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Demeter-Persephone Complex, Entangled Aerials of the Psyche, and Sylvia Plath Bracha L

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Demeter-Persephone Complex, Entangled Aerials of the Psyche, and Sylvia Plath Bracha L Demeter-Persephone Complex, Entangled Aerials of the Psyche, and Sylvia Plath Bracha L. Ettinger European Graduate School When Orpheus said the name of love, Persephone, the queen of the dead, bowed her young head, and bearded Hades, the king, bowed his head also. Persephone remembered how Demeter, her mother, had sought her all through the world, and she remembered the touch of her mother’s tears upon her face. And Hades remembered how his love for Persephone had led him to carry her away from the valley where she had been gathering flowers. Then Hades and Persephone stood aside, and Orpheus went through the gate and came amongst the dead. Myths of the World Padraic Colum I ethinking the feminine in terms of the Demeter-Persephone com- rplex and bringing the shocks of maternality and the Eros of borderlinking into account is part of my project to rethink the human subject as infused by the transubjective dimension. Entangled psychic aerials of the psyche, transconnected kernels, inform the individual subject throughout life, starting with the most archaic phase in a psychic dimension shared with a female body and maternal figure. ESC 40.1 (March 2014): 123–154 Women suffered and still suffer from interpretations concerning penis lack and penis envy and the foreclosure of the maternal (archaic mother- hood) in the process of subjectivization in our culture. Axes offered for Bracha L. Ettinger meaning by the Oedipus as myth, as well as the Anti-Oedipus fragmen- is a major contemporary tation, are insufficient for giving meaning to the woman-to-woman (and, visual artist, philosopher, more generally, same sex) difference and for the difference (of males and and psychoanalyst. females) from the mother. We have to ask what kind of human subject and Ettinger’s next solo society was shaped in view of man’s lack of womb not as organ but in terms exhibitions are: 14th of lack of a whole symbolic universe of meaning and value stemming from Istanbul Biennial, the matrixial sphere where the containing of and the proximating to the Museo Leopoldo Flores, Other occur on a subsubjective and pre-subjective level, and the passage Toluca, and Polivalente, from non-life to life and sometimes from non-life to death, as well as birth Guanajuato, Mexico and birthing, enter the unconscious in the feminine. (2015). Her recent solo The expanse of the psychic foreclosure of the mother (discussed in terms exhibitions include of a Jocaste Complex, in Ettinger, “Antigone with(out) Jocaste,” 217 ) and Historical Museum of the psychic matricide offered by the cultural symbolization in patriarchal St Petersburg, (2013); society for the subjectivization processes affect a matrixial Thanatos that Museum of Fine Arts, turns against the self (Ettinger, 216 onward). Possible fields and lanes in the Angers (2011); Tapies myth of Demeter and Persephone treasure potential trajectories through Foundation, Barcelona which to fish and draw out the seduction into life offered by the maternal- (2011), Freud Museum, matrixial Eros and make room for recognition of the desire of the mother London (2009). Group in the metramorphic quest and the cognition of its anamnesis. exhibitions: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw I–1 (In the Heart of the Persephone the daughter disappeared. Demeter the mother turns heaven Country, 2013– 2014); and earth in her agony, trying to find her. She will be discovered in the Pompidou Centre, Paris Underworld, with Hades. (Elles@Centrepompidou, In one version of the Demeter-Persephone myth, Persephone enables 2010–2011). Ettinger is the meeting between two lovers, Orpheus and Eurydice, in the Under- Chair and Professor of world, as she remembers the kind of love through which mother-Demeter Art and Psychoanalysis, was looking for her, lamenting her loss. Identification takes place here egs; author of Matrix with the primordial mother as Love, an Eros beyond sexuality. This Eros Halal(a)-Lapsus: Notes of borderlinking stretches along resonating strings or aerials of the psyche on Painting (moma from kernel to kernel (between different subjects), first in physical proxim- Oxford), and The ity and then even at great distance and even beyond loss. Matrixial Borderspace A third kind of love, neither narcissistic nor anaclitic (Freud, “On Nar- (University of Minnesota cissism” 90), is born in the archaic transconnectedness with the m/Other. Press). The infant’s primary compassion is infused with the maternal-matrixial Eros of borderlinking. When Freud remarks that “we also failed to discover why it [separation] should be such a painful thing” (Inhibitions, Symptoms, 124 | Ettinger and Anxiety, 131), he is surely aware of the profoundness of some lacuna in his theory. This lacuna is related to archaic maternality and to pre-birth (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety 130); it is concerned with the riddle of love and the pain of its loss. “Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal [detachment of the libido in mourning] should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. [...] The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love” (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 245). Is not the problem already hidden in the conception of the mother (by the theory) as “object”? Without her subjective resonance via the aeri- als of the psyche, this transjective, quantic-entanglement-like resonance between the I and non-I as becoming-subjects, the comprehension of the links involved in originary love is impossible. I–2 When the entangled aerials of the psyche that infuse the entangled kernels of partial-subjects in borderlinking are taken into account as weaving a sphere of encounter-eventing that informs each individual subject, com- passion and respect to the subject’s maternal “object” will accompany an empathy toward the maternal subject. The (m)Other is a subject. The ker- nel-to-kernel out-in-trans-psychic resonance in shared strings should there- fore be cared for by the analyst. When empathy toward the subject-I will include compassion to its others as well—her non-I(s)— when listening in reverie to the patient will include what I have named reverance to “objects” as subjects, the suffering of “hysteria” will be reduced. Whenever the ana- lyst offers a ready-made figure of the mother-monster as “object-cause” that “explains” each and every psychic pain of the daughter, the analyst contributes to her hystericization-psychoticization, denying Persephone (daughter, patient) virtual scenario as a possible future grieving Demeter (mother, adult, aging woman), contributing thus to deferred pain and to moments of sheer psychoticization (increasing paranoia while crystalliz- ing imaginary splits between the “good” and the “bad” internal objects). I–3 Bringing maternal-matrixial subjectivity into account in comprehending the structure of the subject (whether male or female) means thinking of differenc/tiation by way of a non-split. Daughter-Persephone is becoming Demeter-Persephone Complex | 125 a woman when she recognizes her own mother’s pain and joy and respects the web they will always be, somehow, unconsciously sharing. This respect is a subjectivizing liberating force, bordering on a love to the Other of a primary kind (Balint): neither reactive nor reparatory, a love connected to the maternal-matrixial Eros of borderlinking. I–4 The Oedipus complex will be informed and relativized by the Demeter- Persephone complex infused by fleeting feelings of compassion. When the analyst uses the subject’s (patient’s) mother as a ready-made mother- monster “object,” as automatic “cause” or “explanation” for suffering, a “toxic substance” thus bestowing toxic nourishment as some analysts have it, analysis contributes to a loss of primary trust, wonder, and compassion which are creative. The anger (toward the mother) that results during the session or after is, then, not ancient; it is caused in the now of the session. Dora’s (Freud’s patient) moment of acute “hysterical” suffering erupted when a figure of authority that she had respected (Mr K.) abased a maternal figure she had admired (Mrs K.). (Freud, Fragments. I have analyzed this case in Fascinance.) The debasement of the mother (the patient’s own mother) is offered by Freud right from the beginning. He inherits the debasement of Dora’s mother directly from Dora’s father, and he adopts this viewpoint and develops it further. Adult women, in Freud’s thriller, are serially undesirable. Adult men, father-figures like himself, on the other hand, are serially desired. What is then the future that Dora can imagine for herself as a would-be adult woman? Upon Freud’s incapacity to grasp her subjectivizing desire (as a daughter-Persephone) to admire another female subject, an adult woman into whom she can project her imaginary futures (in my language, a Demeter), Dora leaves the analysis. I would go as far as to say that Dora succeeded in resisting the psychoti- cization of her “hysteria.” Freud’s interpretations, anticipating the zone of a particular sexual Eros and in fact imposing sexual desire from his own perspective, miss the sphere in which the daughter-mother differenc/tia- tion takes place beyond Oedipus. I–5 Winnicott’s saying that he “really hates” the mother of his patient Mar- garet Little (Psychotic Anxieties and Containment 47), in some emphatic over-identification with the infant in the adult patient, relieves the patient momentarily and is felt supportive and soothing to her. However, it is a move of demonization and de-humanization that hystericizes-psychoti- 126 | Ettinger cizes her as it hurts her matrixial web at its core. “This made him [Win- nicott] very angry: “ ‘I really hate your mother,’ he said.
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