Fragment of an Analysis of the Mother in Freud A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies in the University of Canterbury by Karyn Leona Stewart University of Canterbury 2012 I am compelled to go my own way, often a roundabout way, and that I cannot make any use of ideas that are suggested to me when I am not 1 ready for them. 1 Freud in a letter to Fritz Wittels in E. Freud, 1960: 346. Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract v A Note on Abbreviations and the Word Mother vii Prologue: ‘Prelude for the Reader’ viii Chapter One: Freud and the Mother 1 Chapter Two: Feminism and Freud 21 Chapter Three: Freud 67 Chapter Four: Freud, Rank’s Anxiety 130 Chapter Five: The Clowning Mother 171 Appendix 1. 205 Appendix 2. 209 Bibliography 212 Acknowledgements ‘Everything would be all right were it not for this and that and t’other’ (Freud in Jones, 1957: 496). Acknowledgements are funny things somebody or something always gets left out. And given that this is a thesis engaged with psychoanalysis and therefore the unconscious, one wonders if the leaving out is deliberate. The journey of this thesis has been rather long and somewhat arduous. Less dream journey and royal road and more nightmare and deserted thoroughfare, in the sense that thoroughfare gives as a ‘rite’ of passage. And while Freud’s dream journey and his theory in general seems to be stopped by a ‘burning bush’ and the biblical reference to Moses is deliberate, my travails have been held up by life. But as Freud puts it ‘we must live in the world after all’ (SE 20: 203). As I said, a long journey with few open spaces and quite a lot of falls, metaphoric as well as literal. This has been a journey accompanied by two little boys, born at the onset and ready to see this ‘thing’ depart. But they have had a ‘good enough mother’ who turned away from her thesis to mother them and then back again when she could. Add two ‘sometime’ daughters, grown now and left the nest and perhaps an understanding towards the length and winding road of this thesis becomes clearer. But it also had its own problems, less a metamorphosis and more a mutation. I began this thesis with Dr. Victoria Grace, who at the end of this thesis is now a Professor. Initially a different thesis entirely but she realised my heart wasn’t in it and told me to go away and write what it was I wanted to think and write about. Even at this early stage she stressed the journey of a thesis and the need then to write about something that you were passionate about. I came back with something so different to my initial inquiry Victoria had to ‘depart’. So it was that I was looking for another supervisor. Here then Associate Professor Rosemary du Plessis stepped in. Warmed by her encouragement I wrote a proposal and handed it in as my sons reached their six- month mark. My supervisor taking a good look at me, declared I needed to be kind to myself, to not imitate superwoman and go home, be a mother as she sensed that was i what I wanted to be. And it was, and for a time I enjoyed that role, adding in teaching at the University and time went on. But always those scratches in my mind, the wayward thoughts, the ‘what ifs’. … So I began again and as I started to write I realised that where I thought I wanted to go was not where I wanted to go at all. Telling me that talking to me was like having Julia Kristeva and I on one side of the room, a compliment as I saw it, and her on the other, Rosemary also had to leave. Psychoanalysis was not an interest for her, maybe the mother but definitely not psychoanalysis. I was told several times by several people that the thesis I wanted to undertake was unpopular – the mother – and unfashionable – psychoanalysis. And then Dr. Nabila Jaber stepped in. I had taught in her classes for several years and had a rapport with her – my academic mother I sometimes called her. And she has been with me ever since. I’m not sure that I can express the gratitude of having someone who just wanted me to finish and believed that I could. Victoria came back briefly and I thank her also, because on her return she bought with her a new, well perhaps enlarged, interest in psychoanalysis. It was lovely to have someone at last that I could talk to about the theory of psychoanalysis even if she was a Lacanian and I a Freudian (a bigger difference than you can imagine). We also parted but I think of that time fondly (mostly) because it was here, in conversation with Victoria that I began to get a sense of what this project could mean. But I can go no further without thinking back to that brief period of a group of us, a coven really, a solid group of four that opened up to others as they passed through the corridors. For a small amount of time we worked and ‘lived’ together on the fourth floor of the History building. Allowed to develop undisturbed we shared crisis, crunch-times and ideas. But more than that, we had a sense, as four PhD’s of companionship and of a knowledge of what doing a PhD entailed. The University broke us up, restructuring they called it and ‘our’ floor was given over to another department and we were spread far and wide. Sharon and Tanja have finished now with only Sally and I, almost in conjunction, to complete our theses. To all three I owe gratitude; on the ‘Kant’ floor we learnt the strength of each other and the knowledge that we would all get there in the end. Freud once said that the Interpretation of Dreams was written in ‘splendid isolation’. And I could say the same with this thesis, but without the splendid, mostly the ii isolation. Because it is to be isolated to be doing something that has no department or school or people that you can discuss ideas with or to wonder where the ideas are going and what do they mean. And the people around me…well, ‘Freud is just that man that talked about sex wasn’t he’? And the mother, well she is such a loaded term, concretised and ephemeral at once, how could we ever untangle or even think such a concept. To quote Freud once again, ‘we must live in the world after all’ (SE 20: 203). And as a mother, however the term is loaded, however the world of theory and also the lived world, the everyday world judges you, you just keep going. My biggest companion throughout this thesis has been Freud himself. I saw a commona lity between us from the start. Perhaps small commonalities, but then psychoanalysis is about the small, the insignificant, the forgotten. His migraines, his fear of poverty, his abhorrence of authority – he has ‘a learnt expression to it’ he says. Freud told Fliess that regarding poverty, he had a ‘constant fear of it’, having known ‘it’ and compared poverty to the ‘certain nervousness’ that one has for life. I understand then when Freud says that his state of mind depends on his earnings – ‘a certain prosperous livelihood improves his style!’ But for some reason, one of those unknown quantities in life, Freud reminds me of my mother. Reading Freud I hear my mother. Now I would not be so bold to confess that a small amount of Jewish blood may offer an inherited tendency towards some kind of knowing, an understanding perhaps. But I would ask, how big is small? And how strong are inherited, perhaps archaic knowledges? On the closing of these acknowledgements (of this thesis really) I thank my family who wondered ‘why’ more than once I am sure. To Brent, who hasn’t been here for a lot of it but who has the ability to make me smile, to make me laugh. To my funny little boys, with their quirky senses of humour and there often direct, more often that not complex way of looking at the world. They were born at the onset of this thesis and it was their growth that let me see the stages Freud wrote of, from the ‘bundle of id’ upwards. Of course Freud’s writing ‘out’ of the mother will be addressed in the following thesis but I still remember the little boy who wanted to find something similar about us (he’d tired of seeing if I had a penis), who finally said, with great relief and real excitement, ‘we both have hands’. iii And finally, in the context of last but not least, my mother. This thesis would never have been written without my mother, in the sense as Freud wrote it that we owe a depth of gratitude to the mother, after all she bought us into the world. But also my way of thinking, my ways of being really, mirror my mother a great deal. Acknowledgments are in some ways a place to reflect on how this project got to where it was and who helped to get it there. And when I say whom, I wonder about the possibility of the other, perhaps archaic voices that exist in the unconscious.