferenczi admitted to some sexual indiscretions approximately twenty years prior to starting psychoanalysis. In psychoanalytic practice, he was reportedly known to have put his patients on his lap, kiss them, and be kissed by them. Whether this situation was a nurturing one is unclear, although Ferenczi purports that this was the case; this may be so, as it was at this time that Ferenczi took a deeper interest in his patients’ real traumas and began experimenting with mutual psychoanalysis between doctor and patient. Ironically, it was Ernest Jones who severely reprimanded Ferenczi for what he and Freud perceived to be inappropriate sexual activities. Refer to Masson 158-161. 68 This is not mentioned in Westerlund’s essay. Refer to Masson for a detailed account of Robert Fliess’s accusation that his father sexually abused him, 138. 69 Jerusalem Delivered is an epic poem that recounts the conflict of the first Christian crusade on the Muslims. In this poem, Clorinda is a warrior-maiden fighting on the Muslim side, while Tancred is fighting on the side of the crusaders. 70 Melanie Klein perpetuates this view in the portrayal of mothers in art by their daughters that is motivated by unconscious feelings of guilt. As I address in my essay, ‘“I Love You; I ‘ate You”: Oral Aggression, Consumed Subjects, and the Creative Impulse in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Novel, Frost in May’, although Nanda is ultimately delivered by the nuns to her father at the end of Frost in May, as illustrated in the previous chapter, according to Klein in ‘Love, Guilt, and Reparation’ (1937), part of the child’s need to make amends for the apparent sadistic injury it has done to its mother is the need to make sacrifices (311). This idea of reparation is exemplified in the following study illustrated by Klein: the case of Ruth Kjär in ‘Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse’ (1929). After her brother-in-law takes down a picture to sell, Kjär, a woman with no prior painting experience, paints a masterpiece to cover up the empty space on her wall. Karin Michaelis, a friend of Kjär’s, notes how the empty space “seemed to coincide with the empty space within [Kjär]” (215). Klein observes that the empty space relates to the newly-found artist’s own mother, which she goes on to fill with paintings of her relatives, including her own mother represented as almost regal in her magnificence, contrasting starkly with a portrait made prior of an old woman bearing the starkest images of age and disillusionment. Klein notes that the second portrait of the painter’s mother is one of reparation, derived from guilt for harnessing psychological injury projected into the shriveled up portrait earlier conceived. According to Klein, ‘The daughter’s wish to destroy her mother, to see her old, worn out, marred, is the cause of the need to represent her in full possession of her strength and beauty. By so doing the daughter can allay her own anxiety and can endeavor to restore her mother and make her new through the portrait’ (218). 71 Brendan Stone makes an empathetic judgement to use this term, as opposed to ‘mental illness’, as a way of being sensitive to the branding nature of those suffering from acute distress in a biomedical context (see Notes 175). Yüklə 0,51 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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