THE FETISH IN NICOLE KRAUSS‟ GREAT HOUSE AND IN CLINICAL PRACTICE

BY JOYE WEISEL-BARTH, PHD/PSYD

4826 Andasol Avenue Encino, CA. 91316 (818) 986-4098 [email protected]

Dr. Weisel-Barth is Instructor, and Senior Training Analyst and Supervisor, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; Book Review Editor, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology; Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Council Member, International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology

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THE FETISH IN NICOLE KRAUSS‟ GREAT HOUSE AND IN CLINICAL PRACTICE: A Relational Perspective on One Response to Trauma

INTRODUCTION

I began thinking about fetishes while reading Nicole Krauss‟s novel Great

House. George Weisz, one of the principal characters in the novel, demonstrates how in the context of trauma the process of personal symbol formation can collapse into obsession with a material object or fetish. That is, the construction of a personal fetish involves transforming and reducing a living symbol, reverberate and evocative of complex people and/or places and/or cultural life, into a fixed idol, a dead thing.

It is a perplexing process. It begins with a major trauma: the loss of a primary relationship(s) and/or the destruction of personally sustaining meaning systems. Such ruin brings a shattering of the sense of self and the unleashing of unmanageable anxiety. Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness along with emotional paralysis and/or apathy often attend the anxiety. Then, if there is an absence of relational support, the sufferer must regulate the distress by himself.

To this end he may attempt to allay his anxiety and restore some life energy by creating a defensive strategy: a turning away from his/her grief toward an attachment to some enticing and enlivening material object. This material object, which may or may not represent a sexual aim, initially bears some associational relation to what was lost; yet, in the rigid and ritualized organization of this defensive maneuver, the enticing material object eventually

2 loses all meaning and symbolic resonance. The fetish is like a drug, which promises rescue from pain, surcease of tension, and the fulfillment of one‟s heart‟s desires. It delivers enslavement instead.

In this paper I will try to show that fetish making is a dissociative process, one that sometimes follows an overwhelming loss that is unmourned and unmentalized relationally. The creation of a fetish reflects temporal, affective, and cognitive dislocation and is a chicken and egg process in which the affects of vitality and passion are invested in a symbol from the past. This psychic process occurs initially in response to anxiety and a sense of lifelessness in the present; and, at the same time, in its temporal turning toward the past, it confirms the present—separate from the fetish—as emotionally empty, lacking in interest and any sense of agency.

Great House is a collection of obliquely connected stories describing several characters whose shattered histories render them unfit for normal life or relationship and whose legacies of traumatic loss inhabit their memories, wrap them in sorrow and longing, and insulate them from direct emotional experience in the present. The ragged and tenuous connections between the stories reflect the splintered nature of the characters‟ traumatic lives. Hovering over and linking all the stories is an immense desk: “This desk was…an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus‟ flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers.” For George Weisz the

3 desk, an object from his ruined past, has become a fetish object; and it is the story about Weisz and his quest for the desk that started my thinking about fetishes in psychoanalysis.

I am also engaged in a training analysis with a candidate who has reached an impasse with his control case analysand. His patient has become single- mindedly preoccupied with having the analyst “hold her,” a longing so grief-filled and hungry that it threatens to devour the analysis. No amount of mirroring, empathic understanding, subjective sharing, or “reality” registers with the patient. She is cognitively and metaphorically concrete, immovable in her insistence on being physically held and on the belief that the analyst‟s sheltering arms have the power to heal a lifetime of loss and pain. She thinks of nothing else. Over time the analyst-candidate has also lost a larger vision for the analysis beyond the issue of holding. Unwittingly, he has joined his patient in her narrow and concrete therapeutic focus.

The patient brings a kind of lifelessness to the analytic space, an absence of curiosity and a refusal of all attempts to explore the meanings of her longings. In claustrophobic sessions that are devoid of humor, energy and emotional contact, the patient often sits slumped over, her head bowed and face veiled by long hair.

The only subject that matters, the only subject that has the power to animate the analysand, is the subject of being held. The analyst has become a “fetish” object for his patient, and at this point he feels doubtful that basic conditions exist to conduct a therapy. The emotional ambience of this treatment feels very

4 much like the sorrowful ambience of Krauss‟ novel, and also prompts me to explore the nature of fetishes in psychoanalysis. Interestingly, while there are sporadic references to fetishes in fairly recent classical and Kleinian analytic literature (Bronstein, 1992; Cole, 1999; Bass, 1991, 1997; Klavens, 1995), there has been almost no attention paid to fetishes in contemporary relational psychoanalysis. Because I believe the subject has great clinical application— fetishes present themselves clinically in many forms--I hope this paper helps to recast and reintroduce it to relational thinking.

I‟ll begin with some relevant psychoanalytic theories relating fetishism, illusion, multiple states of mind, and a certain kind of concrete thinking, on one side, to social and personal trauma, on the other. Before I start, however, let me define “personal fetish” as I‟ll be using the term here. While there are some fetishes that are culturally defined and transmitted, my attention here is limited to personal fetishes that develop psychologically in response to trauma and unbearable anxiety. After trauma, fetishes form and calcify because of the absence or failure of potentially reparative relationships. Although I will review

Freud‟s rather narrow use of the term “fetish” as a primarily male sexual perversion, I prefer the more general definition of fetish as a material object used by both men and women to allay and regulate, not just castration anxiety, but all sorts of relational, cultural, and personally mortal terrors.

Historically, cultural fetishes possess magical powers to protect and to contain personal and communal anxiety. They promise their adherents a kind of

5 vicarious agency; they provide some indirect illusion of control over powerful natural forces. Such magical powers are present in religious idols such as the totemic icons in which primitive gods reside. These idols are often dangerous and quixotic as well as protective. There are agricultural fetishes as well as ones to aid in childbirth, to control weather, and to protect soldiers in battle. As I use the term, personal fetishes, like cultural ones, have power by virtue of their seeming to possess a demonic will of their own. In possession of a fetish, a person has the possibility of taking on some of its demonic power; and this power, experienced as super- or preternatural, is irresistibly seductive and energizing. Unlike Freud‟s understanding of fetishism as a purely sexual perversion, I suggest here that there are different types of personal fetishes; they may be purely sexual, sexually tinged, or not sexual at all. Power and intense desire, not sex per se, define their allure, and because of their powerful and dangerous nature, fetishes require special, often ritual handling.

In our culture we have, of course, a wide variety of fetishistic idols, addictive objects and substances, which promise comfort and safety and power but which can also be supremely dangerous and enslaving. Concrete examples are guns—big ones with huge ammo cartridges; drugs like cocaine and heroin; and the practice of addictive sexuality. All of these at first offer psychic relief or escape or expansion, and then over time siphon the life from its victims. In addition to these, I include here the pursuit of cultural success icons—e.g., money, heroes, exotic cars, and symbols and fantasies of youth, physical beauty,

6 and strength. I also include the glut of electronic devices, games, and cyber networks that capture and enthrall many people, providing them with virtual, dissociated lives apart from flesh and blood experience. Those in the thrall of a fetish make for very difficult analytic patients.

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

The interest in fetishes in psychoanalysis naturally begins with Freud, who early on viewed the fetish sexual perversion as a defense against castration anxiety, a symbol of the “phallic mother (Freud, 1905). According to Freud, the fetish serves as a means of disavowing the differences between the sexes. Such disavowal is necessary because the fantasy of the castrated mother induces intense “castration anxiety” in the child. The fetish, once created, erases the mother‟s mutilation and, thereby, mitigates the threat to the child of being castrated himself (Freud, 1927). A fetish, in short, symbolizes the mother‟s penis. As Freud puts it, whether in the form of an undergarment, a foot, a shoe, or what have you, the fetish is “a substitute symbol of the woman‟s penis which was once revered and later missed” (Freud 1910, p. 96). Possession of a fetish object allows the fulfillment of desire and libidinal discharge uninterrupted by loathing or fear of the mutilated genital.

In Freud‟s late writings about fetishes, he emphasizes that the fetishist‟s

“disavowal” of castration, in fact, represents the person‟s simultaneous knowing and insistent not knowing of the awful event. Freud understands that such disavowal necessarily requires a split in the ego:

7 It is not true that after the child has made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter- wish, a compromise has been reached…the woman has got a penis…but this penis is no longer the same as it was formerly. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute. (Freud, 1938, p.154)

The substitute is the fetish, of course, seductive and exciting, and, most important of all, regulating of anxiety. Yet, what is more interesting here is

Freud‟s suggestion that acceptance and disavowal of castration exist side by side in the mind of the fetishist, knowing and not-knowing, a split in the ego or what we might refer to as two conflicting states of mind co-existing and in continual oscillation, the one with the other—multiple self states. Further, for Freud the split also involves a displacement of feelings, a diminishment of affect toward the

“real” castrated mother and heightened affect toward the fetish object, the

“phallic mother.” This displacement accords with the observation that people with fetishes are lifeless; the cost of their investing life energy in the fetish object is dissociation and emotional deadness in the “real life” present. In addition, all sense of agency is submerged in the power of the fetish.

Most interesting of all, Freud‟s late discussion of fetishes in “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence” (1938) questions the very nature of the mind‟s relationship to external reality. That is, if in response to terrible anxiety the ego splits, resulting in a rejection of reality, on the one hand, recognition of the danger of reality, on the other, and perpetual oscillation between the two states, doesn‟t this suggest some altogether cloudy relationship between the

8 divided ego and external reality? As we shall see below, the state of mind that

Freud depicts is similar to Winnicott‟s notion of illusion, although, unlike Freud,

Winnicott does not see illusion as pathological.

While Freud most often uses “castration anxiety” as the signal developmental human trauma, occurring as part of the Oedipal struggle, he also sometimes suggests that the structure or dynamics of castration anxiety exists in situations other than the Oedipal experience. For example, in “Inhibitions,

Symptoms and Anxiety” Freud names birth, “in which the ego is helpless in the face of a constantly increasing instinctual demand, the earliest and original determinant of anxiety” (1926, p.76). In that same essay in something like a theory of attachment, Freud also addresses the young child‟s separation from the mother as the central anxiety experience of childhood: “missing someone who is loved and longed for…here, I think, we have the key to an understanding of anxiety” (Freud, 1926, p. 66).

Here anxiety appears as a reaction to the felt loss of the object; and we are at once reminded of the fact that castration anxiety, too, is a fear of being separated from a highly valued object, and that the earliest anxiety of all--the „primal anxiety‟ of birth—is brought about on the occasion of a separation of mother.” (1926, p.66)

What is notable in this passage is that whether birth, separation from mother, or castration fears, Freud recognizes that the subjective belief in the occurrence of an overwhelming loss or the anticipation of such loss—accompanied by fears of mortal danger--is foundational to anxiety. I suggest that this subjective experience of unmanageable trauma and loss along with a consequent terror and

9 distrust of the physical and emotional surround--of which castration anxiety is merely one instance--is foundational to the construction of fetishes. Profound past trauma creates temporal confusions and changes our expectations about future safety; in short, after trauma, we frequently suffer anticipatory anxiety about what has already happened.

I offer two final observations about Freud‟s theory of fetishism. First, with respect to the choice of fetishes, Freud observes that the often puzzling selection of fetish objects may be a part of the temporal freeze that occurs in trauma; he speculates that the fetish “is possibly the last impression received before the uncanny traumatic one [i.e., the discovery of the mother‟s castration].

Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman's genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet—as has long been suspected—are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic (1927, p. 155).

I like Freud‟s idea about the temporal proximity of the fetish and the trauma. The idea holds, in fact, for George Weisz‟s desk fetish and supports my more general sense that the choice of fetish has complex associational and memorial connections to the traumatic loss. To illustrate: the desk in Great

House, the last object that Weisz sees before his world disintegrates, represents the shattered home, the dead father, and the plight of literature, culture, and the life of the mind in the wake of the Holocaust.

10 With respect to the question of fetish choice, other, as yet unknown, factors may also be involved. For example, it has been suggested that some fetish choices may be neurologically based.1 Perhaps future brain research will throw a more focused spotlight on the question of fetish choice, and I look forward to understanding more precisely this imaginative effort both to memorialize what was lost in the past and restore it to the present.

The last observation I have about Freud and fetishes is that he remained puzzled to the end about why some people develop fetishes and others do not:

Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain. (Freud, 1927 p.154)

Freud does not explore the relational responses to profound anxiety, which, I imagine, partially explains why he is left puzzled. I argue here that contextual factors, particularly the absence of mentalized grief and mourning following profound trauma and a certain predisposition to concrete thinking all contribute to the creation of fetishes. The intrapsychic problem becomes a relational one.

Winnicott‟s (1953) ideas about transitional objects and phenomena also have relevance to an understanding of fetishes. According to Winnicott, transitional objects—teddy bears, blankets, etc.--are the infant‟s first “Not-Me” possessions. As such they relate to but stand between the infant‟s fantasy world

1 Ramarchandran (1998) suggests that fetishism may be the result of neuronal crosslinks between neighboring regions in the human brain. For example, the region processing sensory input from the feet lies immediately next to the region processing genital and sexual stimulation.

11 and the external world. Transitional objects appear as babies first differentiate themselves physically from the mother; as maternal substitutes, they represent the child‟s efforts simultaneously to separate from and maintain symbolic connection to the mother. Transitional phenomena are an “intermediate state between a baby‟s inability and growing ability to recognize and accept reality:”

(p.90)

The transitional objects…belong to the realm of illusion which is at the basis of initiation of experience. This early stage in development is made possible by the mother‟s special capacity for making adaptation to the needs of her infant, thus allowing the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists. This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to the inner or external reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant‟s experience and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work. An infant‟s transitional object ordinarily is gradually decathected (p.97).

Although Winnicott urges the normative and healthy aspects of transitional objects and illusionary space, at the end of his “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” he acknowledges that, “The transitional object may eventually develop into a fetish object and so persist as a characteristic of the adult sexual life”(p.92). Unfortunately, he neither explains why for most people the transitional object gradually loses its magic nor why, for some, the

“fetish object” maintains its power. He also doesn‟t comment on the paradox that what is imaginative and creative in a child‟s transitional object becomes rigid and concrete in established adult fetishistic thinking. As with Freud, Winnicott does not examine the relational surround of the fetishist.

12 Unlike Winnicott, I think that the fetish object is categorically different from the transitional object. While similarly existing in the realm of illusion, the fetish object emerges from real catastrophic, unmediated loss rather than from a developmentally normal individuation process. As I have proposed above, it is the subjective experience of overwhelming trauma—absent mourning or regulating or mentalizing response--that creates the fetishistic condition: the temporal dislocation of past and present with attendant longing for the lost past and fear of and recoil from the present. In addition, all sense of agency is submerged in the power of the fetish. This dissociated process becomes embodied in a relic from the past and reflects a last ditch effort to regulate annihilation anxiety and make even minimal living possible.

Fetishists are bound by concrete thinking, a literalness that precludes metaphorical and abstract thought. Concrete thinking includes what Piaget

(1965) termed moral realism, the inability to imagine or take into account the moral intentions of others. It also suggests the absence of a “theory of mind” and the failure of mentalizing abilities (Fonagy, et.al., 2008).

Bass (1997) describes the concrete thinking of the fetishist in the clinical setting as having two main features: first, a difficulty in understanding and using interpretation; and second, a perverse relationship to external reality and

“knowing” such that the patient never needs to test or question his own conclusions. In treatment a fetishistic patient may seem to hear and to dialogue with the therapist, but, in fact, no dialogue actually occurs. There is both an

13 overarching insistence, a certainty that what the patient perceives coincides with absolute truth and a refusal to consider anything new that the therapist offers.

A classical analyst, Bass attributes this concreteness to disavowal “a process that produces the primary split in the ego, a split between a differentiation that has become too anxiety provoking and a defensive wish fulfillment to substitute for it” (p.646). Generalizing from Freud‟s late formulation, Bass argues that disavowal occurs in patients who cannot tolerate the perception of difference or differentiation. These people respond with intolerable tension to the experience of difference/differentiation by splitting: that is, by defensively displacing feelings about an object associated with dangerous difference onto an object associated with relief and/or safety. Then they rigidly maintain the displacement.

I would add and underline here that the most dangerous difference for the fetishist is that between the present and the past. Specifically he disavows the living present in favor of an obliterated past for which he/she yearns and has not or cannot mourn. By representing both what was lost and its desired, continued existence in the present, the fetish functions to erase the difference between past and present.

In focusing on the drive-derivative and intrapsychic nature of fetishes,

Freud, Winnicott, Bass, and other theorists miss the contribution of real, lived trauma in the genesis of psychological fetishism. They also miss the relational genesis and the continuing relational factors that create and support fetishistic

14 choices and behaviors. I am suggesting a more contextual explanation for the generation and maintenance of fetishes: defensive concreteness emerges from real external events and relational--interpersonal and intersubjective--failures. In other words, it emerges from destabilizing trauma and loss, experiences that have remained ungrieved and unmentalized by or for the patient. In such a situation the displacement of anxiety and grief onto some substitute object for the purpose of psychic regulation may be energizing and relieving. In many cases, sexual fetishes may also be distracting and erotically satisfying. But I am arguing here that whether sexual or not—the fetish in Great House is not sexual, and the fetish in the clinical case below has only a tangential sexual flavor— personal fetishes invariably offer enlivening experience at the cost of feeling empty and emotionally shut down and alone in relation to the external world of people and events. Thus, fetishes are not ultimately about sex but about states of mind and the creative, defensive effort to regulate psychic turmoil by the use of things or body parts or people.

Masud Khan (1979) understands this and consequently urges respect for the fetish because of the important defensive function it provides: a manic protection from complete self-fragmentation, disintegration, and, perhaps, suicide. Of all the commentators, Khan seems most to comprehend the psychic fragility of the fetishist, and he even questions the value of curing a fetish. Khan reports on two of his “cured” patients. After a two-part analysis, one patient is “a person real in himself, creative in his intellectual pursuits, unharrowed by that

15 ungraspable anxiety in himself, and beginning to live a life which to him is meaningful, sentient and true, and has a purpose as well as a direction in terms of its future” (p. 176). The story is not so rosy, however; Khan also relates that the man “lives a life which, by ordinary standards, is extremely lacking in human contact…. He is just an alienated isolate in human society and lives from that stance” (p. 170). Khan‟s second patient loses all zest for living. After his manic defense fails and the perversions stop so, too, does any sense of aliveness and

“instinctual fervour and dynamism” (p. 176).

How does fetishistic experience express itself in the analytic setting?

Owen Renick (1992) suggests that at times patients come to use the analyst as a fetish: “Freud spoke about the blurring of fantasy and reality in his articles on fetishism, and I have found it useful to think of the phenomenon that underlies certain analytic stalemates as the patient‟s use of the analyst as fetish”(p.544).

While ordinarily we think of fetishes as inanimate objects, Renik avers that a person can be used as a fetish too. I agree and will illustrate this idea below.

Renik begins to explore the consequences of a patient‟s using the analyst as a fetish. He imagines that the analyst‟s countertransference may prompt him to end the therapy prematurely or else to participate in an interminable,

“unanalytic relationship.” While Renik does not address the ways in which the analyst may help to co-create this unworkable and unsatisfactory situation, I will address the problem in the clinical case below.

Finally, with respect to literature that bears on the process of fetish

16 formation and the concrete thinking that accompanies it, I want to mention the voluminous attachment/mentalization research. Mentalization is the capacity to perceive and interpret behavior in terms of intentional mental states in oneself and others. According to Fonagy (2008) it is “a form of mostly preconscious imaginative mental activity” that grows out of interpersonal and intersubjective experience (p. 4). Mentalization begins with the discovery that we each possess a mind that relates to other separate minds, that these separate minds are capable of connecting, of understanding and recognition.

Most problems in mentalization reflect relationship failures and have far reaching psychic reverberations. Recent findings in this field, for example, establish a clear connection between the kind of concrete thinking that fetishists exhibit and an absence of mentalization. (Bourchard, Target, et.al. 2008; Jurist,

2009). As Jurist succinctly puts it, “Problems in mentalization manifest as concrete thinking” (p.1011). Again, by concrete thinking I mean mental processes that are bound by literalness—literalness in relation to one‟s fantasies, to symbols, and to one‟s most immediate and obvious sense impressions. The ability to generalize from the immediate sense impression, to abstract and to think metaphorically or reflectively, is impaired or altogether absent in concrete thinking. For our purposes, then, concrete thinking means the inability to imagine minds and mental states, to reflect on psychic process in oneself and others, to grasp symbolic meaning, to situate one‟s self in its spatial and temporal contexts, and to grieve. These deficiencies obtain in fetishists and

17 makes analytic work very difficult.

As I have suggested, the concrete thinking and inability to mentalize in fetishism emerges from the absence of mentalizing experiences with others probably prior to and certainly in response to trauma. Character pathology becomes, then, relationship pathology, an observation that directs therapeutic action: to provide mentalizing experiences and establish relational connections with the aim of developing and/or expanding emotional range, symbolic representation, and conscious awareness. As many attachment theorists and relationally oriented analysts have suggested, successful work with the severely traumatized occurs, at least initially, in the non-verbal realm and unfolds through complex mirroring functions and mutual enactments.

If the therapeutic goal with respect to fetishists is to illuminate and bring to awareness dissociated emotional states and strategies—to facilitate reflective functioning and expand emotional understanding and range--then therapeutic action requires attention to mirroring functions and mutual enactments. The growing literature on mentalization and recognition and enactments proffer flowering new concepts and vocabularies.2 In the novel Great House and in the

2 Some contributions bearing on human connectivity that promotes mentalizing capacity include two different theories of intersubjectivity (Stolorow, 1994; Benjamin, 1995) the idea of an Interpersonal Interpretive Mechanism (Fonagy,2002), an evolutionary concept bearing on subjective connectivity (Slavin, in print), and terms like emotional resonance (Sander, 2002) emotional understanding (Orange, 1995), emotional attunement (Stolorow, 1987; Stern, 1985), contingent responsiveness (Beebe and Lachmann, 1998, 2001), rhythmicity and specificity (Sander, 2002), marked mirroring (Fonagy, 2001), dialogue (Buber, 1999), self and interactive regulation (Beebe and Lachmann, 2001), moments of recognition (Benjamin, 2004, 2010 ), moments of meeting (Boston Change Process Study Group, 2010), present moments (Stern, 2001), connectfulness (Hastings,

18 clinical case below, we shall examine how the absence and/or difficulty with mirroring and mentalizing functions contribute to fetishistic processes and analytic enactments.

FETISHISM IN GREAT HOUSE

Artists frequently reveal to their audience complex states of mind and human interactions that are staggering in their depth of understanding. Nicole

Krauss in Great House continues her exploration of traumatic loss and sorrow begun in The History of Love, and in her character George Weisz, she holds up a mirror to fetishism. Life changed for Weisz in 1944 with a Nazi stone hurled through the window of his father‟s study in Budapest. The quotidian life of the family shattered with the glass: home destroyed, parents lost in the Holocaust, and life irrevocably refocused backward, oriented toward redeeming the loss.

From the moment before the stone—an adolescent daydreaming of an ice skating race—to the moment of broken glass, in that instant Weisz‟ life collapses into a relentless quest “to bend his memory around the void” of his losses and recreate what is gone. Weisz goes through no real grief process and has no other mind to help him mentalize the loss. Rootless now and alone, he becomes the “Wandering Jew,” living many places, settling in none, and raising children with neither a physical nor a cultural home.

2011), and Self-Realization (Wright, 2009). Similarly, relational theorists are attending to enactment in ballooning numbers: e.g., Bromberg (2006), Benjamin (2010), Stern (2004, 2010), Teicholz (2006), Weisel-Barth (2006, 2008).

19 Weisz makes a profession of restoring what was lost in the Holocaust, what was lost to social, cultural, and personal trauma and death. He becomes a noted antiques dealer, who is expert in locating objects looted by the Nasis. As he says,

“People come to me…I go with them back to their childhoods before the War. Between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. The way he lined his soldiers up under the hem of the curtain. How she laid out the little toy cups…I can‟t bring the dead back to life. But I can bring back the chair they once sat in, the bed where they slept…There is an amazement…when at last I produce the object they have been dreaming of for half a lifetime, that they have invested with the weight of their longing…as if I‟d produced the gold and silver sacked when the Romans destroyed the Temple two thousand years ago” (p.274-75).

When he can‟t find the exact lost piece, he will present a counterfeit substitute to his client.

“If it no longer exists, I find it. Do you understand? I produce it. Out of thin air, if need be…Memory will be invaded by the reality of the bed standing before him. Because he needs it to be that bed where she once lay with him more than he needs to know the truth (p.276)

Weisz understands the way in which longing baffles the mind and how memory and desire blur reality—and vice versa--confusing the boundaries and objects of the material world. As the agent of desire, he uses material objects as magic talismans. He uses them to invade the minds of his clients, to bend their memories and to recreate for/with them evocative pieces of the imagined past.

Weisz‟ quest to restore his father‟s study, lost in the Holocaust, is of a different order than the longing of his clients. He is monomaniacal. He has traced, acquired, and transplanted all of the furniture and objects from the room in Budapest—save the desk—to his house in Jerusalem. As Weisz‟ daughter

20 describes it, “[Everything] in his study in Jerusalem was laid out exactly as my grandfather‟s study in Budapest…down to the millimeter! Down to…the pencils in the ivory try. As if by putting all the pieces back together he might collapse time and erase regret” (p.116).

But there are no counterfeit memories for Weisz; he cannot be fooled. As he says of himself, “He isn‟t like the others. He doesn‟t have the capacity to forget just a little. His memory cannot be invaded…His memory is more real to him, more precise, than the life he lives, which becomes more and more vague to him.” And the embodiment of Weisz‟ memory is the lost desk, the piece of furniture in his view as the traumatic stone catapulted through his father‟s study window. A potent symbol, the desk, at once, represents the catastrophic loss of his family, home, and culture; expresses the promise of restoration and redemption; and functions as a persecutory instrument that haunts his life.

Another character in the novel, who has lived with the desk, describes its presence, “It sucked up all the air. We lived in its shadow…As if death itself were living in that tiny room with us, threatening to crush us” (p.278) Here, I think, is the essence of a fetish. Although it promises the restoration of loss and a fulfillment of desire--all the excitement and vitality of pre-traumatic life--in fact, it is a lifeless thing that paradoxically abducts both the present and any possibility of affective presence.

The amazing final passage in Great House recalls Freud‟s insight about the disavowal process in fetishistic thinking, the oscillation of not knowing and

21 knowing, of adamant denial and acceptance. After fifty years of searching, Weisz finally locates the desk at a storage facility in New York.

I opened the door. For an instant I almost believed I would find my father stooped over the desk, his pen moving across the page. But the tremendous desk stood alone, mute and uncomprehending…There were a few scratches, but otherwise those who had sat at it had left no mark. I knew the moment well. How often I had witnessed it in others, and yet now it almost surprised me: the disappointment, then the relief of something at last sinking away (p.289).

Here is the desk, for fifty years a seductive and demonic object that has possessed Weisz‟ fantasy life with fetishistic power. In the moment that it comes into its physical reality, the illusion shatters, and the desk becomes merely an inanimate thing, “mute and uncomprehending.” We learn from another character that Weisz commits suicide after returning to Jerusalem from his New York search. I think we are invited to conclude that without the fetish, his life becomes unbearable and meaningless.

A CLINCIAL CASE: THE ANALYST AS FETISH OBJECT

David, a psychoanalytic candidate, has become a fetish object for his control case patient Mara. She was one of his first private patients and had been in twice-weekly psychotherapy with him for several years before beginning a control case analysis two years ago. The control case began after she and David made a “pact with the Devil.”

Mara came to California at fifteen, a refugee with her mother and sister from political upheaval and violence in her native country. Her ethnic group had been targeted for persecution, and her father became a political casualty,

22 murdered by the authorities. A shy, sheltered, and frightened teenager, Mara had difficulty making friends and entering the extraverted, insouciant social world of her new country.

The signal trauma in her life, however, began when she was seventeen. In the wake of an automobile accident, Mara‟s mother fell into a three-year coma before finally dying when the girl was twenty. During the protracted coma, Mara visited the mother everyday in the nursing home. There the lonely girl would sit for long hours with the silent, unavailable, nonresponsive, sleeping/dead mother. Occasionally, she would lay her head on her mother‟s breast in order to hear the mother‟s heart beat. Whatever “sleeping beauty” fantasies the girl may have harbored—of the mother‟s waking because of the child‟s need and devotion—they were dashed. The mother died.

The quality of the pre-trauma mother-child relationship is unclear, lost in Mara‟s idealization of the mother and of her pre-emigration life. What is clear from David‟s perspective is how difficult the analytic work has been. Mara entered therapy because of depression, drug use, and a gambling addiction. Her moods and behavior felt unregulated and out of control. Although married and the mother of two little girls, she seemed strangely emotionally disengaged from her husband and children. This quality of disengagement has never changed.

And she kept many secrets. For example, she has never told her husband about her gambling or her therapy—or about any important features of her affective

23 life. The money for treatment comes from squirreled-away household money and from funds that her wealthy sister provides.

During the first phase of therapy, Mara seemed to be examining her life and working to develop self-understanding. David would interpret for Mara the meanings of her feelings and behavior in an effort to establish with her some general agreements about her psychological patterns, a more coherent narrative of her life, and a trusting therapeutic relationship. And almost immediately she developed a positive transference to David that seemingly held the promise of a good treatment outcome. In retrospect, however, David realizes that from the outset Mara was frequently dissociated in sessions. He recalls many instances of talking to her, assuming that she was tracking him, and then being surprised by a startle response from her, a reorienting jolt indicating her sudden return from some absence.

After a few years David also noted that Mara‟s repetitive complaints and stories took on a remote and ritualistic quality—dry and barren--and there was no change in the initial presenting problems. David began feeling bored, impatient, and increasingly helpless while outside the office Mara‟s fluctuating moods and erratic, destructive behavior continued unabated. David maintained a consistent interpretive strategy with Mara and went for consultation many times before the relationship changed about four years ago.

24 THE ENACTMENT PHASE

Four years ago Mara decides that she needs to have David hold her during their sessions and directly asks him to do so. She feels that only in his literal arms will any psychic healing occur. In an amazing moment of insight, she reveals a poignant infantile fantasy: if she might return to a time before her losses; if she might rest in the cradle of a loving mother‟s arms, somehow she would be magically o.k. A fairly restrained, rational man and a traditionally oriented analytic psychotherapist, David declines Mara‟s request, and he doesn‟t explore the fantasy with her.

After that, “holding” becomes the only topic in the analytic hours and the focus of a fierce and painful tug of war: Mara insists on being held, and David http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iphoto/id408981381?mt=12refuses; David insists on exploring the issue, and Mara refuses. The struggle is punctuated by individual consultations for David and Mara with other therapists and then a joint consultation with an admired fatherly psychoanalyst. David and I begin his training analysis at this juncture, and he tells me that he feels impatient with

Mara and hates both the lack of therapeutic progress and his own feelings of incompetence. He hopes that the older analyst-consultant will agree to see Mara as a patient.

For a short time Mara does enter a new treatment with the psychoanalyst.

In our sessions David expresses a range of feelings: relief, sadness at the loss of a long-term attachment, and shame both because he has not been more

25 effective and because he feels foolish in the eyes of the revered analyst. The new therapy does not last long, however. Mara‟s intense transference to David results in a lifeless new treatment with the older analyst. And so two years ago

David, Mara, and the analyst agree that Mara will enter a formal training psychoanalysis with David; the psychoanalyst will serve as David‟s control case supervisor; and David and Mara will experiment with controlled “holding.” While inwardly feeling dread and distaste, David reluctantly agrees to this “pact with the Devil.” Upon hearing the plan, I imagine a kitchen with too many cooks and one bad master recipe. I feel skeptical about the new arrangement because

David‟s participation is disingenuous with respect both to his patient and his supervisor. We discuss his dilemma, but he decides to proceed with the analysis.

For about fifteen minutes at the end of each session, David hugs Mara while sitting with her on the couch. The two sit in silence. Mara feels peaceful and is finally content although she would like even more holding. She frequently asks David if he loves holding her as much as she loves being held. She wants perfect agreement. Because he doesn‟t even like to hold her, David doesn‟t answer. In the meantime, nothing changes in Mara‟s life. From David‟s perspective no issues are explored in the analysis, and David counts the minutes until the holding is over. After a time, Mara begins to challenge David‟s devotion, saying, “I know you hate this.” Or “I know you hate me.” She is, of course, partially correct; he doesn‟t answer and in his silence misses an opportunity to meet Mara psychologically and provide her a mentalizing experience.

26 About a year into this routine while David is on a vacation break, he determines that he cannot continue the holding. It feels emotionally fraudulent to him, and, under those circumstances, non productive. When he returns and next sees Mara, he abruptly announces that he will no longer hold her. He tells me about this after the fact, and I feel sick for both parties and for their analysis.

All Hell breaks loose. Mara is retraumatized, becoming anxious and emotionally disorganized. Mara first demands that David honor his agreement, but after a time pleads that he simply give her hope that someday he may hold her again. He demurs. At times she accuses David of dishonesty, and at other times worries that he hates her. She brands herself as being “too much” and

“unlovable.” She careens between anger, despair, and thoughts/threats of suicide. Soon Mara‟s temporal structures begin to fail, and, in an effort to assert some agency in the analysis, she refuses to observe any time boundaries with

David. At first, she cancels appointments without notice, and then later decides that she will only come on a last minute, if-come basis. She will call for an appointment when she wants one, and David will schedule her if he has the time. Although she still attends about three sessions a week, there is no longer any temporal regularity in the analytic relationship. And because David feels so guilty about being the agent of Mara‟s retraumatization, he has agreed to the if- come schedule. Although he does not feel justified in terminating their sessions, he is hopeless that any analytic work will get done. With her restricted aims and concrete thinking, in fact, he now doubts that Mara has the capacity to do

27 analytic work at all. While David may be perfectly correct in his conclusions, I still see many missed chances for David to mentalize with Mara. In addition, to my ears there is a “blame the patient” tone in his story telling.

Clearly, Mara and David have co-created and are now enacting Mara‟s

“dead mother” trauma. David is the physically and psychically absent, withholding, and rejecting figure, and Mara is the pleading supplicant, begging for the mere hope of a response from him. At the same time, David has become a magical figure for her, a fetish, alluring and galvanizing. He preoccupies her psychological world. Like George Weisz‟ desk, David seems to embody Mara‟s desperate hope of returning to an imagined time before violence, emigration, coma, and death, of returning to some imagined, pre-traumatic, Edenic emotional cradle in which she can be held and rocked and loved. David understands the fantasy but limits his focus and imagination about the case to his own fairly concrete thinking about “the holding.” Hence, in his own symbolic collapse he has participated in and bears responsibility for co-creating the fetishistic conditions. And at this point in the work Mara will have none of

David‟s inquiries or interpretive “nonsense.” She just wants David to hold her.

What an impasse!

DISCUSSION

There are many immediate questions that arise from the case material.

What was it like for me as David‟s analyst to witness the development and hardening of the fetishistic relationship with Mara? What have I learned since I

28 first—and early--became uncomfortable with what was happening in the case?

Where is the line between an idealizing transference, on the one hand, and idolization and fetishism, on the other? What was the contribution to the therapeutic rupture of David‟s conscious but unspoken impatience with Mara‟s lack of progress and then distaste for the holding? And, most troubling to me— and ultimately unanswerable—I wonder whether some human responses to trauma are so obdurate that they are impervious to psychotherapy, or so necessary to a patient‟s psychological survival that they simply merit respect and support. These questions, of course, are ongoing; they are the kind of questions that analysts must regularly confront in practice, in consultation, in seminars, and in study groups. The most that this essay can hope to accomplish is clarifying and playing with the questions rather than arriving at any definitive answers.

Early in our training analysis, David would sometimes complain about his control case, expressing doubts about himself and antipathy toward Mara.

Although the control case was not the focus of our work, David‟s attitude toward it meshed with other of his organizing issues--particularly his discomfort with strong emotion--that I was learning about. David grew up in a stern and critical family where obedience took precedence over emotional understanding and expression, and where troubling events and unruly emotions were sequestered and ignored. In response to his first family and subsequent life experience, he presented a habit of pathological accommodation, followed by shame, self-doubt,

29 and angry reactivity. He also showed ambivalence toward authority, but with his own assumption of fairly authoritarian postures, and a critical impatience with all that seemed too emotional, irrational, and out of his control. David, in short, was emotionally bound and rarely easy or comfortable in his relational worlds: in his view, he was always either too soft or else too obdurate, too cold or not cool enough, too doubtful or too defensively certain. Borrowing from Ghent (1990), I would say that David had not yet surrendered to any relationship in his life, including our budding analytic one.

At the same time, David was an intelligent hard worker, who earnestly wished to be a good analyst. The analytic challenge for me was to help him learn to hear, trust, and honor his emotional responses; to relax his hair-trigger critical responses to others and to himself; and to practice more considered self- assertion. Slowing down his natural staccato rhythm through quiet, respectful inquiry, I hoped initially to create a space with him where he could emotionally access and think more reflectively about his life responses. I also hoped to help him temper the critical impatience, which often caused him trouble with his colleagues, friends, and new wife.

Given his life issues, it is understandable that Mara‟s irrationality would be difficult for David and that he might mount a critical and rational defense against her longings and his lack of understanding. At first, not knowing about her traumatic past, I assumed mistakenly that Mara was more psychically sound than she actually was. Picturing a woman in the midst of an erotic transference, I

30 expected that David was enacting his patterned avoidant responses to intense emotion and trusted that he and his supervisor would smooth out the ragged edges in his work.

When once I realized that I was witnessing a potential train wreck of an analysis, my mistake was to refrain from saying so. I did not want to be another knowing, critical figure in David‟s life. And so as the wheels of David and Mara‟s analysis loosened, and as their relational cars derailed, I remained too tentative in expressing my concerns. Thus, I watched David and Mara together create what was only potential for Mara when she entered treatment: the transformation of David into a fetish object. While I may plead ignorance and distance, I nevertheless feel guilty and sad about my contribution to what at this point feels like another devastating loss for Mara. I should have inquired more, I should have known sooner, I should have done something helpful—all these shoulds that I didn‟t.

What were David‟s specific contributions to the impasse? I‟ll offer some speculations here. First, I suspect that as a beginning therapist David did not recognize the gravity of Mara‟s presenting problems: her absence of affect, disengagement from her close relationships, especially with her children, and her habit of escaping from anxiety with drugs and gambling behavior. Had he recognized her fragility early on, he might have begun the treatment differently.

For example, his mistaken assumption that Mara was participating in and understanding the early interpretive therapy—a reasonable assumption given

31 that she tried “faking it”—may inadvertently have reinforced Mara‟s sense of alienation. Although respectful and admiring of David, she may have felt herself-- as was familiar to her--to be on a different wavelength from him, and this sense of alienation may have added to her hopelessness about the possibility of a reparative human relationship. Perhaps fewer interpretations, more inquisitive listening, and more attention in the early period to the non-verbal dimensions of the relationship—how relational emotions and responses are embodied and regulated in relational rhythms, vocal tones, body postures, eye contact, recognition gestures, etc.—would have alerted David to the seriousness of Mara‟s relational problems. Attending to the non-verbal quality of the initial engagement may have also helped in making a tentative emotional connection. But given the depth of Mara‟s alienation, maybe not.

To be fair to David: fifteen years ago when he began to work with Mara, there was much less awareness of the non-interpretive, non-verbal dimensions of relationship building than there is now (e.g., Boston Change Process Study

Group, 2010). In addition, none of the many consultants, whom he engaged for help, understood the nature of Mara‟s suffering either.

When David acceded to the holding strategy, I suspect that the idealized transference tipped into an idolized fetishistic relationship. That holding Mara was distasteful to him must have been clear to Mara and also confusing and heartbreaking, and more about that below. But I suspect that David also was confused; I don‟t think that he yet comprehended the meanings behind Mara‟s

32 urgency and insistence. And once the holding began, he began having confusing—and to him shameful--sexual stirrings as well.

Surely Mara registered David‟s reluctance in his facial expressions, body posture and other non-verbal behaviors. Perhaps his tension and reserve added to his mystery, but most likely it also confirmed for her that her longings were disgusting. My guess is that at this juncture the relationship became a repetition of her previous traumatic disappointments and losses. She responded as she had with her mother: by entering into a world of illusion where the illusive, impossible object of desire becomes the exclusive focus, the sole vessel of life vitality and hope. It is hard to know what David could have done once the disingenuous agreement to hold was made, once the bargain with the devil was concluded and pursued. But after the holding began, his status as her object of desire, her fetish—and an “untouchable” one at that--was probably confirmed.

Perhaps a different therapist, one with a more yielding heart and easiness with intense emotional connection—including its erotic dimension-- might have created with Mara a different outcome. What if Mara had found someone who was fascinated by and curious about her strangeness, someone who could mirror with patience her intense longings? But this, of course, was not David, and such musing is in the same category as wondering “what if” my dog suddenly became my horse?

As for me, from this experience I certainly feel more humility about my own knowing or lack thereof. My contact with this case began with unexamined,

33 erroneous assumptions, and it took a long time before I recognized Mara‟s fragility and understood the relevance of the fetish idea in relation to Mara and

David. As a consequence of my destructive complacency, I hope—will attempt-- to become more vigilant and attentive to my unexamined convictions. And as a result of my unhelpful diffidence in working with David, I also hope that in the future when I feel internally disturbed about some unnamed feelings or doubts, I will ask more trenchant questions. At such moments I also hope for the courage to risk upset and disruption when I feel serious concern.

CONCLUSION

I have tried to argue in this essay that fetish formation is a severely damaging dissociative process that occurs in the context of overwhelming loss and trauma, joined with terror of the world and absent any available mentalizing, supportive relationship. Fetish formation, the creation of an idol, represents an effort to respond to meaning-shattering experience and regulate its attendant anxiety. In it symbol making and metaphorical thinking collapse or fail to develop. The mechanism is a split in the mental and affective life such that vitality affects are invested exclusively in an illusion, the fetish object, which is associatively linked to a past time. Outside the fetish engagement, the subject inhabits an emotionally barren present, psychologically alone and in a cognitive void of concrete thinking. These are poor conditions for creating an analytic relationship.

34 I have also suggested that this dynamic of fetish formation is exemplified in Freud‟s theory of disavowal. That is, the subjective experience of trauma and attendant terror leads to the defensive disavowel of the trauma, which means in contemporary terms a dissociative split in which rejection of the loss and the sense of danger resulting from the loss exist side by side. These states oscillate with each other. As a further encapsulation of the loss and the accompanying anxiety, the creation of the fetish object follows. It is some relic that “idolizes” the past and is resonant of what was lost. Finally, to complete the process the fetishist endows the object with magical powers to collapse time and heal heartache. Freud‟s theory of sexual fetishes--objects which restore the mother‟s lost penis, regulate “castration anxiety,” and provide erotic excitement and discharge--is one, but only one, concrete example of this process in psychological life.

Neither Weisz nor Mara had figures in their lives to bear witness to or mirror their suffering, to help them name and reflect on the affects and meanings of their respective losses and consequent anxiety. Nor did they engage in grieving processes that concluded with any relinquishment of what was lost.

Consequently, as adults they both inhabit a concrete world that lacks meaning.

In the absence of mentalizing others, they were left to create by and for themselves the means of regulating and containing unbearable and life threatening angst, and so Weisz created the fetish desk, and Mara has created the fetish analyst.

35 This process, which results in attributing all life energy, vitality, agency, and meaning to the fetish, also widens a void in the self; and it has, of course, serious implications for therapeutic work. It is a daunting challenge to form a working alliance with a patient for whom life has lost its animating charge, whose expressions of feeling are vague or nonexistent, who does not know how to think about or reflect on his/her inner world, and who does not believe in agentic change. As we have seen with Mara, such a person, lost in memory and intense desire, is vulnerable to fetishizing the therapy. And as with both Weisz and Mara, without the fetishistic defense, such a person may be a serious suicide risk. Dismantling the illusion may create serious danger.

I will conclude this essay with the claim that there is value in rescuing the fetish concept from classical theory and recasting it relationally for contemporary psychoanalysis. For one thing the concept helps to integrate certain insights about addictions; for example, the way in which some addictions enthrall some addicts and render them impervious to relationships and untouched by life experiences. More important, not only does an understanding of fetishes add to our growing inventory of psychological responses to trauma—and dissociative process--but it also alerts us to some serious and potentially dangerous psychological vulnerabilities and limitations in patients, vulnerabilities and limitations that may otherwise go unrecognized.

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