T h e R o l a n d H a r r i s T r u s t L i b r a r y

P S Y C H O T I C

M E T A P H Y S I C S

E r i c R h o d e

Foreword by

Donald Meltzer

T h e C l u n i e P r e s s

L o n d o n

K A R N A C B O O K S

First published in 1994 by H. Karnac (Books) Ltd. 58 Gloucester Road London SW7 4QY

Copyright © 1994 by Eric Rhode

All rights reserved

The rights of Eric Rhode to be identified as author of this work have been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted In any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Rhode, Eric Psychotic Metaphysics. — (Roland Harris Trust Library) I. Title II. Series 616.89

ISBN: 1 85575 074 0

Printed in Great Britain by BPC Wheatons Ltd, Exeter

L

Acknowledgements

My t h a n k s to Maria Rhode, Donald Meltzer, Meg Harris Williams, Cesare Sacerdotl, and Klara M. King for their help in many ways, and to the librarians of the London Library, the Tavistock Clinic Library, and the Museum of Mankind Library.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD Jdii by Donald Meltzer

INTRODUCTION An hypothesis concerning the rationality of mind. Mind emerges out of a certain ground, among whose constituents are: (1) the relationship posited by Melanie Klein between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions taken as a postulate to thought; (2) the good objects, described by Donald Meltzer, as instigating mind's buffeting between the two positions; (3) the buffeting—in W. R. Bion's terms, the state of catastrophic change—as the grit in the psychic oyster, which originates bodily and architectural creation and the discovery of form.

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Viii CONTENTS

PART ONE The u n b o r n

CHAPTER ONE 15 On representation. The turbulence by which the individual becomes an agent for the good objects.

CHAPTER TWO 24 Representation in the transference, with reference to a part-object picture of the n\other's spine as a support for both the foetus within her and for the feeding child (or patient) at the breast. Skeletal structures idealized in myth as stone constructs raised between earth and sky. Such rite centres separate those who are privileged from those who are not; in origin, this is a binary division between a mother-foetus couple that lives and a mother-foetus couple that dies, enacted at birth by the loss of the umbilical cord and the placenta. The central working model of the psychotic metaphysic: a binary split, implicit in the fetish-cults of umbilical cord and placenta among the pharaohs.

CHAPTER THREE 42 Clinical material concerning psychically unborn people who are intrusively identified with a dead mother-foetus assigned to the underworld.

CHAPTER FOUR 49 Clinical material concerning separated nwther-foetus couples who live in time schemes that move in opposing directions.

CHAPTER FIVE 6 3 Clinical material related to the fetish-cults of the pharaohs. A living twin triumphs over the victim in sacrifice, whose dispatch into the underworld transforms the profane into the sacred. The anti-symbolic and condensed representation of the sacred, as it appears in a patient's train of thought.

CONTENTS ix

CHAPTER SIX 77 Catastrophic change as determining phantasies of "being devoured" in birth. The nature of the "gap" between the separated twin couples: the myth of uninterrupted reverie and the myth of double annihilation. The dead twin foetus returns as a murderous avenger in narcissistic organizations, or as a "soma" inhibitor of the feeding couple, if its reality as a presence in the mind has been denied.

CHAPTER SEVEN 99 Creationist fears that an empty space or gap known as Chaos arises from some binary division in the sky. The mythic belief that a mother of twins is sacred because literally she is the sky. Anti-developmental "dramatic" conceptions of change in terms of disguises and dismemberments. Liberation from a sky/placenta, which is "read" as a constraining divine text. In its place a notion of evolving forms as a substrate to mythic thought.

CHAPTER EIGHT 110 Breakdown: natural concepts as liturgical symbols bridging the experience of symbolic death. Clinical material alluding to the mediating role played by the liturgical idea of water.

CHAPTER NINE The infant's need to confuse the nature of space in its mouth with the space in the mother's breasts (representing two wombs, each containing a twin) as one of the first embodiments of the relationship of microcosm to macrocosm. Infants who think to triumph over their mothers by ascribing the creativity of the womb to their mouths.

119

CHAPTER TEN "The membrane": an infant's surrogate for the umbilical cord, a form ofLewin's dream screen, sometimes

130

CONTENTS CONTENTS Xi

represented by a look in a mother's eyes, which can communicate liturgical meanings as well as immediate thoughts andfeelings. A dream that pivots on the significance of a view through a window. The dream concerns the appropriation of the breast and the transmission of death and madness into a twin self dispatched into the underworld. A later dream describes a reversal: the banished twin self manages to take control once more of the dream narrative.

CHAPTER ELEVEN "The membrane"

150 continued.

PART TWO Disappear ing i n to l ight

CHAPTER TWELVE The rite of passage in psychoanalysis. Liminal phenomena, and the persecutory emergence of symbol from sign language on the threshold of the depressive position. The need to hold on to a psychotic or primitive intuition concerning an underlying and impersonal geometric order to experience. "A substrate to the inner world anterior to the reach of nxetaphor."

161

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 198 Group dreams (sometimes in the form of ideologies) determine perception. Ingesting them may take interminable tracts of space and centuries of time.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 206 Mania and terror: modern technology, and a switch of roles between the triumphant twin and the twin who is destroyed. The importance of recognition as an experience that can occur on the threshold of the depressive position.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 216 Fears of difference: in relation to other cultures, to changes in initiation rites, and to the eruption of liminal iconography on the depressive threshold. Occasions on which otherness as an inner-world concept is confused with annihilation.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 225 On being at the point of a perspectival contraction. Clinical material concerning the victim in sacrifice. In paranoid-schizoid understanding, the site of the victim—the altar—marks the spot where the crossing is made. In terms of the inner world, the site is the space between the feeding mother's breasts.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Aspects of West-African culture identified with the lost mother-foetus couple. Its impact on Picasso. Cultural cross-fertilization described in terms of a rite of passage. The meanings of mask versus face; idol versus icon.

177 CHAPTER NINETEEN Galileo and Descartes, and the modification in meaning of liminal symbolism. The relationship of the loss of the aesthetic of primitivism to the machine-world view. Tokens of catastrophic change in the writings of Descartes.

235

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Cultural cross-fertilization. Paranoid-schizoid conversion as against depressive recognition. Stolen goods, and the revival of aesthetic intuition in the west.

187 CHAPTER TWENTY An Asmat canoe exemplifies the kind of phantasies about space that underlie the modernist discovery of catastrophic change as a factor in the primitive aesthetic.

240

Xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The revulsion and fascination of certain European travellers in west Africa echo the feelings that the triumphant self has concerning the twin it has banished. The paranoid-schizoid fear of otherness as annihilation.

247 FOREWORD

Donald Meltzer

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The rediscovery of the primitive aesthetic. Baudelaire, Cezanne, Picasso.

252

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The relationship of Victor Turner's conception of the rite of passage to Melanie Klein's two positions and to spatial intuition in the writings of W. R. Bion and Esther Bick. The idea of the imaginary twin: W. R. Bion and R. E. Money-Kyrle. Clinical material concerning the nature of the psychosomatic. Donald Meltzer and the good objects.

269

AFTERWORD The fetish as inhibitor of thought.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

287

303

315

Probably every thinking individual eventually finds that his experience of life and his knowledge derived from education through contact with other minds places h im

on the rim of h i s culture. There he not only experiences the catastrophic changes of personal development b u t can observe and think about these bouts of turbulence. Goethe rushing away from Weimar a t three o'clock on a Monday morning to fly from his friends to the golden land of Italy serves as a prototype of a personal periodic happening. At such moments the works of ar t tha t we encounter have a part icular impact. We suddenly experience the strugglings of another art is t-scientist and gain hear t .

Psychoanalysis h a s been a child of the twentieth century and h a s had its own moments of catastrophic change that have transformed it In sudden leaps. Its most recent leap in the dark, which takes it into the next century, known as the post-Kleinian leap, embraces mainly the work of Bion and Money-Kyrle. These two have linked the efforts to describe the

xiii

Xiv FOREWORD

imaginative life of the mind and its inner world to the forms and phenomena of the outside world. It is no surpr ise tha t its interest in the foetus and its emergence into this external world should be seen to condense as preconceptions the events of countless millennia since mind emerged from body through the invention of symbol formation. This process, by which the preconception searches the world of experience for its mat ing to form a n idea, a conception, produces the uni t s of thought by which the individual builds his picture of the world, no two identical b u t possibly congruent enough to allow for communication. This communication between self and internal objects would seem to consti tute creative thought. Such a view envisages a continual potential commerce between self and objects in preconception a n d suitable realizations, for unsui tab le ones produce mis-conceptions.

It is to this point in the process of thought tha t Mr Rhode addresses himself in his search through li terature, ar t , and cultural anthropology for the precursors of this essence of catastrophic change. Bion's imaginative conjectures envisage the new idea as being in existence and seeking a thinker. Mr. Rhode studies in some detail the opposition to this conjunction and shows some of the ways in which it can manifest itself in the primitive levels of transference and countertransference, recognizable from careful s tudies of the infant-mother relationship.

P S Y C H O T I C

M E T A P H Y S I C S

The title Psychotic Metaphysics covers two books. One was written immediately after the other. Both deal with the s ame set of problems, and I begin with an introduction tha t describes the na tu re of the problems. Ensuing chapters provide clinical evidence.

INTRODUCTION

An hypothesis concerning the r a t i o n a l i t y of mind. Mind emerges out of a certain ground, among whose constituents are: (1) the relationship posited by Melanie Klein between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions taken as a postulate to thought; (2) the good objects, described by Donald Meltzer, as instigating mind's buffeting between the two positions; (3) the buffeting—in W. R. Bion's terms, the state of catastrophic change—as the grit in the psychic oyster, which originates bodily and architectural creation and the discovery of form.

I n her 1935 paper, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States", and in her 1946 paper on schizoid mechanisms, Melanie Klein inferred from an ex

perience of h u m a n interactions—In part icular from an experience of the mother- infant relationship—two types of mental configuration: the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions, each of which can transform into the other under the influence of love or hate.

Melanie Klein's unders tanding of the two positions invites exploration in many directions. Here is one among the many directions.

It is possible to describe the movement from the paranoid-schizoid position into the depressive position without allusion to the instinctual and to elucidate the transference without resort to such extra-transferential criteria as biological factors. An infant can look into its mother 's face a n d intuit tha t the radiance in her expression is true of an inward radiance, an integrity of outward and inward that is iconic. The discovery of

INTRODUCTION

the depressive position reveals that thought is similarly iconic: that thought exists in its own right and is t rue to itself a n d carries within itself a dynamic for transformation. Under the impress of the depressive position, the ingredients of the paranoid-schizoid position intensify, and in their intensification they can either increase the dissolution of meaning or br ing about a transfiguration that is prototypic of transfiguration in art . Sensat ions tha t are persecutory in themselves are reformed into a meaningful constellation.

The discovery of the depressive position, and of the mysterious threshold to it, which is the area of Bion's catastrophic change, transformed the na tu re of the transference. It was no longer a way of elucidating some unresolved b u r d e n concerning the pa s t (the facsimile theory, or the theory of transference a s a form of mental digestion); it had become a means of elucidating structures that are specific to the human mind—structures that disclose how mind originates in a rationality of ideas.

One such idea is otherness as annihilation, which is a motive for entry into the s ta te of catastrophic change—specifically, the geometric-seeming idea of the baby in the breas t . When translated into space and time, the idea of the baby in the breas t becomes a conception of the future a s without the self, a s in the belief that one day the mother in the transference will have another baby who will take over the pat ient 's place.

Defining the depressive position helped to bring into focus all the transference difficulties that can impede therapeut ic progress; any a t tempt to cross the threshold tests out and demonstrates the existence of all disablements. It also h a s each of u s face something that is essential and unique in h u m a n na tu re tha t determines our social forms.

Melanie Klein's 1935 paper Is for the mos t pa r t devoted to describing the nearly insurmountable difficulties tha t face any therapist in helping a patient over the threshold. At the same time, the discovery of the threshold endorsed the irrefutable power of transference to be associated to a boundless optimism. Implicitly, Melanie Klein showed the transference to be a function of reason as love. It is one of the postula tes of its progress that the inscrutable pat terning of liminal phenomena (images whose s t ruc tures find their origin in such emblems as the mask or the labyrinth) will resolve itself into a meaningful

INTRODUCTION 3

communicat ion. As a function of reason, transference is always bound to succeed; failure in therapy depends on such factors a s the therapist 's ineptness in being able to read the evidence, for there is no notion of inadequacy in the idea of the transference itself, a s there is no notion of inadequacy in the idea of reason as love.

Thought as reason, as transference, contains within itself the means of its own development. An environment may nourish a mind, b u t an environment does not create a mind. A foetus is related to a very restricted externality—and yet conceivably a foetus may be able to undergo the transformation of the two positions, and to know the wondrous transfiguring power of reason, before it h a s entered the world.

Chart ing the depressive position grants the therapist an opportunity to observe how ideas derive from two sources, which are also sources for the transference. One of the sources is mental pain, which plays such an important role in the movement into the depressive position. Mind is endlessly, if unconsciously, in negotiation with itself about the meaning of some pain that is intrinsic to i ts existence. Thinking is modified less by way of sense information than by the par t pa in plays in its transformations. Unable to bear the pain to more than a limited extent, mind is liable to call into doubt the existence of pain in the core of mind tha t generates meaning.

The other source for ideas is the ideal. Mind h a s to have had some relationship to its source in the ideal, if it is to acquire any dimension in its unders tanding of actual people and places as objects in thought . The generation of depressive meaning requires the functioning of the concepts of goodness, t ruth, and beauty, which na tu r e alone cannot endorse. Any inhibition of the functioning will activate the paranoid-schizoid retreat , which degrades objects in thought and consequently is liable to perceive them as vengeful revenants or persecutory husks . If mind enters the depressive position and takes on responsibility for its degradations, it may experience the objects in thought as messengers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Bodies exist a s agents for interchanges between different personalities. But by implication the theory of the depressive

INTRODUCTION

position denies any s ta tus to body as a self-sufficient fact a n d it tends to deny s t a tus to facts a s means to self-sufficiency. At most, a fact can claim authori ty for itself as a sign or a failed symbol, and a sign in the semantics of the mind is a n unreliable form of communication.

If bodily sensat ion is described as a fact. It is described so on the unders tanding that a "fact" is an example of a proto-meaning. Signs are representat ions tha t tend to fall apar t , or to relate to each other misleadlngly, or to become emblems in which par t s of the self are muddled in phan tasy with par t s of a mother 's body. An actually unknowable site, the interior to the mother 's body, can be appropriated and possessed by means of a type of linkage that Hanna Segal (1957) h a s defined a s the symbolic equation.

In metaphor, a s opposed to Segal-type equations, the relationship of par t s a s sumes a dissimilarity a s well a s a similarity between themselves; metaphors require that sort of ampli tude in mental space. Segal-type equations, on the other hand , postulate that the discovery of a similarity between par t s h a s the power to annu l any evidence of difference. ("If I am like you, then I have the power to become you.") They abolish the idea of the figurative, which a s sumes tha t difference within l ikeness is possible, and they claim (as does the cloning reflections of two facing mirrors) tha t all forms of comparison indicate the same two-dimensional appearance.

In a n evolution of Melanie Klein's theory, Bion proposed that the language of signs usual ly leads to misrepresentat ion, whereas the language of the symbol, which is a language tha t emphasizes difference in similarities, is a paradigm for truthful communication. The presence of the corporeal in thought , the corporeal as idea, in effect provides a system of communication, either by sign or symbol.

The mapping out of the pa th from paranoid-schizoid to depressive position covers failures in mental development as well as moments of achievement. If the therapist is negligent, the movement into development can falter or be submerged by forms of destruction that are basically suicidal. The approach to a loving relationship can precipitate a retreat into s ta tes of incoherence and self-annihilation.

Melanie Klein created an environment in which it was possible for Bion to p u t forward the concept of foetal preconception.

INTRODUCTION 5

which incipiently is a concept of pure thought. It implies that the capacity to reason (to reason even about reason itself) may precede the capacity to think about na ture , and it may be in operation dur ing the time of pre-birth. Such possibilities in speculation allow for the revival of the neoplatonist hypothesis tha t mind as a recipient for a pain, and for a system of ideas tha t is unknowable in origin, h a s logical priority over the conception of mind as a receptor for body sensation.

Reversal in perspective

Bion writes about psychopathological uses of reversal in perspective, in which the patient, possibly without conscious guile, reverses the context in meaning of everything the therapist says, pe rhaps as a way of dealing with the inscrutability of the picture of the future to which the therapist bears witness. (The liminal phenomena that occurs on the threshold of the depressive position can take the form of the dangerous meanings represented by the Oedipus Sphinx—meanings that face anyone on the verge of depressive renewal.) The therapist is misled into the belief that both part ies are in agreement and tha t between them harmony reigns.

An act of transformation of this kind is in itself neutra l and sometimes possibly benign. On occasion the transformations between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions can entail a 180-degree conversion in meaning that is compatible with a n increasing depth in unders tanding. In the ar ts and the s t ruc tura l conception of mythology, concepts of reversal and of perspective, either singly or together, can be used constructively.

Claude Levi-Strauss (1973) traces the condensation and collapse of myths (as though they were dying stars) in a process of transformation similar to reversal in perspective:

Mythological systems, after passing through a minimal expression, recover their original fullness on the other side of the threshold. But their reflection is inverted, a bit like a bundle of light rays entering into a camera oscura through a pin-hole opening and forced by this obstacle to cross over

6 INTRODUCTION

each other. The same image, seen rightside-up outside, is reflected upside-down in the camera, [pp. 259-260]

Conceivably, the foetal mind is presented with a reversal in perspective a t the time tha t it moves from the closed environment of being within the u te rus to the bewildering environment of the postnatal world. It is as though the c i rcumstances of bir th impelled a reversal in perspective of the motifs that const i tute the thinking of the foetus (Levi-Strauss's "bundle of light-rays"), so that the elements of a magical system become, in reversal, the concepts by which na tu re can be thought about.

As a system of Junctions, mind is dependent on body; to this extent, experience derives from the corporeal, and the ego is body-ego. But mind is more than a system of functions: it exhibits powers; and in any consideration of mental powers, the assumpt ion that meaning might derive from sensat ion is p u t in doubt.

Powers erupt and spill over the physical boundary . The source of humani ty is something other than the h u m a n . Freud thought of the id as a witches' cauldron; more generally, mind is a crucible for energies tha t seem to come from "another world".

Human beings are capable of ac ts of inspirat ion—and of atrocities—that cannot be imagined without the thought tha t "this act is surely beyond h u m a n comprehension". At the core of a h u m a n self bound to na tu re lies a not-self tha t requires a s u p e r h u m a n or p re te rhuman description. This is a psychological, not a theological point, though it invites translat ion into theological terms. Foetal thought originates in a n unders tanding of the immanence in thought of the demonic a n d the divine; conversely, the neonate m u s t come to t e rms with a n experience of na tu re in which presences of the superna tura l are slight and realized a t most by way of implication.

The good objects

In order to consider the na tu re of foetal experience, I will t u rn to the theory of internal good objects which Donald Meltzer h a s

INTRODUCTION

evolved out of the good objects theory that is implied by Melanie Klein's 1935 paper .

It is possible tha t the good objects, as elements in foetal thinking, precede the coming into being of parents , nur turers , caretakers , and other agents for the good objects. In this respect, mind a s the site of self-awareness h a s only a secondary dependence on body or bodily function; its prime dependence is on the presence of some otherness within, a ground to the self tha t cannot be known a n d over which the self h a s no proprietary rights.

To be born is to enter space and time and to become a being in history, whose sense of experience a n d unders tanding of knowledge s tems from the premonitions of a body ego. The thought of the newborn is unde r p ressure to be of a historical kind. But history and na tu re are not seamless. Any act of observation in the world of na tura l process is liable to become a t some point an observation of what is not there: an absence, or s ta te of discontinuity, tha t can only be made sense of by the emergence of a poetic symbol tha t appears to come out of the nowhere of an unknowability, like a n inspiration.

An empiricist who denied validity to the poetic symbol, while recognizing the essential na tu re of the concept of unknowability, might a t tempt to account for the void by claiming tha t the categories of p a s t and future are the archives of unknowability and provide the space that mind needs to be able to think about the present . But it is doubtful whether the pas t or the future a s providing such spaces can offer more than a skeletal representat ion of the t ru th .

A young woman speaks of a painful loneliness a s a hole in the s tomach, which might be the hole in the head that in popular par lance nobody wants . An infant leaning against its mother 's abdomen will concretely sense the future within her. The hole within is the place that one day may contain babies; in a more developed configuration, it is the absent breast . It is not only the b reas t that is lost in death, it is the pleni tude of the u te rus a s the future itself. As well a s being a biological organ, the u t e r u s is a prototype for the poetic symbol in i ts fullness; it is the source and site of the psychotic metaphysic.

Retrieving the poetic symbol, the "lost" conceptions of the psychotic metaphysic tha t do not derive from nature , is a task

8 INTRODUCTION

tha t confronts anyone who h a s been born. Coleridge told Poole in a letter tha t when his father first pointed out the s t a r s to him, he was able to feel awe because already he had a preconception of awesome space, which a reading of the Arabian Nights h a d realized in him.

The motifs of foetal thought take on meaning within the context of myth; and mythic thinking is essential to the s t ructure of the uterine setting. The foetus and the placenta oscillate in thought by way of the umbilical cord, a s though they were twins in a s tate of mutua l projective identification. They discover in each other microcosm and macrocosm.

The notion of an eternal centre from which poetic or group transference symbols emanate is carried over into types of postnatal thought cognate with pre-birth intuition. In ancient China, collective representat ions "emanate from a sort of centre" (Granet, 1934, p. 112). A light pours into the cave to endorse the authori ty of a king, or an omphalos, or an altar, or the victim on the altar. The dream ideograms, to which mind a t taches .itself, seem to arise out of nowhere.

Foetal thought is pre-epistemological. On this basis it is possible to suppose that it h a s no awareness of the concepts of credulity and scepticism, and it has no means to differentiate dream thinking from hallucination. It receives supposi t ions without foundation, which are like rumours over which it h a s no power of assessment . Whether this unavailability of ground is evidence of revelation or un t ru th , it cannot know. The foetus lives by way of faith.

One foetal myth asser t s that in the beginning exists the unknowability known as the good objects. Foetal mind is formed out of this beginning; and foetal body is formed out of mind. Preconception implies tha t the foetal body is a metaphor for mind, in the same way as psychosomatic disorders can be viewed as metaphors for a type of thought.

The good objects impel various forms of conceptualization. They give meaning to the concept of eternity—a concept tha t h a s no place in nature, bu t which compels at tention in any theory of the mind's powers. They manifest themselves a s an illumination or first light comparable to Descartes ' na tu ra l light of reason, a radiance whose impingement on thought precedes the awareness of nature .

INTRODUCTION

Experience of the good objects a s "reason" is a determining factor in the development that may later resul t from the na tura l enquiries of infancy. The "reason" that confronts the foetus is not ratiocination: being without soundings in nature , it might be magic. It is the primary imagination by which, in Coleridge's definition, the eternal act of creation is enacted continuously in every finite mind (Watson, 1975, p. 167).

"Reason" can disclose itself as the aesthetic presence of changing proportions, a danqe of shapes , which maturely art iculates itself as mathemat ics and music. If the foetus were never to be born, or never to know the unpredictability of na ture , it might imagine tha t the laws of na tu re preceded the existence of na tu re itself. [The measure of the first days in the Genesis creation, for instance, is a liturgical and not a na tura l conception of time as changing proportion. Liturgy is the ritual form of the poetic symbol; it seeks to retrieve a knowledge in pa r t lost a t bir th because the conditions that meet the infant in bi r th are unable to validate the knowledge.]

Platonism as sumes (as in the creationist myth of the Timaeus) that the powers of mind can commune with the powers of mathematics and music, whether or not the natural world exists. Clearly, mathemat ics and music reflect some transcendental aspect to mental powers, which is unrelated to any source in na ture . Their epistemological s t a tus in the world is perplexing.

Presumably, an ability to appreciate sounds in utero depends on some preconception of measure tha t precedes the first hearing of any sound.

Post-birth s t ruc tures in mind seek for the type of historical knowledge known as recognition. Nature and history cannot account for the dimensions of recognition because they cannot be the source for the mythological assumpt ions that underlie the formation of recognition.

The transit ion a t the time of bir th between the two perspectives—of body's dependence on mind and mind's dependence on body—can fail in various ways. The newborn may be unable to tolerate the conditions of existing in na tu re and history and refuse to give u p the mythological type of thinking that applied to its former situation: in which case it may survive in delusion (the psychosis in the psychotic metaphysic having become

-lir-

10 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 11

virulent), or it may live within the narrow compass of foetal inspiration as a damaged type of art ist . Alternatively, it may deny any reality to its former knowledge and exist within the na tura l world, dissociated from its former self and unable to find any validation for dreaming.

Such psychic failures in bir th possibly depend on some breakdown in the perception of the rationality of the good objects. Reason may contain within itself the preconception of anti-reason, a negation that takes the biological form of an untempered and disconnected ground to experience. Later in the book I propose (with clinical evidence) that migraines and other phenomena tha t Gowers described long ago as "the borderland of epilepsy" may be similar to the scintillations of the untempered ground.

Mythology often gives evidence of the untempered ground, a s when it appears to be the residue of a mode of communication that h a s been destroyed, a deteriorated version of the angelic speech of mathemat ics and music. Frequently i ts subject mat ter is concerned with the theme of retrieval from a universal catastrophe.

The bundles of light-rays that travel through the pinhole of Levi-Strauss's (1973) camera oscura take on the property of myth when they are related to the many myths about light that dwell on loss and damage as well a s renewal, a s in the myth of the Objibwa Indians of nor thern America, in which six gods rise up out of the ocean in order to parley with the Objibwa peoples (Levi-Strauss, 1964).

Inadvertently perhaps , one of the gods unveils his eyes. His glance kills a h u m a n being on whom it falls; and he is obliged to re turn to the ocean in disgrace. This is why the Objibwa have five gods, ra ther than the six that any classification of the universe requires a s the essential categories of meaning. The Objibwa seek to compensate for their deficient semant ic system by resorting to metaphoric thinking (p. 19); in a similar way, h u m a n beings are obliged to extemporize meanings with inadequate resources. They have to give up thinking by way of concrete equation.

In pre-birth, the mind is turned towards a n illumination tha t cannot be tolerated. Ancient Greek myth h a s Zeus's t hunderbolt strike down Semele, who is seven months pregnant

with Dionysus. In another myth, his lightning incinerates four of the Titans who have cooked and eaten the sacred child Dionysus. Yet again, the lightning is transformed into a n eagle tha t eats the liver of the Titan Prometheus, who had thought to steal the power of fire (identified with the sacred element in the body of the infant Dionysus).

The binary appears a s a theme at this point: there is a splintering of the light (and one splinter falls away as Lucifer). Certain myths propose the split a s occurring in the mind a t birth: one twin is identified with the power and movement of the sun; the other twin m u s t bear the guilt of fallen light and travel a s a mirror image through the shades of the underworld in identification with a s u n that emits darkness .

In A. M. Hocart 's (1927) account of primitive representat ion (with which the first par t begins) the priest-king is conjoined to the powers of the s u n at the moment of his coronation, in an equation reminiscent of Segal's concrete equation by sign. The group is granted by way of a dream the idea of the king as a poetic symbol, whose function, in containing the essence of solar energies, is a version of the function by which the group inhibits its members ' craving for incest. The idea of the king is as a group transference object intended to hold in check s ta tes of unbounded psychotic sensation.

It seems likely tha t within the psychotic metaphysic notions of evil derive from some foetal inability to tolerate the proximity of the good. If the good objects are unveiled, or without insulation, or without the moderation of thermostatic control, or without some means to stabilize perceptions of space a n d time (psychic equivalents of telescopes, microscopes, chronometers), they will blind anyone who looks a t them, a s does the Platonic sun .

The good objects are beyond the capacity of h u m a n understanding; and this is why they cannot be separated from the possibilities of psychotic invasion. The sun that Socrates describes in his parable of the Cave, which is a blinding source of revelation, is not an object in nature : it is a light that derives from pre-birth; and, conceivably, a s a psychotic fact, it could be a p lanet that emanates absolute cold.

PART ONE

T H E U N B O R N

On becoming emperor, Mahasudassana set out to circumambulate his new realms, beginning at the East and following the course of the sun. At each of the four quarters he received the homage and fealty of the vassal kings. . . .

[Similarly,] the Cambodian king goes round the city in the direction of the hands of a clock, and at each of the cardinal points is received by dignitaries, washes his face and sprinkles the earth to show that he takes possession of the ground. . . . Like Mahasudassana, he promulgates rules of conduct.

Hocart, 1927, pp. 80, 82

A person who is by nature dominated by the subjective factor is committed to a life of faith whether he likes it or not, since all his important mental processes are unconscious. If he does not continually seek expression for his faith, for his sense of the force by which he is lived, then . . . his dependence on the unseen within himself will be a continual torment.

Milner, 1987, p. 5

CHAPTER ONE

On representation. The turbulence by which the

individual becomes an agent for the good objects.

To be truly a n agent for an idea is "to have an experience as". And "to have an experience as" is to come to know how inadequate you can be. Something is a t stake; you

take on the harness , bear the brunt , and at best pull through. In parenting, to give an instance, you become an agent for

some formative principle. Arguably, parent ing is a function and not a representation—it might be argued that a paren t is j u s t a name covering anyone who "happened to be around" at the time of a procreation or a pregnancy or a bir th or through years of nur ture ; b u t a nominalism of this kind does not engage with the si tuation tha t I wish to describe.

For a brief while, paren ts are agents for a child's good objects: the na tu re of these good objects is unknowable yet approachable through myth. Philip Roth's story about a n unsuccessful theatre agent who writes to Albert Einstein, offering to make h im a success in show business , gets the idea exactly. The theat re agent could be any paren t encouraged to enter the agency bus ines s by the appearance of a newborn.

15

16 THE UNBORN

Intuiting the presence of the infant's good objects, which, like goodness itself, is unlimited in potential, the paren t would be right to think of its newborn in terms of genius. There is genius in every new manifestation of life! Perhaps the pa ren t takes on the newborn with expectations that are too worldly. Parents uphold something, pe rhaps for the first time in their lives, and in their upholding, mysteriously, the formative principle would seem to work through them. They may expect to a s sume this responsibility, b u t so does anyone who takes on care for others.

Priest-kings in former times thought to acquire power through an identification with the sun ' s essence (Hocart, 1927).' The s u n warms the earth, and the crops grow; the s u n brings prosperity to the kingdom. It is tempting, a n d improbable, to think tha t the priest-kings identified with a na tura l energy. Nature is a concept that takes on meaning in the depressive position, and it required the genius of Aristotle to evolve it. The s u n tha t the priest-king identifies with is a preternatural object, a god, or something the gods use—which is group talk for a transference object tha t carries the power in the group's craziness. It exists before any differentiation between inside a n d outside the mind h a s come into being; it is proto-psychological and perhaps originates in foetal intuition; its being carried over into na tu re shows it to be liturgical in meaning. (A liturgical object is one tha t carries over meaning from pre-birth times.) It is only with hindsight that it is possible to describe it a s a representation of psychotic energies, a mythic, paranoid-schizoid emblem for a psychic power stolen from the good objects.

1Henri Frankfort, among others, has criticized the universal motive in Hocart's thesis, which produces "a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike" (Frankfort. 1951, p. 6). "Cultural setting can modify identifications of ruler and deity that at first sight look similar. The Mesopotamian king was, like the pharaoh, charged with maintaining harmonious relations between human society and the supernatural powers; yet he was emphatically not one of these, but a member of the community. In Egypt, however, one of the gods had descended among men. . . . For (the Hebrew prophets) all values were ultimately attributes of God; man and nature were devaluated, and every attempt to establish a harmony with nature was a futile dissipation of effort" (Frankfort, 1948, p. 6).

CHAPTER ONE 17

Through the rites of coronation, the priest-king hopes to obtain control over energies that permit h im to integrate the group. Otherwise the group would splinter into factions, each of which would think to appropriate the sun ' s essence. The priest-king's model is Prometheus, who stole the power of fire from Zeus. Promethean fire is mythic fire, a n d it is something other than na tu ra l fire.

The superst i t ion that governments in power tend to win elections if the weather is good, though trivial, carries some t ru th abou t the magical way in which governors represent the needs of those they govern. Good or wise guardians are not enough; we need guardians who have the magical essence and who br ing good fortune.

In myth, a n infant, looking into its mother 's eyes, comes to believe (in a n echo of pre-birth) that her formative principle was the fire of the sun ; it senses the warmth of her breas t and thinks of her procreative powers as stove-like or incubatory: she is the goddess of the kitchen as well as of other places. Beyond that , she reveals a unifying ground, some formative principle, pe rhaps emblemized (as the Milesian philosophers thought) a s sun , water, or the unbounded . To this infant, a father is like a mother , not least when he is maternal .

Both paren t s have the function of encouraging a capacity in the child of being able to experience meanings, while realizing perhaps tha t meanings originate through some function of the child's good objects. A parent s t ands at some psychic j unc tu re between solidities and powers (and presumably in order for this to happen for the child, its good objects do so too). A child will discover parenta l qualities in s tars , trees, and stones; and in s tars , trees, and s tones discovers its paren ts (as the primal gods), without realizing the cost its parents incur in upholding the fabric of its world. The misleading idea of na tu re as a continuity is bought for the child by those who sus ta in it through its earliest time of need. If its pa ren t s should abandon it, it m u s t face a Lear-like s torm and know an air more chill than any actual air.

Far from "knowing" the formative principle directly, a parent embodies it intuitively, by being both the s t a r s and trees a n d s tones in the child's kingdom, while at the same time epitomizing something else, the realm of powers, of cosmic

18 THE UNBORN

principles, the often buffoonish, metamorphosing family of the gods. Through an atmosphere of good h u m o u r a n d sense of play (fostered perhaps by its experience of its parents ' relationship), hopefully the child will be able to tolerate its desire to murder rivals and to at tack the formation of meaning.

Parents have moments when they are most themselves. A child will observe a parent ' s habi ts and unconscious behaviour and imitate them. It may observe its pa ren t s with a canniness in perception that it reserves for no one else. Some of the habi t s it observes are disabling (you would, a s parent , be a shamed to think tha t they h a d been observed); some less so. You may be unaware of your enabling habi ts because your pass ion for them blinds you to anything else. A paren t who loves reading may find tha t its child takes to reading easily.

Parents and other types of nu r tu re r natural ly feel inadequate, insofar as they are aware of a lifelong immersion in a psychopathology that could, if unchecked, h a r m the child. The Crow Indians of Montana have a myth, recorded by R. H. Lowie, in which the coyote, as trickster or transformer, becomes uni ted with the sun , as supreme deity.

In the cycle connected with him as transformer he possesses hardly one redeeming feature. He is obscene, a fool, a coward and utterly lacking in self control. Yet the moment he becomes associated with the creative deity all this disappears. [Radin, 1924, p. 25]

Here, succinctly, is a process of transformation by which an individual might become a parent . The coyote as trickster is transformer and culture-hero; his powers for destruct ion can be harnessed to the formative principle and used in nur tu re . In some ideal construction, the child perceives the s u n as a central and unifying meaning in its parents ; and at the same time it perceives something else that is more bewildering. Not the monotheism of the formative principle, b u t the polytheism of the tricky argumentative gods, the strife of pa ren t s in argu-^ ment . Here to be faced is the realm of confusion in meanings, of lies and psychopathological intrusions. But the trickster can be harnessed to the formative principle, the sun , and—when transfigured—become some crucial transforming element in the evolution of meaning.

CHAPTER ONE 19

The infant begins to glimpse the good objects it will never directly know through the interstices of experience. In a sense, the distinction of inside and outside the self gives a misleading impression of this type of intuition, in which (as in certain myths) the dreaming and the waking self are not really separated. Meanings for the infant do not begin as denotative or fixed elements; a t some stage in their evolution, as contained in its parents , it feels them to be specifically in the breas t .

The incipient meanings exist in flux, molten steel in a furnace of meanings—a sun furnace, which a certain type of child will th ink of distrustingly as the uterine place that makes all women dangerous to it—a vision of meaning in transformation that cannot be distinguished from the despairing presumpt ion tha t all meaning automatically enters into the fee of the trickster and liar.

In Plato's parable of the s u n and the cave, the self in the cave, its neck clamped so that it can look in one direction, and one direction only, m u s t look at, and believe in, an unfolding procession of delusions. Some tyrant appears to feed errors of meaning into the trapped self, in the form of lies. Only by escaping from the cave and looking into the s u n is the self liberated from the condition of having been suppressed. Looking into the s u n in this Platonic way is comparable to the experience of becoming a paren t or guardian of others—a moment of conversion that is, if sincere, a chance for the s u n and the trickster to work together, a s necessary elements in the makings of meaning.

Obviously things can go wrong. Someone may become a parent or guardian insincerely. But the fact that some people use parent ing to cheat, or public office to defraud, does not invalidate the theory of representation, even though, when it is looked a t closely, the theory turns out to be contrary to good sense. One bad parent , or even an unlimited number of bad parents , cannot discredit the activity of parenting. But the satirist, in exposing fraudulence, may aim for the wrong target, by locating the corruption in the function of representation ra ther than in the individual representation itself, perhaps because he finds tha t this theory of representation is so intransigent in its rejection of the aberrant .

20 THE UNBORN

Roland Barthes 's (1973) celebrated criticism of the 1950s U.S. exhibition of photographs known as The Family of Man raised issues of this kind. The exhibition gave a n impression of certain universals in h u m a n experience. A considerable art is try in both photography and choice of photographs persuasively p u t over a "humanist" representation. Anyone writing abou t western culture in the 1950s—significantly, writing about the cul ture of the Cold War—would find the catalogue to this show a revealing document. It caught a spirit of the times: b u t Barthes, with reason, sensed some hidden persuas ion (though surely no more than he might have sensed in the American Depression photographs of Walker Evans or the Italian neo-realist films out of which the aesthetic of this exhibition derived); and he went to the hear t of the problem, a s he saw it, by at tacking the belief that there might be some unchanging essence or generality in experience, some underlying commitment to an idea—on the grounds that this belief in a n unchanging essence obliterated any meaning that history or social change might have. He thought tha t the powerful corporate style of the exhibition aimed to reinforce the spectator 's t rus t in the ideology of American capitalism: specifically, the belief tha t forever the labourer will labour and the employer maintain his power.

Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little . . . one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature. Progressive humanism, on the contrary, must always remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture, constantly to scour nature, its "laws" and "limits", in order to discover History there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical, [p. 101]

Barthes thought to infer that the misuses of representat ion would discredit the principle of representat ion on which they were based; indeed, would discredit any belief in the. individual's ability to par take of the universal. Not only cheats pretend to be agents for the idea and to defraud those in their care; anyone who thinks to be agent for an idea h a s entered into a Platonic and (extremely, for Barthes) a Fascist alliance. He

CHAPTER ONE 21

implies, without stating, that the only t ru th lies in nominalism. On these grounds, a father and mother have nothing in common with any other father and mother, apar t from the fact of a nomenclature .

The a rgument is so involved with its own idea of freedom that it takes no account of the salutary and informative shock that can occur when someone becomes an agent for the idea. As agent for a power you had known nothing about, you waver and hope to acquire some s tamina. Suddenly, you realize, other lives depend on you; and if you stumble, they will be endangered. Obviously you could betray the commitment. But the fact tha t the possibility of betrayal is there does not discredit the commitment itself.

I am s tanding on the westbound Central-line platform at Oxford Circus underground station, and I am looking at the poster for a Henry Moore exhibition. I see the representat ion of a s tone carving of a mother and child, and I recognize tha t this is other than the s tudy of one part icular mother and child. Moore, the object seems to tell me, is concerned with communicating some essence of motherhood and with inviting me to appreciate the tenderness a n d s t rength that his own markings of the s tone convey. It is a s t a tue about maternity that in the manner of its making activates a n appreciation of maternity. Mothers, it implies, par take in some labyrinthine and occult community of interests. Mothering is not only about origins; it invites me to think about some originality, or prototype, behind all mothering.

I might picture this perception as being like a genealogical table tha t ascends in narrowing perspective and increasing ideality to the perfect primal mother—perhaps the very subject of Moore's s tone carving. The mythic ideal mother is an appropriate subject for anyone who aspires to make an ideal work of art. The ideal work of ar t takes the spectator under its wing, as though it, too, were a mother, and invites the spectator to join some order of cherished children.

Motherhood of this kind is an ideal that can be lived u p to— or be failed. One becomes an agent for an idea. In this, all mothers and children are blurred copies of some prototype.

2 2 THE UNBORN

Moore's mother and child are deities, a primal couple, the mother and founder of a revelation; at the same time. In tactile suggestion, they derive from sensat ions and inclinations of the hear t tha t presumably Moore himself would have experienced as a one-time infant or, later, as an adul t observer of mothers .

In seeing some potential kinship in all mothers , the Moore s tone carving implies a kinship in modes of representat ion. It works through a shor thand, hinting at its kinship to early Renaissance sculpture or to Mexican art, etc. Someone looking at the Moore may congratulate themselves on picking u p the allusions and think to have entered the sacred family of art , in which all things become one, and all issues of oneness become issues of origin. Against this view would be the nominalis t belief tha t the at t r ibutes shared by all mothers a re so few or trivial tha t they can be dismissed. Admittedly, all mothers undergo the biological conditions of procreation and bir th. But why should these be thought of a s qualitative? A mother may have undergone them in some dissociated state. The nominalist allows no notion of procreation and bir th a s mental concepts, concerning experiences endured—nor with the notion of a n idea (of the mother) a s accruing through experiences tha t have transformed the self. The nominalist believes that the concept of mother may have some use in questions of law; b u t it confuses any picture he might have had of whatever relationship, if any, there might have been between the offspring and the woman who h a s given birth to it. For him, a mother is no more than a word with an awkward moralistic edge: and having babies is no different from clearing yourself out in other ways.

In other words, the nominalist seeks to discredit the wisdom of the mythic imagination and to deny its relationship to the sacred. He announces a new order, in which the sexual a n d moral adventurer is acclaimed for his dissociated ability to explore physical extremes of sensation (the notion of humani ty being long since discarded).

On becoming a parent , I learnt that experience h a d taken on two aspects. I was needed for myself a s an individual: b u t also I was needed for what I represented. You are the awkward intermediary—for motherhood or fatherhood perhaps , or per-

CHAPTER ONE 2 3

haps for something else. Your child expects you to live up to the responsibility. This child is the epitome of life, helpless, precious, dependent on you. It bears in on you, perhaps for the first time, tha t you are responsible for a sacred essence: in certain extreme circumstances, this child might be everything that is precious in the universe.

Surviving as paren t (if only just) is obviously crucial to the child's spiri tual survival. You uphold the fabric of its world. Through you, the child experiences a sense of solidity—and comes to discover solidity in the world. The child discovers reassurance in s ta rs and trees and stones through the survival of those who nu r tu re it. In time, when it, too, becomes a parent , it will probably become aware of itself as related not to solidities b u t to powers of u n u s u a l magni tude tha t would seem to dissolve the authori ty of the solid. It may begin to doubt its former-confidence in sense information or worldly knowledge of any kind.

F. M. Cornford proposed that the experience of self a s agent for others—he ins tances the role of kingship (1952, p. 237)— finds its prototype not in biological process b u t in the non-biological and logical relationship of part iculars to Platonic ideas. The ideas are mysterious powers and logically precede any notion of pre-birth experience. For most people for most of the time the powers are relegated to split-off and unperceived psychotic pa r t s of the self. To find yourself as the part icular agent for them is to find yourself in a si tuation tha t is very different from the s ta te of being upheld by the containing solidities of the actual; you will be buffeted by the powers and may think of them as manne r s of inspiration, and possibly as manners of destruction. The paren t a s agent is no different from any other agent of the unknowable.

CHAPTER TWO

Representation in the transference, with reference to a part-object picture of the mother's spine as a support for both the foetus within her and for the

feeding child (or patient) at the breast Skeletal structures idealized in myth as stone constructs raised between earth and sky. Such rite centres separate those who are privileged from those who are not; in origin, this is a binary division between a mother-foetus couple that lives and a mother-foetus couple that dies, enacted at birth by the loss of the umbilical cord and the placenta. The central working model of the psychotic metaphysic: a binary split, implicit in the fetish-cults of umbilical cord and placenta among the pharaohs.

The evolution of the transference is the evolution of reason. The existence of a b lankness between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions indicates a

dichotomy in the s t ruc ture of reason itself. Transference, a s a form of reason motivated by love, moves back and forth between the two positions, t ranslat ing thoughts from one to the other, a s though the positions faced each other across a no-man's- land, a s armies uncomprehending of each other 's language, or culture, or reason for being. The na tu r e of the move back and forth through painful transformation is informative of the s tamina that paren ts or other nu r tu re r s need: Bion (1975, p. 125) thought of the s tamina as being like Keats' negative capability.

In transference, a myth dying on one side of the depressive threshold kindles into new meanings on the other side, in a manner analogous to Levi-Strauss's (1973) assert ion that "Mythological systems, after pass ing through a minimal expression, recover their original fullness on the other side of the

24

CHAPTER TWO 2 5

threshold". Mind on either side of the paranoid-schizoid a n d depressive divide looks on the same objects in entirely different ways and sometimes tries to square their contrasted perplexities in communication by conceiving the difference between them in terms of an immense distance, whether in space or time. Pas t a n d future, a s they s t re tch away from the self, transform into representat ions of an increasing incomprehensibility. The greater the distance, the greater the difficulty in knowing how to elucidate the evidence.

A writer on the religions of early man (Leroi-Gourhan, 1964) h a s described the difficulties tha t face anyone who wishes to make sense of Palaeolithic evidence as similar to an exploration that takes place in a fog-bound slippery terrain beside a ravine. Thought aligned to the depressive position sees the rudimentary sign-systems a n d communicat ion by sensat ion and gesture of its paranoid-schizoid alter ego as being as mystifying as the tracings of earliest man; while mind in the paranoid-schizoid position experiences the onset of depressive symbolization as an intensifying s ta te of persecution, a leap into a future in which a sibling h a s been born and the self feels itself to be annihilated. The transliteration of sign into symbol can present itself as nightmare.

Progress across the threshold threatens the stability of any space- t ime model. Dreamers fear to drown in the spaceless and timeless condition of love.

The experience of being born is not the source for the later oscillations in meaning between the two positions; it is, ra ther , a copy of the tripartite idea of the two positions and of the liminality that exists between them. The idea of a tripartite s t ruc ture is implicit in certain rites of passage and is so fundamental to the ontological condition of the mind that no one seems to have been able to have perceived it before Melanie Klein did. It is a pre ternatura l idea, like a platonic form, and it would appear to be intrinsic to the na tu re of being itself. Techniques of empirical enquiry, and analogies tha t relate it to natural process, are beside the point in intuiting it.

The gist of Wittgenstein's (1979) criticism of J . G. Frazer's descriptions of myth was that Frazer applied an inappropriate set of procedures, modelled on eighteenth-century empiricism, to primitive (i.e. paranoid-schizoid) types of thought . He

26 THE UNBORN

thought tha t such types of thought had kinship more with the s t ruc ture of geometric forms than with the methodology of empirical enquiry. In terms of Frazer's latency-type of understanding, for instance, the priest-kings who identify with the s u n at the time of their coronation are magicians who aspire to be scientists; they want to ha rness the powers of na tu r e to h u m a n use. The fact that they repeatedly fail to do so is taken as token of their stupidity, even though the assumpt ion tha t they aspired to the methods of science is based on a misunders tanding of the significance of primitive rites.

The identification of priest-kings with the essence of the sun , and the identification of paren ts with the physical world, is to liturgical concepts, which are residues from pre-birth, and no t to physical facts. References to air, fire, water, and ear th in the rites of many religions, in mythic thinking and in the dream imagery and anecdotes of pat ients suggest that haun t ing intuitions from foetal thought are carried over into na tu r e a t the time of birth and then relocated in na tu re a s liturgical presences. Air, fire, earth, and water, a s counters of possible meaning, are defined by their at traction to, or repulsion from, the processes of reason-as-love.

Frazer thought of primitive phenomenon as originating in man ' s t ransact ions with nature; Durkheim and Mauss (1903) were closer to the formal organization of the phenomenon when they defined primitive classification in terms of a rational cultural order, from which the tribe made many deductions: a s in the physical lay-out of its insti tutions, in its theory of kinship, even in such details as the pat ternings of its tattoos.

Meaning of this kind arises out of a group cul ture conceived of a s the reasoning of one mind. It is a s though, in psychoanalytic terms, the sun ' s essence were a shared transference object which the psychic s t ruc ture of the group had to contain by replication. The transference object is a psychotic power ("the sacred"), which cannot be defined. At some early stage in thinking, the sun ' s essence, the psychotic as sacred, cannot be differentiated from the immeasurable power of the good objects. The separation of powers into good and evil, usual ly on the basis of h u m a n advantage, is a late occurrence.

CHAPTER TWO 2 7

A mind in paranoid-schizoid s ta tes of mind will be persecuted by reason 's need to discover symbol in the disjointed language of sensat ion a n d sign. If the symbol relates to the idea of s tamina in the transference, the failure in unders tanding can tu rn K into -K.

Now for some clinical material. A woman re tu rns to therapy after a s u m m e r break, in which she h a s been to an island in the tropics. She a n d her h u s b a n d had there met a long-standing friend, Christine, who was with her husband . One day Christine and he r h u s b a n d had suddenly gone away, without explanation. Another friend later told the patient that Christine had left because she h a d realized tha t she detested the patient—who was unnerved by this information, not surprisingly. By chance and in ano ther place she h a d later met Christine, who h a d made no reference to he r disappearance, nor to any motive she might have had in going away.

The pat ient detaches the meaning of a mother 's coming and going from the idea of coming and going; her need to make this detachment is pressing in relation to thoughts concerning the therapist 's going away on holiday. Dissociated from meaning, the idea of coming and going becomes a motif, like a light-switch, which she can use in other c i rcumstances to turn on and off anything (including remembering and forgetting) a s it sui ts her. To this extent, she experiences Christine as an alter ego. But she also projects the motif into her mother in the transference, who loses any depressive significance as someone other t han herself. Thus Christine's' behaviour becomes her unconscious impression of the therapist, t ransposing the therapist as the emblem of reason or primal pat terning into a light-switch therapist unable to hold her in mind. Two factors relate to this manoeuvre. Her earliest relationship to her mother had been characterized by their both reciprocating mysterious s ta tes of b lankness in history and feeling; and she was prone to intense migraines, which occurred on the threshold of the depressive position, and in which the evolution of meaning was stopped in its tracks and reversed. She was then afflicted by a s ta te of conflicting sensat ions that destroyed the operations of unders tanding.

The migraine enacted a failure in dreaming and was analogous to the b lankness of her memory failures, in the sense that

2 8 THE UNBORN

both b lankness and explosive sensat ion hindered communication from the good objects. Stridencies of this kind are evidence of-K in operation—the opposite of the K function of the t ransference and yet contained within it, a s though -K were a b ranch of the larger enterprise of K.

In regard to the disappearings of Christine, the pat ient said that when she h a d been aged nine, at a time when she h a d been through a bout of pneumonia, she had almost drowned. On the night following he r telling me about the Christine episode, she had a dream in which she found herself in the jungle. She thought she had heard threatening animal noises—a snake hissing perhaps—and she had been relieved to find, a s she awoke, that the noise was being made by her cat scratching a t the door. She associated the danger in the jungle to a tree she had heard of in the tropics that can kill you if you fall into it. Her description of this danger gave me the picture of someone falling into a tree t runk, which she corrected: falling into the tree, she said, was like falling into a b u s h of brambles . What she had meant , in fact, was tha t the tree was dangerous from the outside and not on the inside. The leaves on the tree were hairy and could poison you if the hairs on them touched you. And then came the significant clue: she thought the leaves were like the leaves on a lime tree, hear t -shaped.

Her topographical confusion concerning the inside and outside of the tree was relatable to the manoeuvres involved in us ing the on-off device. But the principal source of interest in the dream was the tree's meaning as a liminal representat ion of a depressive symbol representing an aspect of love (the hear t -shaped leaves); from her point of view in the paranoid-schizoid position, the fact tha t the tree was a sign system on the verge of being a depressive symbol filled her with dread. The ambiguity of its na tu r e a s a representat ion was reminiscent of Donald Meltzer's account of a m a n who dreamt of his analyst a s lying on the ground with the b ranch of a beech tree through his heart , the meaning of the b ranch in Donald Meltzer's (1988) unders tanding being the patient 's intuition of the extent to which his analyst could bear depressive pain (p. 2).

An arrow through a hear t is a popular representat ion of love and only secondarily related to an infant's intuition concerning the locking-together of the primal couple, the pass ionate em-

CHAPTER TWO 29

blem of reason itself. The provisional na tu re of liminal phenomena is noticeable in misunders tandings about the na tu re of pain in the liminal phenomenon of birth, which is essentially ambiguous in its meaning, like the tree in the garden of Eden, which m a y b e the tree of life or the tree of death and plays some role in the bi r th or expulsion of the first couple. The dreamer 's confusion about whether the inside or the outside of the tree would poison her, and her need to convey an impression of falling in, appears to be a paranoid-schizoid transformation in unders tanding of the coming out of the bir th process. [Arguably, all myth is a paranoid-schizoid sign representat ion of potentially a depressive symbolization of the bir th process. It is noteworthy tha t the topography of Eden, with its four rivers and firmly demarcated boundaries , is identical to the Hades of the ancient Greeks and that in both places the theme of crossing frontiers h a s kinship to rites of passage that focus on initiation/rebirth.]

As it l inks sky to earth, the tree is a verticality that challenges the horizontality of the liminality between two positions. It links and suppor t s the generations: it is the s tamina in thought and sensat ion by which each generation recognizes its predecessor. Maternal s tamina depends on the introjecting of another materna l s tamina, back through the generations to the beginnings of time, so that an infant, enjoying the unique particularity of a moment a t the breast , is able to participate in the idea of the first moment (which presents itself a s one of the formal emblems of reason). In terms of h u m a n anatomy, the tree is embodied in a mother 's bone s t ructure , especially her backbone—a psychic stiffening, which a husband ' s potency augments .

The sense of expectation projected by certain transference situations contains a history of failed realizations, of paranoid-schizoid signs a n d sensat ions that never become symbols. In depressive unders tanding, expectations bring into sight the unborn: foetuses tha t miscarry, or presences that would never have been born unde r any circumstances. And it brings into sight those who have been through the physical act of being bom, b u t who have never come alive and who spend them-

L

3 0 THE UNBORN

selves in unsuccessful a t tempts to manage their own bir ths. Such people can experience life a s a succession of spiritual miscarriages, very much as the par t s of the self tha t remain in the paranoid-schizoid position can be baffled by their continuing s ta te of confusion.

The therapist in transference, like a parent , can be experienced as substantive, having the properties of a noun , timeless, immutable, an unbreakable net against which the most dangerous feelings can be kicked. At s u c h times, the agent for the transference represents some notion of Being in nowness, unchangeable and indestructible. But the agent can also carry a projection of being the incipiently unborn , a n adjectival object, fluctuating in meaning, t ransient a n d on the verge of being wiped out. The poetic idea, the pr imary imagination, creation itself, cannot contain this s t ra ta of f luctuants with its element of negation, akin to some paranoid-schizoid Hades, which the patient would wish to p u t into the therapist .

A male patient, in a slip of the tongue, refers to three girls in a table. He projects the feeling of being disappointed in love into these three girls—actual girls with whom he h a s flirted, and then left in a s ta te of dissatisfaction. In the narrat ive of the dream, the girls sa t a round the table. To me, though, they seemed to emerge from the table's surface as ideas, or embryos—as though out of the waters of the future or out of some frustrating chthonic underworld.

They were actuality a t tenuated. In the same dream, the pat ient described a garden, a n d the image was so powerful tha t I could feel the garden to be in the room. He recalled how early one morning he h a d kicked a football a t the nets of a raspberry pa tch in his parents ' garden. Once the football had been left outside overnight, and it had been sa tura ted and heavy with the night dew.

The girls emerging from the table and the sa tura ted football were ways of thinking about an incipiency in experience, r a ther than a realized actuality. The adjectival condition of the girls would be a way by which someone who nu r tu re s and doubts the seemingly irrefutable claims of the actual might experience s ta tes of potentiality and becoming in others.

The sa tura ted football, in contrast , is how a child might conceive of the solidity of its sustaining world, insisting that the

CHAPTER TWO 31

sus ta in ing of its world is in things ra ther than in the spiritual fabric of the upholding parental community.

Later work with the same patient h a s me qualify my unders tanding of the meaning of the ideas that he presents that are dense with gravity. Foetal thinking can include a preconception of the concept a s a mou th loosely filled with content, a partially filled empty-space type of thinking that persis ts in schizoid thought, in which a n empty space (as empty proto-concept) is often plugged u p with a placatory rubbish, so that the inclination to fill it with a prohibited nour ishment can be denied. The prohibited nour i shment is a version of the beloved next baby, or sometimes, with an elder sibling's nonchalance, it is a baby degraded to faeces.

In chapter five I consider a n allusion the pat ient made to a dead carp in a pond. The image of the carp communicated an impression of density, a s of many meanings impacted into one small point . The density of the image conveyed the possibility that it contained the idea of a sacrificial victim, a paranoid-schizoid proto-symbolization in which many signs are impacted (the beloved next baby, the future itself, the world of it without me).

The density of the image carries all the sign meanings of the world. One of its icons is the point at which all the lines of a perspective come together like piercing arrows, to an extent that mat ter is so compacted that it is identical to nothingness (a version of Frances Tustin 's , 1972, concept of black hole). Conversely, a n image of this type can radiate outwards, a s in a child's picture of the sun , a s though it were the moment of first creation.

It is helpful to intuit how far all concepts and images carry the presence of the next baby, the future itself, even in the case of pat ients who ostensibly suffer from an indigestion concerning the pas t .

A child needs to be able to enjoy the solidity and gravity of things a n d to b e able to j u m p up and down on its parents ' double bed. For the egotist in any child, the world exists in order to secure the solidity requisite to its s ta tes of well-being. It takes the world a s a mat ter of fact; and it is right to do so. It

3 2 THE UNBORN

inhabits the world a s its appropriate place. It is only when it reaches adulthood that it may think to give u p the world of solidities for the mysterious realm of representat ion.

The spirit of poetry is not necessarily egotistic; b u t for m a n y people it is first reached through a child's belief in its right to have a world suppor t it. Wordsworth needs s tones a n d mountains and s ta rs as furnishings for his inner a s well a s outer world, a s Milton had needed the act of God's primal creation for the furnishings of his. The furnishings of Wordsworth's world are the furnishings of Milton's egotism in another guise, s t imulating (through breaks in routine minor t raumas) a mother 's sudden shifting awareness, a sudden discovery of previously "unknown modes of being". A cliff suddenly uprising, within the securing context of the observer's being in a boat on a lake, pu t s the poet in the child in touch with a non-egotistic insight.

. . . huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men mov'd slowly through the mind By day and were the trouble of my dreams.

[De Selincourt, 1926, p. 24]

Conceivably someone might draw an imaginary map and then, out of nowhere, discover a place that tallies with it. It sounds improbable, a s though mind h a d re turned to the conditions of pre-birth; b u t in practice it can occur in the actual world and leave the participator in a s ta te of wonder a s to why inner prompting should have anticipated a correspondence in something outside the self.

In a n early draft of this book, I find a chapter that might have been written by someone other than my present self, someone who was living out s ta tes of mind that at tha t time he was unable to comprehend. I had been unable to see how my interest in hard stones in a soft landscape was to anticipate the discovery, three years later, of the likeness of the depressive symbol to an infant's intuition of its mother 's psychic bone-s t ructure .

I know that when I had the experience I described there, I was fascinated by a theme that I thought was characterist ic of primitive thought in general, which is the existential s t a tu s of existents that may or may not become actual . It occurred to

CHAPTER TWO 3 3

me then that I might have to posit some imaginary organ of consciousness to contain these paranoid-schizoid indications that never become thoughts , foetal-like existents who are never b o m . Anyway, here is the early chapter.

The solid world

Memories of a brief visit to Stonehenge earlier this year keep coming back to me—I don't know why. The rain was cold, the day bleak, a n d the outcrop of s tones scarcely made an architectural impression. A presence emerged with rain-swept clarity out of a white landscape: s tones drawing attention to themselves, without forfeiting stoneyness. A Londoner, breathing fresh air, looked on sights remote from the lifeless marble of Marble Arch—and a disturbing of the habi tual took place that gave delight. I began writing this book knowing that the s tones were of importance to it, b u t not knowing why.

Events tha t h a u n t you often turn out to be what Bion. like Hume, calls constant conjunctions, moments of unknowable conceptions, inviting exploration of their resonance. The painter Paul Nash had a flair for uncovering h in t s of certain constant conjunctions; and he kept seeking them out, al though his intuit ions did not extend into an intention to articulate their meaning. (Perhaps looking for words in this context might have seemed inappropriate, since the experience was pre-verbal.) He communicated his fascination with the Dorset and Wiltshire landscapes through his Shell Guide Book to Dorset and his Wiltshire paint ings of hill tree-clusters and of massive stones on the plains. His geometric illustrations to Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial and to the creation chapters in Genesis deepen unders tand ing of his landscape. Recurrently, the ancient na tu r e of the earth reveals itself through flint and stone and the contours of earthworks.

In moments of reverie—over a familiar landscape, for instance—all pas tness seems to suffuse the present . There appears to be a timeless dream element in the act of observation. Practising introspection during the act of observation, you can feel the p ressure of an inward articulation manifesting

i

3 4 THE UNBORN

itself outwardly, modifying impressions in the conscious mind, a primary motive in s ta tes of wonder. A dream atmosphere manifests itself, transfused by a sense of pas tness . The observer feels a s though to be the first, and yet to be the most recent of observers in a long succession.

In acts of this kind there is a sense of common notions—of my being me b u t also of my being, in some problematic way, a coming together of ancestors real and imaginary; and in this conjunction of present and pas t I come to believe in realistic universals—timeless shared qualities that in pre-verbal intuition act a s the ground to the meaning of part icular things and would seem actually to subsis t .

At such moments I have a sense of poetic nowness, which of its na tu re implies some primal act of creation, renewing itself continuously. The world presents itself a s paranoid-schizoid sensat ions and signs tha t can be reformed as the poetic symbols of the depressive position. On the level of signs, pa s t and future are not differentiated: they are mythic motifs, in which the pas t can be read as a form of divination. The landscape arranges thoughts of the living a n d the dead: and revenants seem to seep through rock.

In t/rn Burial, Browne meditates over ah ear th that contains r emnan t s of its own pas t history—urns, shards , coins—capsules of spiritual energy that explode different time schemes and spans at different stages of the earth 's unfolding, These residues are not unlike the creatures and things in the "entangled bank, clothed with plants of many kinds" tha t Darwin contemplates in the final paragraph of The Origin of Species; objects in time living out time a t different durat ions.

Each of u s lives out a life, or variety of lives, a t different pulses—unless, tha t is, we fail to live out any life. (And it is those par t s of the self who fail to live out their lives, who remain unborn , who concern the therapist.) Browne's ear th and Darwin's entangled bank are in infant reverie a mother 's body thought to contain many psychic entities of differing spatial and temporal conditions.

In timelessness, pas t and future play together in endless delight. Through contraries in time, Browne's sub te r ranean site of h u m a n residues becomes an undiscovered place. Time makes

CHAPTER TWO 3 5

new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great Antiquity America lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us. [Herford, 1906, p. 95]

Time h a s u s dream of its underlying timelessness; and nature , like a gauze dissolving in light, discloses a creation in constant renewal. The ancient mariner rightly thought himself "the first tha t ever did bur s t upon that silent sea"; b u t each of u s in time comes to this sea and looks on it with newborn eyes: exactly the impression conveyed by Nash's most celebrated painting, Totes Meer—a skein or "dead sea" of World-War-Two debris, destroyed and abandoned German bombers t ransformed into a portent: a geometric revenant invoking Nash's Genesis i l lustration to the dividing of the first waters.

I do not find it surpris ing that when I was thinking and writing about the visit to Stonehenge, a patient should have brought her own experiences of this resonant place, almost a s a gift. Again I quote from an earlier draft of this book.

She told me today about a visit to Stonehenge. She had been awed by the vas tness of the Wiltshire sky. A guide to some party of tourists h a d said, in her hearing, that the s tones before them went down as deeply into the ground as they stood above it—a disputable contention—and that between two of the stones the s u n would rise a t the midsummer solstice.

Her account of Stonehenge came in the middle of a session. I asked her if the depth of the stones' burial p u t her in mind of teeth, and she said it did. Neither she nor I were able to pu r sue this line of thought; yet it was in the na ture of the a tmosphere in which we were contained that this line of thought, in relation to Stonehenge, was feasible: the climate of thought granted representation to tha t sort of intuitive and possibly pre-verbal dimension.

A powerful idea had manifested itself in the room which in par t the visit to Stonehenge contained. The idea had originated in her and was unknown to her. It was like the demon that Socrates describes, which we may glimpse for the first time, if we are fortunate, at the moment when we are dying.

3 6 THE UNBORN

What I do know was tha t in my intuition of the idea I linked the Stonehenge stones to a rib-cage; b u t this was a lead that , like the analogy to teeth, petered out. The rib-cage related more securely to a dream, which she had told me before the Stonehenge incident, of a fire-basket up tu rned over a sunken spot on a grass bank. She associated this spot to a grotto with an iron grill a t Alexander Pope's garden in Twickenham—also to a n enclosed order of nuns , and to a pessimistic, misguided conception of monads as isolates. The sunken spot and the grotto seemed to be representat ions of a living grave.

She was worried about the pass ing of years and the fact that her hes i tant yearnings for a h u s b a n d had not been answered. Hopes of parent ing a child were fading. She talked of sit t ing with a male acquaintance, unlikely to be a lover, together watching a television programme tonight—and the thought of her watching a screen that gleams as vacantly as the moon revives a thought that had already occurred in the session, of the Stonehenge stones rising up into the sky and holding the s u n between them. I might never have been to Stonehenge, and need never have read Hesiod's description of the marriage of sky and earth, to have felt the idea in the room: that the power of the s u n at this moment was like the first impression of a newborn on its parent , the a rms of the earth mother, like the rising stones of Stonehenge, s tretching out and holding her infant against the figure of its father. The infant fills the father sky with radiance, which reflects back into its mother, the ear th of the Wiltshire plains.

She had not been a member of the guided party; a n d the guide had not spoken to her. She had looked on Stonehenge as a traveller without a t tachment , feeling excluded—a familiar sensation—and almost enjoying her isolation. I am not su re that she endorsed my belief tha t the s u n caught between the upris ing stones might be compared to a newborn in its mother 's a rms. She h a d visited a bir th shrine, I thought; b u t it was possible tha t the experience she had undergone would be one she would never be equipped to know. In her turn , she might have claimed that I was misguided in reading her experience in the way I did—my Understanding of it being superfluous to what she had thought and felt.

CHAPTER TWO 37

It is a s though she and I, in communion with each other, were a foetal consciousness that is vulnerable to binary division when it is ba thed in the light of the rationality of the good objects. The most dramatic of binary divisions takes place a t birth, a t the time of separation from the inside of a mother 's body; b u t a b e t t e r model for it, because of its manifest relationship to the transference as a process of reason, is a t the onset of the depressive position: between a self tha t determines that its egoism should die so that it might be reborn through others and a self tha t determines to achieve a spur ious immortality by way of paranoid-schizoid delusions. A m a n on the verge of the depressive position dreams that a friend who is a competent physician, a n d the same age as he, diagnoses a terminal heart-disease in the dreamer. The dreamer thinks: my friend will live, and I m u s t die. The circumstances of the dream reveal that the friend is expected magically to at ta in "immortality" by the practice of a perverse sexuality.

Such a division within the context of rationality would appear to replicate a division that first occurred in similar c ircumstances during the time of the most naked and sustained communicat ion with good objects that many of u s know, as a foetus in pre-birth.

The contrast in meanings of the two par ts of the binary are variable, and the division of the psyche into twins can have many meanings. In the case of the Stonehenge session, the division appeared to be between depressive and paranoid-schizoid modes of apprehension. One twin, identified with the act of parenting, looks into the sun and sees the futurity of the newborn infant; the other twin, a child committed to perpetual night, never sees the s u n and remains in an obscurity where there is little in the way of a vocabulary of expression.

A child exists in every possible parent , who by na tu re of its condition cannot be procreative and m u s t endure as well a s it can the painful co-existence in its inner world of a mother who is capable of giving bir th to children. To be a finite human , as opposed to being a psychopathic god, is to know a twin who carries the bu rden and often the projection of one's own paranoid-schizoid failures in development.

When the first child of a certain pair of twins arrived the

3 8 THE UNBORN

women in the courtyard made themselves ecstatically happy over it, until it was whispered from within the house, that a second baby was on route, when they dashed the helpless babe to the ground and fled as if they were escaping from wild beasts. [Rendel Harris (1913, p. 58), paraphrasing a passage from Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa]

A belief in superfoetation and the mother 's culpability in having two lovers (one for each baby) may underlie the desire to murder one of the children. In certain versions of the superfoetation theory, one of the lovers is a god, whose child is allowed to survive and sometimes is deified. But arguably in many of us , at some level of unworthiness, there is a belief tha t a mistake occurred at the time of our bir th. The god's child was dispatched into the underworld, a n d we were allowed to u s u r p its life.

In birth, a baby can be an object of wonder, touched by divinity and a guilty sense of fraudulence; and not only mothers are ecstatic about it. To be a god is to be invulnerable to time and death—and to feel dissociated from the taint of original sin. An infant's moment of experiencing ecstasy, of enjoying the privilege of being loved, can a rouse the latent grandiosity of its thinking itself identified with the sun . But conversely, and perhaps as a consequence of its grandiosity, to be mortal is to be devoured by time and to undergo the sensation, in dying, of being rent apar t by the teeth of wild beas ts . One twin is raised to divinity, the other dashed to the ground, filled (as it were) by the grinding of wild beas ts .

Psychotic metaphysics operates a s a closed system; and the dynamic of creationism requires some concept of sacrifice a s a means to renew an entropic situation. The sacrificial victim renews sacrality, either by an actual or a symbolic annihilation; it may then endure a painful rebirth into meaning, as it moves through the underworld of the paranoid-schizoid position.

The threat of annihilation intensifies a s the traveller approaches the possibility of depressive symbolization. Aware of the difficulties that face pat ients a s they enter the depressive threshold, Melanie Klein (1935) drew attention to the increasing extent to which they are threatened by the wish to murder .

CHAPTER TWO 39

or to commit a suicide which is always (her word) motivated by a wish to spare the good objects (p. 276).

Myth is bound to the type of thinking tha t p resumes tha t soul h a s a n a priori existence to body; it inclines to doctrines of rebir th and reincarnation—which imaginatively make sense as doctrines concerning the ways in which the good objects speak a-physically to the foetus before birth. It supposes that the doctrines of reason precede their enactment in experience.

The central myth I use in this book is taken from Frankfort (1948). It is important because it clearly delineates some of the implications of the psychotic metaphysic. To say that it is a bir th myth does not indicate that it is about a beginning. To this extent, it is no more a prototype to experience than is physical bir th: the binary split tha t it describes is a version of an inferable split tha t occurred a t least once in utero.

It concerns a pharaoh 's twin, who dies at the time of the pharaoh ' s b i r th and who moves through the underworld of night (like a black sun) in analogue to the pharaoh ' s identification with a s u n that moves through the day-time sky. The pharaoh communes with his other self, pa rdy in placation, by worshipping within a shrine that contains as objects of veneration the pharaoh ' s own embalmed placenta and umbilical cord, discarded par t s of his own body that he presumes to be parts of his twin's body. Fetishism, a s this si tuation shows it, is a confusion between par t s of one's own body with the body of someone other—a confusion that continues to be inextricable because of its concentration on the materiality of things.

In psychotic depression, an infant will concretely identify the pain in par t s of its body, understood as mutilat ions (a face without a nose, a body with chopped-off legs, etc.), with a mother 's nipple tha t h a s left it. The absent nipple is concretely identified with a damaged par t of the infant. The pharaoh 's twin has to carry the damage, while the pharaoh is able to revere the mutilated signs as fetishes devoid of pain by seeing them emphatically a s material things.

A rite similar to the pharaoh ' s worship of the bir th fetishes prevailed not so long ago among the Baganda of east Africa. It reveals how the fetish objects can be linked to the mouth— specifically to the jawbone as the appa ra tus by which biting.

4 0 THE UNBORN

tearing, and clamping takes place; it suggests that fetishism is an outcome of oral sadism.

The king's jawbone is removed from his corpse and prepared, decorated and kept in his temple. Since the king is born as a twin of the stillborn placenta and the royal person after death retains a dual character, the stillborn twin, as well as the ruler, requires a material anchorage for its spirit; and for this special purpose the navel cord is deposited in the temple erected after the king's death, and only when both jawbone and navel cord are present—only when the dual person of the late monarch is thus represented in the shrine—can oracles be forthcoming. [Frankfort, 1948, pp. 69-70]

In association with rites of this kind concerning the idea of twinship, which reveal how na tura l phenomena can represent the foetal need to articulate liturgical presences by way of the na tura l world, it is fascinating to learn that in certain par t s of Africa a woman who gave birth to twins was named after the sky.

In other words, the sky, out of which the mother gives bir th to the paranoid-schizoid a n d depressive conceptions a s twins, is the no-man 's land of the liminal threshold, the beautiful azure of a nowhere tha t is the everywhere out of which acts of symbolizations may arise. A mother in this conception is a n absence of materiality that gives issue to matter—often of the most condensed kind: a s in the case of meteors, which can have the material intensity of a fetish.

. . . amongst the Baronga tribes in Portuguese East Africa, it is the custom to attach to twins when born, the collective name of Bana-ba-Tilo, or children of Tilo, where the word Tilo is used for sky in the general sense, including the thunder and lightning, and possibly the rain. [Harris, 1913, p. 4]

Looking into the sky, into mind, into the primal u te rus itself, uncovers a binary source to geometry that precedes the existence of body as matter .

The divine sky was represented not only as a celestial archway, but also—since it was bright by day and dark by night—as a double-faced god with a tendency to differen-

CHAPTERTWO 4 1

tiation of the two faces. It remains to notice yet another development of the same primitive conception. To put it briefly, the twofold sky splits into twins. [Cook, 1940, p. 422]

These are objects of pure reason that inform foetal intuition: the na tu ra l world can only shadow forth their sublimity. They have to be looked for in the realm of the sky (at a time when mothers were associated with the sky) and not in the realm of the ear th (the earth-mother is a later conception).

The twins are two hemispheres that hold the world within a celestial sphere. Philo, in his Decalogue, writes that:

They bisected the sky theoretically into hemispheres, one above, the other below, the earth, and called them dioscuri, adding a marvellous tale about their life on alternate days.

Philo and other neo-platonic commentators see geometry and the movements of the gods in the sky-kingdom as tokens of the play of reason in the service of a disinterested love. Earlier the Pythagoreans, to whom Plato was indebted, regarded semicircles a s sacred to the dioscuri, and thought that when the twins came together, they made u p the perfection of the circle. In other even earlier versions, the twins, as son and father, Chronos and Ouranos, prove destructive of each other, in the way tha t dawn might be thought destructive of night.

Anyone who looks into the night sky might discover the heavenly twins, Castor and Pollux. By superfoetation. Pollux (sired by Zeus) is divine. Castor (sired by a h u m a n father) is mortal a n d m u s t die. Pollux gives u p his divine s t a tus when faced by Castor 's death. He would ra ther die than live without Castor—a situation that throws light on Melanie Klein's observation tha t mind on the threshold of the depressive position is threatened by the possibility of suicide.

Invited by the c i rcumstances of the depressive journey to abandon the comforts of egotism, a mind may be led to confuse the invitation with a cruel voice within the self that encourages it to commit suicide. This is not Pollux's decision. Pollux is a n exemplar of depressive unders tanding, and even Zeus is moved by him to the extent of granting each of the twins half an immortal life each.

CHAPTER THREE

Clinical material concerning psychically unborn people who are intrusively identified with a dead mother-foetus assigned to the underworld.

A t the end of a session a patient talks about someone he knows who is in prison—and who suffers from a n u n u s u a l bone disease. The man in prison appears to

have two skeletons—or, rather, one full skeleton and another adjacent one that seems to shadow the first skeleton and to exist only in bits. The fragments of the second incomplete skeleton keep growing. The growing bits of bone cause h im pain, and he h a s had surgery to take the growing bits away.

He believes that something went wrong with his mother 's ability to ovulate at the time he was conceived. An inseminated ovum in par t began to split; a pair of twins should have been formed; b u t the process was somehow arrested. The other twin never reached life, b u t its residue, the growing bits of bones, continue to exist as a disabling physical reproach within the twin who lives—or partially lives, for al though the living twin was effectively given bir th to out of his mother 's pregnancy, he was not b o m into life. He now finds himself in a prison, both actual and symbolic, a u te rus in negative, a limbo-like or rectal

42

CHAPTER THREE 4 3

place (a condition tha t is reflected in the limbo-like condition of the pat ient who told me about the m a n with the double skeleton) . It is a s though the guilt of being the living half of a pair s tops the m a n with the double skeleton from being really born as a personality. In his body he carried the reproaches of a stillborn twin who is also his stillborn self.

I heard of this condition in one session, and the idea of the m a n with a semi-double skeleton was in my mind when the session with the next pat ient was about to begin. The patient I was about to see was someone I had only j u s t begun working with, who had been through a good experience of psychoanalysis previously b u t was new to me—he and I were trying to get onto each other 's wave-lengths. This may be why, while waiting for him, I h a d begun to form a t the back of my mind a n image of two identical clock faces, two photographs of the same clock face, Inexactly superimposed, one on the other. These two clock faces were like the image I had formerly experienced of the complete and incomplete skeletons shadowing each other in one body. The two clock faces, the two skeletons, did not glide together into the image of one clock face or one skeleton; they remained slightly apart , like a photograph in double exposure.

The pat ient turned up slightly late. He was upse t a t being late—more upset than the c i rcumstances would have warranted. The least one can do, he said, rebuking himself, is to be on time. He and I had begun the session at different times. In my mind the appointment had begun on the hour, and he h a d been present in my mind in the room, like a phan tom presence; he had begun his session with me about five minutes later. Emotionally we seemed to live out the analytic hour by different clock times: al though he was consciously obliged to acknowledge tha t my clock time, by na tu re of the analytic convention—that we should s tar t on the hour—had precedence.

He h a d been running from the station; he was out of breath. He described the sense of ineffectual fury he had felt in the underground station. He had been runn ing along the platform; piles of luggage, people, had blocked his way. No one noticed him; he might not have existed.

I had two thoughts about this that I was unable to report to him—I was only able to articulate them fully to myself after the

4 4 THE UNBORN

session was over. The first thought was that his race along the platform was analogous in behaviour to someone who h a d been coerced into an identification with the h a n d s of a clock a n d who experienced the movements of the h a n d s as too fast for him; my world went a t a pace that did not suit his. The second thought tha t occurred to me was tha t he seemed to respond to the people on the platform as though he were a t most a biting gnat. He could observe them, and he could feel that they blocked his wishes; b u t they seemed not to perceive him. He fulminated, and they did not react. Two different time-worlds tha t overlapped, b u t only one of them impinged on the other.

He experiences the other world a s obstructive and irritating and denying h im his wishes—ultimately the right to be born. An ovum h a s only in pa r t split. He is to me as the second incomplete skeleton was to the two-skeleton man. He feels he is given an inadequate space in which to grow. The space he feels to be adequate is the delusional space that the tyrant inhabits . But this is a space tha t cannot be susta ined. He can only make himself a sort of life, by tagging along as the bone shadow to my skeleton, or as a shadowy space-t ime system bound to the space-t ime system tha t nu r tu re s his living peer—in this case, h is therapist . He th inks of me a s inhabit ing a relatively full existence in space and time, while he inhabi ts a space and time that is insubstant ia l to the point of being ghost-like. The space tha t nu r tu re s me might be a killing space to him. Reluctantly, he m u s t try to overlap my world and enter it like a phan tom and make u s e of it, a s h is only hope of survival.

As a manne r of doing this, he weaves a narrat ive about himself, cultivated and thoughtful and self-referential, and then a t tempts to slip out of it, as though out of a cocoon, leaving a void. He seems to have no private life. It is a s though he were trying to create a uterine place for himself through words, so a s to bring off a suitable start ing-point for h i s own birth, b u t somehow the process keeps miscarrying. All tha t is left is a n empty cocoon. The self miscarries and s inks into depression.

The other world of the people on the underground— he didn't experience them as couples—is a world that he th inks of a s actual, unlike the world he lives in. It is smug and unhur tab le by him. It is an actuality to which he responds as

CHAPTER THREE 4 5

though it were the empty cocoon that will not enable his progress to bir th. (The content of the session is concerned with people dying from cancer. He is relieved to know that the power of h is magical wishes remains unascer ta ined ra ther than invalidated.)

He h a s a right to grievance. The feeling tha t the underground people are arrogant in their sense of actuality h a s some t ru th to it. (In the transference, this is how he experiences any sense of fullness in being in his therapist.)

The philosopher David Lewis (1986) challenges Pharaonic complacence when he points out how luckily coincidental it is tha t we should think we have been born into actuality, and that actuality is not an at t r ibute of some other possible world. In contradiction to this chastening thought is the thought that if you have been born, you then have some right to believe that you inhabi t an actual world. That seems to be par t of the unwri t ten contract . On another level, reason in the form of the transference indicates that the paranoid-schizoid position could not exist without the depressive position, whether or not the depressive position is realized. One is necessarily a t tached to the other. It is only when you acknowledge the actuality of the world you inhabit , in te rms of its depressive possibilities, tha t you can freely utilize space and time, languages and other forms of symbolisms related to individuality, and enter into a friendly exchange with the symbolism of others (their conceptions of space and time and language, for instance).

If you experience yourself a s psychically unborn, however, you will not feel secure in actuality; your own possible entry to the depressive position is always projected out there, into someone else. You will experience the world as though you were an initiate taking par t in some rite that begins to awaken you from symbolic death by means of an improvised and tentative sign language.

He brought a dream in which he was playing football magnificently, a s though under a special light. The other players were in the shade . He was the adored child, his rivals having no place in his mother 's adoration. Possibly, he experienced his mother 's at tention as a re-forming about him of the lost womb. But this was not the light of otherness, the light of insight; it was the phosphorescence of delusion, in which the infant on its

4 6 THE UNBORN

mother 's lap thinks of its mother a s some depersonalized captive who m u s t endorse its tyrannical claims to omnipotence.

A baby who lives within a phan tasmal image of itself a s its mother 's s tar performer is so concerned with being the object of a recognition, whose manner of recognizing it controls, tha t it will fail to see any evidence of otherness about it. The possessive element in jealousy determines the formations of jealous phantasy; and it determines the jealous mind's limitations in perception. It is unable to recognize the value in any knowledge which may ass is t it to move beyond self-centredness. It sh r inks away from any intimation of that knowledge as though it were threatened by annihilation.

Dominated by the need to be recognized, an infant of this kind can allow no experience of its mother to be evident; it dissociates the admiring light in her eyes from her personality, purloins and dehumanizes it, and tu rns it into a luminous cell in which it hopes to find consolation. It feeds on insubstant ia l light, a s Caesar feeds on the praise of the crowds who tell h im h e is immortal; it creates a subs t i tu te for the lost u te rus . Its one fear is that the luminous cell will collapse, and it will find itself invaded by a death that is experienced as terrible in its impersonality. (Those who depersonalize the ones who love them will also experience death as depersonalized and a s a n at t r ibute of the self.)

People who suffer from delusional jealousy of this kind are sur rounded by paranoid-schizoid invisibilities, phan tom states, pale contours ra ther than subs tances . They are hermits and magicians by nature , who prefer air and water to earth; t ransparencies within t ransparencies modified by light; things that in a sense are not. If they imagine fire, they imagine it to be an ethereal fire. They prefer to feed on the insubstantial i t ies in their mother 's eyes, ra ther than to a t tend to the nipple in their mouths . They are bemused by the reflections in her eyes, and by denying her any reality they are able to see the reflections as representing a world that is not: twins in the mother 's eyes, dividers of celestial power, who in logic precede actuality.

It occurred to me that he was trying to p u t into me the belief that I had great expectations for him; and this belief was reasonable, insofar as the infant expects that its mother, if healthy, will have hopes of its being well nur tu red . But I did not

CHAPTER THREE 47

think tha t the great expectation belief he p u t into me was quite so graceful a s that . It was dictatorial; and. moreover, it turned out tha t it was being p u t into me in order that he could then disappoint me. He would determinedly not live up to any expectation. I was p u t in mind of a foetus who thinks it m u s t make its own uter ine setting in order to bring about its own birth— and who fails in this enterprise and m u s t persistently undergo its own miscarriage. He wanted me to be his uter ine setting: b u t it was pa r t of his wish tha t I should forever collapse, like a burs t ing soap bubble. His failures to give bir th to himself were phantom-like. One day he told me about an Egyptian aetiologi-cal myth, in which a God on the banks of the shrinking Nile made little men out of the slippery clay and then h a d the power to make these clay men walk: the myth supposed tha t men came into being in this way. The patient had begun the session by saying tha t he was convinced that I had a furious look on my face, and tha t I looked furious because he continuously made messes everywhere. A modern reading of the myth would see the God a s a fool in thinking to give life to slippery clay: a n d the patient would feel justified in thinking his therapist an omnipotent fool in hoping to make something of someone who did little else b u t m a k e cont inuous messes.1

It was quite clear that he wanted me to unders tand the myth with myself a s the God and himself as the slippery clay. His slanting of communication was intended to p u t me on the spot. He wanted me to identify with the God in the Egyptian myth in order to demonstrate my ineffectuality. I was to be shown to be the genie in the bottle whose magic always failed. However, it was j u s t before Christmas, a n d I was abou t to leave him for a while. I was inclined to think that in regard to the

'Creationist myths in which the creator seeks to bring inert matter to life are characteristic of the culture of those who feel themselves to be unborn. An instance of this would be the Winnebago myth of the Earthmaker.

He took a piece of earth and made it like himself. Then he talked to what he had created but it did not answer. He looked on It and saw it had mind or thought. . . . He made it a tongue. . . . He made it a soul. . . . It very nearly said something. . . . Earthmaker breathed into his mouth and talked to it and it answered. . . . [Radin, 1924, p. 401

4 8 THE UNBORN

myth, he might experience me as the shr inking Nile. He h a d thought to use me as a depository for omnipotence, b u t perh a p s I h a d another use for him, which he was coming close to acknowledging a t the moment of our parting. He was the infant lying in the slippery clay, and the source of possible life was shrinking from him. In his hopeless condition h e felt impelled to generate into existence the idea of the omnipotent God who would bring h im to life. But at some level he felt this God to be a species of hallucination (possibly invaded by some conception of death). It was this figure tha t he wanted me to represent , as a fool, so a s to defuse the presence of death.

At a n earlier stage in his life he h a d almost died from starvation; and it was possible tha t for unknown reasons h e had a great need to live out some experience of abandonment , of dying on the b a n k s of the Nile. Perhaps someone would pa s s by and save him; b u t this was not given in his thoughts . He would lie in sunlight or moonlight, and he would die. In h i s hopelessness, he would experience his mother (whether inner or outer) as being so close to dying—the shr inking Nile—that she had lost all interest in her children. He would not dehumanize her; she would be dehumanized by ci rcumstance. He needed someone to share an experience of hopelessness . He could not reach the reason in transference that facilitates the movement into the depressive position and brings about the emergence of conscious meanings. He was unborn because his mind could not meet helping hands .

CHAPTER FOUR

Clinical material concerning separated mother-foetus couples who live in time schemes that move in opposing directions.

A psychotherapist ' s roster tends to come into being by chance. Sensat ions of the random recede in working through the same pat tern of appointments week by

week, a n d a n aspect of the myth-making faculty related to the primary imagination, which craves eternally to re tu rn to the first moment , begins to br ing necessity to even the most tenuous of relationships, so that the therapist might ask, with some wonder, why do these people appear in this succession? It is as though the na tu r e of the succession had in itself become meaningful, a circular movement like a clock-face.

A movement into integration occurs in a si tuation in which integration seems inappropriate. The various individuals might be the same person, appearing under different guises, a s can occur in a dream. The therapist begins to see pat ients as members of the same family, related to each other through this place and type of work. They might always be the same child. The same meeting occurs again and again within different constellations of meaning.

49

50 THE UNBORN CHAPTER FOUR 51

In the coming-together of these personalities into a microcosm there is a corresponding move outward, into a macrocosm in which each individual seems to open out as a n interiority tha t contains many others. In any single therapy more than one person gets received, thought about , possibly understood. The contrary movement of all into one and one into many operates on the mythic level in the therapeut ic encounter.

I know tha t in writing this book the myth-making process in myself was from the star t , and against my wishes, inclined to bring my therapy family into the microcosm of my actual family—and the impression made on me by Stonehenge, though how they related to each other I did not know.

Visiting Stonehenge nourished me for about six months . I kept looking a t photographs of it. I was conscious of how Stonehenge seemed to relate to Salisbury Cathedral, as sacred sites on the Wiltshire plain, one being morning s tar to the other a s evening s tar . But I did realize that there was another sacred place in this area, which I h a d never visited, a third point, making up the s t ruc ture of a triangle. And so one Sunday the family embarked for Avebury. I was not aware at the time of how the double-skeleton material tha t I had experienced in my work was to modify my perceptions of this place.

Stone clocks

The Neolithic sarsen stones at Avebury describe a vas t floating circle, so considerable in size tha t at no point on the ground does the observer arrive at a sense of the circle's completeness. To walk among the s tones is to enter the face of an immense clock that responds to the wheelings of planets in the night sky.

In medieval times, people were offended by the existence of this pagan site and sought to destroy it. Stones were knocked down, or smashed to pieces; and a village, with a church and manor house, was built over par t of the circle of s tones and without any care to their siting. Bits of pagan s tone were buried

in the walls of the houses . The idea of burial is important to my theme.

I tried to separate my experience of the ancient s tones from my perceptions of the village. I wanted to exclude the intrusive facades of shop fronts and houses so as to isolate the numinous . Taking photographs, I framed the shots so as to exclude the he rds of grazing cows—out of a mistaken piety to the s tones. I wanted a pu re experience, a s I had wanted a pure experience when, years before, I had visited Italian churches and regretted the demotic clutter of a living faith about the aloof masterpieces. I suffered from the m u s e u m malaise of wishing to isolate elements of the pas t so a s to make them more securely aesthetic objects.

And yet the incongruity of two conflicting manne r s of representat ion was the meaning of the experience presented: in the same way a divine and a h u m a n twin may live side by side in the u t e r u s a n d after bir th suppor t the idea of life itself. The pallid stones, grey-wethers, which at first had looked drained, began to re-asser t themselves. Contemplating the facade of a tea-shop, I found it possible to catch, out of the corner of an eye, the glum presence of a stone and to feel tha t the s tones were more recent arrivals than the houses . It was as though petrified sky creatures were taking over the place. Later, memories of the s tones tend to overlay memories of the village.

The mad, who are fascinated by Stonehenge and Avebury, with reason wish to relate them to the sky and the movement of the s tars ; b u t then the mad sometimes have intuitions denied to the relatively sane. If s u n s have their dials, so have moons. The s tones are moon-dials. And if sunflowers are heliotropic, then s tones presumably can be lunatropic.

The night after the visit to Avebury, I awoke in the small hou r s to the thought that the placing of the s tones and the village together realized the two-skeleton principle. The idea of the body with its fossil-like evidence—the skeleton of living life and the twin skeleton as fragments of bitter bone that cause pain—must have been a t the back of my mind the whole time. At Avebury, the twin denied existence was more a twin murdered than a twin denied fullness of parturi t ion. The fragmentary second skeleton of s tones in its shadowy way kni ts itself into the landscape. The earlier skeleton seemed to take

52 THE UNBORN CHAPTER FOUR 5 3

over the later one, a s though, in reversal of the facts, the fingers of Esau were to have followed in bir th on the heel of his younger twin Jacob. The idea of a perspectival reversal in the bi r th process is an important adjunct to twin phantas ies .

A fascination with theories of reincarnation, of spirits a s pass ing through stages of embodiment and disembodiment, and a fascination with the sensat ion of circularity—as in the belief that the sun and moon in their disappearing circle the ear th and then reappear—are crucial to the imaginative excitement of many myths, reflecting as they do an eternal r e tu rn in which twin-like selves, one disembodied, the other embodied, one divine and one human , Pollux and Castor, sky-children or hemispheres that circle and embrace the earth, sha re the cosmos between them like day and night or summer and winter.

The wheelings of the planets function as evidence for these speculations: and through their coming and going, personified as twins, and through the emergence of perspectival reversal, which this conception of twinship generates (as recurs when the self looks at its twin reflection in the mirror), it is possible to reach the kind of recognition that depends on the discovery tha t inside and outside the self are not identical.

Kant's relating of the inexorable movements of the planets to the categorical imperative in morality practised an imaginative Newtonian reversal in perspective, a pivoting that Freud re-employed when he described the awesome remoteness of the planets as reversible into a representat ion of an infinity of psychic space (and the presence in this space of objects in determined movement). The functioning of the reversal requires for its being a fluent and creative stage to occur before the distinction of inward and outward h a s begun to form.

I want to look at some material from a pat ient who had experiences characterized by a twin-like division which entailed some theory concerning circularity—in part icular , the notion of circularity as applied to a therapist 's system of appointments , the eternal re turn of the same patient . In the case of this patient, the positive experiences of one twin were marked by the negative experiences of the other. His ability to appreciate sessions (positive) was marked by the intensity of

his therapeut ic reaction (negative). His unusua l capacity to symbolize in dreaming seemed heightened by contras t with his unimaginative behaviour in waking life.

At one point binary division took the form of identifying his session with a forward movement in time, in Which he appeared to be reluctantly bound to a developmental process, while in his phan ta sy life he thought that the woman who at tended the session j u s t before him was allowed to experience her sessions in a time span that went backwards. She was allowed all tha t he was not allowed, including the pleasure (as he saw it) of being ravished into insanity.

The idea of the clock that moves forward and the clock that moves backward had its context in a n experience of birth as occurring through two passages: uterine and rectal. By the very fact of being a bir th phantasy , it raised the possibility of some prime ground before the division of the two clocks or bir th places h a d occurred.

Coming to his session, he sees two men s tanding on some scaffolding. He imagines one of the men to fall. The scaffolding s u r r o u n d s a building in the process of being built; and it is like his therapy, a liminal s t ruc ture built about a future both of us hope to build together without any expectation of its being shared. He cannot believe that he and I can both have a future. Only one baby may live. One of us m u s t fall from the scaffolding. In his present mood of self-sacrifice, he sees himself a s the victim. He is the one who is to travel down the discard passage. He h a s p u t himself into the empty space where the murdered baby m u s t be; he feels drawn into the space, compelled to become the scapegoat.

In our mother 's gaze we grow into the light. In the absence of our mother ' s gaze, in some s ta te where focus in gaze is identified with annihilation, there is a space that devours all life, the position of the inevitably murdered baby, which com-pellingly draws the self as the other twin into it. In the case of this patient, h is belief that one of u s had to die was related to an unconscious theory about the existence of two entities at birth, one of whom had to be valued, the other (because in his

Lk„

54 THE UNBORN CHAPTER FOUR 55

view there could be only one valued child) to be blotted out a s worthless.

After a session that he h a s enjoyed, he tu rns u p for the next session at 22 minutes pas t the hour, almost half time. He says he h a d forgotten the session because he h a d been writing a court report about "a paranoid woman". He h a d blotted me out. and he had blotted out the meaning of our relationship, the good time he h a s had. and he got inside me as the therapist , as the one who does the analytic work.

It seems he needs to get inside me, to work out on paper his ideas concerning someone he thinks of a s the patient, h i s unwelcome a n d projected self—"the paranoid woman". In writing his report during session time, had he thought tha t he h a d been inside me? Oh yes. he th inks h e h a d been inside me. He joyfully agrees to agree with me in order to slide into some vigorous a n d all-embracing lie. He says, without a quiver of doubt: "I can only be truthful if I get inside you." So m u c h for t ruth.

He feels himself to be an illegitimate infant, condemned to die. He m u s t displace the real baby in order to have space to think about a par t of himself that he insis ts on splitting off, "the paranoid woman" (who is about to lose a child through a court order—he expects that she will lose the child).

But he says he h a s had enough of this: time is runn ing out (because he was late); he wants to talk about dreams. He now reports a number of dream fragments, which are fascinating, as his dreams often are. I feel coerced to explore his d reams a t a speed to which my mind does not respond well. I suspec t he m u s t have been frustrated and under similar pressures when he cobbled together his report on the paranoid woman.

In the first dream, he is with his older brother . They are sur rounded by rocks. Sea water floods in. His brother escapes through a hole in the rocks above. Next dream. He is on a b u s in North Africa with two brothers , who are obstetricians, possibly twins. Also on the b u s is a Moroccan. He recalls how the Republican supporters in the Spanish Civil War feared los Mows, who fought with Franco, because they decapitated all prisoners of war. I wondered whether the decapitation could be related to obstetrics. Yes, perhaps; he thinks of babies ' heads at birth, like apples, with grease on them.

In the third dream, he is with a woman, leaning against her; she behind him. The position of their bodies is obscure—or I did not have time to work it out accurately. He is having vaginal intercourse with her, and he holds her but tocks . He is covered in blood. Some children direct a spotlight on him, and he tries to cover himself in rubbery stuff.

He insis ts tha t he is having anal intercourse, and tha t this is a repellent dream. I don't agree. He may be inside me in this dream; b u t the important point about the dream is his guilt a t the loss of his brother a t birth. He identifies with his brother, now identified with worthlessness, and thinks him to be his t rue self. His insistence on being rubbish is a guilty defence a t the loss of a n imaginary brother a t birth.

His mythology requires two passages, like the two gates to the Roman underworld: one is vaginal and leads to life and self-realization, the other is anal—a rubbish passage that discards its contents . In labour, the bir th passage exhibits the muscu la r power of contraction. This power can be confused with the more dreaded power of the anal sphincters , which cut of the faeces as though in some act of decapitation. The feared Moroccan troops, los Moros, have the effect of sphincters .

The confusing of bir th and anal passages would appear to be a consequence of fraudulent gettings-into the object. If I b reak into a good place, it h a s a way of turning into a bad place. He h a d hoped to get into the creative site, the u terus , and through the act of intrusion found himself in the rectum. He h a d hoped to travel down the bir th passage and found, instead, tha t he was travelling down a n a n u s and was shorUy to be ejected as worthless.

The theme of bir th and of two selves undergoing two m a n n e r s of process, developmental and regressive, the clock or planetary system tha t move forward as against the clock that moves backward, the two selves and the two processes separating from each other a t the moment of birth, continues to recur over the sessions during the next few weeks.

One day he tu rns up for his session five minutes late, looking disgruntled. He says he has a grudge. I was five minu tes late las t time, and I didn't give him extra time. He hates having to care about issues like these: he ha tes having to be dependent on me. His being late today is his way of saying, I

A i -j-

56 THE UNBORN

don't care about five minutes more or less. He says aggrievedly that he had been about to tell me a nightmare last time when I had thrown him out. (Without having time to hear the nightmare, I had suggested to him that the fact that he had mentioned a nightmare a t the end of the session h a d indicated to me the possibility that the end to the session could be equated with a nightmare, and that this was something h e thought I would not want to hear.)

He now told me the nightmare. Two men h a d approached him and pushed back his head as though to bang it on the wall behind him. He was convinced that the two men were about to kill him. He screamed—only in the dream, he thought, al though he h a d made some noise in actual fact for he h a d awoken his wife.

It seemed clear that the inference that the two men were killing him was a n interpretation included in the dream and could be detached from the dream itself, a t least for the purpose of dream investigation. Thinking he was being killed was a little like his report on the paranoid woman—an a t tempt to take over my contractual obligation to be the therapist , denying me the freedom to unders tand in my own way. In fact, I did not think his dream was a death experience; I thought it to be a bir th experience, to be linked to his feeling a t the end of the session that I had intended to throw him out.

I linked it back to his dream about the two twin obstetricians and the Moroccan in the bus . He was in the bi r th passage. The two men pushing back his head represented a persecutory experience of a labour contraction. I do not know whether a t tha t moment in time he had the model in thought which later came to him—that he was not moving down a bi r th passage b u t was being ejected out of his mother 's rec tum as waste, the two obstetricians now turning into the dreaded Moroccan-sphincters who decapitate their pr isoners of war. He had been born not as a lovely baby, b u t a s a degraded bit of rubbish .

He recalled family stories about his birth. It had been difficult and protracted because he had been a large baby, with broad shoulders. He said he had been born a t a time of international catastrophe, though at this point he did not want to see

CHAPTER FOUR 57

tha t he seemed to think tha t his bir th had precipitated the catastrophe.

He now found himself investigating critically a certain family myth, which he had formerly accepted unquestioningly. When he h a d been four years old, h is family had undergone a crisis tha t had resulted in a loss of s t a tus and income. The c i rcumstances of this crisis had encouraged him to believe that h is father's potency might have been damaged.

I wondered about the meaning of the five minutes ' la teness in this context. He thought that it might relate to the fact that the detailed examination of a baby five minutes after its bir th was often thought to be crucial to the determining of its physical well-being. He himself is going through a chronic crisis about a n examination tha t he h a s failed and m u s t re-sit. He is convinced he will be unable to pass it.

He now made a valuable disclosure, in describing another si tuation. It was like an examination. He had been to visit a n encouraging supervisor, to tell her about a case in his care that h a d filled h im with despair. It concerned a boy aged fifteen, whose forename was almost identical to his surname. The boy's mother h a d died a few years before. The boy's father was thought to be "weak" and unable to support him during the mourning. At about this time, the boy h a d gone to some swimming b a t h s a n d had been anally assaul ted by a man in the locker-rooms. The boy had been taken into care, and a t the in-care home he had formed a gang of younger boys, for the purpose of anal intercourse. He had been sent away from the in-care home to a very strict "macho" insti tution and then, when this place had clearly been of no use to him, to a "feminist" organization, where there had been little in the way of organization. Not surprisingly, the boy had entered a s tate of despair .

I pointed out the parallel between the boy's experiences and his previous description in the session of the journey down the bir th passage. It seemed as though the breaking of the waters and the leaving of the uterine place and the beginning of the bir th journey could be compared to a kind of death, the first poignant anticipation of a mother 's death. At this point of vulnerability occurred the first anal assaul t .

58 THE UNBORN

If the parallel holds, I don't know how this might be experienced by the foetus as it begins its descent down the bi r th passage, b u t it would suggest that this is the moment when the nightmare of being in the wrong passage, of being a piece of rubbish moving down the rectal exit and liable to decapitation by the Morrocan sphincters might begin.

He experiences the leaving of the u te rus a s a grief; and in his grief he is vulnerable to assaul t . I would link this to my observation tha t before the weekend break he conceives of the breas t as sexualized and belonging to someone else and that h e deals with his feelings of being rejected and degraded (as though the sexualized breas t and its lover were the legitimate baby) by turning the breas t shape inside out, a s it were, and identifying it with his rectum. The sexual exciting of the anal membrane is associated with ru th lessness . He t r iumphs over others. He boas ts of his authority over the people he works with and their deference to his opinions.

For instance, he re turns from one weekend in a s ta te of despair tinged by complacency and says in a voluptuous tone of voice tha t he has now come to know of a hopelessness tha t can never be p u t right. He refers to a child in special t rea tment at a school. The child came back to school one day and found that h is specialist teacher and he h a d been moved to another room. The new room was divided, one half being full of rubbish , the other half being available for the teacher and for him.

At this point, I could not unders tand where the hopelessness lay: b u t it did seem probable that retrospectively he was suggesting that the foetus in utero thinks of the other half of its mother as filled with rubbish. When it is born, the foetus-infant carries this idea over into its relationship at the breast . If it th inks of its mother as being pregnant , it a s sumes tha t the pregnancy occurs in the other half of the room, the rectal a rea full of rubbish. No possibility is allowed for a change in the s t ruc ture of relationships.

In leaving the u terus , the foetus in despair h a s its first experience of wishing to get back into some place where it is no longer welcome. It h a s its first in-place-and-time experience of projective identification, of fraudulence, of illegitimacy. The act of

CHAPTER FOUR 59

being dislodged from the uter ine space begins the bir th process; it initiates notions of worthlessness and rejection and fraudulence (related to the wish to reclaim what is no longer available to it). It initiates the first experience of time and foreshadows the concepts of the forward- and backward-moving clocks. The boy's experience of the "macho" insti tution with its pseudo muscular i ty and sadism presented as "discipline" would be like an unp leasan t experience of the bir th contraction—especially so, a s it was in his case, if your shoulders are too broad and your head is j ammed back. The "feminist" institution, with its absence of boundaries , would be like the release of the contraction, sett ing u p bewilderment in the mind of the foetus a t its very unpredictable passage. By now, the foetus would be in despair and convinced tha t the only fate it deserved would be to be dropped out of a rectum. It is unlikely to believe that its relationship to its mother is about to change from an ideally benevolent enclosure into an imaginative encounter.

The sources of negativity at this point can be summarized as follows: You are about to be born. But you think you are about to be killed. Having been pushed out of the u terus , you think tha t your mother has died. Being born, being weaned, are unavoidably thought of as forms of being discarded or dying. You are illegitimate. You cannot believe that at the end of your journey down the bir th passage, or at the end of your therapy, the mother you have lost a s a witness will be discovered once more, a s some one whose loving gaze you might meet. The prototype for the definition of weaning as a losing and a finding—a losing of the actual breas t and a finding of the breas t as a presence in the mind—is reversed by this prior experience. The loss of a mother a s a uterine surrounding or ambience is hopefully followed by the discovering of a mother as a person, a s someone you meet face to face.

He becomes more than usually preoccupied with the woman who a t tends the session before him. He thinks this woman is a favourite of mine and is able to solicit extra minutes from me at the end of many sessions. He is convinced that if only he were a woman, he would be able to get extra time from me.

Her therapy hour and his therapy hour were like the two passages in a mother 's body, divided by the space of ten minutes . It was clearly important for him to imagine he was making

60 THE UNBORN

the journey into life; b u t she was making a more attractive anal journey, which he conceived of in terms of time as a journey backwards, against the clock, reversing the laws of na tu r e and nu r tu re and leading to annihilation. He imagined my concern for her deliciously to reverse the nourishing process; it was disintegrating, and it induced madness . (This conjecture defended him against the pain and guilt he felt a t other times over the condition of a near kin, a woman who had been committed to a mental hospital.) Being a male, he had to p u t u p with the pains of growth, while she, being female, could enjoy the delights of being tortured and driven out of her mind.

He begins a session by saying that he h a s had a dream that h a s disappeared. In its place, he h a s a thought—he imagines himself on a table, and a saw is moving up between his legs. I suggest he is now identified with the woman who comes to the session before him, who, in turn, is enjoying herself with the thought of castrat ing the pat ient who follows her. In logic this should be he, b u t the point of his thought is to have the woman torture the male he believes will one day take over his hour . The bes t way to at tack someone who is going to fill your hour is to think that the person before you, your elder sibling, will destroy him for you, allowing you clean hands .

He reports a dream in which he is in intercourse with his naked elder sister, whose (foreign) n a m e p u n s on the word for "hour" in his native language. Under the bed a mad girl l istens in to the couple. In terms of the infancy model, he might be a confused baby feeding at a good breas t and put t ing madness into his mother 's lap or genitals (the girl beneath the bed).

Boundaries, insofar a s they exist, are fragile in his mind. He freely enters into at least two of the many relat ionships he ascribes to me, or at least imagines to be events in my diary— one being the woman whose session is before him, the other being the anticipated sessions with his as-yet-unborn sibling. He h a s many thoughts at this time of driving his car at right angles across railways tracks, seconds before the express train ru shes past; he expects that someone will cut a t ninety degrees across his temporal progress through life, like a pat ient who is able to drive from dawn to dusk through every one of his therapist 's sessions each day. His fear of my favouring the

CHAPTER FOUR 61

previous pat ient is in par t a fear that the narrower the ten-minute gap between his and her sessions becomes, the more a t r isk he is from his split-off femininity taking him over. He is worried by the possibility that he pu t s madness into others, less consciously worried by the thought that they might p u t madnes s into him.

Clearly he is fascinated by the anti-life experiences he ascribes to my relationship with the previous patient . He comes to one session saying he h a s not brought a cheque for our work, followed by the thought that he was late because he had been to the lavatory. He had been to the lavatory at twenty-five minutes to the hour . In reverie, a t least, he seemed to have thought he was the woman pat ient having her enjoyable anal tortures in the session before him. He cannot present his faeces/money in the session because as a male he would think it improperly homosexual . Anality is admissible on heterosexual occasions because it can be confused with the creativity of childbirth.

It emerges tha t he thinks I extract faeces from the woman pat ient and then eat them, a s though they were babies. This conception of a woman in labour might be from Greek myth: Kronos eats the evacuants of his wife's body (babies/faeces). He dreams tha t he is a t a party and married to a disturbed woman. He sees a woman sitting on the lap of a man . He approaches a nice woman a t the buffet and asks for some s teaming cannelloni. She tells him they are for the family only. He h a s salad instead. He is haun ted (he says) by a sense of recognition in women. With women he feels on the verge of insight. Is it a s though he were almost about to see his mother 's b reas t s once more, I ask. He says, yes.

The contras t between the divine and h u m a n twins, Pollux and Castor, might be reasonably described in terms of the contras t between an infant self latched to a feeding object, who perhaps fails to acknowledge that the bounty it receives (the sense of divinity) is not its own as of right, and an infant self who h a s been left on its own and hopes to hold on to the next feed, if only j u s t . This would be to feel on the pulse the incipient t ransience in all mortal s tates .

An infant undergoing such s ta tes would be reasonably sane; b u t sani ty would be less secure if, a s in the case of the patient .

6 2 THE UNBORN

the division between the two s ta tes becomes split between appropriating the birthright and delegating worthlessness to the other self. To be mortal, then, is to be identified with a buried and abandoned self, who can only hope to survive by appropriating a delusion, the place of its twin, idealized as divine and in some way preferable to the h u m a n condition.

CHAPTER FIVE

Clinical material related to the fetish-cults of the pharaohs. A living twin triumphs over the victim in sacrifice, whose dispatch into the underworld transforms the profane into the sacred. The anti-symbolic and condensed representation of the sacred, as it appears in a patient's train of thought.

The hallelujah of first creation brings into existence a binary system personalized as twins. The par ts of the binary system are sometimes rigidly held apart , as

between the pharaoh and his underworld reflection, and sometimes interchangeable, a s between Pollux and Castor. Hellenic self-esteem postulated that mortality (Castor) could a s sume some of the powers of divinity (Pollux). At the same time, it was critical of any h u m a n claim to omnipotence. Pausanias described a temple mirror that did not reflect the features of the mortals who looked into it, only the s ta tues of the gods behind them (Frazer, 1898, p. 422). Hellenic scepticism concerning the centring of any idea of t ru th in humani ty prefigures the extreme Byzantine belief that only the superna tura l h a s reality.

The mirror tha t reflects the s ta tues of gods conceivably symbolizes an idealized future that has no place for those who are alive a t present . An infant may feel annihilated when it looks in phan t a sy into the breast and there discovers the rad ian t presence of the next baby; it may feel a s though its

63

6 4 THE UNBORN CHAPTER FIVE 6 5

essence had been sucked into a future in which it does not exist. The pharaohs thought to control the radiance of the future baby by associating themselves with the sun, which they believed was yoked with them to a universal law. The alter ego twin, who moved through the liquid darkness of the night sky in conjunction with the night sun, was similarly yoked.

The psychic ovum splits, and, secure in the symmetry of their relationship, two identities, the self and its alter ego, travel down the same bir th passage and through the same passage in time, a s bound as the self and its mirror reflection. But the two personalities within rigidly identical mask-l ike s t ruc tures are uns table and interchangeable and possibly in a s ta te of mutua l projective identification with each other.

At b i r th the twins think to separate, though in later life, a t times of sacred crisis—as during an epidemic (which is perhaps a paranoid-schizoid unders tanding of the emergence of new life)—the distinction between the self a n d alter ego disappears , and the two selves realize in panic that notions of differentiation have been lost. A scholar in Hellenic s tudies. Marcel Detienne (1986) describes the word epidemic a s follows:

Epidemic in Greek belongs to the language of theophany . . . the epidemics are sacrifices offered to the powers of the gods: when they arrive in a country, or appear in a sanctuary, or take part in a feast day or are present at a sacrifice. . . . Apodemics are sacrifices to mark the departure of a god. [p. 12]

The living twin h a s every reason to wish to be freed from its sibling, who carries the ha t red tha t it would lodge into the radiant next baby. The turbidity of the alter ego's suffering recalls the annihilating black-hole space that can transform into another paranoid-schizoid dread, the nipple that contains the divine baby that radiates all the meanings of the world. The sufferings of the alter ego threaten to devour the living twin, who fraudulently claims (as did the pharaohs) an identity with some cosmic phallic conception of the nipple.

The paranoid-schizoid conception of pain is of a terrible enclosure. It has the alter ego lodge in a malignant womb-mouth , which distresses it by its discomfiting shape and extreme temperatures and is liable to be devouring. The self

lodged in the comfortable womb can realize at any moment that its sense of security is delusive—and it may find that it h a s changed position with the alter ego. Worse, a s ancient sacrificial practices demonstrate, the lining of the malignant womb, as tormenting as the shir t of Nessus, can be perceived to transfigure into a radiance tha t ba thes the foetus.

One of my pat ients had been faced in childhood by a si tuation in which he h a d been under pressure to identify with the fortunate twin. He h a d learnt tha t three years before his bir th his father h a d survived a plane crash. His father had been aware of the plane 's rapid fall through the sky a n d of its hitting the ground, and he may have been aware of flames, b u t he had then lost consciousness. A farmer had dragged him from the plane, a n d he h a d survived, though badly bu rn t .

The pat ient never came to know why the plane had crashed; he believed that ice may have accumulated on the wings. He was aware of how distressed he had been at the sight of his father's face and body. The extensive skin grafts h a d been clumsily handled. His mother had nursed his father after the accident; the marriage of the parents , and the conception of the children, had come later.

He tended to avoid thinking directly of his father's accident. Much of his thought, in unconscious phan tasy at least, centred on himself as an infant in uneasy alliance with his mother, mixed up with her, possibly in a folie-a-deux. The s t ruc ture of his conscious thoughts suggested that the infant in him believed that his mother had the power "to sanction the delusion tha t the universe revolved around him. He believed that his mother sanctioned this belief from disturbed, even mad motives; she allowed him to be deluded in this way so as to mainta in her power over him. The phan tasy was: my mother mas tu rba tes my a n u s while both of u s play-act the idea of a lovely relationship a t the breast . He acted out the hypocrisy of the relationship in later life by playing the anal Don J u a n while maintaining the pretence of being a happily married man .

After a term or so in treatment, he broke off with a girlfriend, a n d she felt she had reason to inform the press about a perversion that she had encouraged in him. He was excited by this threat . His belief that many people would rejoice in his "downfall" was a way of coping with a s tate of b lankness .

k .

66 THE UNBORN

masking anxiety, which afflicted him when unconscious thoughts of his father's fall through the skies began to surface into consciousness.

He h a d delighted in the experience of his wife's giving b i r th to a child. At the same time, he could not tolerate the experience; it h a d shaken his confidence in the defensive usefulness of egocentricity; and in pa r t this was why h e h a d come into therapy. It is a s though any father who witnesses the bi r th of a healthy child at some level might realize his kinship to an alter ego in the bad womb.

He h a d a dream early on in therapy in which he was hand-in-glove with his mother and contemptuously looking down through a window at a man called Farrow. The name 'Farrow' was noteworthy, for a farrow is a litter of pigs. His mother 's mas turba t ing of his a n u s (at least in his phantasy) , experienced as contempt for the procreative abilities of women (they give bir th to faeces), was projected into the damaged, excluded presence of his father.

His father's pain began to appear in the material in covert ways. He recalled two pat ients who had come to a clinic he visits, who diagnostically did not sui t its u n u s u a l specialization. One, a man, was a high-risk hear t pat ient with pa ins in the chest; the other was a woman with inflamed arteries. Her condition h a d been correctly diagnosed, b u t she h a d died from lung congestion half an hour after being admitted. The cause of he r death remained unknown; and in this it was like the cause of the plane disaster.

During the last session of the previous week, he had brought a dream in which he was a diagnostician. On the couch was a patient, a baby with breathing difficulties and with bloodshot eyes, which he associated to a memory of his father's eyes a t the time of his death, many years after the p lane accident. His father had been unable to breathe, and no one h a d been able to help him. He equated his father's suffering with the sufferings of a baby on a couch—presumably his own baby self. He recalled how shortly after learning the news that his father was dying of cancer of the spine, he had travelled on a plane and felt a tingle of elation in his spine. He had loved his father, b u t he was conscious of the excitement he had felt when he had heard of h i s death.

CHAPTER FIVE 6 7

Allusions to h i s father's suffering became more b land as they became more threatening to him. He reported a dream in which he was a passenger on a plane that was flying too low. He described the plane as weaving through trees; somehow or other, it landed successfully. As he left the plane, he congratulated the pilot on having made a successful landing. He shook h a n d s with the pilot. The idea of his congratulating the pilot had a contemptuous ring about it and drew attention to itself. It was a reasonable expectation that a professional pilot would bring a p lane down safely without weaving it through trees. It was equally reasonable to expect a patient to weave through the haza rds of a therapist 's interventions.

Whether he saw me at this moment a s the mother who u n m a s k s his delusions in order to asser t her authori ty over him, I did not know. He certainly saw my communicat ions as trees through which he had to weave in order to survive. They were bringing him close to realizing tha t his father's experiences could be his own. Something like a plane crash existed in him, like a bullet whirling about inside a tank. It existed as a historical event affecting his father; bu t it also existed as a psychotic possibility, in which any distinction between himself and his alter ego might break down: and it existed as a potential language by which he might dream.

He did not enter a s ta te of psychosis; b u t he was flooded by the stuff of psychosis, mediated through nightmares, which had the same function a s had embalmed placentas and umbilical cords for the pharaohs . Many of them alluded to the theme of a plane crash: the idea of burning was central to them. In one dream he was looking out of the back of a bus . He saw a man with a flash-bulb camera bu rn up the people he was photographing in the flash of his camera. In the next dream, the defective gas-cooker in his mother 's basement was out of control a n d flaring up. A week later he dreamt of a man and woman in intimacy, and the m a n was consumed by flames. He remembered a film he had seen in which a man had been placed in a wicker baske t and b u r n t as a sacrificial victim.

He h a d told me when we had first met that one of his difficulties was that he could never feel angry. He now found himself very angry after sessions. Feelings of unworthiness began to emerge, b u t he swiftly got rid of them. One day he

6 8 THE UNBORN

remembered how his father had brought him a present of some toy soldiers and a handkerchief. He said: "a terrible s torm was taking place; thunder and lightning. . . . I remember the sight of his b u r n t legs. . . . I'm convinced lightning, not ice on the wings, brought his plane down."

The session had begun with a dream in which he was driving u p to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He had found himself faced by traffic lights turned to red. and he h a d j u m p e d the lights, even though he knew that there was a one-way traffic flow beyond the lights and that he was likely to crash into one or more of the oncoming cars.

This dream was followed by another dream—of being on a jet ty by the sea. listening to old sailors talk approvingly of the murder of babies in the war. A photographer in the group broke into this talk to deplore the atrocities of war. He associated the photographer to the photograph of a little girl bu rn ing from the effects of napa lm in the Vietnam War.

Toy soldiers a s against real ones—his father brings him toy soldiers and a handkerchief—acts of war are bound to tears. But the lightning and thunder tha t overcame his father overwhelms h im also. At this point, h is father, a s well a s being identified with a mother in childbirth, is identified with the littie Vietnamese girl burn ing from napalm.

I p resume that a t a moment similar to this one the self in bir th is first aware of its alter ego a s moving away from it. carrying with it the suffering tha t might otherwise h inder the self from living. At this moment, fitfully, he was beginning to be able to tolerate the sight of his father's suffering.

Some time earlier he had dreamt of a photographer whose flash-light had incinerated those whom he had photographed. The situation h a s begun to change. The eyes tha t see the agony are now no longer the flash-bulb eyes tha t project the suffering that they then see. The second dream photographer is able to stabilize the image; he brings into being a certain food for thought. It was questionable whether thought needs such food.

Within terms of his development, the second dream photographer is a compromise between a personification of himself as a benevolent being and an identification with the sailors who delight in the murder of children. He represents a compromise, too, between the driver 'who j u m p s the lights a t the Arc de

CHAPTER FIVE 69

Triomphe and the meaning of the Arc de Triomphe, which is bound u p with the meaning of depressive symbolization.

Those who talk of a negative theology direct at tention to mysteries tha t cannot be seen or touched or directly known about , a s in the case of the unknown soldier who died on the battlefields of the First World War, whose tomb the Arc de Triomphe contains. This is a depressive symbolization. A flame b u r n s a s a memory to this soldier—the flame being a fire of a quite different order from the flash of a camera or the flames tha t leap about a crashed aeroplane.

The psychic authori ty of the dead soldier lies in his unknowability. Because his individuality is not recognized, the unique pain he h a s suffered cannot be buried with his body. To link the theory of t r auma to the theory of the sacred is to discover that on one level a pain can be timeless and spaceless and waits to be suffered by everyone. In acts of consecration the victim of the sacrifice draws all psychic power into it. as though entered into by all the energies of the universe. But this relationship between a par t and the whole works in two directions. For while the whole universe may seem to condense into the sufferings of the victim; the victim a t the same time can seem to be transfigured. Though lost within a black-hole planet , he tu rns into a sun-like radiance, much as day takes over the place of the night.

Hilda Kuper's (1947) remarkable observations of custom among the Swazi people of South Africa, collected during the mid-1930s, are informative of the na tu re of archaic thinking about transfiguration. Swazi rites of renewal and the bir th rites of the ancient pharaohs provide similar ways of thinking about the idea of someone else's pain.

Each year the Swazi renew the king's power in r i tuals whose degree of potency depends on the point a t which the moon is waxing or waning. When the king is a boy, the r i tuals are few and weakly performed; when he reaches maturi ty, they at ta in s trength. The capacity to make distinctions, between individuals or between life as an energy and life a s an embodiment, increases or decreases in relation to the extent to which the king, a s sacrificial victim, acquires the gravity of the sacred. At

Li

7 0 THE UNBORN

the moment of sacrifice, he is the negation of the sun : he is the black-hole p lanet into which all distinctions collapse. There is eclipse and darkness, and lightning rends the sky. The king carries all badness and danger and pollution. He is ha ted by his people, and they dance and sing out their ha t red . Ceremonies of this kind have the same function as h a d embalmed placentas and umbilical cords for the pharaohs : they mediate. They are liminal phenomena that bridge the gap between the sign systems of the paranoid-schizoid position a n d the symbolizations of depressive unders tanding.

The king is painted black and placed in darkness . He is no t alone. One of his many wives m u s t cohabit with h im dur ing this time. In symbolic death a shar ing occurs: wha t does this mean? The psychic ovum splits, and one twin pe rhaps does not want to know about the journey of its alter ego; b u t there is another mind present during the act of primal division. During the waning of the moon Isis, as mother, sister, and lover, m u s t grieve over the dismembered Osiris. In other religious myths, too, the mother—or wife or sister—of the tortured child m u s t bear witness to its sufferings. The idea tha t during eclipses in meaning someone is able to share the paranoid-schizoid s ta te is central to depressive transformation.

The entire population is placed in a s ta te of taboo and seclusion as soon as the king is in darkness . In a literal unders tanding of the word atonement, the population is at one with the king. Spies report on the breaking of taboo in a s t range fashion. They do not say of the taboorbreaker: you were doing wrong by scratching yourself. They say: you were scratching the king. Social differentiations between individualities appear to have collapsed, and everything h a s become one. The unknown soldier might be anyone, and "anyone" h a s the power to become "everyone". The fact that the soldier cannot be known, that he is a presence in a negative theology, allows him to mediate between mind and catastrophe so that thought can arise.

Earlier I described the paranoid-schizoid conception of someone else's pain as a type of environment. The aeroplane plummets , and the sufferer is always still; it is the world that

CHAPTER FIVE 71

moves about the sufferer, a s a womb-mouth that threatens to devour those who enter it.

Realizing the important pa r t played by the idea of the plane c rash in his capacity to think and feel helped the patient perceive the instability of the relationship he had of the idea of the crash to a conception of time. The crash had occurred some time before his bir th and may have given him an u n u s u a l belief about the na tu r e of his own conception, b u t this belief was secondary to h i s unders tanding of the plane crash as a timeless act tha t might be used appropriately in divination, a s though it were a pronouncement of the Delphic oracle. Womb spaces, which include the crash a s a type of womb space, take the form of geometric ideograms a t some early point on the depressive threshold; they exist outside space and time and can be located equally in the future and in the pas t .

He knew the c rash as a space into which anyone might enter at any time; it was a space he had avoided and therefore felt threatened by. He was convinced that the plane crash would happen to him; and he had to keep his father in mind as someone who would live out this nightmare for him. His wife gave bi r th to a healthy child; the child clearly had taken over the fortunate space, his prerogative to be born into life: he felt filled with panic; he now might be overwhelmed by the fate of the alter ego.

His sense of dread was the pu re cul ture of the sacred in all b u t one part icular: he was able to dream. His nightmares showed the pressure of divinity, b u t they did not annihilate him because they were partial symbolizations or types of myths that were in pa r t able to metabolize an awareness of the divine. No capacity for symbolization exists in a mind that h a s been invaded by the pure cul ture of the sacred, which is anti-symbolic and unknowable. From one point of view, the pure culture of the sacred is the light of the good objects, from another point of view it is the psychosis that activates all psychoses.

A radioactive object does not symbolize radioactivity; it is a n object tha t contains or conducts radioactivity; more likely than not, it is an object that is devoured by radioactivity. The sacred devours all forms of containment a n d is, in turn, devoured: and all types of psychic skin or containment are ineffective against

72 THE UNBORN

it. It can only be described by way of a negative theology. It represents nothing and h a s a way of becoming everything.

An emphasis on the paranoid-schizoid conception of space as a terrible enclosure can conceal the depressive possibility tha t movement out of the paranoid-schizoid position is usual ly indicated by the presence of pain. The man who had been sensitive to the degrees of reality in liminal phenomenon as degrees of density—he talked of three girls in a table and of a football heavy with dew lying at dawn by raspberry ne ts in his parents ' garden—tolerated the situation of being trapped in a pa rano id-schizoid type of hell by projecting any evidence of growing pa ins into representat ions of the sacrificial victim. His images of the sacrificial victims projected s ta tes of compression into the mind of the therapist , and this was why they were noticeable. The communicated s ta te of density arose from a parano id-schizoid conception of the alter ego a s a sacrificial victim made up of signs that r u s h together, like particles being drawn into one point. (The condensation of a radiant maternal face into the dense rind of a mask h a s the same meaning.) [The al ternat ion in meaning between black hole as nipple or space that attracts everything into annihilation and a space that radiates primal glory is similar to the conceptual device by which a mind is able to perceive the cosmos as either microcosm or macrocosm, and which h a s the at t r ibutes of both telescope and microscope.]

He began a session by talking about two incidents. The first one concerned a b u s and its bullying driver: the second concerned a frozen pond and a solitary dead carp in it. The incident on the b u s was without outcome. It had a s t ruc tu re typical of tyrannical s ta tes of mind. The patient informed the driver that he wanted to get off at a request stop close to his parents ' house in the Midlands. The driver told him that this was not possible; he needed a ticket validated at the terminus in London. In telling me about this incident, the pat ient conveyed an a tmosphere of universal despair. The driver's tyranny allowed no escape: it seemed to possess the inhabi tants of the bus .

Although the situation was one that he often found himself in, he did not find it familiar. In order to survive as a slave, he

CHAPTER FIVE 7 3

h a d to make totalitarian s i tuat ions invisible to himself. He was surpr ised by the bus-driver and did not recognize him as the recurrent intrusion of negativity in his unders tanding of the world. Someone s tops h im from getting on. And about this he is complacent. I indicate to h im tha t the bus-driver represents a split-off projected bit of himself, and from the quality of his silence I think he approves of my making this point: the unchanging is the unthreatening, and this is the kind of thing he hopes I will say. He experiences change concretely a s the crossing of some disturbing transition point. Better to submi t to a tyrant than freely to have to cross a frontier. In the days when his local supermarket had a check-out point for eight items, he would count the items in other peoples' baske ts and complain if they tried to take through more than the st ipulated number . He was a Charon vetting travellers as they crossed into the underworld.

At the same time, if he had been without his ability to project h is tyrant self into the bus-driver, he might have been unable to intrqject the second incident, concerning the dead carp, which was of a different dimension. The idea of the carp had two of the at t r ibutes necessary to mobilize the imagination: it posited realms in thought that have a binary relationship to each other—the living and the dead, the sacred and the profane; and it allowed mental space for the belief that thought m u s t travel between psychic realms of radically different kinds if it is to develop, however dangerous the frontier-crossings into the sufferings or joys of others might be.

He talks of the frozen pond in his father's garden. He informs me without regret that the silver carp that lives in this pond has died from the cold. He wonders what will happen to the carp when the pond thaws. Will it be eaten by crows perhaps? But then, he says, why bother?—it is dead. I take the idea of the carp to be a sacrificial-victim type of proto-symbol capable of transforming into a charismatic image that is sacred, dangerous, and compelling of awe. It is a paranoid-schizoid misconception concerning the meaning of symbolization as a depressive identification with the otherness of others.

His mother had recently died. He had always thought of her as good (although prone to be taken over by him), b u t the notion that he might experience her goodness a s an endowment

7 4 THE UNBORN

to h im had not been apparent before. Through the manne r of her death, she had made a gift of her dying to him: she had helped him to undergo the experience. Shortly before he r death, the family had gathered about her wheel-chair and listened to a piece of music (by Mozart) on the gramophone. He realized that something had been given to them at that moment . His capacity to be involved in the experience of her dying and to sus ta in the involvement had moved me. But, not unexpectedly, a few weeks after his mother 's death he re turned to limbo once more. He was gnawed by jealousy at the thought that his mother had loved other people apar t from himself, and that other people were mourning her loss.

This was the state of mind tha t possessed him when he told me about the tyrannical bus-driver and the dead carp. He h a d no intention of seeing himself a s the carp. To be identified with it was to be identified with a potentially living source in his internalized mother, which experiences coming alive a s a n attack—to this extent, the bitings of the crows' beaks represent a fear of being born. He can only know the carp from the paranoid-schizoid position as a bizarre object, a sucking-in of signs, arrows sucked into one perspectival point. His fear of it was a form of the fear of ghosts. "The ancestors . . . are spiritually present in the social life of their descendants in the same way as the sacred animals are present in sacred pools" (Fortes, 1945, p. 143). The foetus-carp within the mother is a spirit of the ancestors, a sacred fish in a sacred pool, a liminal phenomenon that will devour him if he cannot devour it. For him the pool cannot be a place of outcome; if it thaws, it will become a source of anti-life, the psychotic underworld womb tha t tortures any life within it.

He is convinced that h is father had a proprietorial claim over his mother 's creativity: he does not allow himself to think tha t this claim might be a projection of his own negativity. He would see his father as the bus-driver. The incident on the b u s does not allow for an alternation in symbolism. It is oppressive and projects irritation. On the other hand, the pond by its na tu re a s a paranoid-schizoid type of psychic enclosure sets up malign-womb and benign-womb contras ts that are resonant in symbolism: frozen-unfrozen, within the water and without the water, dead-alive. When unfrozen, the pond is fertile in

CHAPTER FIVE 7 5

many ways. His mother had given bir th to many children, and she h a d enjoyed he r professional career. There h a d been one

' miscarriage, to which he tends to re turn , a s making sense of his inability to live out h is own life.

As a thought in the transference, the carp indicates that he anticipated crossing the boundary between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as analogous to being at tacked by the beaks of a flock of crows. He identifies the dead foetus with the dead carp (all paranoid-schizoid s ta tes entail a commitmen t in identification with a foetus in miscarriage). He wants to mainta in this situation: better to be a dead carp at tacked by living crows than a living carp at tacked by dead crows (who presumably would be sibling ghosts: perhaps the ghosts of a denied future). The body of the carp, bombarded by crow beaks , is similar to a body riveted by lightning or convulsed by epilepsy or contorted by the plague: evidence of the sacred, of new life, entering into the profane. This is one of the meanings of the act of sacrifice. It is a version of the journey through the depressive threshold, in which space and time demarcations can become unpredictable (as in the space and time condensation of the lightning flash). All space and all time enter one place and moment and transfigure the corporeal: a similar crisis is unavoidable a t some point in the transference process, a s though this were some defect or incomprehensibility in reason.

During the previous session, a startling event had occurred. For 40 minutes he had presented thoughts that were insincere, and then, out of nowhere, in a strangulated voice, he had said that all day he had been thinking of Purcell's an them, "Rejoice in the Lord Always". Having got this painful confession out— tha t he h a d a baby within him capable of rejoicing in the world—he had begun to smash the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left hand . I thought he was smashing in a baby's skull. At this moment the carp in the pond was himself, only seemingly dead, and about to come alive a s the pond thawed (when the mourning process could be no longer delayed) and then threatened to be smashed up by crow beaks.

The key alternation in meaning that characterizes the paranoid-schizoid and depressive divide concerns the pain and mystery of initiation, sometimes conceived of as the bir th pro-

76 THE UNBORN

cess itself. Within the sign system of the paranoid-schizoid position, the mother in parturi t ion is reduced to being a cruel orifice that eats the baby. Within the symbolization of the depressive position, she is the power of love that is able to bear witness to, and share, the joys and afflictions of her infant: a n Isis who m u s t suffer the death and dismemberment of her beloved Osiris, a s a phan tasy arising from the pain of being b o m .

In paranoid-schizoid terms, the thawing of the pond water is like the en thus iasm with which the followers of Dionysus tore apar t living animals and ate their raw flesh, in imitation of the Titans perhaps. The Titans tore apar t and cooked the baby Dionysus, in order to appropriate his immortality. Zeus s t ruck them down with a thunderbolt , and out of their charred remains rose the h u m a n race.

CHAPTER SIX

Catastrophic change as determining phantasies of "being devoured" in birth The nature of the "gap" between the separated twin couples: the myth of uninterrupted reverie and the myth of double annihilation. The dead twin foetus returns as a murderous avenger in narcissistic organizations, or as a "soma" inhibitor of the feeding couple, if its reality as a presence in the mind has been denied.

T o enter the transformatory space of the depressive threshold is to learn of a fury a t the hear t of reason. An intimacy of communicat ion evolves transference to a

point where the infant in the adul t feels compelled to ask of itself and its par tner : which of u s is mad?

Melanie Klein's discovery of the two positions, and of the threshold between tnem, reveals that reason and transference have a n identical s t ruc ture by which to communicate meaning. Freud and his successors investigated the workings of the transference as a passionate hunch; they did not have the concept of depressive position, which includes the concept of a mother whose turbulent na tu re a t one stage in the transference challenges every counsel to well-being: they did not have the means by which to see how transference was meaningful in its own right a s the agency that recovers mind's ability to receive communicat ion from its good objects. The recovery entails the journey through transformatory space.

77

78 THE UNBORN

Psychosis is not something to be got rid of; transference indicates that it can be p u t to the service of the depressive unders tanding in order to throw light on the mysterious na tu r e of reason a s a depressive phenomenon. Thought requires the passionate rationality of the depressive position to comprehend the minus-knowledge of psychosis—which is never random, marks a retreat from the good, and h a s to be placed within the context of the rationality of the good to be perceived. Psychosis can invalidate the concepts of space, time, and sensation; its perversity lies not in the act of invalidation b u t in its denying that the rationality of the depressive position invalidates these concepts for different reasons.

The good objects confirm the existence of an inner world perceivable by the eyes of the mind, and in which nothing can be verified or proved. The two positions, as K and -K ways of looking at the same phenomenon, are bound to each other like pa r tne rs who are unable to speak if they are unable to speak with each other: one gives voice to the other. Psychosis, as the antagonism to reason within reason, is as emblematic of the h u m a n mind as is reason itself. It h a u n t s the inst i tut ions of h u m a n culture; and it art iculates itself through the ways in which groups form themselves.

The two positions impose the pressure of transformation on each other. The stress is so intense a t the point where they have contact that Melanie Klein was convinced that any impulse to cross from one side to the other could not be extricated from the prospect of murder and suicide. Interpretation frequently shut t les across the point, and interpretation in microcosm carries the macrocosmic p ressure of transformation between the two positions; it abridges many postulates about the na tu re of mind.

Transformation breaks down the cognitive appa ra tus and induces a s tate of helplessness; it is similar to the s ta te of the two par tners in the birth process. A pat ient on the depressive threshold said that her sense of disquiet p u t her in mind of an operation for hear t surgery, which she associated to a mother 's experience in giving bir th and to a film in which four men shot the rapids. ('They were looking for deliverance, and what they got was retribution.") The project of renouncing selfhood is

CHAPTER SIX 79

daunt ing when mind in paranoid-schizoid s ta tes is unable to retain depressive symbolizations.

Hume believed that questions concerning the si tuat ion of knowledge before and after birth throw no light on the na tu re of the unders tanding. Work with the transference adds suppor t to his view. Transference is reason, and the dynamics of reason depend on the transformation that can occur between the two positions, and on nothing else. The neo-Platonic belief that "soul is form and doth the body make" (Edmund Spenser, An Hymn in Honour of Beauty) is true of the depressive conception of unders tanding.

Myths a s liminal phenomena are not "about" bir th experiences; ra ther , b i r ths imitate liminal myths—and sometimes imitate them badly. Birth myths as vehicles for the transformatory function of reason draw to attention certain "flecks" in the transference turbulence that otherwise might pass unnoticed.

In myth a cannibal mother devours Dionysus; in depressive unders tanding, and quite in contrast , she is the mother who suffers pain a t the time of the infant's birth, and whose love for it allows her to identify with its pain—two mothers in phantasy , one within the other: one archaic and inexplicable; the other a source of unders tanding in intimacy.

Behind the Dionysus myth lies an earlier Egyptian myth in which Isis suffers the knowledge of Set 's sacrificial murder and dismemberment of Osiris. Isis's relationship to Osiris as mother-sister-lover is primordial and pre-definitory: while in a similar fashion the murderer Set is Osiris's twin-son-father. Plutarch compares Isis to a normative mother, the queen of Byblos, so as to heighten the poetic psychotic rites by which she t r ansmutes the fragmented god into "immortality" by way of an analogic relationship. Within the normative mother, who in intimacy shares and transforms the meaning of pain in the infant, is Isis as the archaic maternal otherness that regresses unders tand ing on the depressive threshold into terrifying paranoid-schizoid formulations.

A coffin containing the dismembered pa r t s of Osiris's body floats across the Mediterranean towards Byblos and comes to rest in a pa tch of hea ther tha t grows by the shore. The heather grows into a tree about the coffin, which the king of Byblos cuts

8 0 THE UNBORN

down: he uses it a s a pillar to suppor t the roof of his palace. Isis, in search of Osiris, presents herself at the court; she plaits the hair of the ladies in waiting. The queen of Byblos is enchanted by her and hires her to nu r se her baby.

The journey through maternal transformation takes the traveller through a s ta te of b lankness akin to delusion; the concept of "immortality" might be an unfathomable "deep time" reached through fire and water.

Isis nursed the child by giving it her finger to suck instead of her breast, and in the night she would burn away the mortal portions of its body. She herself would turn into a swallow and flit about the pillar with a wailing lament, until the queen, who had been watching, when she saw the baby on fire, gave forth a loud cry and thus deprived it of immortality. [Babbit, 1936, p. 14]

The "immortality" rites, resembling the Eleusian rites that Demeter pract ised to restore her daughter Persephone, belong to the same class of motif as the eagle (representing stolen fire and lightning) that devours Prometheus 's liver by night b u t not by day, the incineration of Zeus's sacred thunderbol t and the potential power of the Medusa's glance to turn Perseus to stone.

Myths define themselves in sensation, and sensat ions in themselves are void of time, space, or body. In myth, beings are insecurely embodied and frequently undergo physical transformation or division, while bodies are metaphors for sensat ion. A sensat ion-thought called devouring, for instance, brings a mouth into being: conceivably it is possible to know devouring without an actual mouth . Something or someone h a s sensations, may think, may give issue to bodies, b u t there is no closed definition of this source. Thinking in myth, which is omnipotent, does not necessarily s tem from any one mind.

Birth myths are paranoid-schizoid representat ions of depressive unders tanding. They are often provisional in meaning, like the "cursorily improvised" men that Schreber invented to carry him through breakdown: and they convey the contradictory impression of being entrenched in what A. N. Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness", in sensat ions of beta-thinking, while at the same time seeming disembodied.

CHAPTER SDC 81

For Wittgenstein (1979), embodiment in myth is a mat ter of choice ra ther than of necessity.

That the feeling we have for our life is comparable to that of a being who could chose his own standpoint in the world is, I believe, the basis of the myth—or belief—that we choose our body before birth, [ l ie]

One twin makes this assertion, not the other. The twin who makes the assert ion is the one who claims omnipotence by obliterating a mother and an infant: in obliterating their relationship, he destroys an essential link in himself represented by this relationship. The twin who dies, on the other hand, is the twin who claims that bir th and rebirth (the meaning of the depressive threshold) ar ises out of transformatory power of the mother- infant intimacy.

Myths can bury all evidence of mothers while registering the often unexpected ways in which the presence of a mother can re tu rn from the underworld, as in a myth from Epeiros, which is cognate to the narrat ive of Shakespeare 's The Winter's Tale.

A young woman, who is a third daughter, wishes to marry a certain prince so as to bear him a boy as handsome as the morning star and a girl as beautiful as the evening star. The prince, overhearing the third daughter make this wish, determines to marry her and in time does so; but when she is about to give birth, he goes off to the wars. His jealous mother orders the midwife to put the newborn twins into a basket and let them loose on the river, with a dog and a cat as companions. {The stars have now turned into animals.) On his return, the husband is outraged and walls up his wife, allowing only her face to show through a hole in the wall. Passers-by spit into her face. Ten years later the prince meets the twins and thinks they are like the morning star and the evening star. (He does not know them to be the same star—a bewilderment about this star frequently occurs in myth as an image for dioscuric mystery.) He adopts them, but fails to recognize them as his own children. After many adventures, the prince realizes that his wife has been wronged. He has her released and his mother and the midwife tortured to death. [Cook, 2, ii, 1006]

8 2 THE UNBORN

Mind in retreat from depressive insight enters a regression in which thought metamorphoses in a sky (for instance) in which space either h a s the property of expanding indefinitely or of contracting into itself a s in a black hole: two s ta tes definable as conceptions of the future. In such circumstances, twins can present themselves a s points of reference—in a context tha t otherwise provides no model to unders t and sensat ion by. "Points of reference" is a primary idea with antithetical meanings, a coincidence of opposites, a s are all religious ideas: sometimes the points are terrifying, like the eyes of a witch; sometimes they are benign, a s in the case of "Pollux and Castor", s t a r s related to the heavenly twins, who lead travellers through a turbulent darkness to safety and whose trustworthiness s t ands in contrast to the deceptive will-o'-the-wisp dance along the rigging of St Elmo's fire.

In many forms of African geomancy. systems intended to divine the future are binary. Twins may personify the fact that binary presences have the power to act as witnesses for the future: points of reference able to bear, if only jus t , the painful evocations of s ta tes of loss in memory and consciousness (represented by the motifs of a beautiful mother, who is bu r i ed / degraded, and of newborns being abandoned to the turbulent elements in sacred chests). The pat ient I refer to in chapter twenty, who was terrified by twin eyes in a mask face, a n d who sought to bury his good objects in dung, demonst ra tes this juxtaposit ion. In my view, Shakespeare 's The Winter's Tale, with its theme of a mother turned to stone, is a twin play, though no twins appear in it.

The concept of futurity describes a type of uns i tua ted thought (in the transference, thought without a maternal framework); and thought of this kind cannot be defined. The duality of twins would seem to bridge the difficulty. Without a model or holding internal mother, mind enters into s ta tes of splitting and disintegration, though it may wish to escape from disintegration by the substi tut ive form of holding known as fetishism.

In the myth of the pharaoh 's bir th, a twin of the pharaoh's— sometimes related to the pharaoh ' s umbilical cord and pla-

CHAPTER SIX 83

centa—is dispatched into the underworld. The pharaoh sets up a shr ine to his own embalmed cord and placenta and venerates them as a surrogate for the lost twin (and, by implication, for his obliterated mother). As a paranoid-schizoid representat ion, the twin is the umbilical cord that communicates uninterrupted reverie: when the cord is cut , the twin is dismembered. In depressive terms, the twin is the essential link to the good objects by which thought is converted into alpha function. He disappears into the underworld with his mother, represented by the placenta.

Depressive insight reveals how the omnipotent self is tempted to transform the meaning of the cord and placenta into a type of fetish-thinking by which the self expects to be able to mainta in its paranoid-schizoid omnipotence. By extension, the unconscious presence of placenta and cord as part-object equations with space (placenta) and time (cord) gives authori ty to the erroneous belief tha t space a n d time are essential categories of ontological unders tanding.

Fetishes accrue to themselves a type of idealization often associated with stolen goods. Weighted with some intensified essence of materiality, as though intended to deflect at tention from some crime, they typify the imperative in beta- thinking to t rap the spirit in an obtuse quiddity. The pharaoh thinks of the twin as an otherness that threatens the reality of his being. He idealizes the cord and placenta as agencies able to control the twin's essence; they confirm his centrality in the universe. His worship of them is analogous to rites in which Indian villagers once thought to trap a god in a stone.

In part-object language, the placenta is a microcosmic representat ion of all space or the lost uterine mother, and the cord is t ime without interruption, a version of the linking power of the twin who descends into the underworld of psychosis and death.

Imprisoned by the self a s pharaoh, the placenta and cord embody a n archaic conception of a cosmos as divided between the fortunate and the unfortunate, each of them rigidly yoked, as though the umbilical cord had lost all flexibility. Each twin is yoked to different conceptions of the cosmos: the fortunate twin is b o u n d to the good s u n (and to a mother who is the sky), while the unfor tunate twin is yoked to a black-sun mother, identified

8 4 THE UNBORN

with the underworld realm of psychosis and death. The twins exist within different paranoid-schizoid conceptions of space and time. The split between good and bad mother entails the splitting of space and time into a t least two different conceptions of space and time.

Steeped in psychosis and death, the good twin r e tu rns from the underworld as a n antagonist committed to revenge. The self, at tempting to renounce omnipotence on the depressive threshold, is liable to experience the diminution of pa rano id-schizoid misunders tanding as an increase in exposure to the antagonist 's at tacks. Unable to perceive loss of selfhood as a liberation, it believes any transference evolution from paranoid-schizoid discourse to depressive discourse concedes victory to an enemy.

The insights of the depressive position destroy the authori ty of the inadequate links on which self-centredness relies. They reveal how the embalmed placenta and cord, marking the loss of a good relationship, have been converted into idealizations of beta-thinking, in order that the placenta and cord might be venerated as elements of the self and not of otherness . They show how self-centredness similarly misconceives the concepts of space, time, and sensat ion as means to control otherness.

Patients entering the depressive position may discover that the reminiscences they had formerly used as satellites to their vanity are paranoid-schizoid inhibitions to thought, in which the pas t is reviewed as a miscellany of indigestible be ta elements . They may come to realize tha t travelling through space and time in the transference is a metaphor for approaches to, or re t reats from, the unders tanding of symbolization, while contingencies in space and time, "accidents", a re metaphors for issues concerning abortion. From the depressive viewpoint, the concept of pas t means no more than a failure in mental indigestion, perhaps through a superfluity of selfhood, while the concept of future signifies a nowness characterized by a freedom from me. Take the equation now and me, sub t rac t the me, and you have eternity.

One of the functions of the concentrate in materiality of the fetish is to conceal the fact tha t self-centredness is arrived a t

CHAPTER SIX 85

and maintained through the abolishing of the twin, representing the foetus-source, to the mind in communication with its good objects. The collapse of all meaning into the black hole collapses all sensation into itself. It dismembers the good twin and creates the world according to me. The career of me requires the unfolding of space and time as its framework, al though space and time are fetish misunders tandings of a lpha thinking, intended to stave of psychic turbulence.

The Wichita Indians link day and night to the white-and-black skin colouring on certain deer in a myth in which the killing of a deer releases time into the world.

When they got to the bank the black-and-white deer jumped out, and as it was jumping out the man of the grass-lodge shot it. After shooting it, he heard a voice from above, saying he had done well. This meant that everything would move, that the sun would rise, the stars would move, and the darkness and the light move on. [Dorsey, 1904, p. 26]

Patients on the depressive threshold may lose self-centred conceptions of space and time and imagine themselves to be victims in some barbar ic act of sacrifice that takes place on the site of a twin murder : the act of twin murder annihilates the self tha t originally wielded the sacrificial knife. To be renewed into sacrality, to become the sacrifice, to rediscover the communicat ion of the good objects, is to know an annihilation that is only contingently related to death: it is to be identified with the pr iest-king who undergoes the suffering of the journey through the underworld, and not with the priest-king who seizes the power of the planets by magic; it is to know Prometheus ' fate.

The cord as paranoid-schizoid system of encoding carries the foetus's later knowledge of the nipple; it keeps space-t ime considerations in an encoded form so that uninterrupted reverie can be susta ined. The cutt ing of the cord, identified with the sacrifice of the twin, releases the measures of space and time. Pandora married to Epimetheus, brother to (and doublet for) Prometheus, opens the box, which in origin Dumezil (1924, p. 98) thinks was the container of immortality. The minutiae she releases (in the myth, particles of evil) are a t t r ibutes of the

86 THE UNBORN

sacred baby quantified as the minute measures of space and time. All the minutiae, if they were drawn back into one definition, would be the sacred baby. The cutt ing of the cord, the sacrifice of the twin, reveals that knowledge of na tura l subs tances is of a fetish kind. As Descartes reveals in his Meditations, belief in this type of knowledge cannot be sustained in black-hole s ta tes of mind.

Paranoid-schizoid thinking under s t ands the transformatory power of depressive insight to be an assaul t ; it cannot comprehend the idea of transformation; it thinks in terms of conversion, a violent act in which sign systems deteriorate into somatic at tacks, specifically on eye-links, head-links, abdomen-links. The priest-king who magically appropriates the sun ' s power (the fire tha t Prometheus steals) is dismembered and eaten as the sacrificial victim a t first light a s the s u n rises. Conflating the victim of the sacrifice with the sacrificer creates an ideogram for migraine states , the moment of conversion-hiatus-cataclysm, in which language and sight may be lost. Saul transforms into Paul, and in the interim there is no naming, as though Saul were identified with the cataclysmic light of an unnameable deity.

Time in Platonist thought is the mind of space: in the pseudo-transformatory moment of paranoid-schizoid conversion, time is ripped out of space, the cord cut from the placenta. Space deprived of time, as a womb aborted of its infant, collapses into the black-hole/blinding-light minus-space of psychosis and nightmare.

Phantasies of this kind are implicit in the process of t rans-ferential transformation, which the patient may experience as the crossing of some gap basic to reason in which all former securities have been lost. The gap of transformation might be the black hole of conversion, as though the s t ruc tures of t ransformation and annihilation were cognate: the energies of one flow too easily into the other.

The Timaeus demiurge, for instance, can be seen as a condensation of sacrificer and sacrificial victim, an analogue for Prometheus. Faced by a condition of chaotic vestigialism, the demiurge, a s conductor of the sacrifice, gives the vestiges

a distinct configuration by means of shapes and numbers. . . . Fire, water, earth and air possessed indeed some ves-

CHAPTER SIX 87

tiges of their own nature, but were altogether in such a condition as we should expect when deity is absent from it. [Timaeus, 53B; in Cornford, 1937, p. 198]

The dismembering of the demiurge's body resul ts in a mathematized proportionality, the intelligence of the cosmos, a paradigm for the first communication of the good objects. Intent on maintaining its empire, the individual is tempted to project the sacrifice into its twin, out of whose dismemberment arises the music of the spheres. 'The overwhelming power of music comes from a transformation and overcoming of death" (Burkert, 1983, p. 39).

To characterize the phantas ies as prenatal is to enter into a paranoid-schizoid misunders tanding concerning the na tu re of bir th myths . From the depressive viewpoint, bir th myths are meaningful only as liminal phenomena: a mode of communication tha t is important a t a certain stage in the transference. Like other liminal phenomena, bir th myths have the power to t ransmit , if only fitfully, two types of discourse: one of a par t -object fetishistic kind, the other closer to the primal articulation of the objects by way of pulse, proportion, and light.

There is a radical difference in the meanings of being born and of crossing the threshold of the depressive position: in being born, the self may realize that a death h a s occurred and think the death (as psychosis) to be lodged in its twin; on the threshold of the depressive position, it m u s t realize that it will have to die in order that the twin can live. The twin m u s t live because it is the one essential good link to the objects.

The infant in the pharaoh venerates the fetishes as subs t i tu tes for a mother who h a s been denied passion and is bound to servitude. In depressive insight, the intense materiality of the fetishes t ransla tes into an image of the mother a s buried or turned into stone.

In a sense all mothers give bir th to twins. One mother- twin relationship carries reverie without interruption; the twin loses itself in the mother a s unending sky—a relationship idealized as "immortal"—and this is the relationship that m u s t be consigned to the underworld by the other twin, who knows the

8 8 THE UNBORN

proto-jealousy that is par t of the transformatory turbulence of the depressive position, the relationship to a black-hole b reas t in which forms cannot sus ta in definition, and whose meaning is denied by the burying of the mother: she is t ransla ted into a n object of fetish worship.

Dioscuric bir th myths among the ancient Greeks often grant a transformatory function to a mother. Helen as mothe r / s i s t e r influences the relationship of Pollux and Castor, a n d the presence of Gaia as mother-ear th incites her imprisoned son Chronos to castrate Ouranos-Zeus, the usurper of her sky kingdom: son and father are equally infantilized a s twins.

The fascination with the splitting of one into two contains a mystery: that the two may be one. Intimacy is not oneness: it sets in motion separation as well a s closeness, and this is why it precipitates depressive turbulence. An adhesion between the couple gives rise to the psychotic concepts of unin ter rupted reverie and—when some outside force destroys the joining of two into one—of double annihilation.

In TheBacchae of Euripides, Zeus kills Semele 6 / 7 mon ths pregnant with Dionysus with a bolt of lightning, sews the foetus in his thigh, and later claims to give bir th to it a s a god. The action implies tha t Zeus is able to remain immortal by dispatching both Semele and Dionysus into the underworld.

In phan tasy an infant might think of the two wombs of Dionysus as the interior to a mother 's two breasts , each interior containing Dionysus as an identical twin—the "gap" between the breas ts being the dangerous place associated with annihilation, the site of psychic death and possible rebirth. Travelling from one breast to another would be a version of the journey down the bir th passage, both s ta tes of transition being derived from some incorporeal prototype.

In a cognate creationist myth, the Titans cook a n d eat the sacred body of Dionysus, with the intention of ingesting his immortality. Zeus str ikes them down with a bolt of lightning, and out of their smoking ashes arises the race of men. In the language of myth, being s t ruck by lightning is a version of the fire by which Isis b u r n s the baby: it confers immortality.

CHAPTER six 89

In both these myths Zeus is god of the sky; like the pharaoh, he is the twin who h a s usurped the sky kingdom from his mother Gaia-Semele. Dionysus is the umbilical-cord twin who "dies" with his mother a s the placenta earth-mother . The cord l inks sky to earth, and the gap that occurs when it is cut . an empty space, swiftiy a s s u m e s the a t t r ibutes of a black hole. In some myths Dionysus descends through into the cold waters of the lake a t Lema to restore his mother to life by music. The surface of the lake is like an imaginary mirror within the narcissist 's mirror, which denies reflection to any mortal who looks into it; it is a version of the black hole.

The theme of Dionysus as being devoured in birth—a theme in which initiation is viewed in terms of a persecutory pain— h a s its counterpar t in the theme of a bir th denied all reality as sensat ion. The child who cannot see its reflection in a mirror has , a s a n internal authority, a psychotic mother who is able to deny the child's existence to the extent of blanking out any experience of the labour in birth.

In the myth of uninterrupted reverie—the uncu t cord in paranoid-schizoid language—Semele's pregnancy t ranslates into he r cont inuous dreaming with Dionysus as her foetus. As against it s tands , a s the other aspect of the psychotic metaphysic, the myth of double annihilation. The cutting of the cord entails the ban i shment to psychosis and death of the mother and one of the twins. The mother 's sexuality, including her powers of procreation, are banished also. The surviving twin is liable to feel that the banished couple is a repository for both the idea of immortal bliss and the idea of damnation, equally identified with gods who eat ambrosia (they are immortal and substantial) and shades in hell (who are immortal and insubstantial).

The remaining twin sometimes does not realize that the banished couple was formerly a couple of which it was a member—as in the following dream, in which the dreamer is identified with two actual twins, one of whom died violently. The dreamer does not realize that she h a s split herself into a Zeus twin that survives a catastrophe (in a s tate of omnipotent

90 THE UNBORN

control) and a Dionysus twin that is annihilated with its Semele mother. One of the forms that the annihilated couple takes in the dream is of a parachute , representing the cord and placenta during the bir th process. In the transference, the dreamer gave evidence of a phan tasy in which she imagined herself a s related to a companion who shared the couch with her.

In the dream she is falling from an aeroplane through the skies with a parachute instructor, who faces her and shows her how to release a parachute . What he shows her is not clear; a n d it is not given in the dream whether or not she h a s a parachute . At the same time, she is floating above the aeroplane, looking down. She infers the existence of the couple falling below, though i n t a c t the plane is in her way and she cannot see them.

In association she thinks of an American movie of the Second World War. The doctor in the American warplane does not know how to help a seriously wounded air-crewman. The crew debate whether they should drop the wounded m a n by parachute into the enemy territory they are flying over, or keep h im on board. The first course presents two problems. The wounded m a n would not be able to use his initiative if h is pa rachu te landed him in a lake, say; and there is no evidence that the Nazis would observe the Geneva conventions and give the m a n medical t reatment. The dreamer was inclined while dreaming to pu t her t rust in the good intentions of the Nazis. She did not hold to this view when she awoke.

The thought of parachutes recalls her brother, S. Her mother and S's twin brother were killed together in a car crash: the body of S's twin was severely mutilated. S now goes flying with I, an older brother . It is as though S were trying to capture his former closeness to his twin. Sometimes they fly over the place where the couple had died. The dreamer h a s fears that S wants to crash the plane; he cannot bear separation from his twin.

There is a split between the par t of herself tha t looks down from above the aeroplane and the par t of herself tha t falls through the skies, into which the phan ta sy of double annihilation h a s been projected. As opposed to the si tuation of unin ter rupted reverie, in which two minds sha re one space, she m u s t know in the dream the experience of being one person

CHAPTER SIX 91

in two spaces. This can lead either to suicide—she then being identified with S and his need to be a t one with his twin. Or it can lead to an identity split tha t marks the separation of "divine" a n d "mortal" aspects of the self. The divine self in the dreamer is, in fact, mortal and misled.

The par t tha t falls, the mortal twin, is later the American air-crewman who is a t risk and may be dropped over enemy territory (Nazi Germany being the underworld of psychosis and death). The American air-crewman and his parachute are identified with the placenta-cord parachute of the dream, whose existence is uncer ta in . At this point the placenta, a s token of the uter ine mother, is in a s ta te of deterioration and about to be lost, and the emphasis now moves onto the umbilical cord as the twin about to follow her. Positively, the cord tha t uni tes two minds is the life-saving communication that allows for an alternat ion between two minds; when cut . it tu rns into the negative presence tha t carries in a concentrated s ta te the threat of double annihilation.

The point about the dead child being a twin does not account for the need, in the second association, of the surviving twin and another brother to share the space of an aeroplane between them, b u t it adds some depth to this relationship. Twin foetuses emblemize the notion of two minds shar ing one space, so that losses and forgettings are felt to be contained. The shar ing of one space by two minds is to be contrasted with an idea of forgetting in which the loved and forgotten being m u s t move through space for ever (being dropped out of the plane).

The par t of herself tha t observes the events from above the plane does not feel the gravitational pull into destruction. It is the pa r t of herself located delusionally inside her mother that is most a t risk when she is faced, as she is now, by a long holiday separat ion from her therapist .

Moments of insight in the transference, though fitful, can give the impression that under other c i rcumstances they might have been persistent . Some factor outside the self resolves the crisis of transformation, and a moment of integration occurs.

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9 2 THE UNBORN CHAPTER SIX 93

The notion of sus ta ined reverie can be tormenting dur ing the crossing of the threshold of the depressive position and may be reified as the liminal image of the labyrinth. The labyrinth derives from an idea of the unending line—one of Es ther Bick's conceptions of the sustaining maternal object (Haag, pp. 93ff.) [vide chapter 20). The archi tecture of the labyrinth complicates the idea of continuity with diversions, similarities, and dead ends. It is possible tha t mind scans liminal phenomena to perceive geometric s t ruc tures of this kind in order to retrieve the proportionality of foetal knowledge.

In the myth of uninterrupted reverie, two minds al ternate in micro-macrocosmic states: the cord functions as both their microscope and telescope. A gravitational type of sign language comes into being, evident in transference experiences concerning the na tu re of the psychoanalytic couch: that the couch is the whole world, that it is an al tar between the worlds represented by the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, tha t it marks the place where the sacrifice will occur or bapt ism be carried out, etc. Phantasies centred on the couch are bound to the formulation my mouth is the whole world—i.e. my mou th is indistinguishable in its mysteriously comprehensive potency from the cauldron of my mother 's womb.

Such identifications entail flexible space- t ime models. Hocart (1927) compares representat ion in kingship (as in the coronation in which the king a s sumes the essence of the sun ' s motion by means of miming its actions) with the Brahmin priests ' building of the fire altar in the Sadapatha Brahmana, out of which a cosmos arises in microcosm.

A lump of clay has been dug up and prepared with the most elaborate observances, each accompanied by appropriate formulae. With part of this clay a fire-pan is fashioned. This process reproduces point for point the first and original act of creation. Water is poured on the clay with a verse mentioning water; the clay thus becomes water as was in the beginning. Then foam is produced and placed upon it, jus t as in the creation foam was produced out of the waters, and thus by degrees the clay is made to be like the earth . . . the sacrificer, having made this world, now invoke blessings upon it. [pp. 190-191]

In transforming natura l subs tances into liturgical symbols, the priest "cooks" fetishes, made out of sensuously perceived objects, into the means for a pre-birth communication by way of a phan tom umbilical cord.

The craving of the two minds to be one space is sometimes evident in post-bir th observation. A girl in early latency arranges to sleep in a different room from her twin brother . She tries to escape from the pull of the need for a shared womb space by imitating, in minutes t detail, the behaviour of an older brother. She arranges that the bed in her new room should be identical to the bed in her elder brother 's room, with the same trophies and even a copy of the book that her elder brother reads in bed. In this way she recreates the uterine setting of the twin—a setting that is hers alone b u t also one that she shares with a brother. Meanwhile her twin brother insists that he will only be happy if he can sleep in a double bed.

In the transference, a yearning for a shared space as a paranoid-schizoid representation for the myth of uninterrupted reverie can translate into a hunger to enter into someone else's space on the couch. A young woman reports how she had to wait for 45 minutes while another lodger had a bath . She had a ba th then, and took only 20 minutes, even though she read a book in the bath , whose title she cannot now remember. (She talks of romances in which you get into the heroine and improvise variations on the heroine's adventures. She is convinced tha t this is how books should be read.) In her therapy, she experiences the couch as a warm ba th of water. She wants to get into the immersions of other patients—a romance that she elaborates on—and to rise from the couch re-born.

She falls asleep, while travelling by train, and as the powers of regeneration fails her, she wakes with a s ta r t to find that she has passed her station. She would like to fall asleep on the couch and be magically transformed through the right touch and temperature, b u t she fears being jolted into the realization tha t she h a s got it all wrong again.

She compares herself to a caterpillar in a childrens' story who eats continuously, enters a chrysalis, and emerges as a beautiful butterfly. She eats continuously and has an ache in he r s tomach a t present , b u t she does not know transformation.

9 4 THE UNBORN

Anyway, she says bitterly, butterflies die outside in the cold, don't they? She remembers a dream in which she is calling into a microphone for someone who does hot answer her . She fears being abandoned in the act of becoming someone else.

The microphone is a conception of the umbilical cord that h a s been cut and fails her . It is a fetish tha t will not serve i ts master . The cord, as a paranoid-schizoid representat ion of the communication by which the good objects communicate with the foetal mind, is experienced as the good twin or emissary who carries the idea of the tragic fact, a s well a s being the recipient to projected fears of interruption, which take the form of sacrifice, miscarriage, cut cord, the void tha t t ransla tes into the black hole.

The tragic fact comes between the couple in reverie a s a dangerous and alien thing. A mother and infant can be disabled when a fissured nipple fills the infant's mou th with blood. The nipple might be a something "out there"—an isolated mindless soma, for whose damage and outpouring nei ther are responsible and yet for which each feels guilt.

A m a n dreams that he and his girlfriend, flying over Nepal (nipple), observe a traffic j a m (a blockage) in the moun ta ins below. Both mother and infant deal with their disablement over the bleeding nipple by rising above it into "superior" s ta tes of mind.

Earlier, he had dreamt of cutt ing a cake that bleeds. He is haun ted by an internal figure, identified with his father, who resents his once having been a favoured infant and projects hat red of babies into him; it adds to his guilt over the bleeding of the nipple, which he experiences a s a twin dismembered in sacrifice, though he is not responsible for the bleeding. His mother wants a friend to take a cake to him in a foreign country; the father of the friend stops the friend from taking the present .

The concept of the nipple uhat bleeds intimates dismemberment , sacrifice, the miscarriage of the good twin, sometimes the miscarriage of just ice itself, an obdurate and irrefutable tragic element. It is possible to avoid it by fetishism, as some of the pharaohs did. The dreamer had an exceptional inclination to somatize his feelings in the form of acute skin rashes ;

CHAPTER SK 9 5

pe rhaps somatization involves the same processes a s the creating of fetishes.

The na tu r e of the cut-cord bleeding-nipple transformation was brought home to me while listening to a series of observations by Catherine J o u a n n e t at the Lorient Tavistock conference, concerning a mother whose relationship with a newborn girl was threatened by the presence of a bleeding nipple. The nipple a s object that pours blood into a mouth can be a type of psychotic "remembering" of the cut cord, a coming-too-close of the murdered and dismembered twin.

The severance of the cord is the source of the "gap" of the ancient Greeks, which opens out between Icarus and his wings when the sun ' s hea t melts the wax that holds the wings to him. Entering the gap is to enter the black hole tha t destroys definition. Icarus falls through water- t ransmuting air, as the sacrificial victim who m u s t drown in some reversal of the amphibious bir th process; only in later formulations may the separat ion from his wings be thought of as a mother 's disabled hands .

He is the twin who violently dies in the aeroplane dream, the pa r t of the self in the transference that m u s t know the disintegration of a certain kind of s ensuous information into the labyrinth in which the progress of one cont inuous line recurrently m u s t lead into deceptive places. The cord, when cut . becoming the gap, disintegrates beta knowledge. It becomes the feared boundary-crossing of the rite of passage: the crack in the pavement, the no-man's- land of the depressive threshold space that destroys the traveller. It is the bleeding nipple identified with the dismembered twin.

Fetish-thinking compacts into an intense materiality. (It is the point where the lines in a drawing in perspective come together; the point that everyone wants to project a s far away from themselves a s possible, into their twin.) The couple that falls into the underworld re turns a s the ghost-monster , the masked face, the guardian of the realms of the dead—a mode of insane "remembrance' that maddens those who exist in a different reality from it. In ancient mythologies, it takes the form of works of ar t of a power (in myth, a t least) to kill anyone who looks on it.

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The idol is not made to be seen. To look at it is to go mad. It is also often shut up in a chest. [Vernant, 1991, p. 154]

The idol is of Dionysus; the chest is the womb that contains him and that reveals an underlying transformation into immortality of those who enter the psychosis and death of the underworld through a disintegration of the forms of the na tura l world. Associated with Osiris and other deities and heroes a s they cross the waters of transformation, the chest is the cista mystica of the Orphic mysteries and other religions, a psychotic place of mourning, in which a mother th inks to assemble broken bits. In the chest, Athena preserves the hear t of Dionysus after his dismemberment by the Titans. It is venerated with the same s t a tus a s were the retrieved genitals of Osiris in ancient Egyptian religion or Siva's dismembered phallus in ancient India.

In double annihilation, remembering is concretely equated to ordeals of a kind that faced Dionysus when he descended into the black lake at Lerna to discover his dead mother .

Eurypylus opened the chest and saw the image, and no sooner did he see it than he went out of his mind. [Frazer, 1898, pp. 356-357]

The idea of the work of ar t that drives the spectator mad is equivalent to remembering a t this stage in the psychotic metaphysic. It h a s the same significance as the Medusa 's glance; it tu rns the spectator into stone. In comparison. Leontes' perception of the stone s ta tue that tu rns into flesh and blood a n d embodies Hermione as a living being in Shakespeare 's The Winter's Tale is an example of remembering as recognition.

Certain shr ines dedicated to Persephone in Anatolia are cons t ructed in such a way as to depict death:

in the shape of enormous vultures over headless (that is, dead) human bodies; opposing them, the goddess appears in one, ever-recurring shape, namely, in the act of giving birth. [Zuntz, 1971, p. 14]

A vulture (mother) who eats headless corpses is set in contrast to a mother in the act of giving birth. The underworld

CHAPTER s i x 9 7

vul ture p lacenta-mother and the cut-cord sacrificial victim, represent ing devouring and decapitation, are opposed to the moment of birth, in which a head appears out of a mother 's body. The banished couple, which h a s had the dynamics of devouring projected into it. cannot know the meaning of living through a body, cannot know how body gives issue to new life in the form of reverie or of an actual infant; it can only know insubstantial sensation, the meaning of being exiled to the underworld.

Recovering knowledge of the vulture-couple entails a n u n u s u a l kind of remembering. To remember in these circumstances is to meet thoughts within the collapsing space of the black hole; it is to be penetrated by Zeus' thunderbolt or the Medusa 's glance. To forget is to meet thought in a space tha t is forever unfolding from within itself, and in which good thoughts are lost over a n interminable distance. In the Timaeus, Plato compares forgetting to the sinking of the city of Atlantis benea th the ocean, a s though forgotten thoughts were a mother sinking through water. The surface of the lake that Dionysus enters to win back his mother is (like Zeus's thunderbolt) a version of the biting-cutting-glaring equation, which severs the phan t a sy of unin ter rupted reverie. Ulysses seeks for his dead mother in the underworld of the Odyssey and fears that "dread" Persephone (an aspect of his mother) will unleash the gorgoneion against him.

In another retrieval, Perseus holds up his mirror-shield in order to re turn the terror of the look in the Medusa's eyes. The look in her eyes is equated with the gnawing-contractions of a vulture mouth-womb that cuts off the cord and leaves the impacted condition of biting-cutting-glaring in the psychic space, which the cord used to inhabit. When Perseus decapitates the Medusa (a version of the Dionysus-Semele murder). Pegasus a s a newborn foal leaps out of her severed throat. The decapitation is undifferentiated from the gorgo scream she emits—and after which she is named.

The congested mask-face and the scream are confusing and intense sensat ions on the verge of definition that arise from the anguish of severance. In the fifth century BC the mirror-shield is re turned to the Medusa, who then shows herself in her true light as the most beautiful woman the world h a s ever known

9 8 THE UNBORN

(Vernant, 1991, p. 149). Medusa-Persephone takes the cruelty of the projected glaring eyes into her and is able to be the Semele of the loving glance with her child Dionysus.

Semele's capacity to receive a cruel visual projection is evocative of the placenta 's capacity to receive pre-sensory foetal projections that can be translated into the idiom of any of the senses. The projection can be auditory, for instance: the placenta is then able to temper an incipient foetal screaming into the tonalities of music.

'The overwhelming power of music comes from a transformation a n d overcoming of death" (Burkert, 1983, p. 39). The decapitated head of Orpheus floats down the Hebrus river to Lesbos: a mouth emits a song of unear thly beauty. Music is the foremost liturgical symbol, a communicat ion from pre-birth; it sus ta ins as well as summons up the pangs of breakdown intrinsic to any s ta te of longing. In post-birth it can restore the delight in form that, disintegrated, entered the psychotic underworld at the time when double annihilation threatened.

In Pythian Ode 12, Pindar describes music as the essential link between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In therapy the music of the therapist 's voice may be a solitary thread that leads mind in paranoid^schizoid s ta tes to rediscover the primal communication of its good objects. Pindar hopes that Persephone will welcome the dead flute-player Midas, whose ar t Pallas Athene invented "when she wove into music the dismal death-dirge of the Gorgons bold, a dirge tha t Perseus heard". By way of "the many-voiced music of flutes", Pallas Athene sought to imitate the shrill cry that escaped from "the ravening jaws" of one of the Gorgons.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Creationist fears that an empty space or gap known as Chaos arises from some binary division in the sky. The mythic belief that a mother of twins is sacred because literally she is the sky. Anti-developmental "dramatic" conceptions of change in terms of disguises and dismemberments. Liberation from a sky/placenta, which is "read" as a constraining divine text. In its place a notion of evolving forms as a substrate to mythic thought.

A technique to contain transformational space h a s to be rigorous while open to spontaneity. If the aspects of the technique are at all like the techniques of the

very different activities of the rite and the drama, they are so, perhaps , because they engage with dangerous religious unknowabilities. Rite in certain religions (vide reference to the Sadapatha Brahmana on p. 92) depend on exactness in replication. The slightest deviation from rule annu l s it. In the drama, as in the rite, there is the same micro-macrocosmic idea: the here-and-now is able to draw into itself and transform the there-and-then. But the drama differs from the rite in one important respect: it is occasional. The priests at the Dionysia were aware of this fact when they ordered that plays should be performed once, and once only, during a brief festival at a certain determined season. The provisional na tu re of communication in the theatre is such that, in theory at least, stagings should be dismantled after every performance.

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In the transference mythico-dramatic possibilities present themselves a s ways of responding to spontaneous mutat ion in the patient, a t moments when notions of the containing mother and models for thought disappear, and phenomena appear to become metamorphic. Myth and d rama concern themselves with a type of pass ionate knowledge that can only be caught fleetingly, a s though it existed on the periphery of dream, pre-definitory, disposed to mutate . "Whenever myth precedes ritual, then drama is produced" (Fontenrose, 1959, p. 464).

The woman who dreamt of falling from an aeroplane later dreamt that she was sitting on the beach in the tropics. Huge waves crashed before her; she thought she was protected by a high fence, which probably was inadequate. She had entered a transformatory maternal space (the waves), a n d she h a d to seize on transitional emblems—of air, fire, or water—to convey the na tu re of her predicament.

The naming of the mother of twins a s Tilo, meaning Sky, among the Baronga peoples of East Africa (Harris, 1913, p. 4) is suggestive of how transformatory space h a s the property of coming into focus as two particles known as the twins. Sky as unending space, thought without model, realizes the twins as points of reference, means for granting magical knowledge about a h object that in fact cannot be known ("the future" is one meaning of this object).

In a seminal insight, Plutarch asser t s tha t myths depend on a fundamental binary contrast between disguise and dismemberment. The king-priest as one twin p u t s on disguises. He wears the crown, seizes na tura l powers, and a s sumes their forms; he claims to be at one with primal creation: he becomes a fragment of the s u n in allowing himself to be crowned; he thinks to become the essence of the sun . Dangerously a t one with the life source itself, he averts danger by having his dismembered sibling be the victim in the act of sacrifice.

The twins have a way of interchanging.

And as for his turning into winds and water, earth and stars, and into the generations of plants and animals, and his adoption of such guises, they speak in a deceptive way of what he undergoes in his transformation as a tearing apart, as it were, and a dismemberment. They give him the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Nyctelius, and Isodaetes; they

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construct destructions and disappearances, followed by returns to life and regenerations—riddles and fabulous tales quite in keeping with the aforesaid transformations. [Babbit, 1936, p. 223]

Such tales are told against an uncontained space, in which no one dies because the commitment to embodiment is hesitant , and the fear of annihilation can be projected. In the form of fire, as a deadly flash of eyes, as Zeus's lightning, the gap of the cu t cord invokes its earliest antithetical meaning as the sus ta iner of uninter rupted reverie. In a Pawnee Indian myth, the sky-people send a figure called Lightning to the earth to confer immortality on h u m a n beings. The gift is lost; b u t Light^ ning himself, a s one of the sky-people, is able to remain immortal by having priests r ub buffalo fat and a mixture of red clay a n d fat into his skin. Mummification saves him from death: "and tha t made Lightning happy again" (Perry, 1927, p. 43).

In some myths, Dionysus survives by alternating the fate of annihilation with his twin.

He seemed to die, but really it was his enemy: it was Pentheus or Lycurgus who died while Dionysus lived on in secret. When the world seemed to be dead and deprived of him, he was there in the ivy and the pine and other evergreens; he was the fire in the wine . . . [Dionysus represented] some mysterious life that persists through death or after death. [Murray, 1927, .p. 362]

He pers is ts in The Bacchae by projecting s ta tes of madness a n d incoherence into his rival and alter-ego Pentheus—on whom he cas ts the spell of madness in saying: "You don't know what your life is, nor what you are doing, nor who you are." I take this to be a crucial insight into the na tu re of experience on the depressive threshold. Dionysus arranges for Pentheus to lose any conception of identity and to be torn to pieces—and in pa r t eaten—by a mother in frenzy. The devouring of Pentheus as a bir th myth is an important component in the mystery out of which Orphism emerged.

In the phan tasy of uninterrupted reverie, forgetting consists of thoughts that have entered a neighbourly maternal space tha t allows for a re turn of them. But thoughts forgotten during

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sta tes of transformation, a s during the crossing of the depressive threshold, can be aligned with the loss of placenta + cord; they enter a space that covers unending dis tances and extreme modification. Thoughts move from one environment into another, a s though they were water creatures who m u s t re-find themselves through fire.

An evocative type of symbolism is called for, which reaches back across a divide to a knowledge that may have been lost in the world. Liturgical symbols are not repositories of feeling; nor do they distil endurances of the na tura l world. They are not symbols of na tura l events; and they are without potentiality. They carry the gap, and they contain the interruption of changed bodily processes. The fact that they exist a s liminal phenomena eases guilt at the identification each h u m a n being h a s with anti-reason, the participation in the totemic feast of dismembering, cooking, and eating the sacred baby, food of the gods who is creative by way of being the immortal element in food.

The group in proto-mental reverie conjures u p an uns tab le transference object out of an immeasurable psychotic space. It faces a disjunction, which is like the chasm to the underworld over which Heraclitus's sibyl

with raving mouth . . . utter(s) things mirthless and unadorned and unperfumed, her voice carrying through a thousand years because of the god who speaks through her. [Kahn, 1979, p. 45]

Like cord and placenta, lungs differ from other means of sustenance in being a system that cannot be cut off from their source without bringing the organism to an end—unless, tha t is, the organism should enter a different order of existence, as the h u m a n organism does at the time of birth.

In sleep, when the opening of the senses close, the mind which is in us is cut off from contact with that which surrounds us, and the only connexion with it is preserved by means of respiration as a sort of root. Sextus Empiricus, quoting Ainesidemos, who in turn claims to quote from Heraclitus. [Burnet, 1908, pp. 169-170]

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In Greek myth, severance defines itself a s the emergence of the binary out of oneness. Out of the one emerges the two, and the gap between the two is the empty space in thought in which the containing presence of the sky-mother might have been.

Hesiod's thought never reaches beyond Heaven and Earth, the two foundations of the visible world; before these was Chaos. . . . In the Physics Aristotle speaks of Chaos as empty space. . . . Apparently the idea belongs to the prehistoric heritage of the Indo-European peoples . . . and from the same stem "gap-" Nordic mythology has framed the word "ginunga-gap" to express the same notion of the gaping abyss that existed at the beginning of the world. The common idea of Chaos as something wildly confused is quite mistaken; and the antithesis between Chaos and Cosmos, which rests on this incorrect view, is purely a modern invention. [Jaeger, 1947, p. 13]

In Hesiod, Theogony, Ouranos. a sky-god doublet for Zeus, blocks the bir th of Gaia's babies in a myth that depends on a twin conflict between day and night.

Mother-earth, in whom they were hidden, groaned at having so many of the unborn within her. She thought of a cruel way to free them. She took a grey flint and fashioned a sickle out of it and told one of her sons, Chronos, her plan. . . . At night her lover Ouranos came, bringing the night with him, and full of love lay upon her, spreading himself out upon her. Chronos, in a position of ambush, stretched out his left hand and in his right hand took the sickle with jagged teeth and swiftly lopped off his father's genitals and cast them away so that they fell behind him. [Evelyn-White, 1914, pp. 91-93]

A rim of light appears on a dawn horizon; the act of castration releases day from night, and earth from sky. Blood straying from the severed organs gives bir th to various races of giants and to the fates. Landing in the sea, the organs are "swept away over the main for a long time: and a white foam spread a round them from the immortal flesh, and in the foam there grew a maiden".

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Objects in the mythic imagination do not observe process in nature ; they borrow from na tu re to represent liturgical pressures from the inner world. They are self-transfiguring without being embodied: two points change shape in a sky so dazzling that nothing in it can translate into three-dimensionality. The sea foams about volcanic rock, a s though brea thed into by the divine pneuma or celestial quintessence, a sky-god once more interfused with an earth-goddess through water. Generation, as b rea th or inspiration, tu rns into the goddess of beau ty herself, who rises from the sea.

All creationist myth contains within it the act of h u m a n sacrifice. Hesiod's legend implies as much, though not clearly enough perhaps . His narrative "keeps u s in an a tmosphere of clear, cold daylight" (Guthrie. 1952, p. 84), unlike the Orphic poems, which are "pervaded with a source of mystery" and indicative of a religion, the reason being that in Hesiod there is no telling of Chronos's a t tempt to eat the baby, of Dionysus's bir th from Zeus's thigh, of the Titans' murde r of the infant Dionysus and their cooking and eating of him: oral myths out of which systems of veneration can evolve.

In the beginning, claims the philosopher Anaxagoras (in Aristotle's account of his thought), there is mind—and against mind there is confusion. Mind, being the one, is a coherence set u p against the two, or the other, "which is of such a na tu r e a s we suppose the indefinite to be before it is defined and par takes of some form" (Metaphysics, 989b). The binary is the indefinite dyad, a notion dreaded in neo-Platonic thought because two-ness h a s the power of multiplying indefinitely, so that the whole realm of mathematical thought becomes uncontrollable.

Those who sense the gap look to the uni ty of the sky as evidence of a time when the gap did not exist (when presumably reverie could be uninterrupted). Xenophanes, the first monist according to Aristotle, "contemplates the heaven and says the one is" (Metaphysics, 986b. 24-25). The sky feeds potency into the male a s a loan of immortality. The male th inks to be able to appropriate the sky's power—one reason, perhaps , why Xenophanes looked to the sky for inspiration. At one time initiate medicine-men among certain Austral ian aborigine tribes

CHAPTER SEVEN 105

crushed rock quartz, the sky stone, and drank it with liquid, in order to ingest the c h u n k s of solid celestial light, or insight, which endowed them with a semi-divine s t a tus (Eliade, 1970, pp. 137-138). An uninter rupted journey of food from source to mou th (as by way of the umbilical cord) differs from a journey in which food reaches a mouth by way of a muta t ion or gap or radical transformation (as by cooking).

The conception of the one as an omnipresent luminosity overrides the observation that anyone who looks into the daytime sky will be aware of the edge of sur rounding earth. Possibly Xenophanes looked up into a night sky as dark and massy as the earth itself and conceived primal unity a s a universal darkness . A sky in unity is indistinguishable from the earth; indeed, if the one supposes a uni ty in subs tance , the likelihood is tha t the one was entirely made of earth and was entirely identified with the feminine (like Aristotle's conception of the h u m a n u t e rus in pregnancy as a space containing formless matter , the pre-divine vestiges of the Timaeus). There is some evidence for this. In ancient China the sky was alleged to have been made of jade; in ancient Greece it was believed to have been made of stone. "Among the peasan t s of Gythion . . . the sky was made of stone" (Cook. 1940, 3.1, p. 942).

Stone, as a condensation of earth, belongs to the earth-mother . The sky as the placenta of the earth-mother gives bir th to a s tone meteor that divides the sky into twin hemispheres and reifies the experience of the gap as a black hole. The meteor is a precursor of Lucifer, a sacred object involved in the dangerous activity of boundary-making and boundary-crossing. Half-buried in the earth where it lands, it is venerated and feared (as are the s tones at Stonehenge and Avebury) as an aniconic, non-figurative art work that h a s the power to annihilate the spectator. It is the hermes or boundary s tone tha t kills because it is interfused with the superna tura l meaning of having crossed the boundary between the living and the dead: like the Medusa 's glance, it cannot be tolerated by h u m a n eyes.

From a biological viewpoint, the s t ruc tures of myth defend against any notion of development. Aristotle as biologist complained a t the mythic way in which the demiurge transformed the content of the sky in the Timaeus because it did not allow

106 THE UNBORN

for the concept of potential, which Aristotle saw as basic to any theory of development.

The same thing cannot be both ordered and unordered; there must be a process and a lapse of time separating the two states. [De Caelo, 1 .10. 280a]

Plato ascribes his theorem of how the world comes about to the Pythagorean thinker Timaeus. It is liturgical, not na tura l . Its notion of intelligence does not take on being within some temporal system; it contemplates the sky-placenta, as a sur face in space that discloses the pa t te rns and forms of meaning, the transfigurations of music and myth. The foetus is inseparable from the sky-placenta as a text on which its well-being m u s t rely. In pre-birth knowledge, everything is divinely given; nothing has to be realized. Reverie requires no potentiality.

The demiurge practises his geometry within a context in which time and intelligence are derivatives of magic, and magic, the language by which the foetus first thinks to communicate, is the means by which projective identification is able to function.

Mythic thinking in the psychotic metaphysic operates either by put t ing on disguises—purloined skins—^or it projects breakdown into some victim in the group. When the s ta te of breakdown cannot be contained, the metaphysic itself b reaks down, the sky as placental system miscarries, and the act of bir th begins; or a retreat occurs into the s ta te of riOt being born.

Movement in the placenta sky stops, and the foetus can no longer identify with the meaning in the movement. Hippocrates invented the techniques of medicine as a means to retrieve the subject of breakdown from the limitations of myth. Much later in time, Augustine looked to Aristotle and not to Plato to give him a framework for unders tanding failures in mythic expectation; and he did so by adapting Aristotle's biological concept of potentiality to theological use.

Augustine frees himself from an unders tanding of the sky as a fundamentalist account of divine intelligence to which thought m u s t be rigidly bound. The hierarchical theory by which the two twins are yoked to the day s u n and the night s u n

CHAPTER SEVEN 107

breaks down, and thought liberates itself from its rigid identification with the sky as placenta.

Augustine took the legend that J o s h u a stopped the s u n seriously a s a fact. He did not unders tand how Joshua ' s act should be interpreted if the movement in the skies was to be read as a n edict concerning the na tu re of divine intelligence. J o s h u a is a king-priest who wrestles the sun ' s power to his own u s e a n d is not smit ten down. He inst i tutes a system of time tha t differs from the system of time that divinity h a s established in the heavens. He declines to identify with the fundamentalist interpretation of the sky as the one source of intelligence.

Augustine arrived a t the notion of time as having a potential as well a s an actual condition by proposing that time and movement no longer needed be concretely equated with divinity. Time in one of its aspects depends on the Aristotelian notion of "lapses", which probably owes more to the theories of initiation, the idea of Zeus's pregnant thigh, than to the idea of the pregnant womb.

Saint Augustine said, in the eleventh book of his Confessions: While the sun was stopped, the potter's wheel turned [Duns Scotus (Duhem, 1985. p. 299), quoting Augustine (Watts, 1962, pp. 259-263)].

As in birth, h u m a n intelligence is no longer bound to the sky/p lacenta a s a feeding object. The potter continues to work in spite of the magic of the warrior king who stops the s u n in its tracks. While the s u n circles wondrously and uncontrollably, the potter 's wheel tu rns arduously. The unders tanding of meaning is no longer linked to one source, the sky/p lacenta conceived of as a fundamentalist text. The skills the potter exercises are a s much the resul t of application as of introjected celestial magic. The fundamentalist text h a s evolved into many versions, each of which carries a certain t ruth .

As in birth, h u m a n intelligence is no longer bound to the placental sky as a feeding object. The potter continues to work in spite of the magic of the warrior king who stops the sun in its tracks. While the sun circles wondrously and uncontrollably, the potter 's wheel tu rns arduously. The skills Uie potter exercises are the resul t of application and not of magic. Potentiality is not a delusive concept: the idea of development is

108 THE UNBORN

required in a mind tha t awaits a physical bir th for its realization.

Within a uterine environment in which s ensuous information is restricted, which is a benefit for the unders tanding, the foetus is able to receive communication from its objects, primarily in terms of s ta tes of proportion, pulse, and light. In pa rano id-schizoid terms, the communication is personified in terms of the twin banished into the underworld who ac ts a s a good link or umbilical cord between the good objects and the foetal mind. The psychological foundations of mathemat ics and music have their site in the prenatal , as art iculations of the steady light of the good objects. On the threshold of the depressive position the self tha t has denied its dependence on—and, indeed, the very existence of—the good objects in its paranoid-schizoid s ta tes of mind becomes once more able to receive the signals of the good objects, if only intermittenUy.

Communication in the pat ient- therapis t par tnersh ip (and perhaps in the infant-mother par tnership during the act of birth) involves sensing a pulse out of which the forms of meaning emerge. Wittgenstein's (1979) criticism of Frazer goes some way towards this theory of scanning. Wittgenstein thought tha t Frazer was on the wrong track when he described myth and rite as pre-scientific a t tempts to control the world or to verify na tura l law. Magical thinking is not failed scientific thinking: it engages mind in quite a different way. Wittgenstein thought of myth as a communicat ion tha t h a s many versions. The meaning of the versions becomes perspicuous when they are placed in series without explanation, like a modulating evolution in series of geometric shapes . He is inclined to think of the formal kinship of myths, a s Bion thinks of preconception, in terms of an intuited proportionality.

Similarly, George Kubler (1962a) avoids the Renaissance conception of art, as an interplay between tradition a n d the individual talent, by re turning to a more archaic view of ar t a s an impersonal evolution, split off from consciousness and experienced a s very distanced in space a n d time, in the m a n n e r of the fossil series. The primitive aesthetic, of which this is an example, supposes a rationality whose serial existence pre-

CHAPTER SEVEN 109

cedes the emergence of personality. Types of series impersonally come into being a n d exhaust themselves. The cycles of evolution are sometimes entered into and extirpated by alien presences tha t seem to appear from some different dimension in which space and time, if they exist, are of a different order from the space- t ime systems of the na tura l world. I would relate this violent intrusion to a concrete equation of the twin being dismembered with the cutt ing of the cord.

The notion tha t foetal mind scans the unknowable in evolving series that either are inseminated or remain void of inspiration is depicted in the geometric creationism of Plato's Timaeus, in which the demiurge brings into existence intelligence as well a s music as facts in the world, by evoking time out of space. His evocation takes the specific form of planets tha t begin to move in ellipses and thus to generate the sublime music of the spheres. In Platonic terms, to look into a night sky full of s ta rs is to know the s t ruc tures of intelligence; the sky is a book that insists on being read: its presence is of the same order a s the information tha t the scanning mind of the foetus receives from its good objects.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Breakdown: natural concepts as liturgical symbols bridging the experience of symbolic death Clinical material alluding to the mediating role played by the liturgical idea of water.

L iturgical symbolism is one of the means by which the traveller crosses the immeasurable gap of the depressive threshold into a rediscovery of the earliest forms of

communication. Space and time are drawn into the gap, as though into the vortex of a bapt ism. Although the water of bapt ism may seem to be water known by way of the senses , or water known to the chemist, it is something other, a s in the case of Thales 's water.

[Thales's] view of the origin of things brings him very close to the theological creation-myths, or rather leads him to compete with them. For while his theory seems to be purely physical, he evidently thinks of it as also having what we may call a metaphysical character. This fact is revealed by the only one of his utterances that has come down to us in verbal form (if, indeed, it actually goes back to him): everything is full of gods. Two hundred years later, at the end of the first period of philosophical thinking, Plato cites this apophthegm with special emphasis, almost

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as if it were the primal word and very quintessence of all philosophy. [Jaeger, 1947, pp. 21-22]

Within the cont inuent of pre-birth life every occurrent— every glint or flash—is a god sign. Every glint or flash is imbued with divinity. In life after birth, Thales's water—transparent , fluid, touchless, tasteless—presents itself as retrieved from some former time. It is a dreadful resurrected life, not a memory derivative: a notation dissociated from sense experience, a liturgical symbol emerging from the fragmented condition of depression. It might have re turned from "deep time", the geologist's conception of a duration so unchar table that thought cannot comprehend it. It is a s though some negation of the symbolic-making power had come into being in the underworld of the dead a t the time of the cutting of the umbilical cord.

In later life the deadness may be associated with deterioration in a lpha function. Meaning drains from the concepts of space and time, and a sense of catas t rophe darkens any a t tempt a t comprehension. Spectral, the water h a s the quality of dream water, without the significance that a dream image might have.

The Uitoto tribe in Colombia, South America, believed in a creator who "spat out saliva so that the forests might arise".

Nothing existed. Through the agency of a dream, the he-who-is-appearance-only father pressed the phantasm to his breast and then was sunk in thought. Not even a tree existed that might have supported this phantasm. Only through his breath did he hold this illusion attached to the dream thread. . . . He spat out saliva so that the forests might arise. [Radin. 1924, p. 32]

The illusion is a conception of the actual world sus ta ined by way of the umbilical cord. Like Heraclitus's breathing "root", the dream thread is a precursor of the lungs, a somatic equiva^ lent of unin ter rupted reverie. The creator sus ta ins a dream of appearances and activates it by means of his saliva. In bir th, the interactions of foetal and maternal minds—one mind shared by two, like a womb space inhabited by twins—can give rise to the myth that the interiors of infant mouth and of breas t are interchangeable creative spaces. Paradigms of the world

112 THE UNBORN

are created in the mouth, diagrams of eternal space, the uninterrupted reverie of pre-birth taking the form of an oral creationist microcosm.

A creationist myth of the Winnebago people begins with the existence of a man who is the whole universe. Isolated and helpless, the father of mankind begins to weep; in this case, the dismemberment of sacrifice is identified with an idealized loss of bodily substance .

Tears began to flow from his eyes. After a while he looked down and saw something bright; his tears had flowed below and formed the present waters. [Radin, 1924, p. 41]

His falling tears t u rn into lakes, and the world begins to be created.1

People struggle to survive, and even to develop, by creating phan tom environments in their mind, a s though at tempting to re-create the conditions they h a d known before the waters broke. They make a version of the amniotic sac for themselves. A patient recalls how. at certain unhappy moments in childhood, she would weep into her pillow and console herself by resting her hot cheeks against the cool, wet pillow; and she would suck two fingers. Her sister behind her would sleep. The patient was creating a tolerable world by re-creating the uter ine condition. There were other reveries in which other bodily extrusions were used in a consolatory way.

The unborn live in a realm that h a s durat ion b u t no time. They are identified with double annihilation, the dispossessed mother and mortal twin, the birth that failed to happen . By way of the phan tom environment, they hope to reach the condition of the divine twin—to persist a s does Dionysus. They live in a s ta te of chronic miscarriage.

The patient whose session followed the woman who wept into her pillow was faced by a different si tuation. Over the years she had imagined the therapist 's private life a s an idealized

'"Among the Khonds of Bengal, and likewise in Mexico, the shedding of tears is believed to be an homeopathic method of producing rain. . . . The Egyptian hieratic papyrus of Nesi-Amsu attributes the creation of mankind to an effusion from the eye of Ra" (Gaster, 1950, p. 16).

CHAPTER EIGHT 113

scene into which she could in t rude and which she would then discover to be blighted (which kept her from the pain of giving up control over her objects). Her waking life was like a series of dreams, self-made amniotic sacs, by which she h a d failed to engage with actuality; she lived recurrently the need to intrude into her good objects and by the power of her intruding to degrade their good experiences into disappointments that gave her satisfaction.

This manne r of existing had begun to break down. The places int ruded upon in dreams became incoherent or incongruous and no longer convinced her of their t ruth a s plausible fictions. She read Melanie Klein's 1935 paper on the depressive position and could not s tand it. Then she had a dream, and some associations to the dream, concerning a caravan where she had gone to change tickets and been surprised and gratified by the k indness with which some official in the h u t h a d changed the tickets for her . She saw in this caravan a woman she admired, whom she related to Melanie Klein, and she was impressed by the way this woman held a baby in her a rms and talked to it.

This dream presented a created world: the caravan admittedly was derived from an experience, a memory, b u t the totality was a something given to her . Her reveries of intrusion had been self-deceiving; her thoughts about the woman irt the caravan did not have this quality. It Was solid and other; it was something to be learnt from.

Like the man who wept in the Winnebago myth, she h a d become aware, for a moment at least, that her thinking was no longer a n extension of her body or of herself. When the tears leave the weeping m a n a n d fall away from him a n d transform into dis tant lakes, they enact a process by which thought separates itself from the self, a s though it were placenta and cord moving transmutingly into another condition of being. Thought enters a condition of continuous changeability uncontrolled by the thinker.

A woman who felt confused with dying presences began to recover from a s ta te of symbolic disablement through a dream about a creationist game with water.

114 THE UNBORN

Those who had known her in her childhood were dead, apar t from a n elder sister, who had breas t cancer and was possibly dying. She remembered her mother . She had desperately insisted on calling in an emergency doctor, a woman, to restore her mother, when her mother had been dying. She now feels this to have been a mistake. The doctor's a t tempt to revive her dying mother had caused her pain and had lead to a disquieted death. Chemotherapy, psychotherapy, and the doctor's means of reviving her dying mother are linked in her mind. A par t of her is someone dying here, wanting to die and to enter the land of shadows, where he r father and mother are. She does not want me to bring her to life, because she fears that my efforts will be painful and unsuccessful.

She cannot recall dreams: perhaps she fears tha t the dreams, if recalled, would not allow her to be free; they would be addictive in some way. She thinks of her therapist a s someone who, in giving her the kiss of life, would allow her to slip back into the shades , to her dead father. She would leave the therapist , a s the emergency doctor had been left, with the failure of not having resuscitated her.

J u s t before the holidays, she had imagined herself as lying in a coffin, which also happened to be the couch. She h a d thought of herself as a princess waiting throughout the holidays on the coffin/couch. She had watched a television play about a dying girl who had lived out her wish to be a ballet dancer. Corny, compulsive viewing, she thought; b u t it was probably a subs t i tu te for dreaming (and a denial of dreaming by its having intruded into someone else's manufactured dream); an a t tempt to reach out for the function of dreaming, for a lost inwardness, the sources of her autobiography.

Some key h a s been kept from her which would allow her to live. She thinks she knows what it is. For years she had believed, in error, that her father worked for a totalitarian government, which she thought of with loathing. Her father h a d joined the army and had died in appalling conditions while fighting for this government. Recently she had found out from a published book that had been in her mother 's possession—and which her mother had never shown her—that her father h a d taken par t in a plot to overthrow the totalitarian government. Her father had been suspected of his pa r t in the plot and sent

CHAPTER EIGHT 115

una rmed to the war front. She resents her mother 's keeping her father's good reputat ion from her. The fact tha t she had formerly thought ill of her father was dispersed in this accusation.

If s h e dreamt, she did so in fragments and in images that tended to be un resonan t and disconnected. This began to change. She began to dream of lakes; of water-skiing, in a lake behind some unspecified launch, holding on to a loop that might be of cord or metal; then of an empty lake-site made of mud and clay. She was holding an object associated with masturbat ion, which she wished to throw away, b u t she could not find a place where she might throw it so that it would remain out of sight. The dream marked a defensive re t reat from a little boy's desolation a t the death of a young father. In the dream she is the little boy, t r iumphant at winning as his bride a mother lost in the depression of mourning.

The next night, there was a loosening up of her capacity to symbolize. She dreamt she was with a boy. The boy drew a lake on the top of a mountain , and she and he ruminated over whether a lake on the top of a mounta in was a possibility. They placed the lake on the side of the mountain . She felt sympathy for the actual boy she h a s dreamt about . She knows that his mother h a s tried to commit suicide more than once. Her mother h a d also at tempted suicide, after her father had been sent to the war front.

I th ink she is playing with me, as the boy—we are playing a creationist game in which we make up the world together. We make u p a mother, perhaps as a way of coping with the knowledge of how precarious a mother 's existence m u s t be when faced by the absence of a father and the manic reparat ions of a daughter identified with a father.

Both she and the boy had been through a breakdown. She was ruminat ing over the making of the world with him and in so doing considering the a tmospheres and places that make up the presence of a nur tur ing mother. "Would you have a lake on a mounta in if, say, the mounta in were not an extinct volcano?", she asks , in discussion of the dream. These were semi-geological enquiries, fascinating in their own right, b u t they were also emotional questions about the na tu re /genes i s of feelings, questions about the site of the u te rus or the place of tears in a

116 THE UNBORN

mother. In practice, parents may represent the creationist powers in a family. But under certain c i rcumstances the child in its play (often with its mother) will become the creator— through speculation discovering and inventing the rich sites and a tmospheres of a mother or a universe.

A world in winter is not a world that h a s "forgotten" summer ; it is a world that summer h a s left and to which it may never re turn .

Dionysus m u s t descend into the lake a t Lerna in order to retrieve his mother; such is the act of recollection that discovers the circlings of intelligence in the vestiges and thinks of memory losses as kingdoms that sink into the Atlantic.

The changes of the earth are so slow in comparison to the duration of our lives, that they are overlooked; and the migration of people after great catastrophes, and their removal to other regions, cause the event to be forgotten. Aristotle Meteorology, 2: 14-16 [cf. Lyell, 1840, p. 22]

Measuring the span of a h u m a n life and placing events within it, the self thinks to gain partial mastery over "the durat ion of our lives". If it supposes memory to be the capacity to retain the self's experiences in facsimile, then memory is a s determined as this measur ing way of looking a t experience.

The notion of temporal changes tha t are not contained within this system because their pulse is different from h u m a n intuition, or contain losses so catastrophic that no mind can register them, does not imply tha t na tu re is mindless, nor that its chronology is alien to the conceptions of h u m a n history; it supposes an unders tanding of mind that does not derive from the consolations and ambitions of the self.

The world h a s no memory and makes no recognitions. Leontes in The Winter's Tale m u s t suffer a similar consequence because of his jealousy, dramatized by his limbo-like disappearance from the action during the middle reaches of the play. In Lyell's view, the world does not know about pa s t and future. It does not have an experience in time; it is like mind only insofar as the mind is psychotic. The sea undermines cliffs, and land buckles: bu t in metaphor only can the world be said

CHAPTER EIGHT 117

to endure or change under stress—unless, that is, one takes the metaphor literally and conceives of the world a s a soul that wanders through the underworld.

Fossils are not memory traces; to see them as s u c h is to see them as vagaries of the Zeus imagination, a s perhaps Leonardo does when he considers them as shells "formed in the hills by the influence of the s tars" (Lyell, 1840, p. 34). A glowing s tar falls through the night, buries itself in a mountainside, and, growing dormant , becomes a fossil. Similarly, the s tone s ta tue of Hermione, who had been presumed dead, tu rns out to be a living presence in The Winters Tale, in a moment of recognition tha t is unlike a recollection. Recognition is something other than recollection; it is a re turn of the dead, a transforming of the vestiges by the Platonic demiurge. Mythology has little place for memory; b u t through glances and gleams and glints it is haun ted by moments of recognition.

Lyell (1840) describes the world's pas t without m a n in terms of a gynaecological creationism:

The waters are represented to have poured out of an oven; a strange fable, said to be borrowed from the Persian Magi, who represented them as issuing from the oven of an old woman.

Some people think of nature as "in the act of parturition", or compare Noah's Flood to "a common menstruum" or "chaotic fluid", [pp. 32, 76, 85]

When Lyell writes about the sea as destroying the land, or the land as swelling out of the sea, or the sea or land "swallowing" each other, he raises the possibility that in time, and under certain circumstances, thoughts are whittled away in mind, or forgotten, or discovered like some archipelago that has appeared out of the waters over-night. Naturalists visit the archipelago and formulate theories about its existence. A thought surfaces in mind, and thinkers swarm to it. formulating theories. Or an island disappears. You draw the curtains back one morning and find that the world has vanished: it takes a moment for you to realize that fog wreathes the window, or tha t snow h a s fallen a n d obliterates familiar places. Remembering or forgetting (worlds) is like trying to hold onto a figure in a dream that may represent the ebb and flow of phan tom

118 THE UNBORN

tides. Lyell (1840, p . 33) cites a story from the Arab writer Mohammed Kazwini in which an imaginary and god-like observer keeps re turning to the same place every five hund red years. Each time the place changes: once it is a lively metropolis, another time a field, then once more a city. Each time the observer a sks the people of this place about the past , about wha t h a d been there the previous time h e h a d visited it. They always profess ignorance about the past . This is like Aristotle's "migration of people after great catastrophes, and their removal to other regions, [which causes] the event to be forgotten".

The god-like observer is the conscious mind that pities unconscious mind 's reluctance to dwell in other t han nowness . Unconscious mind does not unders tand , does not want or need to know the information about the pas t that conscious mind retains. Clearly there is force in the idea tha t things appear a n d disappear; and a curious likeness is discovered between losing things and forgetting things, though these are quite separa te types of events. There is j u s t as much force in the idea tha t things that seem to appear and disappear in some unascer ta in-able way continue to persist and cannot be denied.

Where has the tree gone, that locked/Earth to the sky? Meanings ebb and flow in the mind. A poet of the unborn h in t s at what might have been. In visiting a church , he marks the spot where life h a s drained away. A woman marries; and he writes a tr ibute to her discarded maiden name. It is a s though, through the negative, he glimpses the alien positive. Childless, wifeless, he constantly h in ts a t a world where things are, b u t not for him. He is blitzed like a foetus in miscarriage by acts of extinction, which in other c i rcumstances might have been thoughts . The emptiness of a nor thern hotel by night is alive with a life that is not actually there—the fingerings of air, water, and light.

CHAPTER NINE

The infant's need to confuse the nature of space in its

mouth with the space in the mother's breasts

(representing two wombs, each containing a twin) as

one of the first embodiments of the relationship of

microcosm to macrocosm. Infants who think to

triumph over their mothers by ascribing the creativity

of the womb to their mouths.

M outh may equate itself with womb on the basis tha t womb can renew life—its capacity being idealized as a form of immortality or cloning magic. "In

general, anyone who can exhale his soul is a magician. This soul is his double, a t ransient materialisation of his breath" (Mauss, 1950, p. 27).

In brea th ing out bubble life, a magician uses mou th as womb: mouth and womb invite psychotic equation by way of the fact that both are able to inflict a "biting" pain.

A. B. Cook believed tha t Hesiod's gap might have been "a gaping or yawning mouth" (1940, p. 1039). Piaget asked a boy where h e dreamt, and the boy answered: in my mouth . By analogy, consider a twenty-six-year-old man whose

equipment of thought is still somewhat fixed in this buccal phase so that the theatre of thought has not yet become located in his dream life but is still in his mouth during waking hours. . . . If the buccal cavity is his theatre of thought, anything happening in his mouth might be ex-

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120 THE UNBORN CHAPTER NINE 121

pected to have the same impact on his view of the self and world as we are accustomed for dreams to have. [Meltzer, 1986, p. 180]

Conceivably the boy who spoke to Piaget thought of h is mouth as being a glowing magic temple whose walls had the capacity to generate immortality (fertility being ascribed to skin). The dead and unborn exist in a shadow cave, which the tongue-magician hopes to bring alive. Tongue equated with nipple takes over the space associated with the u te rus : it becomes u te rus -mouth . The acquiring of speech augments this belief; b u t guilt is also mobilized. The tongue can find itself cast in the role of a sacrificial victim threatened by the arrival of teeth.

The concept of mouth that dreams is a rationalization of the need to cope with the imbalance between empty mouth and creative u terus . Empty mouth has to steal or plagiarize creativity, an unsatisfactory way of digesting anything, b u t at least the food gets in.

Someone h a s to pay the price. A dream mou th can function like a prison, renewing itself by working a scapegoat system, with the tongue as victim. An idiom catches the persecuted caution that workers in this system know well: I could have bit ten my tongue—meaning I should have held back my malevolence, I should pun i sh myself for my malevolence, bet ter to pun i sh myself than bite the hand that feeds me. The prison system can be idealized as a church in which profanity—fragmented bits of nour ishment , aftertastes, obscenities—are consecrated by a rite t an tamount to a Eucharis t . Food, sounds , speech r e tu rn to their rightful condition, which is to be holy a s well a s wholesome. The mouth thinks to have recaptured the creative process: it thinks itself to be a dream site that generates symbols.

In s ta tes of degradation, when everything is in bits, there is one way in which it is possible to re turn to the sacred primal condition: and that is by the act of sacrifice. Something living m u s t be offered up in expiation or gift to the source of the sacred. The tongue m u s t be offered u p in sacrifice to the teeth; and if this thought is too uncomfortable, then tongue murder can be projected into a mother 's u te rus as a phan tasy about baby murder in the parental intercourse.

In the one-time aborigine rites of central Australia, fathers of the tribe initiated young men into adulthood by way of painful genital mutilation: the cutt ing of the initiate's penis re-enacted the womb-devourings of the birth process and the "biting-off" of the cord. The ancestors dreamed into existence the forms of the physical world, a n d through the dream totem animals communicated an inheritance of biting.

In no way different from the writers of the ancient Dionysiac theatre, the fathers of the tribe were explicit about the oral significance of sacrifice. In the initiation rites, two members of the eagle-hawk tribe wore elaborate masks and disguised themselves a s eagle-hawks.

Each man had his arms extended and carried a little bunch of eucalyptus twigs. They were supposed to represent two eagle-hawks quarrelling over a piece of flesh, which was represented by the downy mass in one man's mouth. At first they remained squatting on their shields, moving their arms up and down, and, still continuing this action, which was supposed to represent the flapping of wings, they jumped off the shields and, with their bodies bent and arms extended and flapping, began circling around each other as if each were afraid of coming to close quarters. Then they stopped and moved a step or two at a time, first to one side and then to the other, until finally they came to close quarters and began fighting with their heads for the possession of the piece of meat. . . . The attacking man at length seized with his teeth the piece of meat and wrenched it out of the other man's mouth. [Spencer & Gillen, 1927, p. 244]

Initiates achieved qualification as medicine men by sleeping close to the mouth of a cave fourteen miles south of Alice Springs—in trepidation usually, because they believed that the cave was inhabited by ancestral spirits. Human beings who entered the interior of the cave were thought to disappear forever. The act of symbolic death in this rite of passage was focused on tongue ra ther than on penis mutilation. It was a s sumed tha t a spirit would leave the cave a t day-break, and that it would throw "an invisible lance" a t the initiate, if it should find him asleep. The lance would pierce his neck from behind, pa s s through the tongue, making a large hole, and

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then come out of his mouth (Spencer & Gillen, 1899, pp. 5 2 3 -524).

A second lance pierced the man from ear to ear, a n d he was thought to die. The cave-spirits would carry h im into the cave, a hallucinatory place of perpetual sunsh ine and runn ing waters, and they would remove his internal organs, replace them with a new set, and place magic s tones inside him, condensat ions of celestial light, intended to combat the forces of evil within him. When he awoke from sleep, he was often found to be insane. With the passing of time, the insanity would lessen, and he would be acknowledged a medicine man .

Epimenides came by his religious skills by m e a n s of lying a t midday in the cave of the Diktaean Zeus and thinking to sleep for many years. He dreamt of meeting with the gods and with Truth and Jus t ice as actual beings. As a dormant tongue asleep for years in the cave-mouth, h is si tuation evokes the pre-verbal period in infancy. Mouth-dreamers do not see their inspiration coming from outside them; they think of the u te rus as being a s imulacrum of their own mouths .

Hesiod's two versions of the Prometheus legend br ing out the na tu re of initiation rites. The conflict between Prometheus a n d Zeus is a sparr ing match in four rounds : Hesiod does not refer to the central religious creationist myth that makes sense of the sparr ing match. 1

1. Prometheus is the high priest, medicine man, or trickster who presides over the sacrifice. He knows that Zeus will a t tend the sacrificial meal. For reasons unknown, he decides to trick Zeus; he gives him bone and fat wrapped up

'"When we hear that the Titans dismembered Dionysus, that they cooked his limbs in a cauldron in order to eat them, that Zeus sent a goddess, Athena, to take the essential of that horrible food from them, namely the heart, and that Zeus inflicted on them punishments in the underworld that recall those inflicted on the Indo-European demons who tried to steal the immortal's food, it does seem likely that there is a mixture here of Zagrean and Ambrosian themes" (Dumezil. 1924, p. 115).

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in a parcel of skin, and he keeps the best meat for the other people a t the feast.

2. Zeus realizes he h a s been cheated. This is presented as an amazing discovery, though common sense would suggest tha t Zeus had only to open the parcel to realize he h a s been cheated. Zeus takes revenge on Prometheus and his tribe by withholding the power of fire from mankind. Prometheus retaliates by stealing fire from Zeus's domain and so restores his authori ty as the benefactor of humani ty .

3. Zeus takes revenge for a second time by having Prometheus bound to a rock in the Caucasus . An eagle eats Prometheus 's liver by day; and the liver re-grows by night. The high priest h a s now become the sacrificial victim, b u t within a cyclical process by which it is possible to imagine the sacrificial victim to be a part icipant in an initiation rite and a guardian of the sacred.

Mouths that appropriate the power of dreaming from the couple are bound to work within a cyclical model. The tongue is destroyed by the nipple-teeth, b u t then is restored and can once more speak eloquently—as tongues of fire, perhaps .

I want to look a t the myth under the following headings:

• the totemic significance of Zeus;

• the meaning of the inedible food;

• the meaning of the stolen fire.

The totemic significance of Zeus

In the first ins tance he carries projections that have a way of retaliating on the projector. He carries the projection of being a mouth—specifically, teeth that eat babies because they are rivals and because they are delicious. In some myths he eats h is own children. His function in the theory of mouth as dream-site is to confuse tongue and nipple; he exorcizes and consecrates by biting the tongue.

He appears later in the myth in totemic form as the eagle tha t eats Prometheus 's liver. The eagle resembles the aborigine

T

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cave spirits, who take out the internal organs of the noviciate medicine man, because they are organs limited to sensuous unders tanding. Correspondingly, the nightly re-growth of the liver is similar to the medicine man ' s internalizing of new bodily organs tha t restore foetal intuition, the reasoning of pre-birth, reason as logos, the faculty to intuit universality in experience, the divine pat terning that waits to be evoked in the vestiges of na ture .

Noticeably, the theory denies any recognition to otherness as a factor in psychic transformation; it denies reality to the internal couple as originator of meanings. It effectively throws light on the na tu re of integration and division, as becomes apparent if we move to:

The meaning of the inedible food

The parcel of bone and fat tha t Prometheus gives to Zeus a t the feast recalls the extrusions that owls p u t out after they have eaten their prey. Its inedibility sets u p a hard-soft cont ras t with Prometheus 's soft liver, which resembles an edible tongue.

Robertson Smith (1894) discusses a celebrated case in the third-century writings of St. Nilus, in which a group of men in the desert were compelled to devour by rite an entire camel, including its bones and fat, between the sign of first light and the rising of the s u n (p. 338). Such a devouring, incredible in its apparent ingestion of gristle and bone, uni tes the eating of raw meat with the appearance of fire in the sky. In order for something new to occur—the emerging s u n being linked, perhaps, to the vision of a new baby—it would seem that a representat ion of the new, the sacrificial victim, m u s t first be devoured.

In his s tudy of totemism, Claude Levi-Strauss (1964) investigates two myths that are informative about the meaning of the inedible. He compares the myth of a Tikopia god who cheats h u m a n beings of a prize of food and who therefore m u s t be given some inedible fruit (p. 26) to a n Objibwa god whose unveiled eyes strike dead a h u m a n being—it is a s if he h a d

been "struck by one of the thunderers" (p. 19). In Levi-S t rauss ' s view, both these legends concerning disablement relate to some failing in symbolization that obliges m a n to seek compensation for loss in metaphorical systems of communication. Man can only tolerate the dangerous powers of divinity in masked forms. Metaphor and mythic thinking are forms of insulat ion against Zeus's thunderbolt .

In other words, the immortal is a condition of uninterrupted reverie that can only be retrieved in post-birth by a healing of the schism tha t occurs a t birth, in which a mother and infant have been t ransmuted into a couple that carries psychosis. By the antithetical na tu re of primary ideas, inedible food is synonymous and opposed to stolen fire—as signs in mathematics: this being a myth about addition as well a s subtraction.

The inedible food, as a principle of integration, is the means by which two separated entities are added together, while the stolen fire, part icularly in the form of Zeus's lightning, marks the emergence of the divisive duality of twinship. On one level, the inedible food invites some thought on the relationship between h a r d and soft in the mouth, teeth, and tongue, the ability to differentiate consonants from vowels.

But this distinction does not account for the association of inedibility with the gods. The softness of the sacrifice is laid on the ha rdness of the altar, a boundary between the profane and the sacred, a s tone hermes tha t marks the end of one estate and the beginning of another . Inedibility is associated with the divine because it indicates the su reness of measu re and boundary .

Among the aborigine the parcel of inedible food takes the form of churingas—bits of s tone or pieces of wood of the u tmost sacrality, with the power to t ransmit the spirit of the ancestors. The churingas embody the continuity of an uninterrupted dream reverie, which sus ta ins the present relationship of physical objects to the primal dream source of the first creation; they contain the madness- inducing "bite", the electricity of the sacred, that is synonymous with the cutting of the dream cord. Touching churingas, and rubbing the body with them, is important in initiation rites: a tactile way of communicating with the spiritual resources of the tribe.

126 THE UNBORN

In another form, the parcel of inedible food becomes the remnants of the bir th process, the embalmed placenta and umbilical cord, through which the living pharaoh keeps in communication with his alter-ego twin in the world of the dead. It is essential that the reborn self should not lose touch with the self that h a s symbolically died, otherwise the dead self will be dangerous.

This is the feared meaning of the bir th schism, in which the couple thought to have been devoured by the bir th process is relegated to the psychotic conditions of the underworld. Any par t of the self tha t symbolically is thought to have died is liable to be an antagonist to well-being, to the extent tha t it r emains unacknowledged as a presence in the inner world. It may (if only provisionally) be identified with damaged persons in the outside world, which h a u n t the living self as blackmailer and murderer .

But how should we unders tand the primal meaning of psychic division, the act of symbolic death? This brings u s to:

The meaning of the stolen fire

In the beginning there is an inward foetal vision of the shining sky—a vision that gives issue to the proportions of reason. The presence of the good objects can be augmented after the time of bir th by the infant's mother, whose radiance feeds it. Sometimes the radiance may be felt to be too powerful to be tolerated openly; the infant may think to have to steal the radiance in order to be able to metabolize it. This is analogous to the masked or metaphoric or mythic thinking that Levi-Strauss (1964) describes.

The shining sky takes on embodiment: Zeus in his many forms, the divine baby as well as the father. Certain legends describe Zeus's fire as lightning: and the flash of lightning finds its magical reflection in the stoop of eagles (La Barre, 1972, p. 195/h.) and in the emergence of the binary.

Levi-Strauss (1964) alludes to an article by Tristan Piatt on mirror symmetry, in which the flash of lightning is identified with binary division—a suggestion that h a s relevance to the idea of the mouth as a purloined, surrogate womb tha t creates

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dreams ra ther than babies. Among the Macha peoples of Bolivia, lightning is identified with the appearance of harelips and the making of twins: it is as though the lightning were divisive flashes both in a mouth and in a womb.

It is said that if a pregnant woman is frightened by thunder and lightning, the child in her belly divides into two. I was recently told that twins are sometimes born with lips split vertically down the middle; this, too, is attributed to the fear caused by the thunder and lightning. [Levi-Strauss, 1987, p. 209/h.]

Division cannot be stopped once twoness h a s appeared. The inimical is the first dyad, the splitting into the forked tongue tha t mocks the two nipples. The fire that Prometheus steals is sky fire, an intimation of dangerous electricity. It is associated with mouth in s ta tes of psychotic depression. Patients a t the end of sessions can feel an excruciating pain in their m o u t h s and may even feel that their tongues are being pulled out. They think tha t the nipple that leaves them is a par t of their own body being ripped from them; and this pain invites a further confusion with biting, ulceration, and other fiery forms of pain in the mouth .

In the aborigine initiation rites, boys are removed from materna l space; they m u s t die in order to be reborn in paternal space. In The Bacchae, Zeus kills Dionysus's mother, the pregn a n t Semele, with a flash of lightning and places the foetus of Dionysus into a thigh-womb analogous to the mouth as dream site, or the churingas of the aborigine, or the pharaoh ' s use of his own placenta and umbilical cord as talismans: links to the world of the dead and the unborn.

Using the mouth as a dream site h a s its imaginative value; it is a way of being in contact with the other world, the creative place within the mother. Dionysus, the patron god of the drama, is identifiable with a foetus who m u s t undergo two experiences of birth—or, rather , he undergoes an interrupted pregnancy that seems like two bir ths . In Pindar 's variation on this myth (Pythian Ode 3), Zeus kills Asclepius with a bolt of l ightning for having at tempted to revive the dead. In Orphic myth, Zeus destroys by lightning the race of Titans for having dismembered, cooked, and eaten the infant Dionysus. These

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are all myths concerning religious initiation or the crossing of the depressive threshold.

The flash of lightning is the pain of death-in-life tha t the initiate m u s t undergo while passing through the liminal phase of the rite of passage—a phase that the anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) h a s thought to be educative. The totem of Zeus appears before the initiate, compounding many themes, like a n African initiation-mask: man, sky, lightning, and animal mouth . The totem manages to suggest the terrors of lightning and the contours of an animal face as well a s of a h u m a n face.

Similarly, Melanie Klein sees a dream image of a u r ina l / vase/gas-mantle—the type of object agglomerating many functions that Bion later was to describe as bizarre—as a consequence of the transition between sign and symbolization that marks the beginnings of the journey into depressive awareness (Klein, 1935, p. 279). Conceivably, the topographic value of the bizarre object as lying between the radically dissimilar semantics of the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions is analogous to the liminal function of the African mask and may have a similar value as a tool in education, assuming (that is) that initiates can meet someone willing to ins t ruct them in the translation of one type of meaning into the other.

A mouth in communion with a mother 's love takes on the a tmosphere of that love. But the infant can think to purloin its mother 's capacity for creativity and to deny that there might be any difference between them. It can claim that its mouth , and not her womb, is the one site of procreation, and it can confuse the act of procreation with the ability to dream.

Such a belief is instructive of Isakower's (1938) profound equation of infant-mouth with mother-skin, which an infant may think is indistinguishable from its own skin. The infant may believe that its mouth ' s ability to exercise symbolism is unbounded; which is true, in the sense that speech seems to offer unlimited opportunities.

But the belief h a s another aspect. By it, the nipple is denied reality, and mouth usu rps the territory of mother-skin, creating a geography where there is no boundary stone, no demarcation between estates, no al tar identifiable with inedible foods. If this happens , skin becomes a pale extension of the

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infant's own mouth, an ectoplasm or ghost tongue, a dream screen that exudes like brea th in a sub-zero temperature. This is not a s fantastic a s it may sound: the novelist Proust imagined the world of recollection to emanate from a flavour in his mouth .

It is possible to define dream in two ways. There is dream tha t occurs in a specific and bounded location: the mother 's u t e rus or, by misappropriation, the infant's mouth; or dreams tha t seem to unscroll in a n unbounded situation. An infant who experiences its mother 's skin a s an extension of its own reverie may confuse her skin with its own skin and imagine the skin tha t swaddles its body as being an extension of its mother 's cradlings of it.

Idealizations of the mouth as dream site cannot be sustained because they are misappropriations. Idealizations collapse, and the mouth is understood to be a place that h a s been desecrated. Hope of symbolization is disappointed: and mou th speaks in lies and obscenity. In remorse, in an atmosphere in which love is absent , mou th becomes a punitive institution, a prison or a n altar. It bites the tongue. Only if the a tmosphere of love re turns , from some source recognized to be other t han the infant's self, will the sacredness of the mouth be renewed. There is a sense of re turn to pre-birth and to the binding relationship of the cord.

In a report on a tribe of Indians si tuated in Iowa. J . O. Dorsey refers to an Indian who told a fellow worker:

These are sacred things, and I do not like to speak of them, as it is not our custom to do so, except when we make a feast and collect the people and use the sacred pipe. [Dorsey, 1894, p. 430]

CHAPTER TEN

'The membrane": an infant's surrogate for the umbilical cord, a form ofLewin's dream screen, sometimes represented by a look in a mother's eyes, which can communicate liturgical meanings as well as immediate thoughts and feelings. A dream that pivots on the significance of a view through a window. The dream concerns the appropriation of the breast and the transmission of death and madness into a twin self dispatched into the underworld. A later dream describes a reversal: the banished twin self manages to take control once more of the dream narrative.

The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fire-place, and looks out on the very large garden that occupies the whole slope of the hill on which the house stands. Consequently, the rays of light transmitted through the glass (i.e. the rays from the garden, the opposite mountains, and the bridge, river, lake, and vale interjacent) and the rays reflected from it (of the fire-place, &c.) enter the eye at the same moment. At the coming of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the image or reflection of the fire, that seemed to burn in the bushes or between the trees in different parts of the garden or the fields beyond it, according as there was more or less light; and which still arranged itself among the real objects of vision, with a distance and magnitude proportioned to its greater or lesser faintness. For still as the darkness increased, the image of the fire lessened and grew nearer and more distinct; till the twilight had deepened into perfect night, when all outward objects being excluded, the window became a

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perfect looking-glass; save only that my books on the side shelves of the room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with stars.

|S. T. Coleridge, in Rooke, 1969, pp. 144-145]

C oleridge describes a natural is t ic situation. The quality of h is description suggests other meanings.

It is a s though two different types of spatial being adhered to either side of the window. The two types of being are on the verge of becoming inside and outside space in psychic reality; b u t they are uns table in relationship and continue to oscillate one with the other, like twins in a s tate of mutua l projective identification.

In pre-bir th the umbilical cord holds together the foetus a n d placenta a s though it were the window. But a reversal occurs, for what is spiritual in post-birth is corporeal in pre-birth, and vice versa. The source of meaning in post-birth is body-centred and historical: hence the need for a concept of thought, or reverie, a s s temming from bodily sensat ion. In Bion's (1962) theory of reverie, catas t rophe ensues when the infant's projections are not maternally received. Correspondingly, in pre-bir th. where thought is disembodied in origin, as in mythology, the interruption of reverie, experienced bodily as the cut t ing of the cord, is registered and then avoided by the creation of a membrane, which contains and subdues the violent impact of sensa a n d averts catastrophe.

The existence of the membrane allows the magical interaction of subject and object of the pre-birth to continue into post-bir th life.

The membrane is a container of sensation. It is only tenuously derived from na tura l objects, and then from elements, like water and air, that are the least associated with the corporeal. The Uitoto god suspended in space whose spit falls away from him and transforms into the world of sea, lakes, and land personifies the makings of a membrane.

The membrane makes contact: it operates by touch, as though touch were not one of the senses, for the meaning of the membrane is that it represents an absence of sense informa-

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tion. It leaves traces or hardening in the form of the skin that makes u p the surface of mirrors, masks , or water. The surfaces are dangerous because they threaten an end to magic and the emergence of a third dimension.

1. Developmentally, the membrane is the agent by which liturgical symbols communicate, as when eyes become windows for the soul, or music (as in the music of certain voices) becomes the food of love. To this extent, it is a basis for the processes of recognition, which depends on post-bir th s ta tes of mind being able to carry the religious dimension of pre-birth experience (as represented by the moment in Shakespeare 's The Winter's Tale when Leontes sees the s t a tue of Hermione tu rn from stone into flesh).

2. Anti-developmentally, the membrane is the vehicle of omnipotent manipulation, the pivot on which reversals in perspective occur. By it, the newborn is able to cont inue to al ternate self and object, so that microcosm becomes macrocosm, or movement forward becomes movement backward, or the far becomes the near. The oscillation operates a double-time scheme, in which clocks can go forward or backward at the same time, and in which the foetus impiously takes over any notion of the paternal function to further a s ta te of t r iumph.

I want to look a t a situation tha t is anti-developmental, a n d in which oral and kinaesthetic sensat ions exist in synaesthes ia and discharge into aural or visual modalities without discrimination.

The membrane that holds this incongruous s ta te of affairs together consists of sound as an at t r ibute of mouth , a s though sound were a kind of skin. Specifically, the membrane arises from a pulse in music that flows without conta inment into biting and muscu la r sensat ions and into the movements of a dance in which the dancer is equated both with the dance a n d with a totemic presence, a spider whose bite is mythic in its capacity to poison. [There are two kinds of ta ran tu la spider. The one credited with the capacity to poison is, in fact, ha rm-

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less (Lewis, 1971, p. 38).] The rhy thm of the dance and the presence of the spider possess the dancer as a form of devouring, analogous to a t rauma.

At a certain moment during the ceremony a young man wearing a red and yellow striped pullover appeared for a moment in the doorway. The tarantulist [a woman who had been bitten (symbolically or otherwise) by a spider and who was possessed by the spirit of the spider] was about to begin a new cycle in the dance. She immediately became very agitated and lost the rhythm of the music. She showed quite clearly that she felt that the bond between her and the musicians had been broken. The assistants moved to the door and cursed the unfortunate young man, who fled.

She rocked aimlessly, dissociated from the music. The only way to bring her into its orbit once more was to throw yellow and red ribbons at her. Someone was dispatched to get the ribbons. She ignored yellow ribbons when they were thrown on their own, but she took hold of the ribbons when red ones were mixed with them. She stared avidly at them, as though wishing to absorb their colours. She tore at the ribbons with her teeth and began to enter into the movements of the dance once more, allowing the musicians, who all this while had been playing aimlessly, to regain their hold over her. [De Martino, 1966, pp. 70-71]

Implicitly, in intrusive identification, the tarantul is t takes over her mother 's pregnancy (the bite being a sexual conception in which the father bites or devours or possesses the mother 's insides, the exorcism by music being the a t tempt to abort the foetus). The sight of the young m a n and the threatened emergence of an awareness of inside-outside (he is seen three-dimensionally through a doorway) precipitates the belief tha t he is a foetus in the mother, truly imaginary in the sense of being the most authent ic of beings, who continues to exist in spite of the dancer 's delusory denial of his autonomy and of his right to maternal protection.

His presence, which depends on a certain conception of three-dimensional space, undermines the dancer 's phan tasy of abortion, in which the liturgical experience of music is used as the membrane by which she controls reality. Only by biting

134 THE UNBORN

the ribbons, which are identified with the foetus, is she able to re-establish the rite of abortion.

The membrane functions in this magic a s the cord was once thought to do. It establishes congruences in meaning (i.e. the red a n d yellow of the pullover being equated with the yellow and red ribbons), whose meaning is diminished when the inside and outside distinction Is admitted to.

The membrane carries the interruption of the birth crisis within it. It holds in check the violent sensat ions that the infant had projected into it at the time of the bir th crisis; as a container of the sacred, it insulates against danger, a s though the sacred were uninsula ted electricity. The membrane holds within it an experience of interruption, a flaw or wound or mouth , which is indistinguishable from the dreaded presence of the perfect baby.

The conflict in interest between the membrane used as a n agent for liturgical symbolism and as a means to control reality was evident in the dream of a woman who felt confined by internal persecutors and obsessional manoeuvres.

An actual experience of persistent paternal violation in her early years (though not overt sexual abuse) had added suppor t to her unquest ioned assumption that to be born was to enter the c laus t rum and to be in utero was possibly to enjoy the sus tenance of an impersonal and visionary membrane object. On one occasion she talked of a "bubble theatre".

In the dream she was looking a t a view through a train-compartment window. She described the window through which she looked as a screen. She did not make a distinction between the t ransparency of the glass surface of a window and the opacity or semi-opacity of a screen.

In the same session she talked of looking into the eyes of one of her babies—her second son—and thinking to see all wisdom there.

If the light filtered through a screen is related to the pre-birth experience of light glowing through a uter ine wall, while the view through the train window is associated with post-bir th experiences of looking through, or into, an object, then the eye as a mode tha t communicates meaning and feeling in the here and now can be taken as the agent that reveals pre-bir th

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meaning (wisdom) in a post-birth situation. It is the foremost communicator of liturgical insight.

The si tuation of looking through the window, when associated to screen and eye, takes on the meaning of a membrane, which contains the sensat ions of breakdown in bir th.

She presented herself as having been unborn or, ra ther (as she h a d been born on Chris tmas Eve), as having been born as a u su rpe r of the holy child. The account she gave of her earliest years was appalling and rang true. She was the target of her father's sadism, and she was in various ways tortured and degraded by her siblings and the n u n s at convent school.

Educated and articulate, she conveyed the belief that all knowledge was a cage. The experiences she described tended to be sensuously disagreeable. Someone had scrubbed away the bloom. Sense information, a tmospheres , climates were seldom more t h a n verbal referents. If she touched something, it tended to be either too hot or too cold. There was seldom pleasurable contact, or fragrance, or resonance. It was as though she had been confined to a cold hospital ward during the darkest days of the Second World War; on the floor a worn linoleum smelt of disinfectant.

One evening she told me that she could not stop thinking about the period of time that had passed since our last session together. She gave a detailed account of the last session, as though still holding on to it. The telling h a d the feel of a lifeless object, a rind, something to hold on to until we meet again, a something tha t could not be brought back to life. She was intensely depressed. I wondered whether she was using words in the way she did to hold off a conscious awareness of her depression. She said she was so unhappy; and then she entered into a long silence. It felt a s though her verbal self had been brutal ly shorn away from her. Two minutes before the end of the session, she gave a cry of pain and began to sob. I had the belief tha t if we ended then I would be taking her off a life-suppor t system. She told me that she had lost something. She did not know what it was: the loss was dreadful.

The next day she said that before our previous session she had been for a walk in the park nearby. She had felt in distress

136 THE UNBORN

while contemplating the varied na tu re of the early s u m m e r light on the leaves, intensities of green light on green leaves.

It occurred to me that she was describing the coming to the fore in her mind of an experience—light, pure light—that might take her mind over entirely. At the time I thought this might have been a p ram experience; later I thought tha t it was a case of a pre-birth experience breaking through, of light shining through the uter ine screen; and even later, I came to another view. At the moment she could see only an impersonal vision.

She talked about the mulberry tree in her parents ' garden, about which she had felt ecstatic as a child. Without conscious intention, she had moved from the experience of universals to an experience of part icular things. A "realistic" voice within her said tha t her parents ' garden h a d been shabby.

Two voices in her—the voice of ecstasy and the voice of disillusion—now divided; and the second of them went into one of he r brothers , who had been virtually destroyed by their father's brutality.

She recalled recently visiting her brother, when he was dying. They had sat together in the grounds of the hospital on a warm evening, and she had said, "Look! There's a mulberry tree!" He h a d been so distanced from the experience—he had said, a s though it were so remote from him, "Wasn't there a mulberry tree in our parents ' garden?" The mulberry tree that had been almost a god to her had been no more than a dim memory to him. She found this very painful.

Exacdy a week after the occasion when she had wept without being able to articulate the experience of light, at the same time in the evening, we met again, and she found herself in a similar frame of mind. She was barely able to speak. She felt guilty. She had been remiss about something, b u t about what she could not be sure.

A remark, which she thought was Churchill 's, about the lights going out over Europe came to mind—she related it to the time of the Dunkirk retreat . I asked her whether this remark took her close to memories of her brother 's death (not the mulberry-tree brother—another brother, loved passionately and idealized by the family, killed by shrapnel j u s t after the Dunkirk retreat: family life had ended then, she said; her

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mother h a d continued to live for another twenty years, b u t without any hear t in it).

She said, yes, her brother had died about that time, on active duty, when the lights had gone out over Europe. When her other brother had recently died, his widow had given her a bundle of wartime letters written by the brother who had died in the war to the brother who had continued to live. She had been moved by the letters and felt herself to be no longer the youngest child in the family; she had thought of herself as a m u c h older person, being allowed some glimpse into the friendship of two young people.

She had lost a great deal that had been good in herself (often through jealousy; she had a way of replacing memories of the beloved brother , beloved of her mother as well a s of herself, by memories of the damaged, despondent brother, about whom none could be jealous). Seeing the lights in the park had wrenched her hear t because grief, the mourning process, had been re-activated. It was painful to discover that she was not a discarded thing, an unborn: that she was someone who might have a life as a creative being.

Seeing the light in the park, re-entering an abandoned process of grief, was not to engage in an empirical enterprise: even if she had been blind, she might have seen the light. In a sense she had been blind, or at least sightless in her seeing, for she h a d seen the light without perceiving its connection with grief, and, without perceiving the connection, she had lost the light. Only in our meetings together was it possible for her to discover an experience that let the blood flow through the arteries of her grief; and yet the experience might have lain there una t tended for ever. The fact that the experience had occurred recently was neither here nor there. She might have found it without ever having undergone it. The notion that the only language of expressiveness we have in deposit is the language of experience, of something that has been through the physiological system, whether endured or not, is more fragile in its certainty than the dogmatic assertion of it often allows.

It might be said, to use an outworn idiom, that light is a function of the soul, without which the soul would perish. The fact that light is an indispensable adjunct to na tu re is a bless-

138 THE UNBORN

ing; b u t this fact is not essential to the life of the mind in which light h a s other meanings.

Some time passed. One day she told me she had joined a n a r t class—her material had implied that this might come about , b u t when she mentioned it, she did so as though to deflect persecutors by saying tha t it had happened by chance. She did not want to admit that our work together might have brought her to the ar t class.

Her interest in colour had been hinted a t in many sessions over the years, b u t she h a d been unable to accept the possibility tha t she might ever have some active relationship to colour. Now she h a d somehow managed to get a round her internal persecutors . She enjoyed the chat ter and friendliness of the a r t room, and she felt as if she might be aged eleven once more. She was immersing herself in colours—the glow and h u e and depth of the three primary colours—there being some link between the uter ine light and patterning, the impersonal visionary wonder of pre-birth and of the view through a window tha t is mythology giving way to history and the beginnings of knowledge by way of a mother 's eyes. In her pre-birth s ta te she was rediscovering the primary imagination, reason itself, the prime heritage of mind, the identification with the first moment of creation, which was at the core of the here and now.

It is a s though she had begun to be able to sink into the different colour radiances provided by her three sessions in the week, the three primary colours symbolizing the different placings of the sessions in the week. Out of these places in time many colour possibilities can be modulated. The colours are bodiless in their radiance: they allow you to enter them and to be enclosed by them. They are mythic ra ther than historical entities in their capacity to transfigure one another, a s well as anyone who enters them.

The evening before the morning session in which she told me about joining the art class, she brought the dream of the train compartment window.

CHAPTER TEN 139

She found herself in the carriage of a train, the kind of carriage with tables on which you can res t your book. This is the kind of carriage she prefers. The window beside her offered a wide unbroken vista. Facing her was her daughter , V, who h a s h a d a history of mental instability. [She and her daughter travelled in two different types of space; two par t s of the same self, each with their own membrane, weaving different conceptions of pre-birth reality.]

The train was moving. She described the view she saw outside the window. Her description was resonant : it brought the view into the room. I could feel the view in the room—or, ra ther , I could see it, a s I might see the image of a setting when reading a novel.

It was only four-thirty in the afternoon; outside the carriage window it was already dusk. Snow had fallen, and she saw people trudging through it. She thought of their wet feet and she imagined her own feet as getting wet—as though the glass between her and them had thinned away.

She projected dolefulness into the scene outside the train compar tment window, which benevolently re turned it to her, purged of despair, so that now, through the window, she was able to see an amazing sight: High in the mounta ins , the s u n was setting. Its light fell on a mountainside, which appeared to be covered by thousands of small pieces of glass. It blazed with every possible colour. Astonished, she pointed out the view to her daughter , who shrugged and looked away from the window. Later, he r daughter asked her what was to be seen, and with regret she had to tell her daughter that the view had now disappeared.

The sight of green light on green leaves had overwhelmed her when she had walked in the park, and she had been unable to speak. The equation of window-screen-eye seemed to contain a similar distress: b u t this was not so. For she had used the window as a membrane to control the relation of movement within and without the carriage in order to appropriate a mother 's experience of sexual passion (the view on the mountain) and to p u t the incoherence associated with sexual t r auma into her daughter . In mythic terms, a recognition was achieved by projecting a s ta te of symbolic death into someone else.

140 THE UNBORN

The dreamer believed (and she may have been right) tha t her daughter had to go mad in order to be able to speak out publicly about her father's abuse of her. In another version of this situation, which brought out her jealousy, she said: "I saw him sitting with her in front of the television. He was caressing her and, h a n d in pocket, was playing with his genitals."

To be liberated from the experience of incest allows her to control the object by way of the membrane . In this she is no different from the tarantulist . She controls the direction of space, time, and movement; if she did not do so, she would think to be devoured by them, as by jealousy or by a father's abuse .

A father hostile to bir th will be thought to be like Kronos who devours newborns, or the thunderbolt glare tha t kills a pregn a n t mother and her foetus. Ideas of devouring time, of clocks tha t reverse direction, of malignant wombs, come into being through such possibilities. The foetus leaves the good womb to enter a gap-mouth tha t devours it. [The malignant womb may, in fact, be the good one turned bad if the traveller into bi r th should be so disturbed by the beginnings of the journey down the bir th passage that he tu rns back in thought a t least to the place he h a s j u s t left (vide p. 58). This, the first moment of projective identification, will never give back the home tha t h a s been lost.]

The daughter par t of the dreamer declines to look through the t rain-compartment window because it represents the dreamer 's membrane, not hers; it shows for her a da rkness associated with a murder ing father. In the park one par t of he r saw the light; b u t another par t of he r saw a terrible darkness because the light she had seen h a d been a n ecstasy stolen from her mother .

To recognize t ruth (which is to have insight) is unconsciously to enter into a hopeful journey into bir th . But through an intrusive identification with her mother in childbirth, s h e had entered into a negation of recognition, in which the act of being born was equated with the executing of a death sentence. To be born in this way is to a s sume the fate of the twin who travels through a n underworld in which there is no benevolent

CHAPTER TEN 141

conception of time, a n d in which the way out is not the gates of horn, the way of truthful dreams, b u t the gates of shining ivory through which lies pass .

Dreams often reveal this deception. A m a n who was born with the cord a round his neck dreamt of being inside a pyramid. The interior was labyrinthine. A priest was leading h im out of this place with false assurances as to his safety. A door opened in the darkness , and beyond he saw brilliant light. He stepped through the door and found himself on a scaffold, on which he was about to be executed.

Over a year before the dream of the railway compar tment window, the pat ient brought a series of dreams that she understood to be about the onset of senility and death. In one of these dreams she was being transported to a Nazi death camp in a taxi full of elderly people. The dreamer in this case was the psychotic daughter pa r t of herself, who thought tha t in being born one is handed over to a Nazi father and p u t to death.

To be born in this case was to enter a hostile mouth and to be devoured. The distress a t being separated from the womb was experienced as a devouring mouth and as an incestuous fusion, in which the newborn is swallowed up inside her father's terrible insides. The idea of demarcation (in phan ta sy associated with the paternal) was now transformed into a black-hole experience, informative of the terror tha t archaic minds know at any division of unity; it is analogous to sensations of being violated.

In terms of the transference, the experience of an incestuous fusion was acted out in an unusua l way. It took the form of a telepathic communication between pat ient and therapist , about which the patient did not know, and which was probably benign. The pat ient had a dream that "answered" a problem in aesthetics that the therapist had been puzzling over—in other words, the pat ient unconsciously took over a maternal function for the therapist .

In this case the membrane was experienced as carrying a liturgical symbol and not a s a means for psychic incest.

142 THE UNBORN

Let me describe the problem before I describe he r dream. It arose from two facts associated with Shakespeare 's play, The Winter's Tale. From the mythological point of view, these two facts seemed related, though I could not see how they were related.

AristoUe under s t ands plays to be comparable to biological spontaneit ies whose movement into fulfilment is by way of a continuity in action. According to this criterion. The Winter's Tale is broken-backed as a s t ructure , since during its middle section its protagonist Leontes disappears from the action. In a s ta te of delusional jealousy Leontes comes to believe tha t his friend Polixenes h a s sired his son Mamillius. As a consequence of his actions, his son and his pregnant wife Hermione die (though Hermione only dies seemingly), and his newborn daughter Perdita is abandoned on a distant shore.

Sixteen years pass in the narrative: then Leontes re turns , though as an a t tendant to the action, as though he were a member of the audience. The issue that puzzled me was whether Leontes's disappearance from the action was a flaw in some Aristotelian conception of dramatic action as modelled on the spontaneously and direct fulfilment of certain biological organisms (acorns into oaks), or whether it m a d e sense a s a preternatural s t ruc ture in reason, the rite of passage of psychic death and rebirth as a Platonic idea that precedes any act of embodiment, and indeed in relation to which embodiment is no more than an after-thought. One version of the idea would be the myth of Dionysus's interrupted gestation. The two wombs Dionysus travels through in order to be born, and the interruption of the bir th process a s he travels between them, is translatable into the infantile phan tasy that the "gap" between a mother 's two breasts , each of which contains one of two identical twins, the two Dionysii (in strife, Dionysus and Pentheus; in amity, Pollux and Castor), is a place of psychic death. To be able to relate one breast to the other by travelling in mind from one to the other would be one way of describing a stage in depressive unders tanding. A historian, wishing to psychologize the audience's feelings about the absence of Leontes from the middle par t of the action, might argue that Leontes's absence is like the absence of winter in summer; it depicts, by

CHAPTER TEN 143

way of a sense of absence, something of Leontes's paranoid-schizoid state, his disavowal of responsibility, his spiritual amnesia , his inability to mourn loss. But from a mythical point of view, Leontes's mental s ta tes are incidental. The play is not "about" Leontes's mind as a history in thought, described in terms of the Aristotelian poetic a s underpinned by the imperatives of biological fulfilment.

The play's centre lies elsewhere. Its model is a Platonic idea, an idea that can be intuited in the forms of mathematical s t ruc ture and, especially, in the forms of music. The na tu r e of the poetic connection between the weighty motif of Leontes's prolonged absence and the motif of transfiguration, in which the s tone s ta tue of his dead wife tu rns into a living being, is comparable to the aesthetic effect of an interplay between silence and the articulation of a theme in a piece of music.

Music, awake her; strike! [Music] Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach; Strike all that look upon with marvel. [5.3.11.97-100]

The music tha t awakens the s ta tue validates the divine sanity of the universe: that it moves, and it moves in the right direction, the direction associated with love. In a similar fashion, Plato's demiurge in the Timaeus is able to animate the meaningless bi ts of matter , the paranoid-schizoid vestiges, and suffuse them with the being of intelligence and love.

I say this with hindsight. At the time my pat ient brought her dream, I h a d no idea how the "deep time" of Leontes's disappearance in the play might be related to the ecstasy grounded in music of the moment in which the s ta tue seems to move, though I began to unders tand this poetic connection when my pat ient gave the dream.

She was looking through masses and masses of paper. She knew that the information she was looking for did not concern an individual; it concerned a twin. She was looking for her twin. She saw a moving road—a conveyor-belt passage-way, such as you see a t airports—and she thought to herself that she would never find her twin. The people on the conveyor belt looked spent . Among them were two friends who looked very aged. She was terribly upset .

144 THE UNBORN

The conveyor-belt passage-way is wha t the psychotic daughter par t of herself would have seen if she h a d looked a t the landscape outside the railway carriage window. It reverses the meaning, and probably the direction, of the landscape of love into a landscape of hate. It h a s the s ame function a s the taxi that took the dreamer and her companions to the death camp.

Plato imagined certain epochs in which the movements of the planets go into reverse and spiral into self-destruction. A clock so reversed does not register living time; it shadows forth the two-skeleton type of experience (p. 42 ff.) in which the patient seemed bound to a slow wheeling opposed to everyone else's movement through space and time.

Conversely, the pass ing vision of the beautiful mounta inside seen through the t rain-compartment window reverses the movement of the conveyor belt of dying phan toms , m u c h as the movement of the s ta tue releases the cosmic absolut ism of Leontes's delusional jealousy tha t petrifies any experience of being b o m into time.

The pat ient had presented the dream of the conveyor belt at her mid-week session. She had not a t tended her Monday session (missing sessions was quite exceptional for her), and the reason for this was that on the Sunday night before the session she h a d at one moment awoken and felt a s though she had been "pole-axed". (Later material indicates that pole-axing had the same psychic meaning as the breaking of some cosmic axle-tree, the breaking of a mother ' s psychic bone structure, the essential link that creates the parental couple.)

She had slept through the sound of her alarm clock and in this way failed to get to her session. The pole-axing h a d broken her relationship to time as an on-going benevolent progression into bir th and p u t her into the limbo in which clocks begin to go backwards .

The reason why time was reversed became clear when I asked her for her associations to the idea of twins in the dream. She said that when she had been about to give bi r th to her second child, she had heard the midwife say tha t she was about to give bir th to twins.

CHAPTER TEN 145

The midwife was a s t range and elderly woman named Miss White. In those days, in the early 1950s, the custom was to encourage second bi r ths to take place a t home. Before Miss White, my pat ient had lost any sense of judgement; she had been so incapacitated that she h a d been unable to realize how terrified s h e was.

In spite of the connotations of her name. Miss White represented for my pat ient a condition of devouring psychic darkness . Ageing was equated to being helpless, in the way that a woman in childbirth will feel helpless if she feels she is dogged by some anti-procreative presence of intense power. "I have delivered over a thousand babies", said Miss White, and it seemed from the way she talked that she conceived and procreated the babies, or possibly massacred them, out-Heroding Herod, at the very moment of their delivery.

Miss White kept saying, "You will have twins". And after the single bi r th she said, "Where is the other one?" Miss White's claim to be able to predict the arrival of twins had the feeling of an awesome threat: if I have power to increase the number of bir ths, I have also the power to decrease them—that is, to make su re tha t you have a miscarriage. To say that Miss White was like some allegorical representat ion of devouring Time did not do jus t ice to her effect as a dense metaphysical presence by every bir th bed, a Hecate or Diana of the cross-roads, seen by some and not by others.

During the labour, which was painful and without anaesthetic. Miss White insisted on giving my patient a lengthy account of how to make a s teak and kidney pudding. "You oil the dish and chop up the onions . . . now give another push." The pat ient 's h u s b a n d was fat. and Miss White kept saying, "You will m a k e this pudding for your husband" . This resembles Leontes's linking of his son Mamillius with cattle and his unconscious wish ritually to devour child and mother, a s though he were a tarantul is t in the throes of an abortive form of childbirth.

Miss White represented some aspect of my patient that could not be got rid of. Indeed, Miss White at tended the birth of her next baby, and although my patient recognized tha t she feared Miss White, she was so paralysed by some concentrate

T

146 THE UNBORN CHAPTER TEN 147

of murderousness in herself that she found Miss White useful as someone into whom she could project her murde rousness in order to disown it. Miss White, for her part , was an appropriate receptacle for these discharged feelings.

Her ecstasy a t giving birth, in looking into the eyes of he r newborn son and seeing all wisdom there, was symbolized in the train-compartment-window dream by the sight of the light on the mountain . But the experience of giving bir th a n d the joy tha t came with it h a d been misappropriated; in terms of her feelings, she h a d taken over her mother 's body and he r mother 's babies, and she had projected her ha t red a t he r mother 's procreative abilities into her daughter (or into Miss White). There was no evidence of a good father being about; and this was one of the sources of the confusion.

In speaking to the mother in labour, Miss White is saying: "If you give bir th to twoness (whatever the kind of twoness: breas ts , nipples, eyes, babies), you will be alright." (In the light of the taboo against twins, perhaps Miss White is saying the opposite: "If you give bir th to twoness, I will be in the position to be able to destroy the lot of you.") By way of a sadistic contract, I am assur ing your escape from helpless infant s ta tes into the delusional security of being a mother. My offering you this contract implies that by appropriating the role of a sadistic mother, you are becoming the only kind of mother there is.

Miss White p resumes that mothers are necessarily sadist ic and that motherhood m u s t be experienced as an appropriation of one's own mother 's function: for her, there is no other possibility. Behind these arabesques in rationalization, there is some inexorable and unappeasable psychic presence, the bad womb, or prototype of the breas t black-hole, whose energies are refuelled by its power to devour everything, including itself.

A father who a t tends the bir th of his children with a view to devouring them is only thought trivially to be jealous; he is, rather , some principle of the anti-procreative, of which Miss White was a reflection.

The tyrant Kronos (perhaps the son Chronos transformed into father) a t tempts to eat h is newborn son, Zeus. He s ta t ions himself by Rhea during labour, with the intention of swallowing

the babies as they are born. Realizing his intentions, Rhea h a s he r pa ren t s arrange for her newborn, Zeus, to be taken elsewhere, and for Kronos to be given, a s decoy, a "great s tone wrapped in swaddling bands". Another version of this ruse , which points to the theme of the membrane, is tha t Rhea in childbirth and child n u r t u r e is protected by a guard of kouretes who circle in a dance before her cave, creating a phan tom shield.

Kronos swallows the stone, thinking to ingest h i s son. Saved a n d taken elsewhere. Zeus grows u p with amazing speed a n d is able to defeat his father in battle. Kronos spews u p the stone; and Zeus places it a t sacred Pytho to commemorate his sur vival a n d t r iumph.

The natural is t ic implausibility of the idea of stone-swallowing is a component in its being religiously significant: it belongs to the same order a s the Platonic idea and owes little to na ture . It is like Leontes's incredulity when faced by the conjunction of a music tha t stirs feelings and the sight of a s tone s ta tue tha t comes alive. Kronos might be imagined to face every mother in labour a s the figure who negates any promise in creation, a bad womb presence of massive authority, judgemental , its powers increased by its capacity to devour everything. Kronos dissociates creation from its source in originality and b inds it to an anti-creationist vortex that destroys. As monumenta l as a mounta in range, as implacable as the s tone tha t he devours, he is the unease that lies a t the core of gravitas; the presence of psychotic disintegration tha t Cezanne both perceived and projected into the density of the Montagne St-Victoire, an unders tanding of which (as h e told Joachim Gasquet) was intrinsic to his capacity to communicate through paint the massive authori ty of the mounta in itself.

The s t a tue Leontes contemplates trembles within his gaze. It trembles because the eyes that contemplate it are the eyes that , in thought a t least, have destroyed Hermione and Mamillius; it is a s though within the poignancy of the moving s t a tue an act of murder might be undone, as when Abraham's knife hesi tated over Isaac. It trembles because it is of its na tu re precar ious in definition; it is a witness to unknowabilities.

Jea lous persons, who believe that creative power can be in the service of the ego, are confident of their capacity to remake

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>-to

in their own image the world they devour. Like the power of Leontes's eyes to give flesh to the bones of the long-dead, the eating mouth would steal the powers of the womb a n d make something out of that which it devours. Kronos denies biological evolution by discovering that the son he wishes to eat happens to be his father; it is a s though in his mind devouring were a way of reversing biological process, so tha t sons might give bi r th to fathers.

He h a s the inexorability of the stone s t a tue of the murdered comme'ndatore in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni; a conception of the punitive superego that contains within it the earlier meaning of the altar on which the sacrificial victim is slain, a n equivalent for mother earth who receives the dead a t the time of burial and later devours the corpse.

Certain Pacific islanders have a rite that demonst ra tes why a sacrifice (in the form of a fowl) m u s t be offered on the s tone altar a t the frontier between the realms of life and death in order for the dead person to cross over into the lands of the afterlife.

The dead man now quickly presents the stone with the ghost of a fowl which he has been carrying with him, in order to save his nose. : . . If he delays in presenting it, his nose will be flattened. If he has no fowl to give at all, the stone will eat him. [Layard, 1934, p. 124]

Among the Etruscans , the s tone s ta tue took the form of persu, the persona or masked priest (or priest with head covered in a veil) who represents the dead a t funeral performances, a figure of chthonic character—Perseus, Persephone, Perso (one of the Graiai), Perse (one of Hecate's names)—a figure who guards the way into the afterlife, which, a s I see it, is a representat ion of a way into bir th (Croon, 1955, p. 16).

Kronos, like Leontes, h a s some kinship to the wolf in the Grimm brothers ' tale who eats all the pigs apar t from the pig in the clock case, who is able to inform his mother of the crime. At which point, the s tone motif recurs: the mother, finding the wolf asleep, slits open the wolfs abdomen and subs t i tu tes s tones for her stolen babies. The wolf drowns under the weight of s tones while drinking water from a lake.

In relation to this parallel, Leontes's son Mamillius is identifiable with baby Zeus in the Kronos story, or the clock-case pig in the folk-tale. [The clock-case motif, as Andrew Lang suggested long ago, is a late interpolation into the tale and should not be given m u c h significance. And yet, why not? The moment in Orphic legend in which Orpheus looks back at his wife on the ascent from Hades and thereby loses her is a late interpolation also and yet it is an important element in the legend. Sometimes late interpolations spell out a latent t ruth that needs to be spelt out.]

He is the breas t -baby (as his name implies), which the enraged infant Leontes ingests and then finds h a s turned to stone. Leontes is left to swallow the idea of the counterfeit s tone s ta tue , while in some sphere beyond grief the Dionysiac Mamillius is transmogrified into the Dionysus of the other breas t . Autolycus, the peddler who sleeps with other men's wives, and who ac ts out the superfoetation principle so often levelled a t the mother of the twins: all tha t Leontes dreads, the principal factor in exciting the delusions of jealousy.

The Dionysiac idea—a rite of passage, whether it takes the form of a cauldron of apotheosis, or of a second g e s t a t i o n -violates feeling by diminishing the meaning of the child's death; for who will grieve for Mamillius if in dying he becomes someone else? Reasonably it might be proposed that the legend modifies the pain of some natura l bir th act that h a s failed. A mother a n d infant die in the act of birth; and a father m u s t feel tha t his mou th and his s tomach are full of stone.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

The membrane"—continued.

A dreamer uses the image of a t ra in-compartment window as a membrane to weave together the images of the dream and to evacuate their possible danger into

her companion. The membrane does not exist in na ture , a n d it cannot be directly apprehended by the senses . It is a n idea tha t re-creates the psychic function of the umbilical cord in postnatal si tuations, a two-dimensional conception of the u te rus a s a skin that contains entities, which is tolerable when the entities take the form of babies, intolerable when the babies transform into bites, represent ing a whole range of sensat ion tha t h a s to be got rid of. [The babies within the membrane are perceivable as motifs or a toms of meaning; when they are evacuated, they are known as sensat ions of a n excruciating muscu la r kind and are associated with psychosis and torture— biting, blinding, burning, freezing, cramping, etc. They are closer to being beta elements than to being sensa.]

The membrane as a two-dimensional conception of the u te rus originates from the foetus's experience of the cord as a

source of creativity and does not necessarily indicate a regression. It differs from the cord to the extent tha t it can be used to deny the meaning of b i r th as a radical transition. The neonate is liable to resort to it when it fears violation or intrusion, a s when it cannot distinguish the experience of assaul t , actual or imaginary, from s ta tes of transition, a s of being b o m . It then may use the membrane to control and evacuate terror on the assumpt ion tha t the membrane can distance it from terrors associated with incest and the perversions.

The membrane is one of the liminal phenomena by which mind in post-bir th is able to receive the dimensions of pre-birth experience, the communication by the good objects that is a prerequisite to any appreciation of the na tura l world. It is a n agency b y which liturgical representat ions cross the period of transition.

It h a s an u n u s u a l relationship to information; it can become the medium through which any of the senses might operate, and it can t ranslate from one sense modality to another with facility: -but it cannot be directly perceived by any one of the senses . It probably plays some par t in s ta tes of synaethesia or sense confusion. Its t ranslat ions from one sense element to another are volatile and unpredictable a n d metonymic ra ther t h a n metaphoric. [Metonymic: A one-way communication (kingship-crown) ra ther than a two-way communication characteristic of the primal couple.]

I came to the idea of the membrane by way of two au thors in part icular .

• Bertram D. Lewin's (1973) investigation of the psychic closeness in meaning of mouth and skin in his essay on the dream screen (pp. 87-100), in which he writes about skin lesions.

• Claude Levi-Strauss's (1970) concern with motifs as reflecting the s t ruc tura l kinship of mythology, music, and mathemat ics . I thought it possible tha t skin lesions a n d motifs might have the same dynamic significance—the motifs in part icular being liturgical representat ions from the experience of proportionality in pre-birth, which be-

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<tii m t!

come unusual ly significant a s liminal phenomena on the threshold of the depressive position.

Lewin makes the point tha t eaters in phan ta sy sometimes equate mou th and the content of mou ths (p. 95). Mouths sometimes equate with wombs; and eaters can find repugnant the belief tha t a womb-mouth should eat the baby or the skin of the feeding breas t a s an equivalent of the baby. Lewin al ludes to Isakower's (1938) proposal that when the infant in the phantasies of half-sleep confuses mouth with breas t skin, it will under s t and skin irregularities in general as bites. " . . . the skin is a mouth , and when there are multiple lesions, many mouths" (Lewin, 1973, p. 96).

The contents of the u terus , when the u te rus is conceived of as two-dimensional, t ranslate into the idea of markings on the surface of the skin. A Platonist looking u p a t the night sky might imagine the constellation of s t a r s a s markings on a placental skin; b u t the s tars can be persecutory if they are related to the binary. The skin bites re-form as threatening rival-babies. Lewin believes that the skin-like dream screen, out of which dream images may arise, implies the confusion of mouth-sk in . Mouth exudes the dream screen as a skin, which, in turn , procreates dream images as though they were babies.

In comparison, Levi-Strauss (1970) considers s t ruc ture in myth as analogous to grammatical s t ruc ture and, above all (his preference), to s t ruc ture in music, though music differs from language and myth in being untransla table . I would suggest tha t all three s t ruc tures imply the existence of the membrane as a solution that contains the motifs a s particles—a two-dimensional version of Pandora's box. Levi-Strauss sees s t ruc ture in music and myth as consisting of an interaction of motifs.

In his view, music is a distinctive and innate characterist ic of the h u m a n mind: it is "a message, properly speaking coming from nowhere . . . we know nothing of the mental conditions in which musical creation takes place . . . (it supposes) the existence of very special and deep-seated properties" (1970, p. 18). In other words, music germinates in a u te rus that fills no-space and is unavailable to unders tanding by the senses . Such

music, being the food of love, is a version of the love precipitated by entry into the depressive threshold tha t mind may experience as an intolerable incomprehensibility, driving it back into paranoid-schizoid s ta tes .

In his Notebooks, Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1975) observes that in certain types of thought "it makes no difference to say that the m a n becomes a leopard or that he is a leopard". Transformation is "like a change of skin" (p. 31). The cont inuant matters , not the na tu re of the occurrents within it, which are uns table motifs, embryos in a skin u terus , unfixed in definition.

Similarly, Maurice Leenhardt (1979) writes of the Melan-esian kamo a s the living one—a term used without distinction of gender and with an indefinite meaning, a predicate indicating nei ther outline nor na ture . The fact that it takes on body is of secondary importance.

Animals, plants and mythic beings have the same claim that men have to be considered kamo, if circumstances cause them to assume a certain humanity, [p. 24]

In legends, the Jcamo flies, swims, and disappears underground without anyone stat ing

whether it is by turn a bird, fish or deceased man. The story-teller follows the personage through his adventures, and he may change his appearance without a change of state. He undergoes metamorphoses; he is like a character endowed with a sumptuous wardrobe who perpetually changes costume, [p. 25]

In this view, the babies in the membrane have come close to acquiring a three-dimensional model: incipiently they are fish moving in water.

There are various types of myth space (or ideas of the uterus) that contain different types of inhabitants . The kamo, which is a nominative without outiine or nature , is suited to the transformations that Plutarch thought most characteristic of myth: disguise and dismemberment. In infant phantasy , the kamo lies in the gap between the two breasts , in each of which is an identical twin. The twins wear a bad aspect: either they are inhabi tants of black-hole breasts , in which definitions collapse into themselves in an ever-contracting space, whose

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154 THE UNBORN CHAPTER ELEVEN 155

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pressure is felt a s an impacted remembering, or they are inhabi tants of spaces that, in contradistinction, unfold in a n indefinite ever-expanding process from within themselves, and in which all nominatives fade vestigially, into traces of the forgotten.

The membrane originates a s an oral subs t i tu te for the cord: it emanates out of the mouth like a breath-skin. Volatile in meaning, the brea th-sk in modulates into any one of the many agents tha t hold onto fugitive sensory impression. Oral experience translates with facility into visual, auditory, or tactile means of communication. The dreamer of the train-compartment-window dream weaves with the membrane-window as though it were a tactility controlled by the movement of her eyes. She thinks to be inside her mother 's eyes and to feed upon her mother 's joys.

A newborn, thinking to take over the creativity of its mother 's u terus , may hope to t ranslate the creative powers of the placenta-cord into its mou th space and to m e m b r a n e -exudations out of its mouth. It is able to experience the pregn a n t space of the u te rus as two-dimensional because initially it derives its model of uterine creativity from an umbilical cord in which the idea of a container is indistinguishable from the idea of a content.

A west-African woman in a s ta te of pos t -par tum psychosis remarked that snails came out of the skin on the back of her hands . The babies came out of a no-space, a s though out of a cord-skin. Similarly, certain mythological conceptions of the first fiat a s s u m e the emergence of life out of a space that is a no-where. A great deal of tribal art is informed by this a s sumption; it conceives of a n implicitly uterine space as existing either in the no-space of a skin (or mirror), or in a shell-like container (such as a mask), whose rigidity h a s the effect of reverberating acts of psychic projection.

Oceanic ar t (which includes the Melanesian Jcamo modes of a r t described by Leenhardt, 1979) is a n a r t concerned with the .no-space within the membrane, an art of skin-like surfaces and pa t temings on skin, tattoo effects, markings tha t might be flies in amber, babies in a layer of skin. The famous Ruru tu Island carving of Tangaroa in the British Museum h a s crea tures exud

ing from the surface of the god-creator's skin a s well a s inhabiting a pan theon in his back.

In comparison, African sculpture, typical of the other a r t s temming from the tribal aesthetic, is three-dimensional, carved, air-cleaving. Space in the interior of the mask-womb is unresonant ; ra ther , it projects terror at the thought of annihilation.

The membrane ac ts an insulator, a s though it were a conductor of electricity. The motifs a s a toms of meaning can be so insulated tha t they appear to be innocuous; their "bite" is lost. When uninsula ted , they are dangerous. In the type of representation described by Hocart (1927), the pr iest-king "represents" the s u n in order that both he and it should hold each other 's powers in check. The s u n is only an object in na tu r e incidentally: it is a group transference object of a psychotic na ture . Individual representat ion h a s to contain it within the group, or it will destroy the group.1 The king-priest who fails to keep the sun ' s power in check is turned into a sacrificial victim whom the s u n "devours".

The motif that discloses itself a s a psychotic presence—a mou th in the skin tha t bites, for instance—under investigation will often turn out to be an aspect of the idealized and intolerably "perfect" next sibling.

It was a salient fact about the train-compartment-window dreamer tha t she h a d been born on Chris tmas Eve. There was a

'Among the Australian peoples of the Arunta tribe there is a legend that a god who withdrew from the ancestors by climbing a totem-pole into the sky, pulled the totem-pole up after him into nothingness, and brought devastation to the ancestors. The ancestors tried to regain strength after this departure by relating themselves to a deeply planted totem pole. When the pole broke, all connection with the god was lost. The ancestors were afflicted by a mysterious lassitude and died shortly afterwards (Spencer & Gillen, 1927, p. 388).

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touch of Miss White about the claim that she had usurped the J e s u s place. Members of her family told her that the protracted na tu re of her bir th had undermined any pleasure they might have h a d in the festivity.

Her use of the membrane in the dream allows her to deny any notion of a bir th disturbance. One of Lewin's pat ients dreamt of a screen-like object that moved away from the dreamer. Lewin took this object to be an image of the breas t leaving the infant. He raised the hypothesis from it of a dream screen on which all dream images are s i tuated. The train-compartment window also functions a s a screen if reality is denied to the view through it. The pass ing landscape might be the moving-away of the breast , which the infant hopes to control by the thought tha t the movement of its eyes is the agent for any movement in the external world.

The dream is a s composed as a piece of music and h a s a mythic type of s t ructure . There is an inside and a n outside to the train carriage—immobility within the carriage, and mobility outside it. The window opens up a contrast ing realm to those who look into the carriage from outside it and those who look out from within. There are opportunities for reversal in perspective: potentially the view beyond the window and the view within the compartment might indicate different scales in time.

Outside the window there is the trudging of the people on the snowy wet path, in contrast to the radiance on the mountains. There is a mother who looks through the window and is amazed by what she sees and a daughter who declines to look through the window and is disappointed by what she fails to see.

The daughter who looks away from the view is the same daughter who will look into her mother 's private writing desk and find a letter there tha t brings her father's reputat ion into disrepute. The mother maintains a ra ther brittle sanity and h a s divorced the father—she has thought to appropriate the powers of the couple; while the daughter, who is chronically disturbed, is alleged to have had an incestuous involvement with her father. Inside and outside do not exist as distinctive spaces in the dream. They are disclosed as incipiencies on the surface of, or within, the membrane.

The most interesting of the contrasts—because most revealing about the function of the membrane—is the one between the broken glass on the mountain and the unbroken pane of window glass, through which the dreamer looks.

The broken glass catches the light that falls on the mountain. In an earlier dream the dreamer had recalled the quality of light that came through a beautiful rose window in a church. It is possible that the mediation of light by way of the coloured glass reflected a foetal experience of the combined good objects. In later terms, a father's potency was mediated by way of a look that the dreamer had seen in her mother 's eyes.

At times she h a d found the depth of blue in her mother 's eyes de-stabilizing. She compared it to the sight of a church spire against the sky, which she recalled having looked u p a t while lying in a field. She had wondered whether the spire or the sky was moving. Similarly, a passenger in a train may doubt whether the train or the landscape has begun to move.

States of dislocation increase the wish to control sensat ions. To this extent, the broken glass is the baby in the procreating mind of the couple, which the dreamer h a s smashed up. It is also a pa r t of herself—she has a way of dealing with a damaged child pa r t of herself by projecting it into the nipple, so that the broken glass is a precious aspect of herself, as well as an idealized and at tacked other baby.

On one occasion she talked about an allegedly "dyslexic" girl who smashed u p words in her mind and then was unable to p u t them together again—a Humpty-Dumptyism that alluded both to her own experience at having being violated, and to her wish to break up the hypothetical next baby, which, in fact, had never been born except as bits in her mind. (She had been the youngest child in the family.) She recalled experiences in which people were trapped behind glass in a fire, or in which she could not escape from an insufferable landlady and broke the pane of a window with her forehead, or in which she found her car h a d been vandalized, its radio stolen, and its windows smashed . She seems then to have been trapped in the membrane, a n d to have conceived of birth as a break-out. She had to control the bits of broken baby as a way of controlling sensation; if she let the bits go, she would be obliged to come

158 THE UNBORN

out of a s ta te of projective identification with the use of her mother 's eyes. She would experience the bi ts a s coming together a s liturgical symbols. At which point, hopefully, he r mother 's eyes would take over the function of the membrane and t ransla te the pre-birth communication of the good objects into a language of the born.

PART TWO

D I S A P P E A R I N G I N T O L I G H T

Elation and terror at leaving the ground give way to a sense of disinterested tedium; Icarus, looking through the aeroplane window, observes a distant landscape far below, an unfolding scroll whose markings he does not understand. It is as though this calligraphy needed, as a key to its understanding, the presence in mind of some love affair he had long forgotten about.

W

CHAPTER TWELVE

The rite of passage in psychoanalysis. Liminal phenomena, and the persecutory emergence of symbol from sign language on the threshold of the depressive position. The need to hold on to a psychotic or primitive intuition concerning an underlying and impersonal geometric order to experience. "A substrate to the inner world anterior to the reach of metaphor."

From his reading of Schreber 's memoirs, Freud unders t ands Schreber to have experienced (in a remarkable insight) the stage in remission of certain psychic cycles

of destruct ion and regeneration as peopled by "improvised beings".

[He] became convinced of the immanence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world. . . . He himself was "the only man left alive", and the few human shapes he saw . . . he explained as being "miracled-up, cursorily improvised men". [Freud, 1911c [1910], p. 68]

Levi-Strauss has indicated how the need to improvise characterizes primitive life in general, and in making this point he has referred to the concluding sentence of Boas's (1940) essay on the Thompson Indians: "It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shat tered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments" (pp. 407-424).

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Levi-Strauss proposes that thought of a scientific na tu r e is thought capable of forming models that are unrestr icted by the notion of function. Scientific thought, for instance, is able to use the concept of infinity. Primitive thought, on the other hand, depending on Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concrete-ness , uses a sign system that is exigent, finite in scope and similar to the practice of a court etiquette. It re-cycles its exigent resources indefinitely; and it depends on the objet trouve. It finds its model in magic, which Levi-Strauss (following Mauss) sees a s operating within a closed t reasury of devices.

In association with this argument , I propose in later chapters that a mind inclined to paranoid-schizoid perception, and on the verge of depressive unders tanding, will perceive liminal phenomena as provisional in their construction a n d closer to a sign language than to a symbolization. Only a slight change in the modality of perception is needed in order to reveal tha t liminal phenomena can be symbols: b u t the slight change is difficult to susta in , since it contains a prospect of annihilat ion that communicates terror.

As masks or husks , signs exist in a world in which the cul ture of h u m a n expression, any depressive recollection of symbols a s faces—for the infant, the face of its own mother— and the meanings that faces can communicate, is no t retrievable. Something has been lost in a catas t rophe tha t can only be re-found by way of another catastrophe.

In such circumstances hopes for survival m u s t lie, a s Schreber saw, in an ability to improvise. Levi-Strauss (1972) discovers an analogue for this improvisation in the bricoleur or handy-man who makes things out of debris by a process of recycling.

He interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them would "signify" and so contributes to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the internal disposition of its parts. A particular cube of oak could be a wedge to make up for the inadequate length of a plank or pine or it could be a pedestal—which would allow the grain and polish of the old wood to show to advantage, [pp. 18-19]

CHAPTER TWELVE 163

The bricoleur h a s affinity to. say. the tenth-century French farmer who used massive s tones from a Roman arch to build a farmhouse without any awareness of the meaning of Roman archi tecture or of the civilization that once existed on his land. The bricoleur survives on the edge of the idea of history, in a s ta te of marginality tha t the historically conscious have found poignant. The mobilizing of historical consciousness in the mid-eighteenth century had Piranesi observe in his engravings the indifference by which the seemingly pygmy-sized inhabitan t s of Rome lived out their lives among the vast ru ins of the destroyed ancient city, and it had Edward Gibbon observe the pa thos of Christian monks, who moved pas t the temple of Jup i te r with an absence of any awareness of the loss of a pagan greatness.

Much later, Charles Lyell deepens the sense of a historian's regret a t the indifference of others to the meaning of pass ing time in a fable concerning people who live in time and yet are indifferent to the meaning of time, a s epitomized by the rise and fall of civilizations. Lyell's concept of deep time, which indicates a time that cannot be registered because it exists in mindless space, gives further definition to the feeling. Deep time demonst ra tes space to be dumb—a psychotic mother unable to register the bir th or death of her infants: it is the obverse of proto-conceptual foetal intuit ions tha t perceive time as form at its most meaningful in the articulations of music and mathemat ics .

Lost in the aesthetics of the paranoid-schizoid position, and dissociated from the meanings of history, the bricoleur tends to be fascinated by the beauty of flat surfaces when they are juxtaposed. He is conscious of conjunctions and disjunctions and focuses on sensat ions whose link is to a type of phan tasy tha t is disengaged from metaphoric power and limited to sign language. The liminal phenomena in which he trades—masks, s t ruc tures like the labyrinth, the content of myths themselves—cannot become the type of communication associated with a depressive unders tanding of the h u m a n face.

An inspired person is entered into: b u t the bricoleur is not entered into—he is the one who does the entering: he takes over; he vandalizes creatively. He is like the jungle that weaves pa t te rns about the abandoned ruined temple—an image that

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164 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

refers less to mindlessness than to an unceasing and intuitive activity in pre-conscious mind.

Critias, one of the characters in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, refers to a possible catastrophe that destroyed ancient Athens, and all evidence of the beginnings of the Hellenic peoples: a knowledge without which, in his view, a nat ion m u s t feel abandoned. He recalls how on a visit to Egypt Solon discovered that the priests had kept an archive of documents concerning the lost knowledge. They knew (among other things) that the first Athens, which had been destroyed, had been older, and more touched by primal imagination, and therefore more blessed by the divine beginning, than the civilizations of Egypt (Timaeus, 23-24). By way of this rediscovered knowledge, Solon was able to re-invest Athens with spiritual meaning.

The meaning of lost Athens as a catalyst to knowledge is, I conjecture, the same as the meaning of the forms (geometric, mathematical , musical) that the divinizing power of Plato's demiurge is able to conjure u p out of meaningless bi ts of matter—the atoms and void of psychotic despair.

In Bion's terms, the forms are the ontological and pre-experiential preconceptions that may ignite into insight in the meeting with love on the depressive threshold.

The meeting is dangerous. If it induces paranoid-schizoid regression, the experience of love may be misunders tood as a n experience of the sacred, a power tha t annihilates, a s though it were Zeus's bolt of lightning. Such a n occasion is liable to arouse deep pessimism; the gates of horn, the way of t ruth, will be thought to be the gates of ivory, or the way of delusion and lies—and mind is liable to turn away from the possibility of a journey into the depressive position.

In psychic death, the possibility of symbolism itself would seem to have died. Surfaces and bits are drawn to each other in a constructivist impulse of the u tmost fragility. The initiate in the rite of passage m u s t hope to meet with someone outside the self to set in motion the act of rediscovery. The child who survives bir th needs to recover as its messenger the twin banished to the underworld, and to identify with a self tha t

CHAPTER TWELVE 165

symbolically h a s died into psychosis, in order to reach depressive unders tanding.

In making the journey into second birth, the initiate may lose sight of the fact that the primitive, or the paranoid-schizoid, is a cul ture in its own right: for though the cul ture of the depressive position gives meaning, in the form of aspiration, to the cul ture of the paranoid-schizoid position, it in no way invalidates it. The culture of the depressive position h a s to arise out of the cul ture of the paranoid-schizoid position; it probably could not exist in its own right.

For Plato, all art, all technique, h a s a magical or theological impetus to it tha t activates its capacity to unfold. This is an insight into paranoid-schizoid thinking. The ancient Greeks sometimes allude to a proto-medical model for this type of insight. Asclepius practised a dream therapy as a means of bringing about physical cures. His dream sana tor ium at Epidaurus stood close to a theatre dedicated to Dionysus, and his techniques resembled the group purifications and rite-of-passage plots of the tragic theatre. His dream sanator ium at Kos, next to the river Lethe, was identified with s ta tes of symbolic swoon-death.

Asclepius's celebrated ability to heal through dream analysis depended entirely on environmental symbolism that reiterated mythic structure. Such architectural symbols included subterranean chambers—as in the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus; tunnels—architectural symbols for rites of passage—that connected the patients' sleeping quarters to the treatment centres; and sacred springs around which the curing centres were built and that may originally have been associated with the worship of underworld daimons and with the arriving at cathartic cures through contact with the underworld. [Napier, 1986, p. 234n]

The form of revelation in the dream sanator ium upsta i rs replicates the form of the dream passages downstairs that wind into the ear th like roots: an architectural s t ructur ing that embodies the cryptic persecutory na tu re of liminal phenomena, which to minds on the verge of the depressive position and

166 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER TWELVE 167

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unable to receive the meaning of symbols is myth-thinking or sign language on the verge of becoming symbol. An Eleusian initiate would move through a hall divided into dark compartments , each of which represented a region of hell, and then climb a s taircase and enter a brightly i l luminated megaron where the sacra were displayed (Gennep, 1960, p. 91).

A traveller through the underworld meets the self tha t "died" in the earlier stage of the rite of passage. If the dead self is unacknowledged, it will still escape from ban i shmen t a n d re tu rn terribly as the antagonist who destroys the self a s it reaches out to depressive unders tanding. (Conceivably, villains in stories are destroyed aspects of the hero tha t r e tu rn to life as substant ia l ghosts.)

In a similar fashion, the cultural achievements of Africa—its sculpture, especially—represent an alter ego, the twin banished to death and psychosis, which the European mind disowned for a long time and which r e tu rns to h a u n t him, often benignly, as the messenger of aesthetic insight.

Those unfortunate Negroes have revealed to me the meaning of the Platonic logos! Their symbolism is so tremendous and coherent! Only the study of such an archaic tradition in its living state can help us to understand other, dead religions. [Eliade, 1990, p. 46, quoting Marcel Griaule verbatim]

Rediscovering this remarkable aesthetic is analogous to rediscovering the Athens of the lost series of preconceptions, the mother of Dionysus sunk deep beneath the surface of icy waters.

The obverse of the psychotic empty-mirror mother who is unable to register the death and birth of her infants is not the normative and caring mother who lives in na ture , b u t the archaic unknowable "mother" of the preconceptions. She is the mother of the bone s t ructures , the mother of the dance tha t precedes the existence of h u m a n bodies, the mother of the architecture that precedes the existence of wood and brick, the mother of a mind which precedes any experience in na tu r e and who, in mothering this essentially h u m a n achievement, is able to give it definition.

The cul tures of ancient Egypt and of western Africa suppor t each other, a s much as did those of Egypt and ancient Greece.1

Many of the west African tribes believed that they had arrived at the territory they owned by way of a journey through the underworld. A tribe will lay claim to being indigenous, even when it is supposed to have originated from the soil it occupies or even when we can place geographically the caves or cliffs from which its ancestors came. Its burgeoning from the soil is only the last episode of an underground journey whose point of departure is always far away . . . the Negroes preserve the conception of an oriental origin.

When asked about the antiquity of his ownership, [a peasant of these countries] invariably replies that the real owners of the soil, the oldest occupants, those who, in time immemorial, he had to conquer or win over, were not Negroes, bu t a people of reddish colour, with large heads and small bodies.

Afterwards these beings are supposed to have disappeared and to have been transformed into spirits, who, even today, are the object of a cult which is very much alive; and when the Negroes change their habitat and occupy apparently empty districts, they never fail to ask permission to install themselves near to those who inhabited the terrain before them, with the sole idea that these predecessors were chronologically nearer to the ancient owners than themselves and thus in closer contact with them. [Griaule. 1950, pp. 16-17]

The red-skinned natives who "disappeared" are actual people who were murdered, the sacrificial victims of mythology who die to consecrate a native land, ancestors on whom a

'"Of the many customs and practices common to Egypt and Black Africa, certain can be shown to have originated in Egypt and to have spread southwards. . . . Among present-day Negroes, practices definitely Egyptian in origin are features of the burial customs of certain tribes of the Congo Free State and the southern Nilotic Sudan. This also holds for the artificial deformation of the horns of their cattle practised by such Nilotic tribes as the Dinka and the Nuer" (Seligman, 1932, p. 462).

168 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER TWELVE 169

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creationism is founded. On another level, they are the denied preconceptions that, in revenge, a s it were, fail to ignite with the love met on the depressive threshold. Symbolic rebir ths, which do not accommodate the twin who earlier died, tend to b e paranoid-schizoid s ta tes of conversion—the uneasy conquest of an enemy's kingdom—rather than depressive s ta tes of recognition.

It is an established fact that the power of the Carthaginians extended as far as the gold-mines of Bambuk and as far as Nigeria. They exchanged copper and cloth for gold dust, ivory, and slaves. In the twelfth and thirteen centuries, according to Yakout, caravans carried considerable quantities of copper rods for rings and jewels from Morocco to the Sudan. . . . Traces of these industries are found today in ancient tombs in many parts of Africa: what are known as pierres d'aigris, little cylindrical glass pearls used by some natives as ornaments, recall those found in Phoenician tombs. . . .

According to traditions which we cannot rule out a priori, we may believe that emigrant Jews from Cyrenaica and Egypt penetrated among the Negroes in several successive migrations, lasting from the sixteenth to the first century BC. . . . In the last few months of 1946, we discovered in the cliffs of Bandiagara a mythology giving an extraordinarily precise, coherent and developed explanation of the signs of the zodiac, a mythology embracing a dogma of the redemption and the word, which owes nothing to Christianity and which, on the contrary, seems to be the untouched age-old storehouse whence the religions of our own time have sprung. [Griaule, 1950, pp. 28-29]

Among the Ndembu of Africa, the initiate in an initiation ceremony is frequentiy presented with sacra that are disproportionate, monstrous , and disconcerting in meaning, often taking the form of grotesque masks .

Elements are withdrawn from their usual settings and combined with one another in a totally unique configuration, the monster or dragon. Monsters startle initiates into thinking about objects, persons, relationships and features of their environment they have hitherto taken for granted. . . . Much of the grotesqueness and monstrosity of

liminal sacra may be seen to be aimed not so much at terrorizing or bemusing initiates into submission or out of their wits as at making them vividly and rapidly aware of what may be called the "factors" of their culture. [Turner, 1967, p. 105]

For Turner , the sacra are par t of the process of symbolic rebirth, not a reduction of symbol into sign as a consequence of symbolic death. Masks and similar i tems are important because they lead to insight, not because they inhibit understanding. At the same time, as is the case of all mythic or liminal phenomena, the relationship of masks to meaning is insecure. They are make-do and provisional and exist on the verge of the depressive position, somewhere between sensat ion and meaning, code-systems and symbolic language.

They may be less associated to recognition than (for example) to the terror of being separated from an object that h a s been entered into by means of intrusive identification. A woman who existed in a s ta te of intrusive identification with he r mother dreamt, on the night after she learnt tha t her therapy was to end. that she was in an upsta i rs hotel bedroom with a balcony. Planes engaged in a dogfight outside the window. There was an explosion, which she associated to an IRA bomb tha t had gone off in a London club and to the wager in the J u l e s Verne novel that activated Phileas Fogg into making his voyage around the world. She complained because coverage of the Gulf War h a d disrupted any regularity in routine of children's programmes on the television.

Her delusion of ruling the world from within the object was unde r threat , and a s ta te of irritation ensued, which took the form of an unpleasan t aural stridency, which may or may not indicate the beginnings of a move into the depressive position. Similarly, a m a n faced by a holiday break dreams that his eyes and ears are under assaul t , and he thinks he may lose both sight and hearing; he tu rns his attention to pleasurable bodily sensat ions.

The drum-beat ing of s h a m a n s and other forms of dramatic d is turbance can be "associated with the formal passage from one s t a tu s or condition to another" (Needham, 1967, p. 612). An instance of this would be the clatter of tin cans when tied to the back of the car that takes away the honeymoon couple. The

170 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER TWELVE 171

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percussive translates into other types of heightened sensat ion associated with liminal phenomena, as in the wearing of grotesque masks , cross-gender clothes, or striking ornamentat ion, all of which invites a persecuted s ta te of misunders tanding (pp. 606-614).

A severing from the breast , experienced as an excruciating a t tack on the organs of communication, might have, a s a consequence, a notion of the breast as transformed into a n admonitory lintel presence, as dangerous as the hal lucinat ions that the dead send up to the living through the ivory gates. Seeking out h is mother in the underworld, Ulysses is terrified lest "dread Persephone" will summon up the gorgoneion against him. When Perseus decapitated the Medusa on the boundary of the underworld, "she awakened only enough to u t te r he r horrific shriek, from which an etymology for the word gorgon h a s been derived" (Napier, 1986, pp. 88).

Dream images and portents that occur in the transit ional stage of the rite of passage are a travesty of the idea of a mother 's face, loved as a benign otherness, a s ideograms in which the h u s k surface of the mask is combined with a dissection of a mother 's labyrinth-like entrails. The travesty depends on a misunders tanding of the fact that in terms of conceptual space a mother h a s an inside or inner world that can be understood b u t not entered into or "experienced" by the mind tha t accepts the conditions of depressive unders tanding.

A male equivalent of the gorgon, a clay representat ion of the face of the Babylonian demon Humbaba, in the British Museum, consists of a mask whose features are as convoluted as a labyrinth and resemble a cross-section drawing of h u m a n entrails: it might be an index for much mythic thinking and, indeed, for many types of liminal phenomena. Inside and outside are entertained as possibilities a t bes t to be mocked at, Sign language has lost any reference to a signifier, and h u s k s are used to create a formal code.

In ancient Rome, ghosts and masks were called larvae; masks were shells for the invisible dead, the other self, the twin, no longer an essential guide to depressive t ru th b u t a n avenger enraged by its ban i shment to the underworld and intent on destroying the aspiring self. Out of a literal representation of the entrails emerges the features of the feared rival

Humbaba (a version of the dangerous Minoan infant bull discovered in a labyrinth).

In the beginning, the first big mask (of which present-day examples are only repetitions) was a serviceable reproduction of a serpent's body in a state of putrefaction, whose shape the tribes wished to preserve. But the shape was in no way intended to arouse emotion for sentimental or religious reasons; there was no question of reminding people of the original. The sculpture was not aimed at the living. In the words of the myth, the problem was to give the object an appearance such that the spiritual principles of the ancestor, freed from the body by death, would enter this new receptacle and cease wandering abroad to the hur t of mankind. If, then, an aesthetic effect was sought, it was aimed at a very special and unique spectator, i.e. the lead man.

It was a question of both moving and placating the spiritual forces, with the aid of a symbol which could be understood by men and was also portable. J u s t as in Egypt, where the sculptor's art, working in conjunction with the science of the priests, had to provide works which would satisfy the gods, so the shape and the colour of the wood, together with the other ritual actions, had to offer the ancestors a pleasant sanctuary which he would enjoy inhabiting. [Griaule, 1950, p. 91]

Coleridge thought to compare the inventiveness of the Seminole Indian to the in-and-out dance of falling snow:

The Life of the Seminole playful from infancy to Death compared to the Snow, which on a calm day falling scarce seems to fall & dances in & out, to the very moment that it reaches the ground. [Coburn, 1957, Entry 228]

The snow, in terms of the psychotic metaphysic, is a ceaselessly active subs t ra te to mind, an embodiment of the reason tha t the foetus perceives, the organon of the primitive aesthetic from which a poetry is engendered. The sudden drops, lunges, and spatial constrictions of nightmare intimate the possibility that mat te r and motion are as decisive in the psyche as in the

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world of nature , and only discovered in the world of na tu r e as an afterthought. The dance in and out of the falling snow is the spirit of poetry in those paranoid-schizoid reaches of the mind in which the distinction between snow as fact and snow as sensat ion h a s not formed.

Primary imagination supposes that the phan tas ies set u p by sensat ions are impersonal, p re -human, and sacred, indifferently a s much about themselves a s about the na tura l world, implying forms of making tha t have no immediate contact with post-birth capacities for symbolization. Coleridge's pr imary imagination—"a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creat ion"^finds its s t renuous original in Aristotie's theory of active reason, in which an enquiring mind cannot be separated from the object of its enquiry, and the objects of reason (perceived by the eyes of the mind alone) cannot be dist inguished from reason itself.

There is an intellect characterized by the capacity to become all things, to bring them into being and to effect changes in them in the way that states of light do. For light transforms the potential colour in things into actual colour. [De anima, 3.5]

Aristotie does not define active reason as a faculty for abstraction or judgement or discrimination; it is a n identification by way of intuition with the creationist impulse, a rediscovery of the lost archive. An intellect of this kind, being able to conceive of, or make, whatever it conceives or thinks, "the soul is in a way all the things that exist" (De anima 3.8), h a s powers similar to the powers of the demiurge in the Timaeus, whom Plato h a d seen as making the individual souls (of h u m a n beings, animals, and plants) out of the same stuff a s the world soul.

Active reason surfaces once more, and again unde r the influence of a geometric determination, in Spinoza's writings, and possibly by way of Spinoza it influences the German Romantics.

In Spinoza's version of active reason:

. . . mind, insofar as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking, which is determined by another eternal mode of thinking, and this one again by another, and so on to

CHAPTER TWELVE 173

infinity; so that they all constitute at the same time the eternal and infinite intellect of God. [Ethics, 5, 15n]

Intuitive knowledge in Spinoza's thought entails an ability to intuit non-experiential elements in thought dependent "on the power and na tu r e of the intellect alone". To use unders tanding in this way is:

as some conceive the intellect of God, before He created things (which perception clearly could have arisen from no object). [On the Correction of the Understanding, 71]

Mersenne, who corresponded by letter with Descartes, insisted that God deployed the elements of geometry in the same way a s men do and that on this score divine and h u m a n unders tandings were identical (Marion, 1981, p. 170).

Catast rophe in history, as in the destruction of the Incas, will stir any mind capable of grief. But impersonality characterizes catas t rophe in na ture , and universal deluges leaves a blankness in mind a s well as in the world.

Primitive a r t is non-experiential a n d h a s no concept of individual sentience. It is indistinguishable from the fabled workings of divinity. Kubler (1962a), in writing about this kind of art , describes artefacts a s though they were fossils, or other types of objets trouves. Styles are isolated from any signature: they originate out of nowhere and move into decadence spontaneously; there is no reason to suppose some model of cause and effect. So far as sensat ion about these artefacts is concerned, they might be geometric prototypes in the mind of God before he created the world. In the Timaeus, Plato's demiurge fructifies mindless space with the powers of time, so tha t space comes to embody intelligence; b u t Platonic space is not the space of the primitive aesthetic, which is analogous to a foetal type of perception of patterning.

Wittgenstein: I can arrange the factual material [myths collected by Frazer] so that we can easily pass from one part to another and have a clear view of it. . . . Making easy the passage from one part of it to another is fundamental. An hypothetical link is not meant to do anything except

174 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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draw attention to the similarity between the facts. As one might illustrate the internal relation of a circle to an ellipse by gradually transforming an ellipse into a circle; but not in order to assert that a given ellipse in fact, historically came from a circle (hypothesis of development) but only to sharpen our eye for a formal connection. [Wittgenstein, 1979, pp. 8e-9e]

Kubler's conception of the series is unrelated to mind's capacity to know loss, or to articulate the meaning of the emerging symbol. It is similar to the jungle that transfigures the ru ined temple, or the deluge in which whole continents vanish. An iconography of impersonal tracings exists in mind benea th any capacity it might have for grieving, as a series prone to convulsive change.

Within this impersonal and paranoid-schizoid conception, the encounter of conquistador and Inca might be imagined to be explosive, like the meeting of profane and sacred, in a space that is time without intelligence, mute mother, deep time in a persecutory guise. In such a conception, Inca cul ture reveals itself to be an agency with the thinnest of protective surfaces, which survives by channelling aggression into acts of h u m a n sacrifice: it eats its own future. Another agency, the conquistador, placates any tendency to self-devouring by turning ferocity outwards, into acts of messianic conversion, in which greed is veiled from itself under the guise of zeal.

Kubler recognizes the impersonal terror that occurs in any crossing of frontiers between sacred zones. Rites of passage are intended to pacify this terror. In a theory of the other, not a s a loving face, b u t as a mask, sentience enters territories tha t are not its own and is destroyed by alien sacralities; it becomes the victim in sacrifice.

When we imagine the transposition of the men of one age into the material setting of another, we betray the nature of our ideas about historical change. In the nineteenth century Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee was imagined as a superior person successfully enlightening the Middle Ages. Today we would view him only as a stray spark swiftly extinguished without further notice. . . . If, on the other hand, we should ever have the misfortune really to encounter the future, as the Indians of sixteenth-century

CHAPTER TW ELVE 175

America encountered it, we would have to abandon all our own positions to accept those of the conqueror. [Kubler, 1962, pp. 64-65]

Depending on Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concrete-ness , this theory of time is counterpart to a theory of space in which the cosmos is thought bounded by some wall tha t circles it. If someone extends an arm through the wall, the a rm will disappear.

Taboo (especially the taboo against incest) operates in the same way. The transgression of the boundary leads to some disappearance in social identity of the t ransgressor and also to some disappearance within the transgressor 's own mind. The mirror is without a reflection; it no longer shows you your twin.

The discovery of the primitive aesthetic, specifically of tribal art , occurred somewhere in the mid-eighteenth century. It became a focus of consciousness a round about 1840-50 and was an important factor in the emergence of modernism. It occurred in pa r t because the Romantics were drawn to it a s a tool for unders tanding the thought processes of infants and disturbed adults , and in par t because they needed a means to reconstruct their dulled perception of sensation, as a tool for unders tand ing in its own right, a reconstruction that the primitive aesthetic could give.

At the time in which the European mind discovered the power of tribal art, it rediscovered its own long-unacknowledged medieval inheritance: it became aware of the importance of Gothic ar t . Focillon (1963), with whom Kubler studied, emphasizes an impersonality in the achievement of Gothic architecture.

In the first years of the twelfth century, there appeared in France—in Midi, in Anjou, north of the Loire, and particularly in the Domaine Royal of the Capetians—a new structural member which proceeded, by a sequence of strictly logical steps, to call into existence the various accessories and techniques which it required in order to generate its own architecture and style. This evolution was as beautiful in its reasoning as the proof of a theorem.

176 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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Everything that sprang from the vault rib—in the course of a few years, rather less than two generations—revealed the consistency, continuity and vigour of a closely reasoned argument. [Focillon, 1963, p. 3]

The vault rib is evoked as a stage in some closely reasoned theorem, which exists out there, as a fact in na ture . But the making of a human i s t style without signature, comparable to the makings of tribal art, is t rue also of some primal creationist order, in which sources of thought cannot be dist inguished from notions of a na ture "out there". A theorem exists in the depth of mind which, in sensory translation, is a companion to the thinking that can be intuited in the fugues of J . S. Bach, god-created ra ther than man-made, derived from some subs t ra te in the self tha t weaves and unweaves images as well as originates nightmares and dreams.

In the paranoid-schizoid aesthetic it is possible to trace thought back to the formal insights of foetal unders tanding. A subs t ra te to the inner world exists at some level anterior to the reach of metaphor. In the psychotic metaphysic, the unreachable divine element in the mind is equated with the t ranscendental god who exists outside the h u m a n condition, who, in the dream of reason, conducts the sleeping Epimenides towards the ideas of jus t ice and t ru th . The foetus, too, knows dream pat ternings comparable to the art iculat ions of mathemat ics and music by which its good objects speak to it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Aspects of West-African culture identified with the

lost mother-foetus couple. Its impact on Picasso.

Cultural cross-fertilization described in terms of a rite

of passage. The meanings of mask versus face; idol

versus icon.

I n 1937, Picasso told Andre Malraux of his revulsion when, early in the summer of 1907, he saw for the first time the collection of tribal ar t (he called it fetish art)

at the Ethnographic Museum in Paris—then, a s now, s i tuated a t the Trocadero. 'The smell. It was disgusting. I was all alone; I wanted to get away; b u t something important was happening to me, and I stayed" (Malraux, 1976, p. 10)

Rubin (1984) mentions interviews, dating from as early as 1922, in which Picasso talked about the effect on him of the Trocadero "fetishes". The decisive stylistic changes in his painting and sculpture at this time indicate a cultural cross-fertilization. It is possible that Picasso underwent a conversion that was intuitive, preverbal, and largely pre-experiential.

• One hypothesis. Picasso intuited that Spain and Africa represented some long-standing division in Mediterranean sensibility—as Marcel Griaule (1950) was to propose—and that he recognized in the "fetishes" a twin alter ego that had

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been banished to the underworld; in which case, h is sense of revulsion was similar to Perseus 's shock in having to face the Medusa.

• Another hypothesis. Sensitive to cultural change, Picasso found an idiom for the paranoid-schizoid inclinations of capitalism in the paranoid-schizoid conceptions of tribal art . The "fetishes" were a mirror image of some omnipresent "invisible" t ru th about metropolitan culture. Picasso's sensibility gave expression to the fact tha t the ideological centre of metropolitan cul ture had shifted from an adoration of the icon to a cult of the idol—a shift that , in fact, suited h is temperament .

At one time, conceivably, cul ture had centred on the h u m a n face as the fount of symbolic thinking. In Renaissance paint ing the faces of mother and infant are often brought close together, the infant sitting on its mother 's lap, the two faces looking outward and drawing the spectator into their gaze. Implicit in this shar ing of a gaze is the assumpt ion that the infant in anyone looking into its mother 's face—into her eyes, especially—might find her expression iconic, the outward index of an inner radiance, her eyes especially recalling liturgically the lost foetal intuit ions of being close to the good objects.

It is a s though in fact the iconic had preceded the idolic and had been swallowed u p by it. A paranoid-schizoid cul ture communica tes by way of a sign language that breaks u p the idea of the icon into two types of idol: one idol emerges from sensat ions concerning surfaces—that is, the mask; the other idol depends on turning the meaning of the icon inside out (like a mask being turned inside out)—that is, the skull. Possibly the dread tha t Picasso felt at the Trocadero was some implicit skull presence in the fetishes.

Idolic thinking practises a reversal of perspective on the iconic. It denies the meaning of the distinction between inside and outside in order to present them indifferently as two types of contrasted appearance. The placatory cult of the idol confronts the mind with images of psychic death a n d engulfs it in nightmare. With the beginning of the First World War, the nightmare became ah actuality.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 179

One of Picasso's gifts is to metamorphose forms by means of a certain pre-bir th conception of space that modifies the sensations of the spectator in bo th telescopic and microscopic ways. Picasso evokes a sacred space that h a s the power to contract into itself and then to recoil with a release of superb energies. Bion believed tha t it took genius to use psychopathology in the service of development, and this is evident in the game Picasso plays with the perspective of the inner world. He reverses its direction, a s though in imagination he thought it possible to t u rn a good womb into a bad one by shunt ing the foetus back u p the b i r th passage.

In iconic thinking, there is a near and a far, an outside a n d an inside, and notions of a probity in which certain s ta tes of inwardness validate appearances . Space in Renaissance painting seems to contract into itself a s it travels down the perspectival railway track: it condenses a s it narrows. In Picasso's Cubist paintings, and in many post-Cubist paintings by other art ists , a space, airy in distance, grows more dense as it moves towards the eye of the spectator. The density tha t increases a s it approaches might be an iconic space in the process of turning into space as mat ter : the materialized space out of which fetishes come into being.

The remotely dis tant is switched about into being the over-close, a s though the wind were to th rus t a m a s s of wet a u t u m n leaves against a window-pane before the spectator 's face. The spectator h a s arrived a t the wrong end of the telescope, a t the point of symbolic death, where the lines of perspective join together, a n d where no one should ever be.

The impulse is one of assemblage. The possibilities of symbolism have dwindled to the most exigent sign language. Bits of the world, its surfaces, possess the art ist as though he were a seer, a n d come together by way of his agency. There is little capacity to mourn—mourning being an at t r ibute of personality, not of proto-personality. Picasso's appetite for the droll fuels his dread a t the prospect of annihilation.

Through the artist, the alien—matter itself, a s well as the nightmares tha t s tem from other cultures—discovers a usable familiarity. The impersonality of mat ter h a s entered into the

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180 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

spiritual core of being. ['The model for the fetish-idea involves the realization of novel divine power in material objects and bodily fixations within the contingency of worldly experience" (Pietz, 1987, p. 35).]

Picasso's dread. A man dreams of being on the top floor of his childhood home. He recalls how he "adopted" an attic room in this house, and he associates the word "adoption" to his first wife, who was unable to give bir th to a child. He would spy down the narrow stairwell. In relation to this, he remembers with chagrin stealing coins from his father's purse .

Fascinated by the stairwell, he imagines what it would be like to fall between the banis ters to the floor far below. In the dream he looks down and sees his brother cross the floor below hand- in-hand with someone he cannot see clearly, possibly a male. His brother looks u p at him. Suddenly he finds tha t one of his brother 's eyes h a s jumped close to his eyes.

The narrow stairwell, like the magnification of a telescope, brings an eye close; and, like Zeus's bolt of lightning, it h a s the charismatic power to s m a s h someone on the floor.

The dreamer is identified with the wife who is unable to have babies, and he hopes to steal potency from his father. The power and shaping of the stairwell, though spatially penile, evokes the idea of the breas t with a maelstrom interior, which, in turn, supposes that there are two kinds of womb, one of which is good and enabling, the other malign.

The stairwell is an idol, not an icon; it converts the instrumental i ty of telescopes into a demonic, contractive impulsion. In condensing the meaning of space and time, it reverses meaning, so tha t space and time are converted into the compacted and threatening embodiments of minus-space and minus-t ime. It is a s though the integrity of a mother 's expression h a s been divorced from her inner radiance and a skul l -penis found to exist within a mask-womb.

Levi-Strauss (1973) h a s indicated that one cul ture can revive the dying myths of another by a reversal in perspective; and

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 181

one cul ture can have pleasant dreams with the nightmare images of another .

African sculptors, considering the use of actual nails in the carvings of the crucified god of the Portuguese missionaries, saw the aesthetic possibilities of this s t range assemblage and ignored its Christ ian significance. They took to inserting quills into the wooden sculptures of sacred hedgehogs.

The English t rader Andrew Battel

was in Loanga from about 1607 to 1610, and during a visit to the Yombe area saw a "large image called a Maramba fetish". We can thus assume with reasonable certainty that this cult and the use of a carving for that purpose was established in the Yombe country at that date and possibly earlier. There is no mention of the use of nails in Battel's report; a feature recorded for the first time in 1818. The driving of blades and nails into anthropomorphic figures is also thought to have derived from the Kongo people's exposure to Christian icons depicting the martyrdom of the saints and the crucifixion. [Gillon, 1984, p. 285]

European art ists , who thought of Christianity in terms of ki tsch roadside Calvaries without interest, were impressed by the wit of having actual nails represent figurative quills and were directiy inspired to place actual bits of newspaper in Cubist collages. The communicat ions of primitivism (whether Christian or African) had a way of bypassing the conscious, mor ibund ideologies of the community.

A symbol is an icon if it contains a justification for its own being, like the radiance in a face that is t rue to an inward radiance. Leibniz called this type of intrinsic justification the principle of sufficient reason. An icon is tha t which it represents; it enacts the na tu re of the meaning that it indicates; it is t h u s like the implied definition of thought in Melanie Klein's distinction between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. An icon is a likeness to a something that is directiy unknowable and yet is specific—an outwardness integrated into a n inwardness.

182 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER THIRTEEN 183

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The idea of an idol is opposed to the iconic, as a demon is opposed to the idea of a god. An idol lacks iconic integration, it is a product of t ransience and psychological dissociation; it is a persecutory severance, like the Gorgon's head. Its inward s ta te is not validated by its outward appearance, and it may tu rn out to contain a void, or some other evidence of a disjunction or dismemberment in meaning.

The power of the icon, however, is compacted and radiant , a n experience on the dream level of mind tha t un i tes the dreamer with the first moment, the site of passion.

Many of the reveries an infant h a s about its mother make consecutive sense. The par tners interact and sha re in thought and feeling in ways that are fluent and explicable, even when unconscious. At the same time, the infant can know shocks in reverie, of which the effect on it of the idol is one example. It may undergo some experience of a religious conversion or deconversion. It may feel itself to be buffeted by impalpable presences.

An infant looking at its mother 's face may see it as iconic in its powers of expression. Observation of the actual world alone will not engage it in such an unders tanding; it depends on its openness to preconceptions, often manifested in its ability to dream. Without a sense of the primordial sea of dreams, it would be unable to make contact with its mother 's expression, let alone "read" it. The intimacy of the inward sea—of actual salty waves a t the infant's core—enables it to latch on to the expressive face and to intuit some corresponding sway of dream within its mother, which her features bears witness to.

In primitive cultures, allegedly, masks are worn by men.

The wearing of masks amongst both Greeks and savages was a privilege limited to men. . . . The choruses which consisted of male members, alone wore masks, and alone gave dramatic performances. . . . If tragedy points back to the worship of deceased ancestors, the satyric drama points back to the worship of spirits. . . . In the period of the Aegean culture, death-masks were buried with the deceased. In ancient Italy one mask was buried with the deceased, whilst another was carefully preserved, and

the masks or imagines thus preserved were worn on the occasion of the funeral of a member of the household by persons who in the funeral procession represented the deceased ancestors, whose imagines they wore. The right of using imagines in this way—the Jus imaginuum-^came to be determined and circumscribed by the law; but the custom of wearing masks was older than the law which limited it. [Jevons, 1916, pp. 171-192]

Jevons linked m a s k s to men in 1916, a t a time of war when it was plausible to link the male to the fields of death and to a n underworld that a t tha t time for many had taken over the overworld.

In Dionysiac legend, the sacred nurses—perhaps Dion-ysus ' s mother herself—dismembered and ate the infant god's flesh in a s ta te of frenzied orgy. In rites and in the theatre, men alone acted out these t ransact ions with the sacred phenomenon of death, even though on one level the meaning of the devouring represented the possible agony of a mother and infant in the bir th process. Since the mother-infant couple carried the life-process, it h a d to be separated from any ceremony related to death. It was left to priest-kings, actors, and transvesti tes to enact the two at t r ibutes that Plutarch believed essential to the mythic imagination: dismemberment and disguise.

A mother 's face is idolic if it is mask-like, if it is dissociated from the expression that art iculates the dream, or if it indicates an absence of dream, or if it feigns meanings emptied of the dream process, if it is (as a Keatsian communication) "death-wards progressing to no death", pas t the lily and the snow. The face of a feeding mother who is depressed or s u n k in hatred can be like a "cheerful" grimacing mask .

Idolism, masks , certain forms of fiction deny that things are so because they are inwardly so. They present surfaces without content, and surfaces without content cannot remain neutral ; they are like masks , possibly benevolent, b u t possibly invaded by the void, a place that re turns any fear that an infant might p u t into it, taking on the intensity of the bad womb, a concentrat ion of anti-space. In the Prometheus myth, the concentra ted bad-womb space is represented by the transformations of sacred ox meat into stolen fire into flash of lightning

184 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER THIRTEEN 185

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into eagle tha t devours Prometheus 's insides. Each of the transformations marks an aspect of Zeus himself.

Augustine at tacked the making of pictures on the grounds tha t picture-making was j u s t another form of fiction-making. Fingentes a re taken in by pingentes. "No wonder if people who invent fictions are taken in by people who do paintings" (Bevan, 1940, p. 120). The seventh-century bishop Stephen of Bostra thought that the nature of the pagan idol can be characterized by its unreality, its being based on a fiction (Ladner, 1953).

Leibniz accused Newton of idol-making in asser t ing the existence of absolute space and time. Leibniz resented the possibility that space and time, which he thought of as idolic ideas, might be given an absolute authori ty in determining the place of beings. Space and time could not embody the principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz writes: "It is a fiction to suppose that God might have created the world some million years sooner. They who run into such kinds of fiction, can give no answer to someone who argues in favour of the eternity of the world" (Alexander, 1956, p. 38).

Appearances, having the meaning of masks , not faces, a n idolic belief, are provisional, unreliable, and without inward significance; they imply some divorce between expression and inwardness.

Masks are analogues for bizarre objects and other uns tab le and agglomerated proto-symbolizations that occur on the depressive threshold. They echo faces, though their echo is voided of the poignancy of h u m a n communication. They cannot be an index to love. Levi-Strauss h a s asser ted tha t primitive thought, a s a science of the concrete, is unable to comprehend such concepts a s infinity. Masks are epitomes of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness; they are part iculars ungrounded in the idea of eternity.

The expression on a face is different. An infant can look into its mother ' s face and in the radiance of the face discover the meaning of liturgical symbolization—the incandescent metaphor that comes into existence when a preconception meets with the love generated in a part icular moment and in a particular intimacy.

In iconic belief, part iculars depend on sacred and unknowable inevitabilities, the dialogue in which the nur tu re r endorses the importance of the nur tu red and in which issues of space and time are of secondary importance. The iconic disappears when faced by the mask . The idols of absolute space and time appear in its place and deny any ground to individuality.

Blake wrote, with Newton in mind:

A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage.

In Newton's heaven, there is no validation of the unique na tu re of the robin redbreast . The relationship of Blake's heaven and bird is like the dialogue of nu r tu re r and nur tured . It rejects Newton's heaven, which is reminiscent of the void in earlier theory, in which atoms were thought randomly to move.

An infant looking into its mother 's radiance may believe tha t no individuality, however slight, will be neglected or destroyed in the light of such a radiance. Things are so because they are validated in being so. To love is to come to recognition, and to be able to recognize something is inevitably to reach a certain kind of knowledge, in which the mysterious and beautiful concept of resemblance becomes irresistibly necessary. (The concept of resemblance is a t the opposite pole from the delusional cloning equations of sign language.)

The relationship of source to symbol is unusual ly interesting in those cases in which source and symbol interfuse (situations of consubstantial i ty in which concepts are indistinguishable from existents), or are so isolated from each other tha t symbols are reduced to being residues of a lost passion, markings whose meanings (if presumed to have once existed) no longer can be deciphered.

The fifth-century Byzantine historian, bishop Theodoret of Cyrrus, thought that while an icon was a representation having a likeness to something, an idol was something without a likeness to anything.

An icon is an object of probity; the meaning of its presence is validated by the authent ic existence of a mystery. Radiance in the mother 's face is true of her inward thoughts . By its

186 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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integrity, the icon invites the one who looks at it to ask: what is the relationship between this symbol and its source?—a question so insistent that it may distract the questioner from another issue, which concerns the degree of aspiration in the one who looks.

Belief in the importance of representat ion a n d of representation being iconic (rather than idolic) lies deep in the thought of western culture. Plato had seen all par t iculars a s par taking of ideas and of being meaningful through this partaking. The later debate in Byzantium concerning the truthfulness of the visual image^-whether the icon, like the body of the incarnated god, could be a vehicle for the spiritual—was so intense tha t it threatened the very stability of the Byzantine empire. [Similarly, Melanie Klein's fellow workers greeted her definition of the depressive position with great anxiety. The central issue in depressive understanding, the notion that the meaning of phenomena depends on their being interfused with a type of pain and a type of idea that belongs to mind alone, was deeply perturbing.]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cultural cross-fertilization. Paranoid-schizoid

conversion as against depressive recognition.

Stolen goods, and the revival of aesthetic intuition in

the west

As a n embodiment, the fetish has a char isma with the power to inhibit thought. Brilliantly it can blank out knowledge in phan tasy of some robbery and violation of

the baby or penis within the mother, by at tacking the mother 's relationship to these objects. The na tu re of its effect is relevant to a n unders tanding of the modernist aesthetic, which is the aesthetic of primitivism.

The char isma of the fetish consists of a radiance stolen from the good objects and focused into a blinding light comparable to a lightning flash. In a paper on the migraine, R. E. Money-Kyrle (1978) recalled suggesting to a migraine pa t i en t" . . . tha t she felt her migraine to be analogous to the blinding light St Paul saw on his way to persecute the Christ ians and tha t it was therefore related to her own unconscious sadistic phantasies" (p. 361).

The act of conversion depends on a paranoid-schizoid misunders tanding of the ability to recognize, or unders tand , the otherness and rights of others. Conversion, rather , is a mutua l

187

188 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER FOURTEEN 189

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form of intrusive identification, in which one par tner switches place with another . By some reversal in perspective, Paul comes to identify with the man he would destroy.

While named Saul, he had watched with approval the stoning to death of Stephen, who had denounced the elders of the temple for abandoning the unknowable a n d u n n a m e d God of their ancestors. Stephen had called for a re tu rn to the t rue faith. His garments , removed from him, were left in a heap by the side of the s tranger Saul, who watched the execution.

Later, on the road to Damascus, Saul himself was s toned by the light of revelation, lost his sight and name, and became confused with a power that he could not think about because he had lost the ability to symbolize. But in moments of annihilation, the individual can acquire socio-cultural signs, outward representat ions, psychic skeletals, to sus ta in the emergence of thought a s an inward presence: as with the imagos, or hallowed s ta tues of ancestors, that the ancient Romans kept in the courtyards to their houses (Mauss, 1950, pp. 350 ff.).

Rites of passage are suppor ts by which the group hopes to carry the initiate through a s ta te of psychic death. Saul h a d neither rite nor group, only the clothes of the dead man , which he now figuratively wore.

Stephen had accused the elders of becoming idolic. The fact they h a d converted to idolism because they wished to murde r the idea of the icon became plain when, in voicing his criticism, Stephen took on the role of the icon: he had to be silenced. In the iconoclasm of ancient Egypt, the prime objects of a t tack were the eyes, noses, and mouths of the sacred s ta tues—the smashing of orifices through which a mother and infant can experience adoration to pass .

Many Iberian and, indeed, Mediterranean peoples before Picasso had sought to trade with the inhabi tants of west Africa, or to enslave or to "convert" them, and presumably like h im had in phan tasy believed that they were faced by some reflection of a denied self. Through flair (his own, a s well a s tha t of others), Picasso was able to realize that these anonymous works from a phan tom underworld, largely unrecognized, had

an exceptional aesthetic value. He had to appropriate their genius a n d make it his own.

A belief of this kind is the dynamic of fetishism and is characterist ic of many primitive cultures, in which rites of worship and propitiation are magics intended to detain fugitive gods that otherwise might be appropriated by other tribes. Detaining the god is a misunderstanding—a quite creative one—of how a symbolism might come about by the cross-fertilization of stealing someone else's inspiration or wearing someone else's clothes.

A civil servant in the nineteenth-century Indian Raj, William Crooke (1897), observed the rites by which it was possible to trap an errant god. It "is shu t up in the sacred sesamum grain, which is then enclosed in a piece of holy wood and established in a shrine. In the later form the ritual has been softened down, and the god is only implored or coerced by charms to occupy the image . . ." (pp. 325-355). In such ways a notion of ar t comes into being, and mat ter as fetish (the stone) a s sumes the char isma of a work of art .

Sometimes the need was to steal the god and to cage it, so tha t it should not be re-appropriated by the other tribe. "In one of the old Aztec temples there was a cage in which the idols of conquered nat ions were confined to prevent them from assisting their old worshippers in regaining their liberty" (p. 345).

"A stolen god is more valuable than one honestly acquired . . . every old woman will tell you tha t the bes t cure for rheumat ics is to steal a potato from the greengrocer's stall" (p. 355). Stealing the life of the baby within the mother either eradicates pain, or induces pain more extremely. Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and had to suffer a psychosomatic metamorphosis of the stolen goods into the form of an eagle that pecked away his liver each night.

Contact between the living and dead twins, unless carefully insulated by means of fetish-worship (as it was among the ancient Egyptians), can lead to a dead doppelganger taking over a living twin. A bundle of light-rays increases in intensity during the inversion that occurs when it passes through a

190 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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pinhole; by an analogical process, th inks Levi-Strauss, dying myths are revived. The cataclysm of conversion, a s Paul m u s t have realized, can activate quiescent myths intolerably, so tha t they possess those whom they convert.

When Picasso came into contact with the "fetishes" of the Trocadero, he was filled with dread and for a moment thought tha t he was going to die.

Smashing up the inner-world mother-foetus couple, when un-partnered by a father. The presence of a father—or father surrogate—in the inner world can represent a boundary tha t deters the impulse to s m a s h things. A woman pat ient says, with a note of t r iumph in he r voice, tha t men are marginal to the making and nur tu r ing of babies. She denies any reality to the postulate that in a mother's mind, babies and fathers are cherished as differentiated beings and that the structuring of power in the mind requires both presences.

Another patient, a man who denies psychic reality in a similar fashion, reports that he is holding tightly onto a crucifix in his pocket. He adds that he h a s s tomach tension. The following day he says that the s tomach tension re turned as he came down some steps on the way to his session. He fears something bad will pop out of his stomach; he thinks this bad thing is a two-headed monster (a figure confusing father and baby).

When the possibility is raised that he might be identified with the pregnancy of a virgin mother, and that the crucifix is an emblem of the unusua l c i rcumstances that occur if someone confuses an act of birth and an act of death (the crucifixion of the virgin mother 's son)—because there is no internalized father to demarcate the difference between bir th and death— he recalls how, on a recent visit to Italy, he had been s t ruck by the similarity of the heads of father and son in one of Michelangelo's Pietas.

The Pietct for him embodies the confusion in his inner world of a father and baby. And since his inner world—as the source of meaning—is without the function of demarcation, he postulates as a fact the belief that the s ta tue discloses a terrible death concretely identified with a terrible bir th.

Resentful, he appropriates his mother 's capacity to be pregnant ; he then fears that his s tomach tension harbours the b i r t h / d e a t h of a two-headed monster, which he relates to the Michelangelo s ta tue . By clutching the crucifix, he hopes to crucify the two-headed monster inside the u terus , t hus realizing the phan tasy of a b i r th /dea th .

The influence of tribal ar t on modernism led to a conception of the work of ar t as fetish, in which power in ar t is dissociated from any relationship to meaning in content (Stokes, 1961, pp. 32ff.). The dissociation marks the absence of a paternal element in the inner world. In other words, the twin who dies a t b i r th and then travels through the underworld is an existent within its mother. If no father secures its context, or protects it against at tack, it is liable to be reduced to being either a ghost or charismatic endowed with an intensity that inhibits thought.

A work of ar t of an Isness kind does not represent something; being a n impacting of power and meaning, it is that something—an idol ra ther than an icon. It is a species of relic; and relics operate as do reflections in facing mirrors: they multiply without restriction. For instance, if a relic cake containing a god is cut into five parts , each of the five par ts will then contain a separate god.

In On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero a sks "Do you suppose tha t anyone can be so insane as to believe that the food he eats is a god?" (Ill; 41). His gives an oblique answer: 'The gods exist in imagination and not in reality. . . . We have a number of Dionysi . . ." (Ill; 23: 58).

In one legend concerning the murder of Osiris, every par t of h is dismembered body is discovered, apar t from his genitals, which are lost. In another legend, only his genitals are recovered; these were reputedly found as identical objects a t twenty-four different locations, and twenty-four identical shrines were built to contain them.

In a dream a woman finds herself in the London blitz, s tanding outside a building one of whose walls h a s been destroyed. She is able to look into two rooms. The rooms are friendly-looking.

192 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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and she associates them to a father's generosity. There is a shifting white light, a s of fire, on the periphery of the dreamer 's vision. In the dream, or j u s t after it, she relates the shifting white light to the angel of death. She expects that he r family, and possibly the entire culture, will be destroyed.

She h a s sent an envelope to America, containing some papers recording these events. She hopes (though doubts) tha t they will survive destruction. She compares the papers to a message in a bottle cas t into the sea. It occurs to her tha t if the papers do survive, they will be thought unintelligible.

Perhaps she faces the realistic cost of any movement into depressive unders tanding. It is a depressive fact that in Africa—taken in this book to be the womb of inspiration—some of the wood-carvers who produce sculpture of the highest calibre die young and without recognition. The climate rots wood, and much of their work does not survive.

The patient who had dreamt of the t ra in-compartment window (pp. 134 ff.) recalls how she had lain on the ground a n d looked u p a t the sky and thought that a church spire against the clouds seemed to be moving against the sky. (She later described this experience as entering the per turbing deep b lue of her mother 's eyes.) She then had an association to a man , Denys, whom she had met in the far East , handsome beyond belief, lying on the ground, his face s lashed by a knife. She h a d swooned at the sight of his s lashed face (as she h a d felt like swooning when she had looked on his face when unviolated). These two recollections of Denys were dream-like, a s implaus-ible a s the moving of a spire against still clouds: bu t the events had actually happened to her.

This is revelation-jealousy material, by its na tu re cryptic and fragmented and not directly yielding to unders tanding. Its quality of intense Isness, of swooning before the power of the stolen visual, is intertwined with the iconoclastic impulse to stone the object, to smash it to bits—the iconoclastic dynamic in her case being suppressed.

Looking into the sky, she loses measure . Inside and outside, what moves or is still—all these become uncer ta in . It is a s though in an unguarded moment she (the patient) were to see

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 193

the emblem of some twin's death within her mother, the spire or crucifix travelling against the clouds.

The beauty experienced in looking up into the sky is checked by an intimation of murder . No one knows who is the at tacker or the victim. Looking up into the sky, supine, she is in a similar physical position to the assaul ted handsome victim.

Denys reminds her of seventeen-year old boys she had enjoyed teaching years ago. and of another man , Doug, a war correspondent, who had lost a leg a t the front. Doug h a d been bitter; she h a d been unable to console him. Out of the blue the doodle-bugs would come: their dread sound would cut out, and then you knew they would fall within seconds. She remembers the shadow of a doodle-bug gliding along the ground.

Boundaries had disappeared. Doug, dug/breas t , doodlebug: the echoic progression chimes with her anxieties concerning a b reas t in which she experiences the beautiful newborn child a s victim in a sacrifice. In dealing with her guilt, by confusing herself with the victim, she resembles Sau l /Pau l in revelation losing any self-definition. Paul says (Corinthians 15:49), "we have born the image of the earthly"—the cul ture of ancient Egypt, of death as identified with mother earth, from whom the babies arise and re turn; the Alexandrian philosophy of deity as arising ex nihilo—"let u s also bear the image of the heavenly", which is the double image of the baby and spire against the clouds.

Fragmentat ions in the service of murderous ecstasy were evident in one of her dreams. Her mother si ts in front of a washbasin . The tap on the washbasin is fixed to a n exposed lead pipe tha t goes up the wall to the ceiling. The pipe has burs t , and water spur t s out of it. In a double bed lies one of her two older brothers as an infant. The brother in the bed grew up; and recently, when in his sixties, he had died: the dreamer thinks of him as having had an unfulfilled and even desolate life.

What the dream does not give—and the meaning of this re luctance becomes clear from the dreamer 's associations—is tha t the brother in the bed is a subs t i tu te for another brother, whom the family had idealized and the mother had adored. The idealized brother had been killed in the early days of the war, a

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194 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

piece of shrapnel entering his neck. The b u r s t water pipe, a s a dreadful thought of miscarriage in the mother 's mind, might represent her going to pieces over her beloved child, as blood issues from a severed jugular vein.

In jealousy, the dreamer could not allow her mother to have the full experience of grief. Denying the meaning of he r mother 's feelings for her brother played some par t in her denial of the concept of inwardness.

The passion to procreate and to destroy the procreation of others underl ies the need to worship images. In certain Mediterranean cultures, women kiss and fondle the holy images and weave themselves into the procession of phan tom forms in the hope that they might steal one of them away as their own child. Possibly they see the images as fetishes. If the image can incarnate being, then so may the u te rus of the worshipper.

A stretching-out and embracing underl ies the hunger for thought. In some cultures, perhaps more than in others, a dream lives out the life of the group and h a s the power to determine its thinking. In Plato's definition, material things "partake of" the intelligible, as though mat ter were mind yearning to be a t one with God.

In Byzantium, the Hellenic interest in similitude fed into a long-standing Mediterranean debate on the na tu re of creationist inspiration, relating to the presentat ion of the theme of resemblance in Genesis (Ladner, 1958). Let us make man in our image (Genesis, 1:26). As agent for a primal power, the king becomes the power and is able to reproduce it by techniques analogous to the way in which facing mirrors create an unending series of reflections. "In early times the solar na tu re of the king was very real" (Hocart. 1927, p. 19): a n equivalent solar appropriation seems to occur in works of ar t of an Isness kind.

The king derives from the sky kingdom, as allegedly do twins in certain par t s of Africa. In fact, the king is persona geminata: his person embodies the separate presences of the sacred and the mortal twin. Both bodies have a metaphysical dimension: the mortal body, for instance, is a martyr 's body and marked down for a violent death.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 195

All murdered—for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his c o u r t . . . "

[Shakespeare Richard II (3: 2.120)]

In mediaeval Europe the two-bodied na tu re of the king is an aspect of christology, though the idea of persona geminata is wider and older than the Christian influence. In central Africa—part pagan, par t Islamic—the institutionalizing of a n identical doctrine concerning the conjoining of a divine a n d mortal twin in the sacrality of the king h a s been long-standing (Adler, 1982; Kantorowicz, 1957).

For the psychotic the fusion of concept and existent resul ts in the thought: this occurs because I think it. In religion, any thought , insofar a s it h a s plenitude, allies itself, and indeed is fundamentally at one with, the creationist existent. Spinoza: "By Cause of Itself (causa sui) I unders tand that whose essence involves existence; or, tha t whose na tu re cannot be conceived except a s existing" (Ethics; first definition). No question here of a sign equation. The first definition st ipulates something tha t reality h a s to shape up to: it resembles a preconception concerning the t ru th of the good objects.

[Let me raise a myth/hypothes is a t this point concerning the na tu r e of "primitive man". He is someone who lays claim to the creative powers of God as a mat ter of fact. He does not expect to be labelled hubrist ic or megalomaniacal. He believes in the possibility of h u m a n consecration as a fact. And he believes also in deconsecration. As the ideology of the king's two bodies shows, a body transformed into divinity is related as a twin to a mortal body that is denied a na tura l death and h a s to suffer the extreme violence of a martyr 's death, in compensation pe rhaps for its twin's divine assumption. On a cosmic level, a "primitive" man who identifies with the idea of a first fiat, the making of a totality within the minimum of time, is liable to believe in conditions of absolute destruction, a cosmos destroyed by fire or flood. In general, though, "primitive man" tends to be unselfconscious in his claims to be creative; he is able to defer ideas of destruction, perhaps because he allows his mind to be captivated by the brilliance of the fetish. To this extent Picasso, in spite of h is alleged terror of death, is a "primitive man" able to use mat ter to create an imaginative

196 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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world tha t is comparable in its scope to a creationist fiat. Alternative man—you and me in a "scientific", civilized guise— may find any h u m a n assumption of divine creativity appalling; and yet the ways in which alternative m a n allows the wonders of technology to insulate him from the implications of mortality and to insist on God's non-existence has the quality of a similar declaration.]

In legend, at least, the vision of the alleged luminous cross in the sky that Constantine and his troops saw on their march to batt le with Maxentius, precipitated the cult of the icon in Byzantium. The dynamic of the "conversion", similar to the experience on the road to Damascus, may have induced Con-stant ine 's conversion to Christianity; though it h a s been doubted whether Constantine was ever converted to anything, even on his death-bed.

The Life of Constantine (at one time at tr ibuted to Eusebius) asser ts tha t the luminous cross appeared to the emperor in the evening sky. Its appearance was accompanied by the words, "By This Conquer!" It was s i tuated above the setting sun . On the night following the vision, or perhaps on the same night, Constantine had a dream in which the figure of Christ came to him, bearing the same sign, and bidding him to make a likeness of the cross, and with it to march against his enemies. At the coming of dawn, b u t not before, the emperor communicated the dream to his friends and ordered some of his craftsmen to make the labarum, which was adopted as the official s t andard of the Byzantine empire (Vasiliev, 1952, p. 50). Vision, or dream image, inspired the relic-power of the labarum, and the cross as vision gave authori ty to the empire.

Reputedly, Helena discovered the actual Holy Cross when on a visit to the near East. She thought to perceive, in fact, something that Constantine could only know by way of vision. Other pilgrims were reputed to have found fragments of the actual cross; and these were passed about the empire.

Constantine, like Paul, connived in a murder .

Apparently it was his mother, Helena, who informed him that his wife, Fausta, had been living in sin with his oldest

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 197

son, Crispus. Constantine had both offenders put to death. . . . [Grant, 1983, p. XI. 9-10]

A haunt ing , if subsidiary, aspect to the theme of murder , conversion, and vision is the role played by the seemingly impartial Constantine in having the council of Christian bishops a t Nicaea anathemize the heresy of Arianism, which had originated in the Hellenic climate of Alexandria, and which was anti-iconic and in effect denied the twin na tu re of Christ, h is being both sacred and mortal.

Arius and his followers had claimed that the Logos and the Son were not co-generated with the father, and that the Logos and the Son were created ex nihilo. In effect, they proposed that the church should turn to idolism; and they were excommunicated for at tempting to refute the doctrine of consubstantiality, on which eventually the intellectual foundation of the cult of icon was to be constructed.

Cultures speak to each other, often in little more than an echo of feeling, or h int of shape or measure . In ancient Egypt and Greece, in Byzantium and in the art of western Africa, the curve of a smile or a breas t or a cheek in a nativity gave way to the angularity of a pietd. A tendency towards Byzantine symbolist thinking in the France of the late nineteenth century helped to awaken the capacity to unders tand the tribal ar t of Africa and the Oceanic kingdoms. Isness, in the disquieting guise of the fetish, revived the aesthetic intuitions of u rban man .

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Group dreams (sometimes in the form of ideologies) determine perception. Ingesting them may take interminable tracts of space and centuries of time.

A rculfus, a French bishop, went on a pilgrimage to the Near East round about the year 670 AD. On the way home, his ship went off course somewhere between

Rome and France, and he found himself washed u p on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland.

It is not known why this happened. People perceive as their dreams allow them to perceive: and to an u n u s u a l extent in Arculfus's time a certain dream was so influential tha t it utterly modified temporal a n d spatial configurations.

Adamnan, the abbot of the monastery of Hy on Iona, was deeply stirred by Arculfus's description of the holy places. He took the account down in dictation and had it made up into a book, De Loctis Sanctis.

A mythic event had possessed Arculfus. It was like a dream that so compels the dreamer that he h a s to reach out and grasp it in the actual world. Arculfus visited the Holy Sepulchre in Je rusa lem under the compulsion to art iculate some spiritual crisis that h a d long per turbed him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 199

In J e ru sa l em he found a specific representat ion in a certain tomb which provided the essential dimension to his passion. Adamnan writes of Arculfus measur ing out with the palms of his hands the sides of J e sus ' s tomb in the Holy Sepulchre, "the length of which Arculfus . . . found to be seven feet" (Arculfus, 1889, p. 7).

Kneeling before the tomb, the pilgrim—using number s in the service of emotion—measures out lengths, a s though fused with a bereft mother, who in grief no longer inhabits space and time, and whose sense of measure is a disembodied pulsat ion-in-feeling. Touching and grasping can be rite-of-passage activities, ways of bridging some poignant gap. Hopefully they might be thought to bring alive the dead infant of dream, the superna tu ra l murdered twin within the mother .

One day Arculfus was allowed to see the napkin that had been placed about the face of the dead man. It was taken out of its casket, and amid the multitude of people that kissed it, he himself kissed it in an assembly of the church; it measured about eight feet in length He is told that the napkin had been thrown on a fire, but the fire in no way could touch it, for rising whole and untouchedfrom the fire, it began to fly on high, like a bird with outspread wings.

Although some cul tures are more determined by their dreams than others, at all times someone who has hungered for the unknown—the unknown being, let u s say, a baby to cherish or destroy—will experience sense verification differently from someone a t a distance from such a desire.

The existent, perceived as a desired future, may be so powerful psychically that any representat ion of it will yield to its power. The ideology of the relic is based on such a consideration.

A relic is not an indifferent bit of matter; it is matter t ransfused by the idea of a god (the god being the baby or the dream). The idea is unique in every aspect—many faces, yet always the same unique face. Although cut from the same cloth, each relic instantly acquires uniqueness as a life that is separa te from the whole; it is a s though it were the first of its kind. It is, a s Plotinus suggests, like a drop of water taken from the sea, tha t in itself may contain all the part iculars tha t make u p an ocean. It is a microcosm with a creativity and ontology.

198

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as well a s an epistemic s t ructure , tha t is identical to the macrocosm.

A relic is no t ins t rumenta l nor is it replicatory, a s concepts or man-made things can be. If someone makes a copy of a relic, the copy in the process of being made loses its epistemic likeness to the prototype and becomes unique, the first and only one of its kind, through its spontaneous fusion with a unique existent that is the ground to all being.

In the ideology of creationism. every part icular is uniquely present at the first and only moment of creation. Relics are heightened forms of the part icular in creationism; they are to be found everywhere in daily life. They arouse wonder because they derive from the first fiat and are aspects of the godhead.

The t ransmuta t ion of an ordinary piece of cloth into radiant relic is analogous to the process of muta t ion in Laius's mind by which the murdered Oedipus becomes the superna tura l portent who can break taboo with impunity.

A hypothesis about a mysterious t ransmuta t ion in the realm of the mother 's mind becomes, in the mind of the outside baby at the breas t (or at least of the baby in Arculfus), a certainty about the physical na tu r e of things.

When Arculfus measures the dimension of the tomb, which carries with it the meaning of the manger, or life source, the resul t ing measure is neither ins t rumenta l nor conceptual; the sacred radiance of the tomb, an emanation of God's un-mediated radiance, in turn emanates into the measure , so tha t it is t ransmuted into the godhead and h a s the miraculous powers of a deity.

Its t ransmutat ion is not a renewal, since each time a relic comes into being, it always provides a first beginning. If Arculfus were to give the measurement to someone who was ill, it would be thought to have the relic power to heal this person.

A transfer of measurements was enough to ensure a transfer of the divine powers believed to reside in the original building. [Kitzinger, 1954, p. 105]

Matisse believed (in one par t of his mind at least) tha t his pictures had the power to help an acquaintance recover from an illness (Flam, 1973, p. 85).

Pilgrims who visited the Holy Land revered the column against which J e s u s had been alleged to have been flagellated. One pilgrim, Theodosius,

claimed that not only Christ's arms and hands but also His face were impressed on the column. The object evidently was a borderline case between simple relic and miraculously produced image, a phenomenon characteristic of the period of incipient intensification of the cult of images.

. . . persons suffering from disease took from the reproductions of Christ's body the measurements of the appropriate limb. They must have done this either by means of a string, a strip of papyrus, or similar material, which they then tied around their necks with salutary effects, or by means of a ruler, in which case they must then have transcribed the numerical value of a small tablet suitable for suspension as an amulet. [Kitzinger, 1954, p. 105]

If the number eight is identified with the resurrection, then any allusion to eightness in a holy building equates it to the moment of the resurrection. The hunger for resurrection pulls together the two forms of eightness. If the meaning of the resurrect ion is lost, then the two forms of eightness will no longer be fused with it.

In dream thinking, too, a measurement may occur not as a fact about space b u t as a symbolic attraction between two otherwise dissimilar constellations of perception and feeling. In a group dream, a s in certain myths, a number as a group transference object sets up a range of similar associations in different people.

It would be possible to define the group in terms of the tacit restrictions it imposes on the range of association in thought; the tacit restrictions would be a version of the inhibition imposed on incest.

If the act of bapt ism in Christian mythology entails some identification with the death and rebirth of Christ, then architects will design baptistr ies and mausolea to resemble each other—which, in fact, was the case.

Relic theory makes sense of a practice, common in the Middle Ages, of building architectural "copies" of the venerated

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places tha t bore no outward resemblance to the prototype.

The buildings vary surprisingly . . . they are astonishingly different from the prototype which they are meant to follow. [Krautheimer, 1942, p. 3]

The parts which have been selected in these "copies" stand in a relation to one another which in no way recalls their former association in the model. . . . The original unity has been disintegrated and the elements have been reshuffled, [ibid., p. 13]

Relic theory offers an unusua l definition of the concepts of resemblance and similarity. The intensity of a dream h a s dissimilarities discover a likeness to each other. The idea in Genesis tha t "God made m a n in his own likeness a n d image" invites misunders tanding if resemblance loses its relationship to its ground in dream and is limited to the relationship of prototype and copy. Resemblance may indicate some hunger for division in the essence by which it yet re ta ins the meaning of its original identity.

There seems to be a deep-rooted tendency in the human mind to seek what is identical, in the sense of something that persists through change. Consequently, the desire for explanation seems to be satisfied only by the discovery that what appears to be new and different was there all the time. Hence the search for an underlying identity, a persistent stuff, a substance that is conserved in spite of qualitative changes and in terms of which these changes can be explained.

The group in medieval belief had to live out the joy and agony of the holy child's birth, death, and resurrect ion. The sacred provides a transference situation, in which space and time, a s temple and feast-day. are transfigured into experiences of spacelessness and timelessness.

The psychic task was to ingest miraculous events by means of repetition: acts of ritual that , however often repeated, were indistinguishable from the first fiat. The dynamic of the ri tual is the obverse of the dynamic of the relic; all actions, however different, are always the same action and m u s t rigorously follow the same procedures.

Corporate awe of this kind t ransmutes the meaning of symbolism. Passion will identify two buildings on evidence tha t is minimal or non-existent from a n empirical point of view. The fact tha t a certain measurement or dimension occurs in two buildings will be enough to establish their identicality. To someone in a s ta te of mourning, similarly, an echo is enough to establish the conviction of a link with the one who h a s died.

Cultures can t r iumph over each other or even destroy each other; b u t they can also consciously (or unconsciously) mourn each other 's losses. To a mind under the passionate impression of the unknowable, the touch and shape of a west African fetish will indicate dimensions of experience that are the equivalents of discovering a new continent. "All I needed to know of Africa was there", said Picasso of his visits to the Trocadero Ethnology Museum.

The unknowability of Christian passion required about fifteen hund red years of group dream ingestion before the unknowability could be refracted through other forms of culture. The experience of the Cross for a long time determined many forms of symbolization, including the type of symbolization required in discovering resemblances: the act of recognition itself. It was so impassioned that it did not take into account details that the modern architect would think important in any description of a building.

To medieval eyes anything which had more than four sides was approximately a circle. Nor are semicircle, square and rectangle clearly differentiated. . . . An approximate similarity of the geometric pattern evidenUy satisfied the minds of medieval man as to the identity of two forms. [Krautheimer, 1942, p. 6]

[Gebert, a n "outstanding authori ty on geometry, is quite imprecise so far as the description of geometrical shapes is concerned. On the other h a n d the number of par t s that make up a geometrical pat tern is always strongly stressed. A square, for instance, is described as being contained within four straight lines; the number four is decisive while the relation of the four lines to one another . . . is simply omitted. The geometrical form is, a s it were, t ranslated into arithmetical figures" (Krautheimer, 1942, p. 8.)]

2 0 4 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER FIFTEEN 2 0 5

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It is impossible to unders tand the resemblances a n d spaces in the dreams of other people if the observer does not feel the passion that may pulse through them and whoseexis tence they may devote their waking lives to denying.

A psychotic, it has been said, is someone estranged from his psychic s tomach and who lives out, ra ther than ingests, by way of dream: and yet to this extent, the psychotic lives something in his acting out. There is no means of recognizing meanings in cul tures where people fail to acknowledge a ruling passion. They lose sight of the full significance of resemblance and recognition. The possible life in the concepts fades away. Resemblance tu rns into a manner of deadened replication and resul ts in a recognition so inert that it might be no more than an irritable spasm in consciousness.

From the 15th century on . . . a gradual process of draining the edifice of its "content" seems to begin . . . it reaches its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Architectural patterns are then used regardless of their original significance, a Greek temple for a customs house, a Gothic cathedral for an office building, a thermal room for a railway station. [Krautheimer, 1942, p. 20]

The Holy Sepulchre is hallowed as a relic; a s the unmedi-ated presence of the godhead itself, and not a s a site for the events tha t once occurred there, nor a s an object s i tuated in history. Antoninus Martyr, a pilgrim, perceived it as a glittering chaos, the vision of conversion itself: a disintegrating rad ian t presence in the sky. The moment invokes the pass ing through a pinhole of the Levi-Strauss (1973) "bundle of light-rays". In metaphysical passion, an observer of the cosmos finds its centre in a celestial multi-angled lens, from which is refracted the light of all reality.

From the tomb to Golgotha is eighty paces. On one side the ascent is by steps where our Lord ascended to be crucified. In the place where He was crucified marks of blood appear in the rock itself. On the side of the rock is Abraham's altar where he was going to offer up Isaac. There also Melchisedec offered sacrifice when Abraham was returning with victory from the slaughter of Amalek; and there, too, Abraham gave to him a tenth of the spoil for the purpose of

sacrifice. Near the altar is a fissure, where if you place your ear, you will hear the sound of running water; and if you throw in an apple or a pear . . . and go down to the Pool of Siloam, you will find it again. [Bernard, 1891, p. 28]

All representat ions of the sacred object become the object. It is a s though the object were to devour any claim the representation might have to be conceptual. Adjectives disappear into the numinous strength of nouns; and nouns of every kind reveal themselves to be the same noun—which, in turn, discloses itself as unnameable: so that all representat ions disappear in the face of the primary all-radiant unknowable existent.

Spatial conceptions of an idea that exists nowhere will obviously resul t in an incoherent topography. [Aristotle describes one of Plato's formulations of the ideas as existing nowhere. 'The Forms are not outside because they are nowhere" (Physics, III, 4, 203a.7).]

Walter J ackson Bate has observed that many readers of Coleridge's dream poem Kubla Khan are convinced after they have read the poem tha t they have acquired a precise sense of the archi tecture and measurements of Xanadu and its surrounding landscape: and yet they feel a t a loss when asked to give shape on paper to their topographical sense. Their spatial intuit ions have an authority that is not borne out by the facts. Is the sense of thinking precisely to know a dream place a delusion, or is it something else?

Readers of the poem have supplied an amazing range of possible sett ings for it. Many of them are undismayed when they are informed of the divergences in description. Unable to depict the setting, they are still impressed by an experience of having had a precise sense of something—but of what, they cannot be sure.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mania and terror: modern technology, and a switch of roles between the triumphant twin and the twin who is destroyed. The importance of recognition as an experience that can occur on the threshold of the depressive position.

A traveller a t London airport, while waiting for the flight call to Paris, becomes aware of thoughts so fleeting that they pass by him almost unnoticed. Engines roar;

light crosses the fuselage; the proximity of power elates him, and he h a s a sense of being taken out of himself into a manic state. At which point a thought occurs to him that he does not relish—one that , he realizes, is related to the manic state. In some clearly demarcated area in his mind, the aeroplane tu rns into a fireball.

Falling meteors are reputed to have the power of burning with inner fire and shining in the night-time (Evans, 1901, p. 21). Terror almost brings the traveller to his knees; reasonably so, in the light of the crash he nearly underwent some years before, when Mont Blanc rode up to the aeroplane window.

And yet something else: these are psychotic anxieties awaiting to be re-awoken at any moment . They are reminiscent of the sensation he sometimes has when entering a swimming pool—of a body violently fragmenting; a failure in the

206

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 207

power to symbolize: a failure to re turn from a rite-of-passage death.

Anxieties occur that are a s primal a s any, a surfacing in nowness of the first disintegration, which sets in reversal the meaning of the first integration perhaps, some God in the outback summoning up the world on the first horizon: light and dark, water and air, animals and trees. Imagine God's creation through the first six days moving backwards through time. It becomes the swirl tha t devours, the vortex within a bad breast , the subs t ra te to nightmare and dream, which tu rns out to be physicality itself. It would seem that beta elements, an indigestible physicality, underlies all thought, and that Democritus 's materialism—atoms in a void—describes a psychotic s tate . If the glistening aeroplane is as potent a s a fetish god, then the aeroplane in negation is a maelstrom.

Separated from mother earth, whether in elation or terror, the traveller no longer inhabits his own skin. Previously, he h a d felt tha t magical energies were seeping into him through an imagined fusion with the aeroplane as fetish; in the explosion, the robbed and vengeful fetish annihi lates security. The midair disintegration is an object that pulses power. For early man, s u c h an object could take the form of a stone in which a god dwelt, whether impacted into mat ter or explosive with char isma.

An abrup t sensationalism of this kind has authority in the modernis t aesthetic and in the aesthetics of daily city life. Personalities and things are granted an unexamined meaning on the basis that they have an ins tant charisma; billboard posters are assumed to be tokens for the imaginative life. A medieval and primitive philosophy of revelation re turns through the back door in the form of the aesthetic intuitionism that informs modernist art. The fascination with sacred intensities, with the idea of a god who asser ts "I am what I am", re-locates its rituals in the uses of technology and in the fascinating movements of lights and colours in the city at night.

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, and much at the same time Edgar Allan Poe grasped the first formings of the primitive aesthetic of modernism. In A Descent into the Maelstrom Poe describes a vortex that might be a relic turned inside out, the site out of which originates dream and nightmare. The traveller

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is sucked into minus-space, a negation of the space created by Plato's demiurge.

The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfect smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around. . . .

The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on account of a thick mist in which everything was enveloped, and over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow and tottering bridge which Mussulmen say is the only pathway between Time and Eternity. This mist, or spray, was no doubt occasioned by the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as they met together at the bottom. . . .

Round and round we swept—not in any uniform movement—but in dizzying swings and jerks that sent us sometimes only a few hundred feet—sometimes nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. . . .

Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious—for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below. [Poe, 1967, p. 239]

Primitive man reforms the debris of destroyed cul tures with an indifference to the possibility that the debris might have some meaning within the context of time as history. The comfortable furnishings of the ship in Poe's story enter into a process of transformation; it is as though the god of Genesis had raised a violent storm to disintegrate a bourgeois home, a

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 2 0 9

form of Isness in violent reverse, which discovers an aesthetic coherence in the debris. The s t randed flotsam acquires the value of art .

In the psychotic metaphysic, zones in space are indistinguishable from s ta tes of being, and to a greater or lesser extent s ta tes of being are vital with the condition of sacredness . At the time of the Renaissance it was thought that the self was able to mas te r experience and textually to t ranslate the world into maps, instructions, the formulation of laws: mind could look onto the world. In the Poe story, journeying and space are no longer the at t r ibutes of a mathematical functionalism; they move through degrees of being. Poe's traveller experiences space m u c h as Parmenides had done when he had risen in his chariot above the gates of day and night.

Parmenides spatializes being as the centre and circumference of a sphere, whose movement is centrifugal; he considers nothingness to be a misapprehension. Taking an anti-Platonic stance, Poe describes nothingness as a reality in which movement , if it exists, is centripetal.

Presumably, a foetus-infant begins to relate an experience of space to s ta tes of being during the bir th process. Space is the one common factor as the architecture about it is transformed. At one moment it is a t the centre of its support system (and without any means to distinguish its wishes from actuality); in the next moment it is separated from all surrounding, aqueous space giving way to space as actual air, a s lungs inflate in the setting of the wide world.

When Parmenides imagined himself a s carried by "wise horses" through the gates of day and night, beyond s u n and moon and the "avenging Jus t ice" of na tura l law, he did not merely ride u p into brighter air, as the modern traveller hopes to do. His journey was an ascent into wisdom. The different kinds of space that he travelled through signified spheres of being of an ever-increasing purity. The higher he rose, the more significant, or divine-imbued, was the s ta te of being that he passed through.

His cul ture is the cul ture of the type of ar t tha t s tems from Picasso's experience before the fetishes. A modern sculpture is not about something, nor does it displace anything; it moves in an emotional space in which abouts dissolve into forms of

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Isness. Like a n aeroplane in flight or explosion, it is admired when it is emanatory and seems to hold the air about it in a sus ta ined ball of chaos. Common sense indicates tha t a piece of stone h a s no ascertainable power; symbolic displacement in the mind of the observer gives resonance to the sur rounding air. But mind is a t tuned to many types of space, and only certain kinds of ability in sculpting can release the satisfaction of symbolic displacement.

In the psychotic metaphysic, the explosion of the plane implies a space that h a s the power to disintegrate a s well as to bring things together. There is no idea of a self—merely a p ressure of existence, varying in intensity, sometimes given to symbolic representation and to indications of usable two-dimensional meaning, sometimes not. There is no quest ion of subject and object, no question of anyone being able to separate response from experience.

Elation and terror at leaving the ground give way to a sense of disinterested tedium; Icarus, looking through the aeroplane window, observes a distant landscape far below, an unfolding scroll whose markings he does not unders tand . It is as though this calligraphy needed, as a key to its unders tanding, the presence in mind of some love affair he h a d long forgotten about.1

He notices the markings, and because he cannot unders tand them, he barely a t tends to them. Any meaning they might have for him is faint. Enjoying air and fire and water, he ignores the articulation of some ancient message on the elephant skin beneath: scratchings, carvings and other indeci-pherabilities. In the thin air, he forgets the meaning of stone: graveyards where life once more might come into being. Feeling

'Plotinus, in writing about happiness, describes the soul's persistent relationship throughout life with the One. Since the soul suffers pain, and can feel estranged from the object of its love, Plotinus supposes that its loving and happy relationship to the One is basically unconscious and only hinted at in conscious thought. The hints can be misunderstood or ignored.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 2 1 1

masterful, he contemplates the rise and fall of planets beyond the extending horizon.

In Peru, in a place tha t I expect never to visit, there is a plateau between the Palpa and Ingenio rivers. Aerial photographs disclose tha t if you look down from a considerable height, you can see something that would otherwise be invisible to you. Above Nazca, which is the name of the plateau, you can perceive

. . . an immense network of lines, stripes, spirals and effigies, all executed on a colossal scale upon the barren table-lands above the Palpa and Ingenio rivers, in an area about 60 miles long and several miles wide. The weatherworn surface of small stones is dark, but the sand and gravel ju s t underneath are much lighter in colour. The lines and stripes were formed by piling the dark surface stones along the sides of the exposure. Many straight lines strike across the plateau and rise without lateral deflection up precipitous slopes to vanish inexplicably, going between points of no particular distinction without any pretence of serving as paths or roads. Certain modular measurements recur . . . some mark solstitial and equinoctial points upon the horizon. Others may point to the rising and setting of certain stars. [Kubler, 1962b, p. 286]

A self high in sky, remote from its origins and in brilliant fire, looks down and sees the primitive idea as markings, myths, or sculptures , tokens of a forgotten intimacy tha t elude present unders tanding.

It is unlikely that a dreamer can star t or stop the generation of dream. He confronts, if only fitfully, an unceas ing process as fundamental to the life of the mind as breathing is to the life of the body. There is no possibility of the self being able to tu rn dream on and off while continuing to have being.

Donald Meltzer, in discussion, h a s described a si tuation in which a n observer is able to suggest to a boy drawing a pattern—presumably as much from the boy's feelings in making the drawing as from the na tu re of the pat tern—that the pat tern is a conjecture about his mother 's expedition to the shops a t

2 1 2 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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the time of the session—a tracing of her movements, either haun ted by the thought of missing her or intentionally of controlling her. One of these meanings, the wistful, would be a developmental activity, an act of love.

His marking out of her possible movements would indicate his wish to be at one with her; and yet in making the pat tern , he is au thor to an aspiration, not the maker of a fact.

The observer's sympathy with the boy's loneliness invites him to unders tand the representat ion within a cul ture of sympathetic attraction, in which loved ones natural ly gravitate towards each other. Love is not magic. The drawing will not bring the boy's mother back to him before the agreed time of re-meeting; and, perhaps, however convincingly he draws, she will never re turn . Making the drawing is like the need to kiss the photograph of someone dead, while realizing a t the same time tha t the one who is dead will no t re turn : "we act in this way a n d then feel satisfied" (Wittgenstein, 1979, p. 4e).

Human beings mourn not only the dead; and the boy, in making his drawing of the conjectured movements of a living mother, is involved in an aspect of mourning that entails the recognition of an otherness, whose life in thought depends on acknowledging a certain death in the self.

If a game or rite is a representat ion, and the dynamic presence of the mother in the mind of observer, and possibly of the child, is a source of the representat ion, then it might be asked whether source a n d representat ion remain a t a fixed distance from each other; or whether they sometimes come closer to each other and sometimes move apar t . In any climate of feeling, the distance between source and representat ion is constantly variable; as in the Platonic a n d Stoic conceptions of the cosmos, where the impersonal measures of mathemat ics were a s sumed to speak the language of the soul, and the at tractions and revulsions of feeling to have an effect on the mind comparable to the physicist 's unders tand ing of movement in the na tura l world.

Another example, which t ransposes this theme to a more generalized level, is that of a Mexican potter who says (on television, in a programme about the work of C. G. Jung) that the pat tern on her j ug represents the journeyings of her ancestors through the desert. She points to certain markings

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 2 1 3

as meaningful: here are the ra instorms through which the ancestors travelled, and here, she says, pointing to another mark, is the sun .

Imagination hungers to su rmoun t any distance that may exist between itself and those it loves; inclining to the sacred, it wishes to tu rn time on its tracks and to re turn to the first creationist instance, a s though to its home. Tradition, or the renewal of pas t meanings, is implicit in the recognition of an impulse to reach the one. It is as though the pat tern on the j ug yearned to move in the same direction and. in being so gravitated to the sacred, is entered into by the power it yearns for; in its authority, it would seem to emanate circlings of light.

The boy who pined for his absent mother and drew a pat tern created a topography of nowhere, a geometry of the soul. His activity was different from those who seek in malice, fear, and delight to t rap the god in the stone—perhaps to steal its power from others. In ar t feelings have the capacity to draw things close over distances whose alienatory condition is noticeable. The landscape is not a mirror: it tells someone else's story. Pilgrims discover a holy land interfused with the presence of a child, a twin, who in dying and rebirth describes the na tu re of change. A god enters or leaves a stone. A mother holds within her the inseparabilities of joy and grief, and the pilgrims are a t one with her .

If Arculfus a s a pilgrim writes of leaves on trees, he writes of trees whose meaning h a s been transfigured by the thought tha t once a certain child associated with divinity "might have touched them. The ancestors of the Australian aborigine do not release a potential in the landscape; they bear witness to an actuality that is always there—Isness. the redness in red, the ha rdness in rock, the god in the stone. The dead, who include the absent , are always there, alive in perception, waiting to be noticed.

Resemblance is not likeness, if likeness concerns entities that are indist inguishable (clones, copies, identicals). It is bound u p with recognition; it acknowledges the difference in similarity; and it allows itself to feel wonder and puzzlement. The experience can be intensely persecutory if the capacity to evoke is lost.

A woman patient, hearing a child singing upstairs , says that the singing voice sounds like her mother, who h a s been long

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dead. The "like" or resemblance of the singing voice to he r mother 's voice uncovers her yearning tha t they should be the same; and the yearning for the possibility is inclined to ha rden into the conviction that they are the same. By stopping he r from going into the next room, I am stopping her from stepping back forty years, into a room where her mother is alive at this moment. The voice exists in space into which she cannot enter . Her mother exists in a space into which she cannot enter.

What happens to the pat tern when the meaning h a s been lost and the communication of love been forgotten? A pat ient who had existed in a s tate of sus ta ined intrusion into her objects began to be able to puzzle in wonderment over drawings of mounta in sections in her son's homework. She was in quest for some lost communication. It seemed mysterious tha t the flat mounta in symbols on his map might be re-drawn as vertical cross-sections of mounta in height. The puzzle was more than one of topography, geometry, or of transformations in convention. It concerned the fact that something so mysteriously wonderful a s transformation might exist.

She could see why the world might contain transformation. Symbolism exists in an imaginary space governed by sympathies and repulsions, in which a life of the pass ions projects a cosmology. The fact was beginning to dawn on he r that the transformation of one thing into another could be an activity beautiful in its economy, even in a son's homework. As one who tended to think with "the fixities and definites" that Coleridge saw as characteristic of the fancy, she was unaccus tomed to witness the economy and power by which the imagination brings about transformations.

She continued to find ways of thinking about the na tu re of the imagination. She was not sure what to make of the worm casts and shells and wrinkles that mark the sand after the tide h a s pulled out. She believed that the markings on the sand resembled the texture of the wallpaper in the therapy room, and she wondered whether the foetus in utero might "see" a similar texturing through water.

She recalled a film in which the heroine had looked at images projected onto the table of a camera oscura and then

C HAPTER SIXTEEN 2 1 5

walked into a courtyard wreathed in wisteria and blazing with sunlight. She seemed to be conjecturing about a mother during the time of a mother 's absence a n d to see the beauty of a mother 's inwardness as though through baptismal water, and then to find conjecture swept away by the moment of re-meeting.

Discovering resemblances is an act of kinship: it is to visit the country from which your ancestors came a n d to see about you the faces of childhood. It is hedged in with a pain. The woman who thought the singing in the next room was the sound of her mother had to learn that it was not her mother— and consciously had to come to the belief that someone was stopping her from being united once more with a loved one.

When fragile, mind is liable to experience a world in which the loved object is lost as a series of tormenting metaphors . Forced by the pain of isolation to separate the possibilities of the imagination from the actuality of facts, it may turn against the imagination, and collapse the similar par t s of a cosmos made u p of metaphor into identicalities, so tha t s ta tes of mind become events tha t replicate throughout the universe and can be entered into freely.

A patient may postulate that his house is identical in its interior to the interior of his therapist 's house (of which he h a s no knowledge), so that what he does in one space magically shapes events in the other space.

A m a n describes a certain room visited in a dream. He thinks of it as a room in his house. He keeps describing the room as this room, this room, this room—with such an emphasis on the indicatory that it dawns on me that the room in the dream, though ostensibly a room in his house, is, in fact, the room that he and I are at present sharing. The room he takes over is not j u s t the room I work in—he consciously admits he would like to take over the building and develop the property— b u t some room that he thinks I dream about .

In dreaming, he uses his dreams to get inside my dreams and to take over whatever it is tha t I dream about . We might be twins living within the membrane of a mirror, in a phan tom struggle to possess the same object.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Fears of difference: in relation to other cultures, to changes in initiation rites, and to the eruption of liminal iconography on the depressive threshold. Occasions on which otherness as an inner-world concept is confused with annihilation.

Bougainville, the mathematician, travelled to Tahiti with a slide rule in his pocket: "a real Frenchman, ballasted on the port side with a treatise on integral and differen

tial calculus, and to s tarboard with a voyage a round the world" (Diderot, 1956, p. 188). He wanted the natives to see things his way, and yet probably he hoped that they would "liberate" him: a mathemat ics of reason would yield to a mathemat ics of the passions.

Diderot was one of the first of the intellectuals to unders tand the appeal of the primitive aesthetic to the European mind. The different cul tures of the mathemat ic ian and the Tahit ians reflected each other. Both sides approached each other with a concealed talisman. Savages carry amulets tha t are like the sticky boiled sweets, copper coins, and bits of string in a schoolboy's pocket. The man of the Enlightenment h a s a slide-rule in his pocket. Both hope that the other will free them from the irritability that liminal phenomena arouse in anyone in a paranoid-schizoid s ta te of mind.

216

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The child, scratching a dry pa th in a London park, might be someone from a different culture. It h a s a n u n u s u a l sense of otherness about it, as though it had a gravity or centre to its being that is very distant from any centre in the observer; it might be someone who had prematurely learnt to survive on its own.

The observer, feeling irritated, cannot unders t and the na tu r e of the communicat ion in the scratching, if there is a communication. He wonders whether the point of the communication might be to project s ta tes of exclusion; b u t he feels disinclined to give the child the space in himself in which the meaning of the marks made on the ground can gestate.

In the country, some weeks later, he watches the same child make m a r k s on a chalk bank by the roadside. He is not irritated, and yet he is without any unders tanding of the marks . He cannot be sure whether he is there a s the child's caretaker, as an alien of some kind, or as someone intended to share the experience. He experiences the scratchings as liminal phenomena. It is as though one par t of himself were projecting opacities of meaning into another par t of the self, as a way of dealing with some failure to unders tand depressive meaning.

A pattern drawn in sand

The Malekulan Islanders of the New Hebrides a t one time held to a certain belief about the afterlife. They believed that when they died, they h a d to pass along a road to the land of the dead, which was sur rounded by a high fence and "situated vaguely" in wooded open ground. Before the land of the dead stood a rock on which sa t a female ghost called Temes Savsap (Temes means "ghost"). Drawn on the ground before Temes Savsap lay a geometric design known as Nahal or "the Path". The newly dead person was expected to walk between the two symmetrical halves of the geometric pat tern.

As each ghost comes along the road the guardian ghost Temes Savsap hurriedly rubs out one half of the figure.

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The ghost now comes up, but loses its track and cannot find it. He wanders about searching for a way to get past the Temes of the rock, but in vain. Only a knowledge of the completed geometric figure can release him from this impasse. If he knows the figure, he at once completes the half which Temes Savsap rubbed out; and passes down the track through the middle of the figure. If, however, he does not know the figure, the Temes, seeing he will never find the road, eats him, and he never reaches the abode of the dead. [Deacon, 1934, p. 130]

The making of intricate pa t te rns on a flat surface is a striking characteristic of Oceanic art; and drawing geometric pa t te rns of the Nahal kind was a thriving cul ture among the Malekulans. At one time, women had made the designs, b u t now only the male was allowed to do so. The art is t had to be able to remember a great number of the geometric forms that had been t ransmit ted over the generations, and h e h a d to be unusual ly adept at design. He would begin by drawing a framework on the sand.

With his forefinger he traces around the framework curves, circles and ellipses. In theory the whole should be done in a single, continuous line which ends where it began; the finger should never be lifted from the ground, nor should any part of the line be traversed twice. In a veiy great number of the drawings this was actually achieved, [ibid., p. 133]

The content of the myth throws light on the meaning of the pattern-making, if I a s sume that it is like many myths and does not acknowledge natural death, only symbolic death, and is less about dying than about birth or rebirth. The motif of geometric pat terning is analogous to the liminal phenomena of the initiation rite or to transference imagery on the verge of the depressive position. [Positing the depressive position changes the relationship of psychoanalysis to myth. Myths are no longer thought to i l luminate some unknowability about the past , a s in the case of Oedipus's relationship to his parents . They illumina te some unknowability about the future—specifically, the future a s a baby that is not the self, a s in Oedipus's meeting

with the Sphinx, a n object that is bizarre because it is liminal, existing on the threshold of the depressive position and representing a future tha t is cryptic and persecut ing because it contains an otherness tha t excludes the self.]

The geometric shapes of the Nahal drawing evoke an image of the primal couple in conjunction. In other drawings, the conjoined primal couple contains an idea of a baby. A patient on the threshold of the depressive position will experience the b reas t as containing a chamber in which the primal couple are linked by the presence of a baby. The couple embody the inscrutability of a future, which the patient may think of as indicating a symbolic death for the self.

The drawings might be a challenge to foetal omnipotence at the time of birth, presented in terms of a myth about a rebirth into the land of the dead. A robbed and bereft mother—whether Temes Savsap or the Medusa—signals to the foetus that it h a s been deluded in thinking tha t it could possess the communication of its good objects, the pat ternings of music and mathematics.

Patterning is always touched by the inscrutable: as a liminal phenomenon, it is always on the verge of oscillating into paranoid-schizoid s ta tes of confusion in sensation or into the type of space in which a depressive symbolization can manifest itself. In retrieving the rights of the primal couple, the mother recovers her beauty, and the foetus realizes that the pa t te rns it h a d thought to possess have been transformed into cryptic and persecutory liminal phenomena.

J o h n Layard (1936) associated the geometric pat ternings of the New Hebrides with the fact that Malekula was a mega-lithic cul ture, in which mortuary ritual was represented by stone monuments . He marshalled evidence to suggest that Malekulan culture may have derived from the megalithic labyr in th cul tures of ancient Egypt and ancient Crete. Layard (1937) considers how a similar pat terning on sand occurs in India, usually by the threshold of actual doors.

The lovers who make up the couple in the breast , while being at one with each other, differ by way of gender and parental function. The temptation is to retreat from the isomorphism of the couple into the belief that all mating resembles the replication of images in reflecting mirrors.

220 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 22 1

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Temes Savsap p u t s this type of belief unde r threat when she rubs out par t of the pat tern. As certain anthropologists have observed, the rubbing-out can be associated with renunciatory vows that asser t "I will not marry" or "I will not eat meat" (Deacon, 1934, p. 144). However the rubbed-out par t is identical to the par t tha t remains, and the threat is not too formidable; the shape of one can be inferred from the shape of the other, if the ghost is able to acknowledge the principle of similarity.

Temes's "rubbing out" is a liminal phenomenon, a sign-symbol on the verge of depressive insight that paranoid-schizoid perception misunders tands and feels threatened by. A mother possessed by the "ghost" foetus within her insists on "rubbing in" (rather than rubbing out) a n uncomfortable inner-world link between herself as a good object in the infant's mind and certain part-object satellites of the good object.

A man, who lives out his life as though he were a priest committed to the ceremonies of ritual—but a priest hollowed out by the life in ritual—reports that he h a s had two dreams. "I think they were similar. I do not remember them, except that they h a d a geometric shape."

He allows me access to two objects, which yield little in the way of meaning; perhaps he wants to tantalize me. He h a s something (possibly two objects that feed him), which he can only grant me a h in t of. He is preoccupied by the failure of his younger brother 's career. He later describes the two geometric objects as trumpet-like and made of stone. He wants me to carry his sense of dismay a t being so distanced from depressive unders tanding. He p u t s into me that pa r t of himself that is identified with a brother thought to be a failure, who cannot unders tand the meaning of the two objects.

It is probable that he experiences the two breas t objects as transformed into some rudimentary configuration of vagina-rectum. He fears impingement and concedes little to meaning. Lyell describes a geological world that does not need h u m a n motive or divine char isma to be transformed; likewise, to someone in paranoid-schizoid s ta tes of mind liminal phenomena can

seem impersonal in dynamic—a geometry without feelings, in which a source in love cannot be known.

A m a n begins a session in a s tate of great volubility. What he says h a s little meaning; it sounds as though he were recapitulating the content of previous sessions in a scrambled way. He talks a s though he were the chairman of a meeting listing the agenda. He h a s difficulty in breathing during the outpouring, and the difficulty in breathing sounds sincere (in its infantile dependence), in contrast to the outpouring (in which the infant seems to be in someone else). When asked about his breathing difficulty, he says that he has some phlegm in his throat. I have an intuition, which I think was based on a preverbal communication from him, of an armadillo push ing a t a ball of something with its snout . When I asked him if he knew of an animal that pushed things around, he answered, with delight and amusement in his voice: the dung beetle. It conceals eggs in cow dung and rolls them round to keep them from its enemies. A shared preverbal intuition releases him a little from the s ta te of having a mou th full of empty sensat ions that could not be turned into experiences.

Space in a paranoid-schizoid mouth is an emptiness in which things are p u t that do not securely fit. Sensat ions on the verge of significance are interpreted as fillers—basically, as rubbish . Another patient, for instance, gives the impression (especially when talking about food) that the articulations of language are empty spaces where concepts should be, have been (sense and meaning locking together, like a nipple and a mouth); b u t the spaces were loosely and provisionally filled with something that might have been faeces or a baby that waited to be eaten. It was a mat ter of course for him that if he talked about food, he was talking equally about faeces or babies. He as sumed without question that people who said you should not eat babies were hypocrites.

A similar identification occurs with the man who has a ball of phlegm in his throat. An empty space is filled with an overflow of filler that is most probably an equivalent of faeces: interchangeably, the empty space is mouth or an appropriation

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of a mother 's u te rus degraded into a rectum. The space is not without value: one par t of him is in a s ta te of projective identification with a pregnant mother and wishes to protect the baby within: h e is a s solicitous of the phlegm in his throat a s though it were the eggs of a dung beetle. Another par t of him, more in touch with depressive anxiety, is afflicted by difficulties in breathing, because it knows that it is not the pregnant mother and m u s t somatize its distress a t meeting up with the liminal phenomena that exist in conceptual space.

He describes looking at a poster on an underground stat ion which advertises a film about identical twins, brothers , dangerous criminals, whom he thinks of as face-slashers. He dreams of two objects (possibly representat ions of nipples), each one of which contains one of the brothers . Some time before he saw the poster, he had said that when he had been four and a half, his mother had taken him to Bertram Mills' circus. Up to that time—according to his mother, a t least—he had been a m u t e child. The family h a d taken ringside seats . Coco, the "king of the clowns", had come up and spoken to the boy personally. He had been so shocked by the mouth that had spoken to him out of the painted mask-like face tha t from that time on he had begun to speak volubly (or so his mother was to claim).

The mask-like face conveys a liminal shock comparable to the rubbings-out of Temes Savsap. The living eyes in a painted face that resembles a mask heightens any contras t between eye sockets and face and invites a comparison with the nipple-breast contrast , the eye or nipple having been presumed to be invaded by a dangerous rival. The clown's voice would be a rival's manne r of at tack, razor-sharp, which the boy could only fend off by continuing to release speech, as a mask-shie ld , over the many subsequent years.

The patient retreated into silence and a pitiful helplessness when his way of using talk was linked to the experience of the clown: his collapse was startling. He said that on one occasion his wife had wanted to know what his train of thought had been, and he had tried to discourage what he felt to be her intrusive interest. He associated this memory to Wagner's opera Lohengrin, in which the hero cannot tell his beloved his

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 223

name, because—the patient thought—the hero feared that if he did speak his name, he would lose something.

Names are givings tha t (like semen) contain the ancestors, the kins, the t rue resemblances, the genius in sap. They are markings in the landscape, cues to meaning, like masks; they indicate, ra ther than represent, a fullness of significance that might be good or bad.

. . . a name and a title is like a mask defining us in a certain way and implying a lineage of an ancestral kind. In ancient Rome, the cognomen, or "super-name" one might bear, was finally confused with the imago, the wax death-mask of the face of the dead ancestors kept in the wings of the entrance-hall of the family house. [Mauss, 1938, pp. 352-353]

The ancient Romans distinguished between the lares or good ancestors and the larvae or terrifying ancestral ghosts whose bodies take the form of masks that torment the living. Fustel de Coulanges (1901), who taught Mauss, recalls that 'The soul without a tomb . . . m u s t wander forever under the form of a larua or phan tom without ever stopping" (p. 18). "Our ancestors believed that the dead when they were malignant were to be called larvae; they called them lares when they were benevolent and propitious" (p. 28).

Mauss possibly had in mind Linnaeus's distinction between the imago and the larva of the insect, the larva being the insect cloaked or unrecognizable and therefore indefinable in terms of its species. Linnaeus took the term "larva" from a Latin word used interchangeably for a ghost or mask.

A ghost, like the god without a stone or the twin banished to the underworld or an empty space in which sensat ions cannot be t ranslated into concepts, m u s t be held in check by some continuity of line or sus ta ined series of correctly conducted rites. Respect to the deceased can be paid in par t by tending a flame on the hear th , which may on no account be allowed to go out without disastrous consequences.

Any break in continuity is liable to arouse misapprehension, since it indicates habitations that exist with or without a

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god in them. A mask is such a broken surface. Its aper tures may draw into themselves the violent expulsions and impulsions of infancy (projectile vomiting, diarrhoea, severe breathing difficulties, skin complaints, etc.), as though the infant were confused with the unsecured presence of a love as uncontained as a ghost.

The proto-symbolic s t ruc tures that cont inue beyond the s ta te of symbolic dying in the rite-of-passage, typified by the h u m a n face as a punctured, distended mask, excite violent projection into the initiate, which the homeopathic rites of masked tribal dance are intended to contain. When the masklike face of the clown is related to acts of violent impulsion, the eye spaces in the mask-like face are identified with razor-slashing nipples, whose intrusion into the pat ient 's mind was to have him erupt verbiage continuously.

As our soul, being air holds us together and controls us, so does wind [or breath] and air enclosed the whole world. [Remark attributed to Anaximenes, floruit, 540]

As against eruption, there is steady breathing—the harmonious breathing of the cosmos, a t ransaction between inward and outward, comparable in its gentleness to the iconic radiance of a mother 's face, authent ic in bearing witness to an inner s ta te that is radiant because it is integrated by t ru th . An icon enfolds within itself the content of a thought that a n idol, in contrast , would project into someone other.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

On being at the point of a perspectival contraction. Clinical material concerning the victim in sacrifice. In paranoid-schizoid understanding, the site of the victim—the altar—marks the spot where the crossing is made. In terms of the inner world, the site is the space between the feeding mother's breasts.

The process begins with a theophany—the appearance of a god to some favoured worshipper at some special spot. To this place the constant presence of the deity can be secured only by slaying and eating of the sacred totem animal and pouring blood on a pile of stones, a primitive altar which is replaced by a pillar to mark the holiness of the spot. In time the primitive monolith is replaced by a representation of the god. [Crooke, 1897, p. 325]

I t was necessary to begin the dismembering of the sacrificial victim a t the first h in t of dawn and to have devoured the body before the rays of the sun had spread across

the sky.

The camel chosen as the victim is bound upon a rude altar of stone piled together, and when the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers around the altar in a

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solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound while the last words of the hymn are still upon the lips of the congregation, and in all haste drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off bits of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw with such wild haste, that in the short interval between the rise of the day star which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly devoured. The plain meaning of this is that the victim was devoured before its life had left the still warm blood and flesh—raw flesh is called "living" flesh in Hebrew and Syriac—and that thus in the most literal way all those who shared in the ceremony absorbed part of the victim's life into themselves. [Robertson Smith, 1894, p. 338]

Something had to disappear absolutely in order that something else might appear; so much so, that the worshippers seemed to have been unable to perceive that bones in reality are not digestible.

Levi-Strauss (1964), in his s tudy on totemism, h a s pointed out the links in an Objibwa legend between: sight and the glance that kills, the loss of a god, and the beginnings of metaphor. The rigidly exact comparison of the disappearing of the victim in desert sacrifice with the complete appearance of the s u n allows for the inference that the ceremony practised a n alternation analogous to the changes of night a n d day. If first light were identified with the re-makings of day, a time of potentiality when illumination was hinted at ra ther than seen, then the actual beginning of the sunr ise would have suggested a likeness to an infant in the throes of being born.

Devourings had to be contained. The rites of disappearance were not permitted to overlap the rites of appearance. It was essential to deny, in the moment of sacrifice, the kinship of the one about to be murdered with the one about to be born, m u c h as a murderer might deny that the victim he kills will include some aspect of himself.

The sacred na tu re of the sun ' s rising, thought to be synonymous to a divine birth or to the birth of the sacred, had to be validated by the "disappearance" of a profanity, a kin (whether

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 2 2 7

animal or human) , whose total vanishing was identified with the disappearance of darkness .

An intense, watery winter's s u n begins to set over the sea by Abbotsbury on the first day in 1990 when I am thinking about the contents of this book. It enters dark rooms through small windows, sickly orange, unt rans la table into painterly experience, though why it is unt rans la table I do not know. And yet it is a n extraordinary sight to end this drizzly New Year's day: and it plays some par t in my thinking about what I now see to be a n important rite-of-passage theme in Descartes 's Meditations; how the undergoing of identity loss, consequent on extreme s ta tes of doubt, is crucial to an education of the unders tanding and to the emergence of a belief in a non-empirical type of knowledge.

Eclipsed by symbolic darkness , mind is made aware of resources that it had not been able to recognize by day. Through intuition it perceives the world to reform hesitantly unde r the influence of a charismatic that techniques forged in the world cannot test out.

Light, like feeling, changes the world of things. Surfaces are sa tura ted in colour and texture or become drained of hue. Meanings advance and retreat . 'The beauty of colour [derives] from the conquest of the darkness inherent in mat ter by the pour ing in of unembodied light" (Plotinus. Ennead, 1.6.3). ['The aesthetics of Plotinus provide the formulae which render all periods of Byzantine ar t intelligible. M. Andre Grabar has suggested that they contain the Byzantine techniques of the suppress ion of space dimensions for the dematerialization of reality; the foreshortening of figures; reversed perspective; and the use of the horizon line" [italics added]. But this might apply j u s t a s well to Picasso's "conversion" at the Trocadero. 'The characterist ic Byzantine conception of the relation between colour and light . . . are already explicit in the first Ennead" (Mathews, 1963. both quotations p. 19).]

The fact that night and day share one space, as though Castor and Pollux had had to tolerate a s tate of individuality in fusion, s t imulates thought about the socio-cultural symbol of

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the rite of passage. The self in a s ta te of symbolic death th inks to lose the perceivable world with the onset of eclipse and to recover outwardness through a radiance often represented, as at Eleusis, by the presence of a newborn. In Manichee belief, darkness invokes evil and the powers of the bad womb. A woman who actually dreamt of being suffocated by soot might have thought to have perceived the soot a s a negation of the light of insight.

The idea of twins having to share one space is clear in myths about the cataclysmic interruption of worlds, in which one view of the world is taken over by its twin, a s night takes over day.

CENSORINUS: [There is a <Great> Year . . . whose winter is a great flood (cataclysmos) and whose summer is ekpyrosis, that is a world conflagration. For it is thought that in these alternating periods the world is now going up in flames, now turning to water. Heraclitus and Linus <believed this cycle to consist> of 10,800 years] [Kahn, 1979, p. 156]

Scientists of the ancient world observed that spatio-temporal spans were irregular. At times, all tokens of stability vanished. Cosmic sympathy was lost; there was no longer any iconic validity to the belief that spirit might infuse matter . Fire and water were without measure , agents for flood and ekpyrosis.1

A pat ient recalls that she h a d met a man , and had thought tha t their relationship was "coming to the boil"; she then h a d had a breakdown. She had been convinced that a t the time when she h a d fallen ill—her lungs were enflamed and full of bad stuff—someone h a d been trying to pun i sh her for her wish

''The usual translation of ekpyrosis as conflagration is misleading, because it suggests a sudden catastrophe. In fact, ekpyrosis originally denoted the period of the cosmic cycle where the preponderance of the fiery element reaches its maximum" (Sambursky, 1959, p. 106/h.). Of the cyclical, Sambursky writes: " . . . no doubt the Stoics would have agreed with Whitehead's statement that 'there is time because there are happenings and apart from happenings there is nothing'. More specifically, the character of these happenings and therefore that of time on a macroscopic scale reveals itself as essentially cyclic and periodic" (p. 106).

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 229

to get married. If she or the man she was at t racted to were to approach each other too closely, or cross some line that was not perceptible to the senses, though known to intuition, they would fall ill and die.

It was as though drawing close to the line marked an intensification of ontological reality, and a drastic limit being imposed on the scope of possibility. It was like the altar on which the sacrifice h a s to occur.

Some people live out their lives in a disembodied way because they fear that if they allow themselves to have experiences, they will be devoured by them. A pat ient reads a story about a woman who is sacrificed by some Indians. She associates the moment of sacrifice to the moment in time when her final session would come to an end. She is unable to have experiences without being overwhelmed by them. She recalls a weekend visit to the Natural Science Museum to see the dinosaurs . Most of them had been removed; the place was being modernized. She h a s to unders tand experience as parents turned into dinosaurs , the terror taken out of their teeth by their being relegated to the t imelessness of pre-history. In a s ta te of persecution, she thinks of time itself as devouring.

Another pat ient was temporarily reconciled to the prospect of weaning by a dream in which she was ceremonially eaten by her mother and sister-in-law. She was almost consoled by the thought tha t in death and its variants she might be taken into others (cf. Abraham. 1916, pp. 248-279).

Crossing the boundary can be experienced as a cataclysm or conversion. A man dreams of a woman who fills him with dread. She has a squint . He describes the squint by saying that one of her eyes "looks outward". Presumably, the other eye looks inward and feeds the outward eye.

The two eyes are like a conjunction of the good and bad twins. The glances of the two eyes, when p u t together, become one line that travels both inward and outward at the same time. The line is like an arrow that is able to extend in opposing directions. The eye-look crosses a boundary in moving from inward to outward, and the boundary contains some notion of a flat surface through which the arrow travels without disturbing the calm of the surface.

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The tribal art ists of Oceania and Africa sha re a fascination with the existence of flat surfaces—as in certain beautiful Grebo masks . The ancient Greek mythologists are fascinated by the surface of lakes and mirrors. Mysterious energies can t ransact from inward to outward and outward to inward, usually through the two presences known as eyes. The empiricist defines the flat aspect of features through touch; b u t the energies that move inward-outward, largely through someone's eyes, are elusive of definition and similar to the ocular occultism of psychic projection. An infant might conceive of its mother 's face as emerging or indenting into a flat surface.

The eye tha t looks outward and the eye that looks inward together make an arrow-telescope for insight. But if you ha te the idea of this telescope, a s the patient did—because it implies a mother in touch with an intuition that the infant cannot manipulate by prediction—then the eye that looks outward, when linked to the eye that looks inward, will become the evil eye, which induces a universal panic.

His mother h a s the power to communicate love; he travesties her power by communicat ing death. He would prefer to live in the underworld of signs. But his unconscious keeps giving him a dreadful gift: the dimension of the symbol re-appears , though in a discouraging form.

He senses that symbols take the form of sacred zones with dangerous boundar ies in-between them—or, rather , he becomes aware of boundar ies to be crossed; and he is frightened. He tries to diminish the s t ructur ing of symbolic energies by reconverting symbol into a code language. He does this, as an infant, by means of his mouth.

As his mother lifts him to the breast , he thinks to convert a mou th capable of loving feeling into an a n u s that soils. The act of soiling the nipple, to which the mouth is clamped, h a s the magical effect both of pivoting his relationship to the object, so that he is no longer outside it b u t inside it, sucking a t an inside nipple.

At times when he has met me. I have thought to see his face as a skull. He has always then begun the session by talking about death—usually about the dread of death, which, he thinks, he shares in common with his colleagues a t his workplace. His power to project an image of death travesties any

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 2 3 1

unconscious belief he might have had about a mother who is able to communicate love to her infant, and who in emanat ing a s ta te of love is able to traject an inward condition outward, through the expression on her face—in particular by way of her eyes.

On this point. Bion's concept of reversal in perspective discloses a kinship to his concept of catastrophic change. One day the pat ient said with some venom: last night I dreamt of you—and you looked much younger than you do now. We were in a border town; and we discussed whether you should leave this place for a place over the border. I was not sure what we decided. . . .

He was trying to get me across the border a s the bad son intruder . He would stay in the border town, reversing our roles and our ages and taking over the dreaming and the primal scene, b u t in doing so denying the possibility to the couple of having conceived him.

He h a d seen me at a public gathering on the Saturday night before this session, and though I had told him previously that I would be staying only for a short while a t the gathering, he had been per turbed when, after seeing me there (I had not seen him), he h a d thought that I had "disappeared".

He had lost any sense of boundaries . On his way to the session, he h a d fallen asleep at the wheel of his car, while waiting a t the traffic lights. He now sought to discount the fact tha t he might have killed a pedestrian, though there had been dream material to suggest that this had been possible. By entering my space, he had also entered my disappearance.

At the same time, he had taken over the enviable expressive powers of his mother 's face and had projected hate by way of a face tha t projected an image of a skull.

Much later, the na tu re of the boundary he feared to cross became clear in a dream in which he had a blackout (representing the boundary crossing). He was anally masturbat ing a young woman, and his brother was with him; he thought they were in some sort of collusion. He then had the blackout, and when he re turned to consciousness, he found himself at home, his wife and the young woman being with him. He wondered whether his brother had brought him there.

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He associated the blackout to having been concussed as a young m a n when playing baseball. He had lost consciousness for a minute or two, during which time he had picked himself off the ground and blindly continued to take par t in the game. The fact that he continued to be operational while unconscious reflected on the na tu re of the blackout and on his anxieties earlier in the session concerning his rage a t a work colleague who happened to be a young woman. It is conceivable that he experienced his brother during the blackout a s becoming his hands in mas turba t ion as they murdered the young woman. His persis tent a t tempt omnipotently to control the object (by manipulation) was a defence against the helplessness of a blackout.

He had suffered a frightening spasm the night before while watching television with his wife after an agreeable fish dinner. To his horror on every channel he had discovered nothing b u t sexual intercourse. (It is as though he were now the young woman, getting four of her bodily channels enflamed by masturbation.) Had he ever suffered from epilepsy, I wondered. No. he said, b u t h is wife did call him the epileptic because of his unreasonable vehemence. He appeared to be an epileptic in temperament, if not in disposition, who h a d never undergone a fit.

His "epilepsy", a s an unrealized unconscious deposit, a phan tom that cannot be experienced, limits any ability to conceptualize depressive recognition to frightening paranoid-schizoid types of "conversion" of the Sau l /Pau l kind.

[Another man dreams of a single mother who wants to p u t out her infant for adoption. He advises her to have it adopted by "two homosexuals". He meets u p with another single mother, who is witch-like and frightening.

By denying to the first breas t he feeds from (the first single mother) an internal presence, which is probably a father represented by a part-object, the infant in the dreamer exposes himself to the phan tasy of an entry of a finger into his rec tum as he moves to the second breas t (this would be "the two homosexuals"). He then projects the at tack made on the first breas t onto the second one.

In the ideology of the king's two bodies, the two bodies of which the king consists are in fact created out of intrusive

identifications with the two breasts , each of which contains one of the twins—either Pollux (the immortal one) or Castor (the violently murdered one).

In terms of the inner world, the king is an infant travelling through the space between the two breasts , who feels possessed by the two intrusive identifications, so that he feels taken over either by the fate of Pollux, or of Castor. Having denied rights of demarcation to his father, who disappears in his moment of agony, he is liable to confuse his father with a murderous finger in his rectum.]

The spectator as art ist no longer finds himself looking down the perspectival t rack into the infinite (an emblem of Renaissance desire), bu t , on the contrary, finds himself at the point where the t racks of Renaissance perspective condense into one point. The arrow he shoots tu rns about on its track and ends its flight in the eyes of the one who h a s shot it. He is no longer conquistador; nor is he really an Inca. He h a s become the sacrificial victim of the Inca.

Discouraging beliefs of this kind hinder unders tanding of the depressive fact tha t an infant, in thinking about its pregn a n t mother, may feel nowhere in granting that the centre of interest h a s moved from its own feeding relationship with its mother to an area of disembodied conjecture: its generous wonderings about its mother 's relationship to the foetus within her.

In aesthetics, importance no longer lies in the observer's relationship to the representation; it lies in the relationship of the representat ion to the object it represents . The observer is nowhere—or, ra ther , he is in the process of "disappearing", as the perspectival arrow turns on its t racks and enters his eyes.

The ontological intensity of an icon depends on its being inseparable from its source in meaning. Similarly, the probity of a mother 's expression is indicative of its relationship to her private inner world. The infant, in looking at the breast , has a sense of its mother, her foetus and its father being a t one in consubstantiali ty.

The authori ty of the symbol as icon among the Byzantines of the late sixth century pointed to "an increasing preoccupation

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234 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

with the relationship of the image to its prototype (rather than to its beholder) and an increasingly strong belief in the potentialities of the image as a vehicle of divine power" (Kitzinger, 1954, p. 149). The self tha t h a s entered into a s ta te of symbolic death no longer has authori ty over the meaning of the representat ion before it. It may experience the representat ion as an annihilatory "conversion" or as the beginning of a symbolization.

An agnostic may have a n analogous experience when faced by a newborn baby. An overpowering sense of as ton ishment banishes all questions of authori ty and legitimacy. Such moments are not delusional. Adoration exists on a different plane from doubt: either you accept it a s opening the door on symbolization, or you reject it. Adoration does not bar ter with the sensible world.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Galileo and Descartes, and the modification in

meaning of liminal symbolism. The relationship of the

loss of the aesthetic of primitivism to the machine-

world view. Tokens of catastrophic change in the

writings of Descartes.

P lato thought of psychology as a s tudy of the soul. He saw mathemat ics as a b ranch of psychology; and he h a s the philosopher Timaeus describe the creation of the

world soul in mathematical terms. The char isma by which the demiurge transfigures space and its vestiges is the source of the integrating power in mathemat ics and music as languages of the soul.

In his psychogony Plato describes (in a highly baffling manner) the constitution of the world soul, using profusely mathematical terms (numbers, relations, circles). In other words, the soul itself looks like a mathematical entity. Certainly this was not overlooked by Iamblichus and Proclus. [Merlan, 1953, pp. 10-11]

Proclus s tates ,

Plato was right when he constructed the soul of mathematics and divided it numerically and bound it by proportions and harmonical ratios and placed the erstwhile principles

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236 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

of figures in it . . . and made the circles in it move in an intellectual motion. All mathematicals exist primarily in the soul . . . and the soul is the fullness of all mathematicals. [ibid., p. 18]

In Galileo's writings the valuation of number a s soul-sym-bolization is subordinated to an unders tanding of number a s concept. Galileo's antagonists thought of concepts a s signs; and since they believed signs to be idolic, they thought they saw reason to charge Galileo with idolatry.

Yet Galileo was a Platonist, and he had little place in his science for the perceptions of common sense. The Galilean scholar Alexander Koyre quotes Galileo as writing in the Dialogue on the Two Systems that

Plato believed that (the human intellect) participates in divinity solely because it is able to understand the nature of numbers, and I am inclined to make the same judgment. [Koyre. 1966, p. 192]

Drained of soul, numbers are no longer animates of divinity. They are signs in a text in which a divine author , who h a s possibly ceased to exist, h a s made ambiguous assert ions. The codes of the Galilean universe consists of vestiges tha t are sufficient un to themselves.

Galileo wrote that

Philosophy (i.e. natural philosophy or physics) is written in a very large book, which is always open before our eyes. (By this I mean the universe.) You cannot understand the book if you do not first learn to read the language and to know the characters in which it is written. . . . It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to understand its speech. [Koyre, 1966, p. 186Jh.]

A primitive thinker might claim that the sacred cannot be replicated; it is always specific: it occurs here and not there, now and not then; a n d it tends to be devastating in its effect. Galileo reports on events that can be replicated throughout the universe: and the universe in which these event occur can be replicated indefinitely. Galileo's conceptualism had the same

CHAPTER NINETEEN 2 3 7

effect as h a d Arius's criticisms of consubstantiali ty: it denied the validity of the iconic conception of t ruth. The Inquisition challenged Galileo-on the grounds that his conceptualism was a crypto-sign language intended to deny authority to the Eucharis t , in whose mystery the power of the symbol to convert tragedy into redemption was thought to be most completely realized. Galileo, though, did not think of physical knowledge as tragic—as belonging to a theatre of cataclysm that t ransforms its part ic ipants by way of the devices of reversal in perspective and recognition.

Galileo describes functions that belong to the practical, even mercantile world. The world of physics is no longer the world of psychology, of the anima mundi, and Galileo works in areas of thought tha t are dissociated from the theme of symbolic death and the ideology of the psychotic metaphysic.

The destruction of the cosmos . . . and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe . . . implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts. [Koyre, 1957, p. 2]

Only by exercising imagination is it possible to realize how disturbing Galileo's contemporaries m u s t have found his dissociation of fact from value. Galileo calculates not in terms of dream, and, overtly at least, does not travel through some underworld of the mind to arrive at evidence of t ruth . Measuring facts that apply equally to replicas and relics, he is concerned with a science of movement, parochial in application and generalized in meaning. His definition of physics a s a reading of the world as text implies a definition of sanity in which quest ions concerning the primitive or psychotic aspects of experience h a d no bearing.

Descartes, who is virtually Galileo's contemporary, is also inclined to consider na tura l phenomena in terms of a mechanical model, while emphasizing the usefulness of a Platonist and mathematical conception of reality. Taking Platonism a stage

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238 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

further than Galileo does, he communicates the plangency of mind's estrangement in na tu re from the reality of the forms with the talent of a Virgil in exile, grieving over the loss of his native land.

In the second of his Meditations ("Meditationum de Prima Philosophia", 1647. in: Haldane & Ross, 1911. pp. 154-155), he describes the effect of fire on a piece of wax, so a s to illustrate an argument that would seem apt in describing a machine-world view. But the poignancy of his writing is more suited to the theme of spiritual exile than to changes in physical states, and it conveys the impression of being a metaphor for some psychological crisis. His writing implies that loss in the physical world and loss in mind are akin to losses of the world and self in moments of religious conversion. It t ransla tes an observation of physical transformation into an idiom sui ted to describing s ta tes of mind during the stage in rites of passage in which the initiate undergoes symbolic death.

. . . it has been taken quite freshly from the hive, and it has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey which it contains; it still retains somewhat of the odour of the flowers from which it has been culled; its colour, its figure, its size are apparent; it is hard, cold, easily handled, and if you tap it with a finger, it will emit a sound. Finally all the things which are requisite to cause us distinctly to recognize a body are met with in it. But notice that while I speak and approach the fire what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it, and when one taps it, no sound is emitted. [Descartes, "Meditationum de Prima Philosophia", 1641, in: Haldane & Ross, 1911, p. 154]

Wax derives from some original or creativist place in which it had been at one with its surroundings. It enters into processes of transformation that are harmonious; and then it meets with a mutat ion that would be t raumatic if wax were thought to be mind.

Before fire had cut off its sentient relationship to originality, the wax had been evocative of its former condition as honey in the hive; and by way of its fragrance, to reveal how earlier it had been nectar in the flower. Descartes does not draw the reader 's

CHAPTER NINETEEN 239

attention to the fact that the transforming of nectar into honey requires the agency of bees, nor that the fragrance of flowers is only slightly evident in the odour of honey. He is concerned with the abrup t consequences of fire's influence, in which the wax is dissociated from its history and its association with food. [The anxiety about the transformation of the wax may include some anxiety about the way cooking can change food and may arouse doubt as to why a cook would wish to disguise the food's former state. Someone might similarly wonder why familiar things in the setting of a foreign country should seem so alien.]

The change is so like a Pauline conversion that the subject before and after the change are unrecognizable to each other; they may be thought to have fused in the act of symbolic death.

So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown . . . that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. I feel as if I had fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which so spins me around that I can neither stand nor swim up. ["Meditationum de Prima Philosophia",-1641, in: Haldane & Ross, 1911, p. 154]

The effect of a whirlpool, a s a metaphor for a n effect on mind, is like the effect of fire on wax. Subject and object lose differentiation in a bapt ismal s tate of death-in-life.

As a practising anatomist , Descartes thought of his dissecting room as his library. He conceives of body as a behaviourist might, as a machine in which sensation, insofar as it h a s meaning, tends to be misleading. The quality of his description of the wax as melting suggests that his behaviourism is not matter-of-fact; it is troubled by some conception of how things had been before the machine-world view, conceived of as a fire, had touched the wax of the h u m a n soul.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

An Asmat canoe exemplifies the kind of phantasies about space that underlie the modernist discovery of catastrophic change as a factor in the primitive aesthetic.

A t the ethnographic m u s e u m of the Trocadero, a New Guinea pirogue of the Asmat people, acquired by the m u s e u m in 1950. is tilted onto its s t e m so that it

s t ands bolt upright like a totem-pole. It reaches to the ceiling of a high room, while remaining the very image of gravity.

Its prow, which is carved, seems to be longer than its body, and is made up of three figures: a man, first, who sits, legs apart , on the tip of the canoe, and who wears an object like a top-hat on his head, out of which would seem to mushroom a woman, in much the same manner as Athena allegedly arose from Zeus's head. The man ' s top-hat suppor ts the woman, as though it were a squat log on which she sits; it might be about to enter her bir th passage.

If the canoe were horizontal, the man would be seen to be entering, or emerging in breech birth, from the woman. He is not alone by the birth passage, for concurrently she appears to be giving bir th to a child, whom she holds before her.

240

i CHAPTER TWENTY 2 4 1

upside down, its head pointing away from her . The father and the neonate seem either to depart from her or to re tu rn to her.

The genitals of the child, or at least its umbilical cord, give issue also—to a cloud-like formation, or pat tern, consisting of curling shapes , a little like a handwriting. These shapes p ress forward in the shape of a triangle that narrows to a beak-like point.

If this description of unexpected angles hewn out of the relationship of three h u m a n bodies invokes, a t least a s a n idea, the proto-cubist modernity of Cezanne's Montagne Sainte-Victoire or of his Baigneuses series (as in the Baigneuses once owned by Picasso), it does so with intention, for this is b u t one among many possible examples of the congruence between primitive a n d modernis t sensibilities.

The figure of the mother, which is so central to the carving, is by na tu re of its centrality less perceivable than are the other two figures. The total carving has the aspect of being her thoughts . The m a n makes the woman, who makes the baby, who makes the future as a cloud or pat tern, which, in turn , is transformed into a bird. The cloud-pat tem-bird configuration is primarily a space that provides hope, in origin akin to the sky.

Mythological thought is analogous to foetal thought, which is inseparable from the thinking of the mother 's mind in which it exists a s though her mind were the anima mundi. Thought in the foetus is not an aspect of individuality. It does not know the distinctions of inner a n d outer, nor of self and other. Foetal thought exis ts .as a something that the mother of the foetus might think—an analogous doctrine in theology would be that all thought is thought in the mind of the creator.

If the mother in the carving is granted the idea of a n inner space, then the cloud-pattern-bird configuration takes on the meaning of an area in her mind in which she creates a world of movement, so that the child may have a place in which to thrive. If the mother did not provide the child with air in which to fly. she (and it) would never recognize it to be a bird. And its emotional development requires it to be so recognized. Its bird na tu re is other than a mat ter of metaphor; it is the totemic intermediary through which a symbolism can come into being.

242 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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God and animal are interfused with humani ty in the primitive unders tanding of the sacred. All is one (by way of the fact tha t all have mouths). When man is estranged from his animal na ture , he is estranged from his source in divinity. He is like wax before the solar-fire of a god, or edibility in the devouring mouth of a n animal. He is unable to retain definition.

In the prow carving, the father holds a shallow feeding bowl before him. It shields his genitals, and it associates his genitals to the theme of feeding. The bowl's position parallels the presence above it of the child emerging from the woman's body. The hungry father reasonably might wish to project into his b i rd -son his sense of being estranged from the sacred, as occurs in another legend concerning a bird son, the legend of Icarus. The son m u s t know a fate from which the father is saved.

Vast wings, like abstracted maternal hands , insecurely at tached to his shoulders by wax, lift Icarus too close to the sun, so that the wings detach from his shoulders, and he falls to his death in the sea. The father m u s t come to know the devouring mouth and to wish that his b i rd-son should carry the mouth-pa in (perhaps abdominally, like Prometheus) in being weaned.

Primitive thinking depends on intuitions that modern man h a s largely lost. The meaning of the intuitions depends on two equations:

m a n + animal = man + god = man + vegetable

or:

the sacred = m a n + animal + god + vegetable.

If these equations break down, an intermediate s ta te comes into being, which is neither thought nor action, and is given shape to a s a sign language. Scripts and calligraphies have evolved under the pressure of the emerging sign languages.

The cloud pat tern in the Asmat carving is an instance of this. The newborn in the carving becomes a bird through the process of a calligraphy-making intrinsic to the cloud pat tern . Through the agency of its mother, it discovers its bird self, and through its bird self it discovers an idea of the future.

CHAPTER TWENTY 2 4 3

The mother 's imaginative identification with the newborn's aspirat ions aligns her to the depressive position. Indeed, all depressive s ta tes of mind are ones committed to a maternal depth in dimensionality of thought of this kind. The father's relationship to the mother and newborn inclines to a paranoid-schizoid competitiveness. It indicates how the inclination to commit incest (to murder and possess, to possess and so to murder) is inseparable from a paranoid-schizoid type of perception.

The mother 's res t raint on her greed concerning so desirable an object a s her newborn, her realization that it m u s t be allowed to be as free a s a bird, involves a turning away from inces tuous compulsion. And yet the dynamic of a work of art, like the dynamic of the h u m a n psyche, entails having (on the one hand) the incestuous confusions of the paranoid-schizoid position and (on the other hand) the renunciation of incestuous desire tha t the depressive position entails. Without the presence of the father, as agent for paranoid-schizoid desires and confusions, the carving would fall apart .

Coming to know a bird self is bound up in the imagination of the depressive position with the infant's need to reach out for a calligraphy. On the sarcophagus of Rameses III, in the Egyptian depar tment of the Louvre, hieroglyphs carved in marble reveal a procession of h u m a n figures, changing into a procession of animals. Under the pressure of the sacred, hieroglyphs come to acknowledge some essential connection between m a n and animal. The psyche h a s to be able to revert to the animal confusion of paranoid-schizoid states, in which the figure of an eagle cannot be isolated from the chained figure of Prometheus, in order to set in motion the capacity to symbolize.

Man h a s to register his difference from the animals, b u t first he h a s to reaffirm the equation of

m a n + animal = the sacred.

Once the concept of an inner world h a s been granted, it is possible to evoke the animal in the equation of

animal + god = man (for example, Prometheus)

as an important factor in the need to be able to project.

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Sacredness is a s u n that melts wax, a mouth that devours, a psychosomatic pain or pang of grief. Virgil's Aeneas, for instance, knows the sacred flame as a form of sorrow. The promptings of his dead father compel him on reaching the Italian shore to seek out the sibyl to ask her how he might descend into the underworld in order to meet with his father once more.

The solar temple a t Cumae, close to which the sibyl exists, is like a n Aesclepian dream sana tor ium and h a s a role in the rite of passage of Aeneas's descent into the underworld. Daedalus built the temple in par t to placate, in par t to thank Apollo, for having brought him safely in flight from Crete to Italy.

Aeneas s tudies the friezes carved by Daedalus on the gates of the temple. They recall moments from Daedalus 's time in Crete. There is no reference to the death of Icarus. Daedalus 's guilt concerning his son's death h a s paralysed his creative powers.

And Icarus, his share of the picture would have been great indeed. Hands of an artist twice had tried to mould out his fall in the gold; hands of a father twice had fallen from the trying. . . . (Aeneid VI. 9-44.)

The father's h a n d s had fallen in despair, in the same way as the two feather wings had fallen from his son's shoulders: an essential loss in mind of the poetic symbol tha t could, if found, lead mind back to the radiance of its objects. Daedalus builds a temple to the god who h a s destroyed his son; his grief is genuine, and yet he is identified with a power from which he is estranged, the sacrality he reveres.

The earlier fragmented legend of Prometheus is informative of this mysterious compulsion. Consider how Daedalus and Prometheus hold together similar motifs:

1. a solar-bull in the Minoan labyrinth eats the sacrificial victims—Daedalus—the bird-son Icarus who dies;

2. the solar fire stolen from Zeus—Prometheus—the eagle who pecks a t Prometheus 's liver by day.

It is a s though Daedalus were the father in the Asmat carving, who is forced to enter the depressive position and to lose the

CHAPTER TWENTY 2 4 5

premature idea of paranoid-schizoid integrity, which the carving embodies and from which it seeks to escape by means of its bird-like aspiration. The Asmat father (and Prometheus) would appear to be in a s ta te of projective identification with a woman in childbirth, whose pain is unbearable: it may be that identifications of this type add to the difficulties that face any mind in its a t tempts to move out of the paranoid-schizoid position.

Prometheus (and Daedalus) have a double-bind identification with the sacred. They venerate it as the source of being, while tormentedly having to give way to an impulse tha t would have them u s u r p its power (which is associated with the t ransforming powers of fire). The double-bind identification in certain Greek legends takes the form of a cannibalistic rivalry between father and son, who resemble mythic twins, forever at tempting to devour each other.

'The es t rangement of the gods and m a n is sometimes ascribed to Prometheus . . . the inventor of fire and of animal sacrifice" (Robertson Smith, 1897, p. 308n). But Prometheus discovered cooking by fire, not fire itself; he was the first priest to preside over the ceremony of animal sacrifice and its first victim, the cook and the cooked, which saved the tribe from perennial paranoid-schizoid profanity. The crime of stealing the fire contains the greater crime of having joined with his brothers to murder , cook, and eat the sacred child. The father in the Asmat carving holds a feeding-bowl beneath the emerging presence of his newborn son, a s though wishing for a similar nour ishment .

Prometheus 's si tuation is reminiscent of Phaeton, who bullied his father, the sun-god Apollo, into allowing him to steer the s u n chariot. (Phaeton is an Icarus seen in an unfavourable light.) Phaeton argued that if he were allowed to steer the chariot he would have "proof that Apollo actually was his father—a claim to legality tha t makes sense in terms of the belief tha t kings have divine right to exercise absolute power. Phaeton is unable to hold the chariot to its course: he scorches the earth, and, alternately, he freezes it. His father strikes him down, and, like Icarus, he falls from the sky into water and drowns. The father embodies a fear—and, indeed, the fate— that m u s t face any h u m a n being who wishes to make things: which is that the h u m a n being should acquire a sacrality or

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246 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

flash of lightning that he cannot keep in check (whether this takes the form of solar or nuclear power).

Heraclitus, as the poet of fire, observes that the s u n m u s t be kept to its course—"or the Furies will find it out". The gods, and not man, regulate its course. Scientific law, and the aesthetics of primitivism. originates in a sense of primitive jus t ice as a love of measure in otherness; it is inexorable. The s u n that rises over the sacrifice is a king at the moment of coronation, on whom no mortal eye may look. Marking out the passage of time bears witness to the psychosomatic jus t ice of the con-substant ial , a s does the eagle that pecks out Prometheus 's liver by day, though not by night.

A father who would inhibit the bir th of the bird-child m u s t suffer the fate of being identified with a mother and baby to whom he h a s denied celestial space and so h a s trapped in the travails of birth forever. In such an identification, the father knows that the sun that begins the day is trapped within him, and he m u s t keep the world forever in night. Prometheus bound to a rock in the Caucasus mounta ins is a Prometheus who thinks to control his mother, a s Uranus did Gaia, by means of a usurpat ion of her body in childbirth. The eagle that pecks a t Prometheus 's liver by day, and not by night, is the unborn sun or son within a mother 's body, whom the father has stolen. The son within the body needs to get out and rule the world, if only for a day.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The revulsion and fascination of certain European

travellers in west Africa echo the feelings that the

triumphant self has concerning the twin it has

banished. The paranoid-schizoid fear of otherness as

annihilation.

A l though science in its positivistic aspect is dismissive of magical thinking, its discoveries in technology often have the awesome effect of magical powers. Industrial

and domestic electricity would seem to have unleashed Zeus's thunderbolt , while the movement of a single switch can plunge a city into darkness . Similarly, the magnification of optical lenses, by which Galileo and his followers explored the night skies, can resul t in a phan tasy that might be either psychotic or revelatory.

I had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental bu t symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for the vultures, if there had been any looking down from the

247

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248 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

sky; but a t all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. [Conrad, 1946, p. 130]

The vista disappears, a s the binocular image leaps forward into the eye, so that the perceiver is aware of some impacting residue, the sh runken severed heads , and not of a symbolization. The binocular zoom is analogous in its effect to a tribal mask tha t expels a s ta te of impact at the expense of a diminution in meaning.

The bewildering effect of the impact recalls Descartes 's perplexity when considering a pool of melted wax. Any sureness in comprehension lies with the an t s and vultures, who do not ingest objects so much as make them disappear, as though eyes and mouths could be interchangeable in their tendency to devour.

We can discover this effect in another , earlier example, which ties a perception of the primitive aesthetic to the tradition of Byzantine iconism.

All her life [she] continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. [Eliot, 1872; 1950 ed., pp. 188-189]

Eliot's heroine literally cannot believe her eyes when faced by the alien, for in metaphor, at least, her eyes are diseased: and yet it is what her eyes see. and not their organic s tate , tha t pu t s her in mind of the disease analogy. The hypothetical deterioration in the organ of sight is so confused with a flamboyance in the visible that she cannot be sure how far the experience is a consequence of ascertainable t ruth .

The Dutch Protestant merchant William Bosnian visited west Africa in the late seventeenth century and observed the similarity between the religious cus toms of the natives a n d the practices of the Church of Rome. His finding Rome in Africa is not surprising. The Portuguese navigators and missionaries had colonized the coast for over three hundred years, and (as

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 2 4 9

earlier chapters in this book have indicated) cultural links with Europe and the Middle East extend back even further in time.

Alien Africa evoked the familiar lost cul tures of the Mediterranean basin . Bosman saw in the fetish cults an affinity to the religious rites of ancient Greece and Egypt. He dwelt on the fact tha t the Europeans in Africa lived in forts and experienced themselves as besieged. They were there to get gold and slaves, though Bosman only mentions inter-tribal slave trading. Some of them expected to convert the local inhabi tants to Christianity.

Bosnian's account of African culture is affectionate. He describes the golden ornaments worn in the hair of women as fetishes; h e sees the fetish as an adornment that increases attraction, one of the first informed definitions of the term.

The gold which is brought us by the Dinkirans is very pure, except only that it is too much mixed with Fetiches, which are a sort of artificial gold, composed of several ingredients. . . . There are also Fetiches cast of unalloyed mountain gold, which very seldom come to our hand. . . . [Pinkerton, 1814a, pp. 369-370]

Later definitions of fetish a s commodity or a s device by which sexuality is displaced would seem to begin here.

Some wear very long hair curled and platted together, and tied up to the crown of the head; others turn their hair into very small curls, moistening them with oil and a sort of dye, and then adjust them to the shape of roses; between which they wear gold Fetiches, or a sort of coral here called Conte de Terra, which is sometimes of a quadruple value to gold, as also a sort of blue coral, which we call Agrie, and the Negroes Accorri. . . [cf. p. 168 and Griaule's allusion to the pierres aigris). They are very fond of our hats, never thinking they pay too much for them. . . . [ibid., p. 387]

Another traveller at this time. Father Jerome Merolla, is unaware of how the rites that he condemns in the local peoples resemble the Christian rites he would encourage in them; yet he seems drawn protestingly into the primal current of emerging life in a way that Bosman is not.

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250 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

. . . while their children are young, these people bind them about with certain superstitious cords made by the wizards; who likewise teach them to utter a kind of spell while they are binding them. They also at the same time hang about them bones and teeth of divers animals, being preservatives, as they say, against the power of any disease. Likewise there are some mothers so foolish that they will hang Agnus-Deis, medals and relics to the aforesaid cords. . . . A woman came to me to have her son baptised, and who at the same time had the magic cord about his waist; I immediately ordered the mother to be whipped. . . . [ibid., v. 16b, pp. 236-237]

Merolla's severe account of the fetish cults does not anticipa te the later high aesthetic valuation of primitive intuition. He is unable to see a conception of the Christian relics he loves in the fetish objects; he cannot see how the native mothers ' anxieties about the fate of their babies is little different from the anxieties and unders tandably magical beliefs of mothers on the other side of the Mediterranean basin. He writes about the fetishes with an obscure sense of rage.

When the women are with child, they clothe themselves from the loins to the knees, after the country fashion, with a sort of rind taken off a tree, which is like a coarse cloth, and is so neatly interwoven, that it seems the work of the loom rather than the product of the earth. This tree is called Mirrone, the wood whereof is very hard, the leaves like those of the orange tree, and every bough sends down an abundance of roots to the ground. It is generally planted near the houses, as if it were the tutelar god of the dwelling, the Gentiles adoring it as one of their idols; and in some places they leave calabashes full of wine of the palm tree at the foot of them, for them to drink When they are thirsty; nor would they dare tread upon the leaves, any more than we would on the holy cross. But if they perceive any branch broke, they no longer worship it, but presently take off the bark or rind whereof the women with child make those garments, receiving them at the hands of wizards, who tell them to ease the burden of the great belly and cause them to be easily delivered. It is not to be imagined how careful the women are of this tree, believing it

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 2 5 1

delivers them from all the dangers that attend child bearing. Nevertheless, understanding there was one in the liberty of our mission, I went, well attended, and cut it down. The woman it belonged to asked why it was cut down; I told her I wanted it to cut into planks; and she went into her house without speaking one word more, [ibid., pp. 236-237]

In considering religion, we should not be obsessed by the idea of its necessary goodness. This is a dangerous delusion. . . . It may be very evil. [Whitehead, 1926, pp. 17-18]

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The rediscovery of the primitive aesthetic. Baudelaire, Cezanne, Picasso.

B audelaire's writings on art , dating from about 1850, are among the first recorded intuitions concerning the importance of the primitive aesthetic (Shapiro, 1978,

pp. 47-85). Comparable intuitions occur in Baudelaire 's contemporaries, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe describes a maelstrom in which pieces of furniture cling to the ebony walls of water. The furniture is poised against a seemingly still surface, as though it had been abst racted from time. The vortex revolves with vast efficiency, drawing the pieces of furniture into the point where the perspective closes together.

The significance of the maelstrom as a black hole of the mind is at least as old a s the Platonic cosmology, which a s sumes that planetary movement in one direction is divinely inspired and resul ts in universal creation and that planetary movement in the contrary direction is synonymous with universal destruction. The fact that the movement in one direction is touched by divinity indicates tha t it is a form of thought

252

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available to symbolization and aesthetic unders tanding; the movement of the planets t ranslates natural ly into the music of the spheres. The fact that the contrary movement of the planets is able to destroy the cosmos indicates that this is no movement in na tura l philosophy, in which the movement of a body in space and time is unable to change the context in meaning of the movement; it is an idea of movement in the anima mundi, in which some negation of demiurgic power is able to use a reversal in direction to deny the significance of the cosmos as a container of meaning. On this model, a magician, operating the microcosmic-macrocosmic model, claims to be able universally to change the meaning of a context by making some small change in the disposition of part icular things.

Arguably, the cosmos tha t resul ts from the reversal in direction of planetary movement is a black-hole cosmos of minus-space and minus-t ime, which s t ands in counterpoise to the meaning of beauty in primitive aesthetics. The radiant rationality of a universe that moves forward in space and time contains ant i-reason in the form of a catastrophic black hole, which draws dream into nightmare and nightmare into a void. The void cannot be distinguished from an absolute condensation of mass .

If modernism rediscovers the meaning of the relic through an idealization of things that have been separated from their function, it does so because the idea of a black hole in its dynamic imbues it with terror. The over-upholstered nineteenth-century sitting room contains a death-swirl, whose authori ty is less endorsed by the Old Testament than by the latest configurations in technology, the paddle-wheel and the turbine (later the turbine-engine). The bits of furniture that have been swept out of it and hang on the walls of the maelstrom, a s though they were works of ar t on the walls of a museum, are, in fact, about to be obliterated. Their apparent stability a s "timeless" works of ar t is untrustworthy: the black hole, whose proximity transforms them into sacred objects, is the god of sacrifice in a new guise, Descartes 's antagonist , whose power over the unders tanding increases a s psychosis takes over the mind.

Insofar a s the modernis t movement in the ar ts derives from primitive aesthetics, it both concedes authori ty to the idea of

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254 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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the black hole, while assert ing against it the contrary movement into beauty. Primitivism ins t ructs modernism in the need to resist the appetite of the Occidental city: a gargantuan s tomach, a species of Don Juan i sm, that devours everything. It gives debris a temporary dignity and mainta ins tha t the career of the bohemian or tramp-like artist , when posthumously idealized, absolves metropolitan greed. Bits of waste- land on the periphery of cities, the incidental—all these fragments m u s t be re turned to the first deluge and the first radiance, water and light, the turbine revolutions of light and shadow in certain of the sea paintings of J . M. W. Turner .

Night cities—Paris in particular—have a Homeric enchantment about them. Points of light emerge out of an ocean of darkness. Theatres, fairgrounds, luminous shop-windows, the diorama (a three-dimensional precursor of the radiant engulfments of the cinema), posters, prints, the sculpture of streets. Gates of ivory or gates of horn: the spectator looks into, or at, or around. But what is it that the spectator looks into, or at, or a round?

Baudelaire, writing about ar t in the Paris of the mid-1840s, knows how to read the text; b u t he realizes that something is wrong about his way of reading: certain sculptures in particular—tribal sculptures and fetishes obviously, b u t even Gothic sculpture—have a way of eluding his unders tanding. [The Louvre in Baudelaire's time kept its collection of Gothic sculpture in storage. If Baudelaire had been aware of this deprivation, he would probably have been unable to recognize it as serious. 'The resuscitat ion of Gothic sculpture, like that of Egyptian sculpture, came nearly a century later; never did Baudelaire refer to Chartres" (Malraux, 1960, p. 2). In fact, Baudelaire does juxtapose the ideas of primitive sculpture and cathedral, only to deny any link between them (Mayne, 1955, p. 120). This does not invalidate Malraux's point tha t the recognition of value in tribal ar t is connected to the rediscovery of Gothic sculpture.]

A noble savage walks through a city as though he had entered someone else's dream. Baudelaire might be the mirror reflection of the savage: he meets primitive artefacts with the eye of a n alert somnambulis t . He misunders tands pictures by

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 2 5 5

"reading" them as though they were pages in a book; a n d yet he leads his contemporaries in the verve of his sensing the counter-cul ture significance of tribal art , a s when he denounces with the vigour of a savage certain types of fashionable art a s le chic, a concept new in his time, and by which he meant manne r s of replication, empty stereotypes, often subtle in their mimicry of feeling (Mayne, 1955. p. 98. "Somewhere or other Balzac spells it 'chique'"—Baudelaire)

He anticipates the fact that the new aesthetic is indifferent to the vanity or greed of the spectator and marks a re turn from consumerism to the religious viewpoint. Cezanne gives the same at tention to a slipper, an apple, or a h u m a n head. Art no longer merely represents a subject. It h a s become the subject: It is because it is. It rejects illusionism as insincere. It h a s only a qualified interest in the benignity of perspective, which flatters man by conferring on him the belief that he can be mas te r of his surroundings .

In a n ecology of the high seas, ar t is ts think to create ideal habi tat ions in which minut iae can survive. The fragment of newspaper in a Cubist collage is a spirited survivor in a world in which newspapers are produced and destroyed within the span of twenty-four hours . Certain fetishes cut out of cardboard in the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology recall the pa thos in fragility of the collage—forms of construction that arrive a t the most sonorous projection in the 1912 cardboard-and-str ing guitar const ructs of Picasso. By minimal means, the craft of bricolage invokes spaces a s awesome a s the nave a t Chartres.

Two of Baudelaire 's descriptions can be pu t together in the form of a comparison, which, in fact, he does not make, though the na tu r e of his a rgument suggests that he might have done so. In the first description, a primitive person (the unacknowledged alter ego of the civilized spectator) looks at a painting; and Baudelaire compares this manner of using sight to monkeys who climb all over a painting, back and front, and fail to unders t and what the object means . The monkeys seem able to read the picture b u t are unable to fathom why the painted representation of a landscape h a s no existence behind the canvas.

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. . . The painter Catlin was all but embroiled in a very dangerous quarrel between two of his native chiefs; after he had painted a profile-portrait of one of them, some of the others started to tease and reprove the sitter for allowing himself to be robbed of half his face! In the same way monkeys have been known to be deceived by some magical painting of nature and to go round behind the picture in order to find the other side. [Baudelaire, fourth of four instalments of the Salon of 1859, published between 10 June and 20 July, 1859, in the Revue Francaise. Mayne, 1955, pp. 286-287]

The monkeys are baffled, because they cannot unders tand why an existent does not represent itself a s three-dimensional. Terrible things, s u c h as mirror reflections, masks , a n d ghosts, emerge from the collapse of three-dimensionality into the flat. An existent that is compressed into the flat is feared to be annihilatory as pa r t of the black-hole process that distils everything into the essence of nightmare. Monkeys represent the primitive element in everyone's mind tha t knows tha t flat representations—texts, codes, any literate communication—are collapsed from some three-dimensional s ta te and are already far travelled down the vortex of destruction.

The monkeys look behind the picture, a s though peering into an object to see what is going on inside it. Looking behind is the same for them as looking inside or getting into something. The picture is a box with a non-existent inside to it—a tricky, falsely reassur ing piece of furniture on the maelstrom wall.

In the age of Darwinian evolution, monkeys are no longer the captive figures of Rococo art: personifications of le chic. They are charged, accusing—and visible in any pass ing mirror. They existed in mythic time, and they anticipate the genius of primitive transformation, Picasso himself, whom Baudelaire obviously never knew bu t whose intentions he possibly foresaw.

All writing for the monkey is indecipherable hieroglyph—something to be wandered over and woven about , b u t not to be understood. The art ist a s monkey is someone who denies any

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 257

validity to social conventions, or j u s t refuses to unders tand them. He holds the book the wrong way up, partly in ignorance, partly because he ha tes the losses that literacy inflicts on his powers of intuition. He is the m a n who is determined not to read the images a t the first Lumiere film show and is derided when he ducks as the shadow train enters a station.

The cul ture of cities flatters its inhabi tants into thinking that they have a synthetic immortality. Everything is replaceable, like a plastic cup. Technology is an ineffective opiate tha t only intermittently can split off primitive awareness from the conscious self, with the resul t that the primitive is liable to re tu rn with renewed force. Human beings know, in some preverbal, non-contextual monkey par t of their minds, that their culture, sooner ra ther than later, m u s t be swallowed u p in some black-hole representat ion of a sadism that is seldom more t han partly defused. In his literalism and disregard of the social lie, the art is t a s monkey opens u p new techniques.

For Baudelaire, the "peasant, the savage and the primitive man" are upse t by painting—"because of its immense pretensions and its paradoxical and abstractive nature" (Mayne, 1955, p. 287). They feel no disquiet when faced by "a round, three-dimensional object about which one can move freely" (ibid., p. 286), and which envelops the spectator in a certain a tmosphere like any natura l object.

Sculpture comes much closer to nature [than painting does], and that is why even today our peasants, who are enchanted by the sight of an ingeniously turned fragment of wood or stone, will nevertheless remain unmoved in front of the most beautiful painting. We have a singular mystery here which is quite beyond human solving. . . . Though as brutal and positive as nature itself, [sculpture] has at the same time a certain vagueness and ambiguity, because it exhibits too many surfaces at once. It is in vain that the sculptor forces himself to take up a unique point of view, for the spectator who moves around the figure can choose a hundred different points of view, except for the right one [italics added]. . . . A picture, however, is only what it wants to be; it can only be looked at on its own

2 5 8 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 2 5 9

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terms. Painting has but one point of view; it is exclusive and absolute, and therefore the painter's expression is much more forceful. [Baudelaire, The Salon of 1857, in Mayne, 1955, pp. 119-120]

Baudelaire, as a literate man , is perplexed by elements in the world that are not par t of some code system.

The origin of sculpture is lost in the mists of time; thus it is a Carib art. We find, in fact, that all races bring real skill to the carving of fetishes long before they embark upon the art of painting, which is an art involving profound thought and one whose enjoyment demands a particular initiation. [Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846, in Mayne, 1955, p. 119]

Who could doubt that a powerful imagination is needed to fulfil such a magnificent programme? It is indeed a strange art, whose roots disappear into the darkness of time and which already, in primitive ages, was producing works which cause the civilised mind to marvel! [Revue Frangaise, 1859, Fourth instalment, in Mayne, 1955, p. 286]

Three-dimensionality is retrievable from the black-hole void. A girl aged fifteen weeks communicates the idea of a link between the idea of the three-dimensional and a nowhere place when she mimes the comings and goings of a friendly adult (who is visiting her) by moving her tongue in and out of her mouth. The place where her tongue goes when she pulls it back into her mouth is a nowhere place similar to the one that adults go to when they leave her. She communicates with her visitor by co-ordinating the idea of tongue movement with the idea of adul t feet in movement.

The void out of which three-dimensionality arises consists of two types of nowhere places. One is an absence of a possible concept of history. The other is the absence of a possible concept to elucidate prehistory, which the concept of myth a t tempts to do just ice for. Baudelaire is as puzzled as the anthropologists of his age were by the idea of the mythic imagination, which presented itself as an alternative to historical unders tanding. He sees Carib ar t as looming out of the mists of time, the mis ts being a shor thand for unknowability. He is

without a poetic symbol or transference object to make sense of the experience, and he is unable to formulate a secular interpretation of a religious phenomenon.

Lyell had shown up the falsity of a world picture whose meaning depends on the dating of some first moment of creation; he had undermined belief in time as originating in timeless revelation, whose reification in the present takes the form of the relic. An art arising from the mis ts of time is s tructural ly comparable to Lyell's unders tanding of geology, whose changes in formation require the concept of deep time to make sense of it—a time beyond the common-sense understanding of clock-time. If time is the mind of Platonic space, then Lyell's unknowable deep time converts space into a universal dumbness .

Worshippers of the sacred, who thought the reification of time to be idolic, found that Lyell had denied them the concept of the sacred. Believing that the world of things h a d emanated from the first moment , they had revered relics as creationist things that swam in the timeless and spaceless mind of God with the aqueous depth of dream images. Now they had to account for the mysterious originality of things a s foundlings left on doorsteps, out of nowhere and no-time, astral perhaps, like the fossils found in mounta ins that Leonardo thought to be the burn t -ou t remains of fallen s tars . The new things were found objects, owing nothing to dream states, perturbingly alien, flotsam and je tsam, often replicates, incongruous in juxtaposition and hard-edged, meaningful only in having a chic, surrealist absence of resonance. S tudents of myth in the nineteenth century looked for inspiration to genres whose appeal depends on their being found objects: the fairy-tale, ballads, folk art .

The notion of prehistory challenged the great nineteenth-century institution of history; b u t prehistory did not present itself a s a form of anti-history, or of history as a special dispensation; it presented itself a s a numinous and preverbal aestheticism. "The first example of Palaeolithic art—an engraving of h inds o n a fragment of bone—was discovered about 1834 in the cave of Chaffaud (Vienne)" (Laming, 1959. p. 15). Mary Anning's earlier careful chiselling of an ichysaurus out of the blue lyas s tone a t Lyme Regis had an effect on her contem-

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260 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

poraries similar to the discovery of a tribal fetish. Presumably, both bone fragment and fossil were per turbing because they had no known history. The language in which the text was written could not be deciphered.

. . . the spectator who moves around the figure can choose a hundred different points of view, except for the right one, and it often happens that a chance trick of the light, an effect of the lamp, may discover a beauty which is not at all the one the artist had in mind—and this is a humiliating thing for him. [Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846, Mayne, 1955, p. 120]

Baudelaire discovers in the relationship of the fortuitous beauty of city lights and the impactings of tribal sculp ture a programme for future art, which in effect h a s been realized. The contingent, fleeting qualities of city experience, which the cinema in part icular has been so adept at recording (glimpses of a face in a rain-swept street, the chance effects of pass ing light) are characterist ic of u rban intimacy and the speed with which u rban people intuit female and male aspects of each other, as facets to omniscient reverie, ra ther t han as unders tandings grounded in the dream-genealogy of pass ing generations.

Of certain of h i s mid-nineteenth contemporaries, Baudelaire writes (though he might have been writing about any modernist art ist since the time of Picasso),

They are as learned as academicians—or as vaudevillians; they make free with all periods and all genres; they have plumbed the depth of all the schools. They would be happy to convert even the tombs of St. Denis into cigar- or shawl-boxes, and all Florentine bronzes into threepenny bits. [Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846, Mayne, 1955, p. 121]

Since the time of Baudelaire, many ar t is ts have sought to join ra ther than to fight the monkeys, in an ar t tha t raises s t ruc tures from the abandoned debris of the cities. The power to salvage can exhilarate the spectator, a s when Picasso t ransfigures bits of a bicycle into a formidable Bull's Head (1942).

Objects denied their one-time function begin to proliferate meanings tha t are useful only in feeding the mind. Through the luxuriance of nature , the rus t ing machine in the jungle be-

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 2 6 1

comes a temple to the monkey god. The found object is entered into by a deity who exacts a sacrifice.

No one was more aware of the meaning of the maelstrom than was Cezanne. The making of ar t was like Jacob ' s wrestling with the angel; it involved a struggle with imponderable forces. Distrusting replication, and the autonomy in making tha t acts of replication imply, he confided to Joachim Gasquet that before the Mont Sainte-Victoire he did not think to copy a likeness (Gasquet, 1991, p. 153); he experienced a condition in which he a n d the mounta in seemed to disintegrate in perception, as though they both had been drawn into a vortex (analogous, perhaps , to the Platonic vortex in which music and the movement of the spheres became de-synchronized).

He a n d the fragments of the mounta in had to re turn to the origins of the world—a condition of psychic eclipse, in which processes of n u r t u r e were inaccessible. Actively and quite physically he disintegrated among mounta in bits. The articulation of meaning h a d not ceased: it was only when the confusion h a d ceased that he found himself in a context without meaning, without signs, and without any sense of selfhood. Without reason, a n d out of chaos, s trange markings emerged on the canvas, onto which he could hold, as though to save himself from drowning.

A constructivist impulse had been mobilized somewhere beyond the capacity to unders tand; something minimally was being made anew. To Gasquet (1991), Cezanne said:

When I think of the first men who recorded their dreams as hunters beneath cavern vaults, or of those good Christians who painted their paradise as frescoes on the walls of catacombs, I realize how they must have had to remake, as though for the first time, their craft, their souls, their capacity to mark down their sensations [p. 155]

The delicate calligraphy of Palaeolithic cave painting gave courage to the hesi tant constructivist impulse that had now come into being. It was necessary to rebuild out of debris.

"What I try to t ranslate is mysterious", he said to Gasquet (1991), "I tangle with the roots of being." He would lock the

262 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

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fingers on either hand together and say—you latch together in this way or you lose everything. "It seems as if no real change in the h u m a n mode of being can be achieved without dying to the previous condition." While facing the Mont Sainte-Victoire, h e would think to die to his previous condition. He would lose the distinction of inside and outside and discover s ta tes of mind not unlike those of certain infants or savages: he was, he admitted to Gasquet, at tempting to reverie about the existence of primal creation—the essential condition, in Coleridge's view, for acts of the imagination. He would experience sensat ion to transform into volume and value as though a t the moment of the first fiat. He recognized a Platonic order in which mathematics measured out the soul (Gasquet, 1991):

Geometry measures out the earth, and a feeling of tenderness emerges in me. Out of the roots of this tenderness, the sap, the colours rise up, as a kind of deliverance. An airy, coloured logic suddenly replaces dull, obstinate geometry. Everything organizes itself: fields, trees, houses. . . . I see! [p. 154]

In thought he travelled far from the mounta in while remaining dependent on its actual otherness. It cont inued to exist before him unchanged, though he saw it turn into a geological ossa ture before his eyes, a scanty a n d provisional assemblage, not unlike a tribal mask . Something ate the object away, devouring first its bloom and sensuous appeal, leaving only the skeletal and the geometric.

It was as though time had re turned to the t imelessness of prehistory, and in doing so had uncovered the anxiety of catastrophic change, which occurs on the threshold to the depressive position. Mind either renounces its own expectations to those of the object, or it re treats into s ta tes of deterioration that may lead to its being psychotic; either it identifies with the music of the spheres, or it finds itself taken over by the negation of positive planetary movement, the minus-space and minus- t ime of the maelstrom, which t ransmutes the fragments of a destroyed environment into a shr ine to the god of destruction.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 2 6 3

A characterist ic of the journey through the underworld of death and psychosis is the separat ing of sense experiences into isolated sensat ions. The authorit ies at the Museum of Mankind in London, pe rhaps without conscious intention, place a series of ornamented skulls close to their display of tribal masks . The skulls are factures on which a sculpting has been built . One of them h a s had added to it a cane jaw, a wooden nose, and cowrie-shell eyes. The mask , as a variation on the skull (which is a ha rdnes s beneath softness), is a ha rdness outside the softness of flesh.

Initiates to the African rites of passage are submit ted to elements, such as ha rd and soft, which have been isolated from each other in order to make the initiates "vividly and rapidly aware of what may be called the 'factors' of their culture" (Turner, 1967, p. 105) ". . . to enlarge or diminish or discolour is a primordial mode of abstraction" (p. 103).

Skull and mask personify the distinction of outside and inside as entities tha t are so dissimilar tha t they might be opposed. To an infant, a split between outside and inside might dissociate a mother 's face from the feelings that inform the face; it obliterates the scope of meaning and opens u p the prospect of two forms of ant i -humanis t invention:

1. gleeful idol metamorphoses, in which physiognomies are pulled and squeezed into an unending variety of shapes, similar to the psychotic bus t s of the eighteen-century sculptor F. X. Messerschmidt (Kris); -

2. s t range celebrations of the substant ial , which demonstrate the substant ia l to be hollow.

The skull in the first case is a framework on which clay can be worked. In the second case, the idea of the mask, a s a malign surface that takes shape out of emptiness, stirs a benign constructivist yearning to assemble s t ruc tures about a void. Bits and pieces, p lanks nailed or glued, conjoin about an emptiness like shanty-town hu t s . It is as though s ta tements consisted of predicates with only the void as subject.

In primitive thought, dead ancestors lose their individualities; they are reduced to being potentialities (Levy-Bruhl, 1936, p. 139). Space in the tribal mask condenses into surfaces in

2 6 4 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

which skin and bone are fused about an emptiness. The semblance of an individual face contracts into a black-hole m a s s so intense that it a s sumes the gravity of death; it pulls everything into its nowhere. Sometimes a mask comes to represent a feared mother 's body by acquiring a huge muzzle crammed with a pantheon of teeth-babies. Tribal m a s k s depend on scoopings out and swellings—as though someone were twisting intensities of feeling into an enemy's head.

Constructivism challenges the propositional logic of Renaissance ar t in which predicates m u s t depend on the existence of a subject. Renaissance ar t begins with a mass , a h u m a n body or a par t of a h u m a n body, redolent of intimacy, out of which definitions come into being. Things germinate from some centre. Committed to the iconic state in which mat ter incarnates spirit and the spirit is unity, the art ist cont inues to t rus t in the capacity of the subject to reveal meaning and passion, even when he a t tacks the idea of the subject violently. He underplays the idea of the void. He sees the lines of perspective, a s they contract into a distant point, a s roots extending from the root system of his eyes.

Cezanne, and later Picasso, make u n u s u a l communicat ions about the capacities of space to modify its inhabi tants : both of them intuit the existence of the black hole and realize that space in mind is dangerously gravitational. Picasso is fascinated by the possibilities of caricature, a s had been Baudelaire before him, and he knew how in tribal ar t the need to expel the terror of death sets off the compulsion to deform the appearance of things.

All alone in that awful museum, with the masks and the fetishes, I understood why I was a painter. Les demoiselles d'Avignon must have come into being that very day, but not because of the forms. It was my first attempt to exorcise by painting. Spirits, the unconscious (people weren't talking about that very much), emotion—they're all the same thing.

He had been working on the Demoiselles for two months . The visits to the Trocadero stimulated radical revisions to the

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two figures on the right of the canvas; women, both of whose faces are mask-l ike (Rubin, 1984, p. 250).

The compulsion to realize the existence of the minus-space a n d minus- t ime of the black hole within the movements of space and time precedes the discoveries of spatial deformation in optics, as in Malraux's fascination (in The Voices of Silence, 1956) with the aesthetic meaning of magnification in photography, to which the conversation with Picasso possibly contributed. Physical and mental abnormalities are tokens of the sacred. A savage who looks a t a stone and acknowledges a n indwelling god in it, a psychotic who squints a t the glare of a light-bulb and thinks it a demon, an infant who discovers a twin in the reflection of itself in its mother 's eyes, from the viewpoint of the sacred are signs of the theophanic. They have the art is t break away "from the dialogue implicit in many forms of art; far more coherently than the work of children, they destroy . . . the conventional relationships between the art is t a n d the outside world . . ." (Malraux, 1956, p. 562). During his early years, a s a deliberate imitator of Goya, and drawn to cruelty, Picasso had recorded the sight of diseased prost i tutes and blind beggars. [Rubin (1984) reminds u s tha t among the events that brought about a n unders tanding of the fetishes a t the Trocadero were Picasso's visit during the previous year to an exhibition of archaic Iberian reliefs a t the Louvre, his long-standing interest in the work of Gauguin, and his visits, in 1902. to the Hopital Saint-Lazare, where he had made drawings of prost i tutes afflicted by syphilis.]

The confident craftsmanship of the Renaissance disappears into nomadic hints tha t appeal by the fact of their being fleeting. Demons, unnamed powers, wild animals and unsecured spiritual energies, tha t "have certain mysterious powers of appearing and disappearing" (Robertson Smith, 1894, p. 120) h a u n t an empty site. The constructivist object exists at the point where things appear and disappear. It is to be found in the late water-colours of Cezanne, or in the tentative markings on the cave walls of Altamira, which have, in fact, lasted for millennia. The dead as ghosts, bodiless and t ransparent , devour solidity.

266 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

Intuition in primitive aesthetics discovers the motive for inspiration in landscape. The ancestors of the Australian aborigines dream into existence the meaning of the landscape, and in so doing they give it contour. Jacob in the Old Testament falls asleep in a nondescript place and through two dreams comes to realize that he h a s been sleeping close to the gates of paradise. Cezanne s tar ts from a setting that he knows to be far from nondescript and then discovers the meaning of the turbulent dream, which unconsciously h a s informed him, through a n act of integration that he thinks of as a grasping of a motif.

He does not think to bring a painting into being by willpower. He enters into reveries about the Roman civilization tha t had existed about the mounta in and about the conditions of prehistory that h a d preceded the founding of Rome. He becomes an agent for a thought, or potentiality, in the mind of his ancestors. "Before u s is a being of light and love, a universe that fluctuates—the hesitation of things" (Gasquet, 1991). Mind on the verge of depressive insight moves into the dimensionality of symbolism, or it is forced into a retreat that, if unarres ted, ends in psychosis. Cezanne's achievement in crossing the threshold into symbolization is to have his intuition of the mountain , as realized by markings on canvas, contain the history of its making as art . It has gravity because its m a s s contains the meanings of Cezanne's own struggle with the disintegrating powers of death.

The meaning of the skull within the mounta in , and the meaning of Cezanne's struggle, informs Picasso's unders tanding of the Trocadero fetishes, which homeopathically pu t him in touch with a religion devoted to the obliteration of the black hole. He had no need to re turn to the beginnings of the world; his intuitions were a-historical. It was necessary to trap a god in a stone. He told Malraux: "Give spirits a form and we become free from them. Fetishes are intended to free people." A notation of a specifically geometric kind compelled him to challenge conventional descriptions of space. Things related to each other, if a t all, mysteriously; subject was a pretext to give shape to a n underworld of minusTspace and minus- t ime that welled u p as a p ressure in mind.

The notion that a chair-maker m u s t have a blueprint of the chair in mind (something to hold on to) when he const ructs a

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 267

chair is foreign to the anti-replicatory na tu re of fetish thinking. Neither Picasso nor Cezanne know the provenance of the object. In the neoplatonic universe, the power of love transfigures the cosmos. In Picasso's universe the transfiguring power is death conceived of a s a psychosis that destroys the boundar ies of otherness.

Experiences of his ar t fuse with thoughts about his intimate life, a s though thoughts in his mind or thoughts in the mind of the spectator could not be differentiated. A painting of one of his wives is liable to become a painting of any of his wives, or of some thought concerning a possible wife in Picasso's mind, or, even more far-fetchedly, of the wife's spirit as indwelling in various canvases, transforming as it transforms in Picasso's mind. So far a s the content of his ar t is concerned, Picasso is as tribal a s any of the great African sculptors.

Byzantine iconism underlies the aesthetic of any art tha t he would have observed in the Spanish and French churches of his early environment. He rejects it—or, rather, he t r ansmutes it into an idolic ar t of hollows and voids. The geometry of spatial compression and surface-flattening, derived from the tribal mask , tends to be more extreme in him than the Poussinesque low-relief perspective that Cezanne was drawn to. An intensity of increasing compression closes in on the spectator: elements cut into each other to the point of disintegration.

The Demoiselles, as I have observed, is not the first Cubist painting. Indeed, while marking the final stages of Picasso's transition from a perceptual to a conceptual way of working, and suggesting something of the shallow relief space that would characterize Cubism, this great and radical work pointed mostly in directions opposite to Cubism's character and structure—although it cleared the path for its development. The Demoiselles obliterated the vestiges of nineteenth-century painting. . . . [Rubin, 1984, p. 253]

He discovers in the maelstrom a geometry that is beautiful. The collages he and Braque created have the power to release an architectonic space into a room: a stereoscope creates a similar effect when it h a s two identical photographs (twins) spring forward as a single perception before the spectator 's eyes. He takes an unpropit ious flatness and, vaunt ing over it, plays a

iiitii that

268 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

variation on the idea of a text's two-dimensionality. He compresses space into a condensation of improbable intensity and, by some improbable flair, h a s it leap outwards. He reverses the suck that draws all meaning into the black hole, and out of flatness gives bir th to the three-dimensional.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The relationship of Victor Turner's conception of the

rite of passage to Melanie Klein's two positions and to

spatial intuition in the writings ofW. R. Bion and

Esther Bick. The idea of the imaginary twin: W. R.

Bion and R. E. Money-Kyrle. Clinical material

concerning the nature of the psychosomatic. Donald

Meltzer and the good objects.

M elanie Klein's threshold to the depressive position and the liminal phase of the Ndembu initiation rite (Turner, 1967) are stages in transition and transfor

mation. The depressive threshold is a n interim state to be worked through ra ther than to remain entrenched in. It marks the beginning, or the failure in beginning, of an adul t willingness to take on responsibility for thought; and it a s sumes the existence of a nuc leus capable of either good or bad identifications and able to respond to assistance.

When faced by a n invitation to align itself with its good objects, the nucleus is vulnerable. Internal persecutors threaten it with death if it accepts the invitation. Guilt at former collusions against the objects may overwhelm it, and it may be compelled to take par t in acts that represent murder or suicide and actually may entail murder or suicide. Although suicide directs an at tack on bad objects, it "always aims at saving its loved objects, internal and external" (Klein, 1935, p. 276).

269

jAail

270 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

In the liminal phase, the tribe binds novitiates to it by projecting s ta tes of annihilation into them. Possibilities are dramatized within a restricted field. In the case of both rite and Kleinian therapy, the experience of annihilation is given a setting that can potentially symbolize the experience. But the capacity to symbolize is deficient in initiate and patient . Former models for thought have collapsed and have not been replaced; signs link to each other in ways that are unrelated to the function of t ru th . In the liminal phase , the term "symbolic death" describes s ta tes of annihilation in a conscious mind, more in identification with a dead child (often the dead twin), than in any likeness to na tura l death. In the depressive transition, the theme of annihilation can be lost in a n onset of confusion.

In the post-Kleinian writings of Esther Bick and W. R. Bion, the concept of the self undergoing experiential transformation almost disappears. Both Esther Bick and Bion describe a foundation to the capacity to make decisions in which the capacity is still rudimentary. Feelings remain latched to sensat ion, and the self h a s little relationship to internal figures.

The children Melanie Klein describes incipiently exist within the holding space of a good world, in which people and things have insides and outsides tha t lock into each other and are dynamic in their interchanges; that enter into splits tha t depend on spaces that are substantive, and across which projections leap like an electric flash between two points.

In her papers, at least, Esther Bick concentrates on aspects of infancy in which there is a falling-apart or a leaking or a provisional holding-together. The infants exist as actions in a nowhere that is everywhere: in birth, they are a s t ronau t s who have lost contact with their space capsules and drift in weightless space. Their feelings derive from sensat ions: they have little sense of internal figures to whom they might relate.

The foundation to the depressive transition tu rns out to be very close to the content of the liminal phase . Thinking in this archaic dimension occurs before the emergence of personality; and in it mental topographies might be views from nowhere.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 2 7 1

According to Bion (1962), the observing mind oscillates between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions unde r the pressure of emotionality. The mysterious arrival of a "selected fact" retrieves it from incoherence and grants it the temporary holding power of an insight. Mind in this aspect might be a Ndembu novitiate committed to helplessness and psychic annihilation as a means of arriving at a revelation.

In their separa te ways, Esther Bick and Bion create a phenomenological space comparable to the one of the liminal rite in which beings are conceived of a s masks , shapes containing a void, actors whose gestures embody an emptiness. The basis to being is an annihilation that is impersonal, a form of the sacred. The blow that kills the foetus may create an emptiness tha t needs to be filled.

The dance with masks is not mindless; there is thought and the makings of ar t in it; b u t mind within this setting cannot receive the powers of symbolization that allow for it to enter into, and retain, allegiances. It, too, is identified with an unsecured foetus. Bion's reaching out for the earlier s i tuation is evident in his paper, 'The Imaginary Twin" (1950), in which he brings forward the theme of the twin, and in R. E. Money-Kyrle's s tructural ly comparable A Note on Migraine (1963).

Both papers describe cases in which the idea of a dead sibling (experienced as a twin, though in Bion the "imaginary twin' is somebody else) disables the mind of the patient. An actual sibling death or miscarriage in the family has intensified the significance of the dead twin as a presence buried in the mind that insists on being released. Bion implies, ra ther than states, tha t a sister who died in infancy took over the mind of his patient; and that the patient projects the life that he would have led, if he had been free from possession, into the imaginary space of the non-existent twin—who is, by the fact of being imaginary (in the non-Coleridgean sense of being not real), denied any actual life. My belief is that the sister 's possession of he r brother ' s mind m u s t have occurred a t the time of the illness in infancy in which both children had diarrhoea, and the sister died.

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2 7 2 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

Money-Kyrle's (1963) pat ient h a s a sibling who h a d died in miscarriage (revealed in a dream by a sight of vomit and blood, not unlike the diarrhoea of the other case). The idea of the sibling materializes in one of her dreams a s a n imaginary brother with mad eyes, who h a s been involved in a car crash, and who smashes u p the headlights of the pat ient 's car. The headlights represent (as variables in meaning) the function of actual eyes, a s well as of eyes as the organs of psychic perception.

Bion and Money-Kyrle are concerned with thought disorder as a consequence of sadism. Following Melanie Klein, they believe tha t the self should be held responsible for its catastrophes . The mad brother is a guise of the patient, by which she smashes u p her own appara tus . Money-Kyrle (1978) informs her ". . . tha t she felt her migraine to be analogous to the blinding light St Paul saw on his way to persecute the Christians and tha t it was therefore related to her own unconscious sadistic phantasies" (p. 361).

The migraine is no revelation. It is dissociated from knowledge, and from any of the means by which knowledge is arrived at. It is a t tended by memory losses, which the analyst believes the patient is able to p u t into him, though within the context of migraine the patient did not experience failures in memory as losses; she perceived them as pa tches without significance; empty spaces without a history. [This is an issue about neither recalling nor memory. It is about a failure in communication between the self and its good objects.]

In one dream, the patient takes over the analyst 's place, and someone shows a book of paintings to three women "one who could hear b u t not see, one who could see b u t not hear , and one who could not remember . . ." (Money-Kyrle. 1978, p. 364). In order to equate seeing, hearing, and failing to remember—if this is what the bringing together of the three women indicates— presumably it is necessary to reduce perception and memory function to sensation, which may occur. But thought then originates in a dream in which the pat ient meets with a bizarre object. It h a s torn electric wires, which Money-Kyrle associates to damaged optic nerves. The pat ient h a s other dreams that present the bizarre object in less agglomerated forms as related to the theme of miscarriage.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 2 7 3

The twin intercedes between mind and the good objects in such a way that the good objects are able to convert sensat ion and sign da ta into the language of symbolization. If the twin is buried in the underworld of thought, from which s tems psychosis a s well a s death, it will no longer continue to be the essential link to knowledge; it will be transformed into an anti-knowledge or -K link, a dreaded ghost with the power to reverse t rends in development; and another intermediary will have to be found to exorcise it. Bion and Money-Kyrle recognize tha t the other intermediary lies with the power that discloses buried truth, or models for thought, by way of dreams. The t ru th disclosure of dreams functions in the same way as the ceremonies that face the Ndembu novitiate in the liminal rite of passage.

In her 1935 paper, Melanie Klein describes two pat ients in whom a persistent collapse of sensation into the sign language of auto-erotism h a d them falter at the depressive threshold. One pat ient was afflicted by diarrhoea and vomiting and thought himself poisoned. The other patient was confused by extreme sensat ions of a conflicting na ture . "In a friend's flat, he had repeatedly mixed up the refrigerator door with the oven door. He wonders whether heat and cold are, in a way, the same thing for him" (Klein, 1935, p. 280)

If sensat ion related to feeling is inhibited in finding a n intermediary to its objects, it will recoil in distaste at any goodness introjected into it, because it will be unable to assess it. It lives by sensation, and by feelings centred on sensation. Signs that verge on the s ta te of an intercession by which they might become thought, are discovered to be too runny or too lumpy (as tormented children might think of food) or reveal themselves a s distasteful liquids (blood, diarrhoea, vomit) or as hieroglyphic indigestible "bits". Anxieties about introjection, of the body taking in and put t ing out bad subs tances in the form of contaminated food or vomit and diarrhoea, convey an equation of food and miscarriage. All incorporation, whether of food or thought, h a s to be disavowed, like the dead twin, because it is too threatening. Unable to consolidate itself a s symbol, sign m u s t re turned, defeated, to s ta tes of disordered sensation, in which there is nothing to stop the slide into hallucination.

1

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2 7 4 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

The patient, who had alluded to the s ta te of the dead carp in his father's pond (uidep. 31 and pp. 72 ff.), on one occasion mentioned the scene in Joyce's Ulysses in which Bloom grilled kidneys and thought that he could smell ur ine in them— kidney-kidlets, the patient pointed out, and he alluded to the organic relationship of ur ine and kidneys. He talked about food as though he were put t ing out empty containers for thought which, if they were filled, would be filled with the ideas of either murdered babies or of faeces. It is possible to infer from the na tu re of his phan tasy that for other people an un-murdered twin may be the essential link, or intercessor, by which the good objects are able to fill the empty counters with meaning.

The second of Melanie Klein's two pat ients (Klein. 1935, pp. 279-280) h a s a dream in which sign bits are j ammed together, creating a n object that confuses the functions of a wash-basin, a lavatory, a n d a gas-mantle. It is the kind of object tha t Bion was later to call bizarre—a reversal of the idea of the black-hole maelstrom, similar in function and agglomeration to the Sphinx that faces Oedipus. In mythology there are many examples of a twin whose burial in the underworld has him tu rn into a representative of the -K link of a black-hole kind: the reflection in the mirror who sucks the life out of any mortal who looks at it, the Medusa, as well a s the Sphinx.

The significance of the dead twin as intercessor in Ndembu initiation rites is unavoidable, however buried the knowledge of its fate might be, since the novitiates (who are in puberty) are compelled to a s sume its fate. Summarily equated with corpses, they are "buried, or forced to lie motionless in the posture and direction of customary burial , s tained black, or forced to live for a while in the company of masked and mons t rous m u m m e r s representing inter alia, the dead, or worse still, the un-dead . . ." (Turner, 1967, p. 96). The tribe projects annihilation into them, and they are denied any form of social identity or classification. They become the living agents of a knowledge that mind cannot openly tolerate.

The fact "that they were not yet classified is often expressed in symbols modelled on processes of gestation and parturi t ion. They are likened to or treated as embryos, newborn infants, or sucklings by symbolic means which varied from cul ture to

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 2 7 5

culture" (ibid., p. 96). "Stobaeus. quoting from a lost work of Plutarch, asser t s tha t initiation and death correspond word for word and thing for thing" (ibid., p. 96). The rites bring together food poisoning, miscarriage, a n d the sign language of African art—the mask in particular—as means "drawn from the biology of death, decomposition, catabolism and other physical processes tha t have a negative tinge, such as mens t rua t ion (frequentiy regarded as the absence or loss of a foetus)" (ibid., p. 96). Newly circumcised boys are placed in the same category as mens t rua t ing women (blood—the antithetical miscarriage/ thriving foetus conjunction).

The migraine from which Money-Kyrle's (1963) pat ient suffered was meaningless and str ident in pain; the extreme na tu re of the lack of meaning and of the stridency were probably related. It implied the vehemence of a life denied because unsymbol-ized, a beat ing a t a door by a twin caught in a bombed-out empty space.

Emptiness fills with sensat ions that are unintelligible since they are unanchored in space and time. Unsecured, they turn into extreme and often unlocalized forms of pain. The emptiness may be related to the a b d o m e n / u t e r u s or to the inside of the head, or it may be duplicated, becoming the eyes of the dead or the empty eye-sockets of a mask . It indicates a voiding out of pain.

The fact that migraines can al ternate between the head or abdomen—places in which distress occurs, if mental or physical digestion should malfunction—is reminiscent of the clay Babylonian mask of Humbaba, the labyrinthine markings of whose features resemble a brain or entrails in dissection. The externalizing of a hypochondriasis in the form of a mask would appear to be the motive by which inside the head and inside the abdomen become interchangeable as representatives of the u terus , both brain and entrails indistinguishably being taken as sites for futurity and prophetic insight. The ancients contemplated entrails to l eam whether their ancestors augured them a good future. The sites for pain present themselves as empty, since the intensity of the pain cannot be tolerated enough to be translated into meaning.

Umil

276 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

The two gates that Homer's Penelope tells Ulysses about might be imagined, when opened, to contain identical empty spaces that look out over an identical empty vista. When p u t together, the two empty spaces begin to make a pa t te rn that is replicated without limitation, like reflections in two opposing mirrors. The gates, as ways out of the underworld, are outlets for a buried knowledge. Virgil indicates that the spirits of the dead communicate t rue dreams by one gate and false dreams by the other, which implies that plus- or minus-knowledge, reason a n d anti-reason, have one source. By implication, the subs tances that the gates are made of (horn and ivory) determine their function as communicators of t ru th and falsity, in the same way as Australian aborigines once believed that their ancestors had dreams that actually made the contours of the landscape. The gates exist within a similar unders tanding of the cosmos: they are not gates in somebody's mind.

The spirits who communicate false dreams by way of the ivory gates are a denied future ra ther than a denied past ; they are the children Ouranos suppresses in Gaia by pressing down on her during an unending sexual act. The gates are "pure" thoughts waiting to be filled by content: they might be two aspects of the same uterus , one of which will be filled with babies, and the other of which will lose the foetus in miscarriage. The foetus first comes to know of its twin by way of thoughts its mother projects into it. "I have lost one baby, I may lose another. There is an empty space, better keep it empty rather than fill it with a life that will be lost." In later years, the adul t will know two kinds of space: one is the space that contains mindless pain, which is the screaming of a life denied; the other is the space where the adul t cannot be, without stealing spatial properties that turn out to be at t r ibutes of the good objects.

Wittgenstein (1979) thought that s t ruc tures in myth were comparable to the gently modulated evolution of one shape into another in a geometric series; he saw no similarity between them a n d the machine-world view of cause and effect, a n d yet

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 2 7 7

there is a likeness. In the heavens of Plato's Timaeus, the planets travel in gradually modulated ellipses, and their movements embody intelligence; on earth, priest-kings go "round the city in the direction of the h a n d s of a clock" and promulgate "rules of conduct" (Hocart, 1927, p. 82). Such semblances of thought are drastically circumscribed as means to thinking. Like the pharaoh ' s worship of placenta and umbilical cord, they are devices intended to keep the good twin in the underworld and make emptiness meaningful. They hold together s ta tes of sensation, disengaged from good-object relations. They are as much manic defences against t ru th a s is the machine-world ideology which thinks in terms of cause and effect.

They are not secure; the furious twin erupts into them as a -K por tent filled with the power of underworld psychosis and death. Invasion destroys the series, tu rns the planets on their tracks, and reveals them to be, in their apparen t stillness, moving into the annihilation of a cosmic maelstrom.

When Marlow, the narra tor of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, perceives two images though his binoculars, he seems to think that the meaning of the two images, which is a function of his unders tanding, was conditioned by the remarkable optics of the binoculars, a s though the optics had the magical powers of ivory and horn. He sees a nondescript scene through them and then, by a lens zoom, he sees a horrific t ruth. The effect of the zoom is intrinsic to the meaning he discovers in the scene: it is as though the zoom were an extension of his thought processes.

The two images he perceives are like the spaces in the opening of two sets of gates, one the space that contains the screaming of a life denied, the other the space where the self cannot be, without clandestine appropriation. This was the case of a woman whose looking in adoration at her child turned out in the transference to be a stealing of someone else's adoration. The event she described was crucial to an unders tanding of her psychopathology. She was looking out of a window and she saw her beloved twelve-year-old son s tanding by a lit bonfire; he was holding a canister of petrol in his hands . At this point, she h a d a migraine attack—acute pain in her head, scintilla and blank pa tches in her field of vision. She was on the threshold of the depressive position, and sensat ion was in the process of converting into sign and then into symbol.

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2 7 8 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

In the event, it turned out impossible to travel further with her: the image of the child by the bonfire marked the most advanced point of he r therapy journey.

The premonition of her son being in danger a s he s t ands by the bonfire and the awareness of pain and of a dis turbed visual field were two events like empty spaces that h a d been temporarily filled. Within the terms of the machine-world view, the two events relate in terms of cause and effect and in terms of a subject and an ob jec t^ tha t is, it is possible to see the possible meanings of perception

beloved child + bonfire + canister of petrol

as "causing" the onset of the migraine; or to perceive the observer and observed as subject and object, and to have them influence each other a s cause and effect.

But, in fact, the beloved child by the bonfire a n d the disturbed field of vision lie side by side isomorphically like snow crystals. "As one might il lustrate the internal relation of a circle to a n ellipse . . . to sharpen our eye for a formal connection" (Wittgenstein, 1979, pp. 8e-9e). To cross between one empty space and the other entails a rite of passage. Cataclysm is the point to s tar t from—the burden tha t the priest-king insists its twin m u s t carry. The s ta te of blank patches, scintilla, and meaningless pain takes logical priority over the perception of

beloved child + canister of petrol + bonfire

a constellation of sensat ions denying meaning that h inders any movement into development.

She appeared to be undergoing a psychic greenhouse effect. At one time I had thought of her migraine experiences as representing a pre-verbal form of possessive love; b u t through the transference I came to learn that the adoration she felt for the child had been stolen from the therapist as mother and was a n adoration that her internal mother had intended for an imaginary twin. (Her actual mother had made a meal of the fact tha t she had never given birth to a boy.)

She cherished the child so long as she was able to think of it as belonging to her, "my baby"; and she at tacked it as soon as

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 2 7 9

she felt threatened by the unconscious postulate that it might be someone else's child.

In terms of her infantile experiences in the transference, she saw the bonfire and cherished child a s images within her mother 's b reas t s or eyes, m u c h as Coleridge (pp. 130-131) saw the fire burn ing in the grate in his room, and the s tars in the sky above the garden outside his room, as images suspended in the membrane of his s tudy window. As images within the breast , the child was the brother she had never had, and the bonfire ambiguously represented two threats: of her own jealous rage a t the existence of this child and, more mysteriously and frighteningly, the dangerous possessive pass ions that unconsciously she accredited to her mother and which her mother had been unable to insulate her from. (Consciously, she had experienced her mother as unfeeling and a bit strange.)

As was the case with Money-Kyrle's patient, she dealt with he r inability to transform sensation into symbol by at tacking the therapist 's capacity to reverie: she tried to p u t the -K migraine sensat ions into him. At some level she m u s t have intui ted tha t a capacity for reverie depended on some intuition of the good objects' gift of innate proportionality, out of which symbols come into being.

She a t tacked the therapist 's capacity for reverie, a s though it were a loved infant that she wanted to make her own. Since she could not appropriate the foetus of thought within the cul ture of the mind in which it lived, she had to appropriate it as a dead ripped-out thing.

She would begin sessions with some out-of-the-way anecdote and have the therapist chase after the point of the anecdote, h is ability to think being seemingly at her command. Eventually, a s a clue to her behaviour, she reported an incident concerning a m a n who had phoned her to say that he intended to leave off a child with her. With a touch of whimsical cruelty, the m a n proposed that they should meet for the hand-over at various remote and inconvenient spots.

She was committed to manipulat ing the transference so as to avoid experiencing its depressive potentiality to transform meaning. She at tacked the space in the therapist 's mind in which meanings could arise. In the transference she represented this space as a space in her own body, a confusion of

2 8 0 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

head and abdomen/womb characteristic of the classical definition of hysteria as a wandering womb with mental a t t r ibutes and typical of the head / s tomach oscillations of migraine. She equated the contents of the therapist 's mind with the contents of her abdomen/womb.

A year before she had entered therapy, she had arranged for a surgeon to b u r n out her fallopian tubes. She had been under sedation, so that she had been able to undergo the terror of the bonfire (the migraine pain) without feeling any sensation. She was fascinated by people who arranged to get themselves surgically operated on for no genuine reason, and she knew of this activity a s a well-documented perversion. She spoke admiringly of a n u n who travelled the world to have unnecessary operations and who allegedly kept hypodermic needles in a locker.

She believed, with good reason, that her mother had been cut off from her—possibly cut off in reveries about needles and lockers: and she had to project sensat ions in order to activate a breast that outwardly was insensate and that inwardly b u r n t as a bonfire. She presented a condition of both anaesthet ized response a n d str ident sensation.

She drew a distinction between colonialists and emigrants at a time when she was beginning to hold less rigidly to the belief that the therapist 's mind was co-extensive with hers . She said that a colonialist is a predator who takes over an object and destroys it, while an emigrant is someone in exile who feels helpless and is able to be grateful when given a haven.

She thought of the therapist much as the early navigators had thought of Africa—as a culture that becomes cryptic, opaque, and dangerous when it cannot be controlled. The therapist did not exist, except a t moments when he acted against her wishes; and he then irritated her. He was the native who failed to remain in the background. She continued to insist that his mind was an extension of hers .

She made the distinction between colonialists a n d emigrants when talking about a man who had taken up too m u c h of her time. The colonialist in her account was the client, not she. And yet the fact that the distinction had occurred to her a t this moment implied that it had some bearing on a change in the c i rcumstances of the therapy. She was giving up a little he r

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 2 8 1

colonial claims on the therapist 's mind and beginning to establish a relationship to it as a possible emigrant (though this was never to be realized).

She began to refer to people who were damaged. She talked of a meeting in her counselling practice with a woman whom she described as having had half her bra ins scooped out. Actually this was how the therapist 's mind sometimes felt after a meeting with her. The husband of the woman who at tended the meeting (he brings the woman; they are a couple) kept moving the chairs about, on the pretext that the counsellor would not then have to move her head from side to side as she talks to them. (He is a version of the man who suggested remote and inaccessible places to h a n d over a child to her.) She tells the m a n sharply tha t she can move her neck. She reported events in the session in a way as to have the therapist swivel the eyes of h is mind as though watching a tennis match .

She was invaded by images of devastation when faced by the possibility either of two similar objects becoming identical with each other or of two identical objects (thought of as inseparably one) beginning to separate from each other and to reveal their differences. The model in thought was of a mother in reverie being able to allow twins a comfortable space in the womb. She was threatened by the presence of the therapist as soon as the relationship began to cross the threshold of the depressive position, and this was where the migraine phan tasy of the cherished child and the bonfire h a d appeared. She h a d to re-establish her control over his mind, as though it were a par t of herself available for abuse . Her strategy was no different from the conquistadors who destroyed the Incas or the traders who looted Africa.

Conclusion

He who knows the power of the dance dwells in god; for he has learnt that love can slay. [Rohde, 1897, p. 263, quoting Jelaleddin Rumi]

A man talks of light falling on windows and then of explaining the theological doctrine of three in one to his daughter . It was

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possible to think of the windows as his three sess ions a week, which caught and reflected the light of the one (the light of his combined good objects), and of the fiery light from the windows as a source of illumination that had to be angled into obscure areas of his mind. The light came from within him, though nei ther he nor anyone else could perceive its source.

In terms of the theory of the sacred, his twin knows the light which he knows by intimation; and the twin m u s t be destroyed by the light. A t rauma, which possibly occurs in pre-birth, liberates one par t of the mind from the prison of the self, which another par t (the priest-king) embraces eagerly, without realizing tha t the twin who "dies" at the time of bir th is the source of grace and renewal.

Coleridge describes mind's es t rangement from its twin in terms of two types of learning. Knowledge by understanding has mind consti tute the world of experience and of science by means of the senses and the intellect. It interrogates na ture . Knowledge by reason uses knowledge by unders tanding to record the perceptions of the mind's eye. It operates without reference to space and time and is indist inguishable from the objects it perceives. The objects of reason "are themselves reason" (Rooke, 1969. p. 156).

For Coleridge, knowledge by unders tanding is like steel, which has "hardness, brittleness, high polish and the capability of forming a mirror"; b u t knowledge by reason is like plate glass, which has the qualities of steel. In addition, it invokes, by its "transparency or power of t ransmit t ing as well a s of reflecting the rays of light", aspects of the na tu r e of reason (Rooke, 1969, p. 157).

Knowledge by unders tanding reached maturi ty in Newton's na tura l philosophy, which a s sumes as a postulate that certain quantit ies should be universally determined. Dissociated from any ground in unknowable being, unders tanding can only perceive fixities and definites. A ruler of a certain length in one place h a s the same meaning in another place and another time.

Such an unders tanding searches for poetic symbols to make sense of its estrangement, b u t it is without the means to achieve this end. An idolic conception of the world cannot comprehend the iconic. Poetic symbols are not objects of un-

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derstanding: they are not fixed quantit ies in the world; and this is why the unders tanding is unable to know them.

The idea of a universally fixed quanti ty is a misconception of internalized probity, of just ice and t ruth, a s ideas that Epimenides dreamt of in his mind's eye while asleep in the Asclepian cave. In s u c h dreams ideas are facts; they exist in the landscape of mind like mounta in ranges.

To meet one's good objects face to face is to walk into .the fireball. Donald Meltzer, in discussion, h a s suggested that the light of the combined good objects would be blinding if it were to be seen directly. Conceivably foetal sensat ions can be so intense tha t they inhibit the emergence of definition or embodiment—one source for a theory of the sacred as a cataclysm in which naming and continuity a s the bases of prediction are inaccessible.

As soon as the notion of anything begins to form, an energy enters in and destroys it. Sensations are intensities of pain, often disguised as extreme sense impressions (absolute hot or cold, for instance). An intolerance to the pain may lead to a loss of t rus t in the senses as having meaning. Such sensat ions destroy embodiment and so cannot be located. Sometimes they appear a s somatic distresses that cannot be related to any par t of the body, sometimes as feelings that are isolated from h u m a n relationships. Sensat ions so intense can take the form of a black hole. They can drive mind into an over-estimation of the need for embodiment and into a belief in facts a s obdurate or unt rans la table actualities. In such s ta tes the thought is distressing tha t disembodied t ru ths might exist.

We begin as thoughts in our mother 's mind, inseparable perh a p s from visionary wonder, and to an extent some of us never become anything else. We embody the emptiness of a womb that waits for someone else. And to some extent we contain the empty u te rus . A man on the threshold of the depressive position unde r s t ands himself in infancy to have been intruded into by his mother: he h a s since retreated. He was not an incubator baby: b u t if distressing incidents occur, he experiences them as though from behind a pane of glass.

284 DISAPPEARING INTO LIGHT

He h a s a b lankness in him where lively exchanges should be; and he seems unable to talk freely with himself. He says he is timid, and this is why he is reclusive. His thoughts t ranslate into transference meanings and then when re turned to h im enter an atmosphere without resonance; they fall dead.

The question of ending therapy is raised. It is a s though he had been looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, and the telescope, in being turned about , th rus t s its image of the world into him. He experiences the idea of an ending, as he had experienced the dis tant accidents, a s a fact in the world, and not as an event in his mind. Unable to have feelings about the possible ending, he h a s s tr ident sensations instead—as though pain could only speak to him in this way.

In the night there is a frightening crash behind his head, and he wakes from sleep with a s tar t . He thinks loosened bricks in the chimney stack in the wall at the back of his bed have fallen down inside the stack. His way of turning psychic events into obdurate facts h a s him experience the pain of thinking about an ending as a violent auditory sensat ion.

His muted distress conveys a sense of alienation from any ground to being. Nothing can be exactly named: sensat ions cannot be denoted. His anxiety is like a membrane containing violent sensa. Possibly the cutt ing of the umbilical cord played some par t in restricting his attention to the ant i -reason of pre-birth. His belief in the obduracy of facts is enforced by pressure from the split-off membrane containing violent sensa .

The sacred as cataclysm precedes the coming into existence of the capacity to split the content of perceptions into the good and the bad. Its value and its meaning are uncertain. An embryonic mind realizes its source in the engulfing radiance of the combined good objects and shr inks away devastated.

Those who believe that the concept of evil is based on a misunders tanding of the good conceive of cataclysm as a misapprehension of eternity and think of anchorage in space a n d time as false. But though cataclysm a n d eternity have outward characterist ics in common—they are unbounded and pre-definitory and draw attention to a disconnection between

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 2 8 5

sensat ion and reference—the meaning of a cataclysmic s ta te before the split into good and bad objects is unlike the meaning of a s ta te of cataclysm after the split has been resolved. In one there is no relationship to eternity, in the other cataclysm is conceived to be an aspect of eternity, while evil is to be seen as a misapprehension of the good. In the light of an eternity that is theologized as a t rue god, all types of quantification are false idols or fetishes. The idea of cataclysm is a misunders tanding of a religious mystery.

Descartes faced by the pool of melted wax knew a representation of a mind that had been destroyed by cataclysm. It has none of the definitions by which it formerly knew itself. He relegates the cataclysmic s ta te of mind to his twin, who reappears a s -K, the antagonist he m u s t propitiate, by handing over to him the ability to verify t ruth by way of the senses. He seeks t ru th by reasoning towards it a s an innate presence in the mind. Yet it is here, in the inner world, ra ther than in the actual world, tha t he m u s t first meet with the antagonist , for the experience of cataclysm as well a s the idea of reasoning derives from foetal intuition.

Anti-reasoning, cataclysm, the black hole, the sacred, give rise to the epistemology of hysteria (which includes the epiphe-nomenon of the migraine): an incoherent environment, by means of which the shades and the "bad" ancestors, the dead in their malicious guise, possess the mind, and in which no one can discover a meaningful link between symptom and disease, name and identity, or the various stages in the history of a n identity. In Descartes, anxieties concerning the epistemology of hysteria are translated into modes of perception characteristic of witchcraft. Neurology subst i tu tes -K links with K links, though of such a muted kind that they do not do just ice to the phenomena; the cause-and-effect links of the machine-view of the world make no sense of mythology or of its ideology, the epistemology of hysteria. It relies on verisimilitude and not on recognition as the mainspring to truth, and it abandons the idea of t rue reason as a proportionality, a music, or a mathematics arising out of the unknown of the innate good objects. It places its confidence in the fact that objects in space and time can be mirrored, and it a s sumes mirrors to be the servant to its wishes.

^

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In birth, one twin m u s t disappear into Kronos's throat in order that the other may a s sume the power of the sun . Priest-kings (like Prometheus) contrive the slaying of the victim and the act of ritual cannibalism and then find ways to disperse responsibility for their crime (Vernant, 1991, pp. 299-300). The psychotic metaphysic comes into being: the growing child comes to realize that what is most far from it (Le. the fireball) is most within it and probably will destroy it. Adult life will overlay this insight; it will raise a belief in the universality of the fixed quanti ty as a talisman for sanity. In space or time what is far cannot be what is near . The notion that something absolutely outside is also something absolutely within will be rejected as incoherent. But only when it is faced by incoherences of this kind will mind seek to liberate itself from a tyrannical belief in the obduracy of fact by seeking out symbols t ha t bear witness to the unknown.

AFTERWORD

The fetish as inhibitor of thought.

The cul ture of psychotherapy exists on an intersection between history and myth. When history and myth are isolated from each other, one of them, or perhaps both of

them, is liable to be degraded into a type of fetish. By a fetish I mean an embodiment that has the power to

inhibit thinking. This is to asser t a paradox, as something that belongs to mat te r should have no capacity to disable ideas.

In fact, fetishes are beguiling delusions that would seem to bridge the different conditions of mat ter and ideas: they are assemblages, like the collage, in which actual bits of the world and representat ions (or ideas) of the world lie side by side.

A fetish is a physical fragment lodged in the translucency of an idea. A patient, whose mother had carried a stillbirth within her for months when he was young, was in touch with this possibility when he alluded to a piece of shrapnel in a friend's eye, which might no longer disable perception if it were removed. The shrapnel in his thought functioned as a fetish,

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blocking perception because it embodied the t r auma of a foetal death that had not been thought about .

The existence of fetishism, and possibly of assemblage, implies some unacknowledged breakdown (i.e. an unacknowledged stillbirth), which may take on a social a n d / o r metaphysical dimension. For instance, embodiments in Platonism "participate in" ideas without being lost in them; the stability of the universe in which they exist allows for a secure bridging system to arise between them; the embodiments are courtiers in a hierarchy in which the king actually is the idea. Governed by the principle of sufficient reason, everything h a s its right place. At times of disorder, sometimes creative disorder, as when conceptions of an infinite universe replace conceptions of a cosmos, the fetish is liable to be summoned u p as a subst i tute for the notion of "participation", so that a charismatic materiality, evoking s ta tes of mindless reverence, blocks the way to any perception of the idea.

A fetish is of the same order as a psychosomatic transformation of an idea into a mindless bodily pain; it exists on the depressive threshold as an idol that distracts at tention from the need to u s e mind in the service of symbolization. It is a t ranscul tural object, a n essentially political object of bar ter a n d negotiation, which is fundamentally meaningless, like the "gift" Mauss writes about (1923-1924), and it distracts people in different ways.

It inhibits thought because its physicality tends towards the non-representational, and thought needs to represent something if it is to articulate itself. It symbolizes little, if anything. Any representational power it may have is directed towards itself, to enhance the presence of its own being. It pu t s over a mindless physical charm—in the way that certain narcissist ic people do.

At the same time, it provides a model for a central doctrine in modernist aesthetics—the doctrine of Isness, in which a work of ar t is admired because it is able to be charismatic of itself.

Unlike the icon or the idol, whose authori ty depends on their being emanat ions of group reverie, the fetish depends for its appeal on an isolated communicant: it sets up a narrow intimacy, which someone outside the intimacy may disapprove

AFTERWORD 2 8 9

of or fail to unders tand . The fetish posits a double consciousness "of absorbed credulity and degraded or distanced incredulity" (Pietz, 1985). Without the fetish, there would probably be no erotic reverie.

Its existence depends on an act of misappropriation. Its char isma is a delusion that arises from the conviction that the self can endow its own faeces with a radiance that it h a s robbed from its good objects. The site of the theft is of a specifically maternal kind. The weapons of Perseus (the root of whose name, persu, is probably one of the sources of the word personality)—his sandals , sword, sack, and mirroring shield—are tokens of an inwardness (i.e. baby) taken from a beautiful mother, who by this theft is turned into an outraged Medusa, a formidable guardian of the underworld. The Medusa is a version of the Oedipus sphinx: a fetish of the mother-foetus, which defends against the phan tasy of miscarriage.

The intersection

Imagine a h a n d drawing a straight horizontal line, which crosses a vertical line tha t lies at right angles to the horizontal. The meeting of the two lines is the only contact either h a s with the other, or with anything else.

The intersection is a module; it could evolve into a geometric form, or into the site of a cross-roads, or into the black-and-white squares of a chessboard. It is the setting for possible identifications, and to this extent it is a mythic representat ion. You might think of the lines as a rms extending from a skeletal s t ructure—a backbone, perhaps . If you identify with the point of intersection, you might be a mother or a foetus in the act of birth, or you might be a mother adhering to a foetus that is either dead or alive.

Frances Tustin has observed how the drawing of two lines that cross each other at right angles can augur a movement into integration among autist ic children. Sometimes a child will represent the crossing of the two lines in other ways: by holding two pencils together, or by pointing to the crossbars in a window. Frances Tust in (1981) believes that when the right-

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angle crossing of lines occurs, the child h a s begun to ". . . hold good things inside the body" (p. 158). Up to that point the child h a s related to surfaces without any notion of an inside, which means that the surfaces cannot integrate into three-dimensional objects; they can only be known as isolated sensat ions: of hot and cold, say, or smooth and rough. With the drawing of the intersecting lines, some notion of an object with an inside comes into being, and with this notion appears the intuition of mind being able to retain thoughts .

The point where the two lines cross is potentially an inside space, a container in which a pregnancy might take occur. Often difficulties in accepting this realization depend on some assumption that the spot is the site of miscarriage and suicide.

Such an assumption belongs to the class of t raumat ic or fetish thoughts, which have the char isma to arres t any capacity for thinking about the subject. They are able to make disappear all evidence of the phan tasy of pregnancy, including the marking of the site by the two intersecting lines. If they can be deterred, the self as agent to the drawing of the intersection will be able to locate depressive sorrow in space and time.

Psychotherapy realizes itself in the world a s sessions, supervisions, lectures: events in space and time. In sessions, pat ients often speak in a meaningful way about the pas t a s a receding object, or as an object determined by some biological conception of process. In a historical way, therapists often write up their recollection of sessions in sequence and with a sense of events as unfolding in space and time.

To this extent, psychotherapy h a s an Aristotelian conception of history as based on biological organisms that spontaneously evolve towards self-fulfilment. But from its beginning, psychoanalysis knew that its site was the intersection between history and myth, and not history alone. Freud at tended to the disjunctions and displacements of dreams, whose syntax belongs more to the codings of myth, drama, and rite, a n d to a theory of psychic cataclysm, than to history or na tura l evolution.

AFTERWORD 2 9 1

From the historian's point of view, the entry of myth into history resembles a meteor entering the field of gravity. From the mythologist 's point of view, the entry of the meteor into the field of gravity resembles the fall of a Lucifer, whose br ightness reveals the spot where a murder—either psychic or real—has taken place. If the light of a falling angel is at t r ibuted to the meteor, then the meteor becomes a fetish, a charismatic object with the power to disable thought.

A strange distortion then occurs to the sense of space and time. Pausanias , who wrote a Guide to Greece in the second century AD, informs the reader that the cross-roads where Oedipus killed the stranger, whom he later l e a m s to be his actual father, happens to be an actual place. An exotic myth, which may have meaning for foreigners, s t rangers , people from other planets perhaps , suddenly turns out to be about an intimate relationship to an actual father and to the roots of an actual history; events that one had not thought about, because they did not seem to represent anything, or in any way to be thinkable, suddenly come into sight, as though someone had focused a pair of binoculars. The baby a t the breast realizes tha t the milk it sucks into its mouth provides insight concerning a world within the breast a s well as being a subs tance p leasant to taste.

Pausanias writes: "Further along the road you come to the SPLIT as they call it; on this road Oedipus murdered his father." A recent commentator on Pausanias adds: "the SPUT [is named] after the ancient cross-roads, which were still plainly visible in the summer of 1963." [Levi, 1971, p. 414]

In history the negation of space-t ime narrative is the oblivion of t r auma or the oblivion of automatic replication. In myth the negation of free-floating oceanic s ta tes of metamorphosis is the labyrinthine and prohibited compulsion of incest. The s tranger you meet always turns out to be a brother or sister, if not a mother or father. On the other hand , if history and myth are isolated from each other, thought finds itself unable to be mobilized.

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In R. C. Sherriff's play. Home at Seven, the central character , a commuter, reaches home from work as regular a s clockwork a t seven o'clock every weekday evening. He holds onto seven o'clock as though it were a tal isman. One evening he re tu rns home to discover that though his sense of time as replication is unaffected, he has had a memory loss, and his internal clock h a s missed out on twenty-four hours .

Within the context of history, his memory loss is meaningless; it depends on some description in terms of t r a u m a and automatic replication, which are ways of describing the meaningless. His obsessionality depends on his us ing seven o'clocks as though they were identicals, which they are not: they are similarities; and he uses the idea of identicality a s a fetish to ward off any intimation of catastrophic change. In terms of myth, though, his memory loss begins to disclose meaning. The people a round him seem to be aware of the lost twenty-four hours a s having a content that is prejudicial to his well-being. Some of them begin to think that he was responsible for a certain act of embezzlement, and for a murder , which occurred during the lost time.

He resembles the Oedipus of Sophocles, who is cast in the role of the scapegoat because he h a s a gap in his awareness where a gap should not be. The gap is a version of the stillbirth that cannot be thought about . In this context, memories are alibis. If you lose them and lose your delusional sense of control, then other members of the group may project into you the evidence of a ca tas t rophe that you have spent a lifetime in avoiding. In this case, the catas t rophe is defined as a "crime".

In terms of history, the lost twenty-four hours is an absence that resonates, like a void in which a headache begins. It is as though the commuter had been pushed out of his rightful place in. space and time by some usurp ing presence, which tu rns out to be related to insight, and he knows of nowhere else to go. In order to survive, he h a s to wipe out the usurp ing presence, and since the presence is the organ for psychic unders tanding, his act of wiping it out increases his s ta te of b lankness .

AFTERWORD 2 9 3

As an epigraph to her s tudy of gnosticism called Le Dieu Separe (1984), Simone Petrement conflates two quotations from Pascal's Pensees (The Project of June 1658, "Order", p. 165; The Dossiers of June 1658, "Miracles", p. 336): "And can't you even admit that the sky and the birds prove the existence of God?"— "No. The only evidence for any belief in God is the cross."

Worlds created out of sensory perception, fetish worlds, cannot tolerate insight; and if insight enters them, it m u s t be destroyed. Only the intersection, the site where the insight was destroyed, the altar on which a sacrifice has taken place, the site of the stillbirth (between the two breasts) remains a s a trace of the fact that a mythic insight had once entered history there.

A patient , Mrs J , is frequently twenty minutes late for her sessions. She insists tha t her lateness is a historical fact: the ever-recurring traffic j a m on one of the bridges crossing the Thames delays her arrival at the session. The fact that other pat ients might cross this bridge to reach their sessions on time is excluded from consideration by the manner with which she p u t s over this dogmatic belief.

She presents the assumpt ion that the facts are obdurate in such a way as to block any thinking that would challenge the authori ty of her belief. The belief that there is a concrete and unassai lable something out there—the actuality of events on the bridge—is bound to her unconscious capacity to stop my being able to think around the issue. It was a fact that the bridge was traffic-jammed. It was a fact that when she reported this si tuation, the trafficking of my thoughts j ammed also.

She brings the image of the traffic-jammed bridge into the room, as though it were a fragment of actuality transformed into a fetish. It seems to have the power to swallow any shift into the symbolizing mode. In a footnote added in 1920 to his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905d), Freud proposed that the fetish functions much as a screen memory does: it conceals evidence of t rauma. The blanking-out of events intolerable to thought, characteristic of t rauma, adds to the thought-inhibiting char i sma of the fetish.

But the momen tum of sessions that begin in history often moves them into the mythic dimension, in spite of themselves.

2 9 4 AFTERWORD AFTERWORD 2 9 5

i

iL<i fa

We kept working over s i tuat ions tha t were versions of the traffic-jam on the bridge. The sense of obstruction became t ranslucent and released another meaning: somehow myth h a d entered into history without being murdered on the spot.

Actual events transformed into reports that he r family had given her years before concerning he r own birth: he r mother ' s protracted labour, the impatience of the relatives waiting for the bir th, the readiness with which they h a d dismissed he r on arrival as a piece of rubbish . It was conceivable tha t in keeping me waiting, she wanted me to carry the intolerance of the relatives.

The jammed-bridge material, which entered m e a s a projection, p u t me into the position of being pushed out, like Oedipus a t the cross-roads—a position tha t invites one to m u r d e r insight. It was the same position as her relatives had occupied a t the time of her birth. Inferably, they h a d pushed her out in order not to feel themselves pushed out. Inferably, she thought of the relatives a s jealously having h a d phantas ies about the na tu re of the mother-foetus relationship, thinking of it a s a n idealized adhesion, perhaps; the foetus did not want to be born, surely, because it so liked being inside. They might have wished to project feelings of worthlessness into her as a defence against any anxieties they might have had about a baby dying during the act of being born.

A m a n whose wife was expected to give bir th to their first baby a month later began a session with two representat ions of pregnancy. One representat ion concerned a s t ruc tu re tha t was impacted. He talked of a woman with whom h e h a d once been in love. She h a s multiple sclerosis now, a n d h e did not know how to relate to this circumstance in his mind. He said tha t the present lover of the woman h a d said to him: "I have just had my last supper with her." Speaking with the woman on the telephone, feeling awful, he could not forbear from letting her know what the present lover had said: he had then felt t reacherous.

Although the allusion to a last supper and the feelings of treachery carry the overtones of myth, this is not the point I want to touch on at present . I want to look a t the idea of the collapsed mother-foetus, represented by the disease, which is

a version of the j ammed bridge idea—a fetish that communicates a char isma of being or Isness that is unthinkable about . Any distinction between the baby and the support system of the mother 's spine is lost; it is as though the intersection of the two lines at right angles to each other had transformed into a malign fusion, the cross on which the foetus is crucified. The function of the fetish is to defend against awareness of the murder of insight as some victim in the act of sacrifice.

At the time of birth, the boundar ies that differentiate mother a n d foetus would seem to have almost disappeared. It is a s though their sensat ions belonged to the same neurological system. One source for the scholastic idea that accidents inhere in a subs tance might be a belief that a foetus adheres in its mother: source of the phan tasy tha t the two lose form by being smashed together. (This is to destroy a Platonic type of s t ruc tu re in which embodiments "participate" in a n idea.) The pat ient was aware, in s ta tes of half-sleep, tha t he ground together h i s teeth or clenched them too tightly. He feared to grind away his teeth, the teeth at this moment taking on the significance of the mother-foetus relationship in his mouth, which he wanted to reduce to pap: one meaning of the last supper .

As against the image of crushing and grinding, the impaction of a couple, the patient gave another representation of pregnancy, in which space and time seemed too loosely related to each other. He reported a dream in which he was eating while seated a t a table. One of his h a n d s touched a stair banister , which he associated to a banis ter in his parents ' house; ra in fell on his hand . This was the first pa r t of his dream, and he associated to it a memory of having shared a b a t h with his wife the night before, and of lying in bed later and listening with enjoyment to the sound of rain falling outside the house.

Bathing with his wife presents the couple as free-floating in water—in an amniotic liquid, perhaps—a release of the space-time impaction of the crushed couple. Any threat in the water is projected into the rain outside his bedroom, which falls on some unborn , defenceless rival, not he, though he m u s t know tha t the s ta te of being out in the rain will be his s ta te when the newborn appears; the dream rain that falls on his hand, though not on the res t of him. in par t acknowledges this possibility.

Ill-

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m.

The banis ter represents the spine tha t the foetus in himself needs to find. It transforms the idea of the fetish into a tal isman that can be held on to at the onset of catastrophic change.

As he sat eating a t the table in the dream, he became conscious that three custom officers were looking at him—in an accusatory way, he thought. (He a t tends three sessions a week in therapy.) In a free association, he compared the officers to a young woman he had met. who had come from China—from Peking, to be exact—which related the look of the cus toms officers to peeking, a pun , the baby in the breas t experienced as an alien looking out at him, a s t ranger at the cross-roads, a Laius. He told the woman from China how m u c h h e admired her country. She said, in turn, a s though she thought him patronizing, that foreigners travelled through her country thinking they understood the life of its peoples, b u t of course they did not.

China represents the mysterious na tu re of the inner world, as well a s the cul ture of life within the breast ; it represents the realm beyond conscious unders tanding that psychotherapy hopes to explore. It invites the opinion that if this is the world of the baby inside the wife or mother, then the baby inside is the organ for psychic perception, the Laius whose death destroys any unders tanding Oedipus might have of boundaries , so that he fuses with his mother in a version of stillbirth.

The two representat ions plausibly describe how the foetus might feel as it passes through s ta tes of muscu la r contraction and release during its journey down the bir th passage. In the first representation, in which mother and foetus are impacted, space and time contract into a loss of form. In the second representation, the contraction is released, and space and time spread out immensely, as might space and time to an infant who sucks at the breas t and realizes that it h a s been released into insight. Something that is both near and yet as far away as China exists within the breast . Thought, unanchored from the substant ial , moves into mythic insubstantiali ty.

The collapse in s t ruc ture that occurs in catastrophic change is an essential function of mind. It is embodied on many occa

sions during life, as at the time of travail during which mother and foetus enter the process of the bir th labour.

The newborn, like the idea of the godhead itself, is agent for the power of the good objects to bring about a semantic transformation, which history cannot account for and which requires the dimension of myth if it is to be described. Semantic transformation is the creative turbulence that the Romantic philosophers thought of a s the dissolution of subject and ^u ,>ct.

such circumstances, the grammars of history and of myth break down in ways that expose the degree to which they are different. History is liable to deteriorate into fetishization; while myth discloses itself to be a phantom representat ion of the act of making sacrifice.

In history, there is always the need to find a subs t ra te or au thor or origin out of which the things arise, and on which they depend. In comparison, myth is insubstantial , the realm in which adjectival ideas can s tand freely without the assistance of nouns . In fact, many myths disclose a split between not ions of persistence and dismemberment, sometimes represented by the notion of the god who is torn apar t and on a t ranscendent level re-integrated: the god divided into the mortal twin of Pentheus, who is eaten by his mother after being driven mad (a persecutory phan tasy about bir th or initiation) and into the immortal twin Dionysus. Plutarch thought of myth as governed by two principles: those of disguise and of dismemberment. It is a type of skin or surface thinking, such as Frances Tust in described. In disguise, you p u t on skins: in dismemberment, you translate a body into skeins.

In myth the near is the far and the far is near; pa ths lead in unpredictable directions; secrets are whispered to s t rangers and withheld from intimates. The grammar of myth depends on a s ta te of constant metamorphosis and incipient cataclysm. The initiate thinks to lose all sense of subs tance in the waters of bapt i sm and to be drowned into a new life.

Myth is the s ta te of the absent matrix, the absence of matter , the absent mother. It shadows forth hope, in the form of a n intersection of lines at right angles to each other, waver-ingly related to space and time.

2 9 8 AFTERWORD

Imagine, pinned to the ground, a shadowy figure—sometimes of h u m a n size, like Vitruvius's celebrated image of h u m a n proportion; sometimes as a giant, a Gulliver among the Lilliputians; sometimes as no more than an absen t presence, insecurely related to space and time, oscillating between being the microcosm of a macrocosm and the macrocosm of a microcosm. All that is alien exists on the edge of the body, a s though it h a d streamed out of the end of outstretched a rms and feet.

In acts of sacrificial murder , the al tar on which the victim is placed faces the rising of the sun . The dismembering of the victim recreates the world anew, represented by the sun ' s rising. In Pauline theology. Christ ian churches are described as the body of Christ, and the various par t s of the church are associated to the members of Christ 's body.

In their s tudy of primitive classification, Durkheim a n d Mauss (1903) have described cultures—they give, among other examples, the early Chinese and the Zuni people of New Mexico—that categorize animals, colours, clans, planets , plants, and familial relationships in terms of the extremities of the four points of the compass, a s though such facts m u s t exist on the edge of an outstretched body, as s t rangers do, who live on the border to the tribe. The ability to classify arises from the intersection of two lines crossing a t right angles. The Zuni arrangement of the world into four compass quarters , a s Frank Hamilton Cushing (1896) evokes it, recalls the geometric conception of creation of the first chapter in Genesis:

. . . not only the ceremonial life of the people, bu t all their governmental arrangements as well, are completely sys-tematised . . . each region is given its appropriate colour and number. . . . Again each region . . . is home or centre of a special element, as well as one of the four seasons each elements produces. The north is the place of wind, breath, or air, the west of water, the south of fire, and the east of earth or the seeds of earth. . . . In strict accordance [with this] are classified the four fundamental activities of primitive life, to the north . . . war and destruction, to the west war cure and hunting, to the south husbandry and medicine, the east magic and religion, [pp. 369-371]

This classification is intrinsic to all tribal and kinship divisions. [Numbering possibly originates in the "quatern" con-

AFTERWORD 2 9 9

cept—"four billets radiat ing from a fetishistic middle towards the east, north, west and south" (p. 840)—a concept "so strong as to enthral thought and enchain action beyond all realistic motives" (McGee, 1900). The "fetishistic middle" supposes a b lankness or thought-inhibiting defence where a mother in childbirth or miscarriage might be, out of whom radiates all symbolism and anti-symbolism, K and -K.]

Conclusion

The act of feeding at the breas t can invoke the phan tasy of a heal thy foetus within the breast , whose form embodies the fact tha t it exists in the fullness of a mother 's space and time; or, in contrast , it invokes the phantasy of a foetus and mother reduced to a lumpy flow of blood/faeces.

Descartes, whose mother died in childbirth when he was aged one, writes about the embodiment of a piece of wax as though it were a foetus that forms within the fullness of space and time (1641: 1911, pp. 154-155). The piece of wax h a s a history, in which it enjoys the fullness of sensory experience: it is "taken from the honeycomb . . . it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered, etc.". But when touched by a flame, the wax loses it appearance; it is no longer a cont inuent in history. It has become an entity in the primitive aesthetic and h a s been evacuated from the idea of history. It is as though space and time, a s they collapse into themselves, condense all the a t t r ibutes of the wax into the latent s ta te tha t is characterist ic of all undeciphered codes. The wax as a pool of liquid no longer exists as a sus ta ined sensuous identity: it has become a fetish.

In Freud's unders tanding, the material authori ty of the fetish is a delusion; basically, the fetish is a function and no more; it defends against t rauma. As an entity in history, the piece of wax is a fetish that breaks down when submit ted to the catastrophic influence of fire. The primary object in t r auma is one's own excrements concretely identified with a smashed-u p mother-foetus couple. As a pool of liquid, the wax represents the first s tage in unders tanding the traumatized experience behind the fetish.

3 0 0 AFTERWORD

The fact that the melted wax has no sensory likeness to its former s ta te does not dissuade Descartes from affirming that it persis ts a s a substance; b u t in order to make this affirmation, he h a s to admit to an unusua l theory concerning the na tu re of the senses.

In a letter (Descartes, letter to Mesland, 9 February. 1645, in Cottingham, 1984), in which he associates the accidents that inhere in the subs tance of wax to the accidents of the Euchar is t [cf. Cottingham, 1984, p. 173], Descartes relates both surfaces and modalities to Aristotle's theory in De Anima that all sense information is a form of tactility information. One knows the bread and wine of the Euchar is t by touch alone, a n d touch is impoverished as a source of information. Descartes describes the bread and wine of the holy sacrament a s "surfaces", a s he does the outward appearance of the unmelted wax. Before they are able to draw the intersection of two lines at right angles, the children Frances Tustin (1981) h a s described think of the world in the same way, a s a series of disconnected surfaces.

The Euchar is t is a metamorphic idea of a mythic type that t ranslates uncomfortably into history. Descartes argues for its reality in history by arguing that if a mou th can only know "surfaces" when it tastes bread and wine, it cannot know the subs tance inherent in the surface appearance of its food, and presumably it has to approach all tast ing in a s ta te of absolute credulity ("the subs tance m u s t persist") or u t ter suspicion ("all sense information has to be distrusted"). Knowledge by way of "surfaces" veers towards extreme opinions. Mouth contact is unable to prove or disprove the Cartesian assert ion tha t the subs tances of bread and wine can be t ransubs tan t ia ted into another substance .

Fetishes draw attention to themselves a s inhibitors of thought at times when the m a p s of unders tanding are being re-drawn, as when, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Galileo defined objects in terms of primary and secondary qualities and Descartes formulated a distinction between body and mind.

Neither of these definitions, in assuming the primacy of the reality of history over other forms of reality (the reality of events

AFTERWORD 3 0 1

unfolding in space and time), provides a means for unders tanding mind 's need to contain the buffeting of catastrophic s tates .

History provides no advocacy for this need, nor is it able to underwri te it, since history tends to function as a fetish and to inhibit any thinking about itself. [The idea that the pas t exists can only be sus ta ined if one responds to the pas t a s a fetish and avoids thinking about its ontological s ta tus . But the pas t is an empty concept, like the concept of memory. All tha t exists is sha rds and fragments, sometimes transformed by the historian into relics: diary entries, photographs, etc.]

Spinoza realized that mind and body require some mythic underpinning (namely, some conception of the godhead) to retain their authori ty a s a binary relationship. Otherwise history tends to favour body a t the expense of mind and to incline towards behaviourism—as was the later fate of Cartesianism.

The m a n who abandoned the woman with multiple sclerosis, in describing their last meeting as a "last supper", concretely experienced the woman's illness as a badness that stopped him from eating with her. In the most uncompromising version of the Christ ian communion, the celebrant ingests bread and wine tha t h a s t ransubs tant ia ted into the actual flesh and blood of a murdered and resurrected god, who represents two of the representat ions in phan tasy of pregnancy: stillbirth as multiple sclerosis, or an effective bir th into life.

To some degree, all feeding invites reverie, in the sense that the infant within the self h a s an interaction in thought with its mother concerning the imaginary objects that exist between the two breasts : b u t this can be abruptly arrested by some awareness of a tragedy within the breast , a stillbirth, which only in par t can be ascribed to the feeder's own aggression.

If the breast, in feeding milk and insight into the infant, conveys some experience of stillbirth that die infant cannot tolerate, then the infant will be inclined to experience the information as a provocation to cannibalism. It will think that breast is feeding it on uncooked bits of baby flesh not on milk and insight. The materiality of the baby flesh in the milk indicates that the feed has taken on the function of a fetish, whose presence inhibits any awareness of miscarriage and grief.

3 0 2 AFTERWORD

The feeder may then retreat further from experience by conceiving of the food as a series of surfaces, disconnected from any sense of inwardness or meaning.

When a patient tu rns up late for a session and claims to have been held up on a bridge that is traffic-jammed, the therapist is liable to feed on fare that consists of a disquieting emptiness followed by a fetish fact that inhibits thought. The traffic-jammed bridge, an unpleasant lump in an intermittent food flow, is like the package of gristle a n d bone tha t Prometheus tricked Zeus into taking, and which subsequent ly he h a d to pay for in terms of a chronic pain inside himself.

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Rouget, G. (1980). La musique et la transe. English edition. Music and Trance (translated by B. Biebuyck). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Rooke, B. E. (1969). Coleridge's "The Friend". Bollingen Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rubin, W. (1984). "Primitivism" in 20th-century Art. NeW York: Museum of Modern Art.

Sachs, O. W. (1971). Migraine: Evolution of a Common Disorder. London: Faber & Faber.

Sambursky, S. (1959). Physics of the Stoics. London: Routledge. Segal, H. (1957). Notes on Symbol Formation. International Jour

nal of Psycho-Analysis, 38: 391-397. Seligman, C. G. (1932). Egyptian Influence in Negro Africa. In:

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Spencer, B., & Gillen, F. J . (1927). The Arunta. London: Macmillan.

Stokes, A. (1961). Three Essays on the Painting of Our Time. London: Tavistock.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 3 1 3

Teit, J . (1909). The Shuswap: Memoir of the American History of Natural History. New York: American Museum of Natural History IV.

Turner, V. (1967). The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Tustin, F. (1972). Autism and Childhood Psychosis. London: Hogarth.

Tustin, F. (1981). Austistic States in Children. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Vasiliev, A. A. (1952). History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453. Oxford: Blackwell.

Vernant, J.-P. (1991). Mortals and Immortals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Watson, G. (1975). Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Biographia Literaria. London: Everyman.

Watts, W. (1962). Augustine's Confessions. Loeb. 2. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.

Whitehead, A. N. (1926). Religion in the Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough". Doncaster: The Brynmill Press.

Woolf, V. (1931). The Waves. London: Hogarth. 1953. Wordsworth. W. (1850). The Prelude. In: E. De Selincourt,

Wordsworth's "The Prelude". Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zuntz, G. (1971). Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and

Thought in Magna Graecia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

INDEX

/

n

aborigine: dream-time, 266, 276 myth, 123, 125, 127, 213 rites, initiation, 104, 121-122,

127 Abraham, 147, 204 Abraham, K., 229, 303 Adamnan, 198 Adler, A., 195, 303 Aeneas. 244 aesthetic, primitive:

and catastrophic change, 240-246

loss of. 235-239 rediscovery of, 252-268

aesthetic intuition, 187-197 Ainesidemos, 102 Alexander, H. G.. 184, 303 alpha:

function, 83, 111 thinking, 85

Amalek. 204 Anaxagoras, 104

Anaximenes, 224 annihilation, 2, 4, 38, 46, 53,

60, 72, 101, 112, 155, 162, 179, 188, 270, 271, 274, 277

double, myth of, 77-98, 112 vs. otherness, 216-224, 247-

251 Anning, M., 259 anti-space, 183 Apollo, 244, 245 Arculfus, 198, 199, 200, 213,

303 Aristotle, 16, 103, 104, 105.

106. 116. 118, 142, 172, 205, 300

Arius. 197, 237 Asclepius, 127, 165, 244 Asmat (New Guinea) symbolism,

240-246 Athena, 96. 122, 155, 240 Auerbach. E., 303 Augustine, 106, 107, 184

315

316 INDEX

Autolycus, 149 Avebury, 50, 51, 105 Aztec myth, 189

Babbit, F. C , 80, 101, 303 Bach, J . S., 176 Baganda (East Africa) fetish. 39 Balzac, H. de, 255 Baronga (Portuguese East

Africa) myth, 40, 100 Barthes, R., 20, 303 Bate, W. J., 205 Battel, A., 181 Baudelaire, C , 252-268, 303 Bernard, J. H., 205, 303 beta:

elements, 84, 150, 207 knowledge, 95 -thinking, 80. 83, 84

Bevan, E., 184. 304 Bick, E., 92, 269-286 binary division in sky, Chaos as,

99-109 binary split, of umbilical cord

and placenta, 24-41 Bion, W. R., 1, 2, 4, 5, 24, 33,

108, 128, 131, 164. 179, 231, 269-286, 304

birth: caesura of, 25 myth, 39, 79, 80, 87, 88, 101 phantasies of "being

devoured", 77-98 bizarre object, 74, 128. 184,

272 black hole, 31, 72, 82, 85, 86,

89, 94, 95, 97, 105, 252, 253, 254, 264, 265, 266, 268. 283, 285

Blake, W., 185, 304 Boas, F., 161, 304 Bosman, W., 248, 249, 304 Bougainville, L. A. de, 216 Braque, G., 267 Browne, T., 33, 34, 304 burial customs, 167

Burkert, W., 87, 98, 304 Burnet, J., 102, 304 Byzantine iconism, 248, 267

Caesar, 46 Castor, 41. 52, 61, 63, 82, 88.

142, 227, 233 cataclysm, 290. 297

as aspect of eternity, 285 conversion as. 86, 190. 229 as sacred, 283, 284. 285 transformation as, 237

catastrophic change, 1, 2, 262, 292. 296

and phantasies of being devoured at birth, 77-98

and primitive aesthetic, 240-246

and reversal in perspective, 231

in writings of Descartes, 235-239

Catlin, G., 256 Cave, T . 304 Censorinus, 228 Cezanne, P., 147, 241, 252-

268 change, anti-developmental

"dramatic" conceptions of, 99-109

Chaos, 99-109 and Cosmos, 103

Christ, 196, 197, 201, 298 Chronos, 41, 88, 103, 104, 146 Churchill, W., 136 Cicero, 191 circularity, 52 Clark, S. L. R., 304 claustrum, 134 Coburn, K., 171, 304 Coleridge. S. T., 8, 9, 131. 171,

172, 205, 214, 262, 279, 282, 304

concrete equation, 10, 11, 109 Congo Free State, burial

customs in, 167

INDEX 3 1 7

Conrad, J. , 248, 277, 305 Constantine, 196. 197 consubstantiality, doctrine of,

197 conversion, paranoid-schizoid,

187-197 Cook, A. B.. 41, 81, 105, 119,

305 Cornford, F. M., 23, 87, 305 Cosmos:

and Chaos, 103 Platonic and Stoic conceptions

of, 212 Cottingham, J., 300, 305 Coulanges, F. de, 223, 305 Crispus, 197 Critias, 164 Crooke, W.. 189. 225. 305 Croon. J . H., 148, 305 cubism, 179, 181, 241, 255,

267 cultural cross-fertilization, 187-

197 Cushing, F. H., 298, 305

Daedalus, 244, 245 Darwin, C . 34 Deacon. B., 218, 220, 305 death:

symbolic, 45, 70, 121, 126, 139, 169, 179, 218, 219, 228, 234, 237, 238, 239, 270

and liturgical symbols, 110-118 -

natural concepts as liturgical in, 110-118

transmission of into twin, 130 deep time, 80, 111, 143, 163,

174, 259 delusional jealousy, 46, 142,

144 De Martino, E., 133, 305 Demeter, 80 Democritus, 207 depressive position (passim):

and mental pain, 3, 4 and paranoid-schizoid

position, relationship between, 1-11, 24, 45. 75

threshold to, 5, 41, 45, 75, 77 catastrophic change as, 2

depressive threshold (passim): emergence of symbol on, 161-

177 importance of recognition on,

206-216 liminal iconography on, 216-

224 Descartes, R., 8. 86, 173, 227,

235-239, 248, 253, 285, 299. 300, 305

De Selincourt. E.. 32, 305 Detienne, M., 64, 306 Diana, 145 Diderot, D.. 237, 306 difference, fear of, 216-224 Dinka rituals, 167 Dionysus, 11, 76, 79, 88. 89.

90. 96, 97, 98. 100. 101, 104. 112. 116, 122, 127, 142, 149, 155. 165, 166, 183, 297

disguise, 100. 106, 121, 153, 183, 297

conceptions of change as, 99-109

dismemberment, 100, 112, 153, 183, 297

conceptions of change as, 99-109

Dorsey, G. A., 85, 306 Dorsey, J . O., 129, 306 double annihilation, myth of, 77 dream:

analysis, 165 group-, 198-205 ideogram, 8 image, 26, 111, 128, 152,

156, 170, 196, 259 locus of, 129

3 1 8 INDEX

dream (continued) patient's, 28, 30, 36-37, 45,

49, 54-56, 60-61, 66-68, 71, 89-91,94-95, 100, 113-115. 119-120. 134, 138, 140-144, 146, 150, 154-157, 169. 180, 191-194, 215, 220, 222, 228-229, 231-232, 272, 274, 295-296

all plain dreams are, 28 screen, 129, 151-152, 156

membrane as, 130-149 therapy, 165

Duhem, P., 107, 306 Dumezil, G., 85, 122, 155, 306 DunsScotus, 107 Durkheim, E, 26, 298. 306

Earthmaker, 47 eightness, 201 Einstein, A., 15 Eleusian initiation rites, 166 Eliade, M.. 105. 166, 306 Eliot, G., 248, 306 Epimenides, 122, 176, 283 Epimetheus, 85 equation:

concrete, 10, 11, 109 sign, 195 symbolic, 4

Esau, 52 Etruscan myth, 148 Eurypylus, 96 Eusebius, 196 Evans, A., 206, 306 Evans. W., 20 Evelyn-White, H. G.. 103, 306

father, role of, 190-191 Fausta, 196 fetish (passing:

aeroplane as, 207 -cult:

of umbilical cord and placenta, 24-41

of pharaoh, 63-76 as inhibitor of thought, 287-

302 Maramba, 181 Trocadero, 177, 178, 190,

209, 255 effect of on Picasso, 177-

178, 265, 266 West African, 203

fetishistic middle, 299 fire, stolen, meaning of, 126-129 Flam. J . D.. 200. 306 Focillon. H., 175, 176, 306 foetal preconception, 4 foetal thinking, 6, 7, 8, 26, 316

and mythological thought, 8, 241

Fontenrose, J., 100. 306 food, inedible, meaning of, 124-

126 Forde, D., 306 forms, evolving, as substrate to

mythic thought, 99-109 Fortes, M., 74, 306 Franco, 54 Frankfort, H., 39, 40. 306 Frazer. J . G., 25, 26, 63, 96,

108, 173, 307 Freud, S.. 6. 52, 77, 161, 163,

292. 295, 301, 307 Furies, 246

Gadd, C. J., 307 Gaia, 88. 89. 103. 246, 276 Galileo, 235-239. 247, 300 gap, 110, 140, 142, 153, 199,

292 Chaos as, 99-109 gaping mouth as, 119 ginunga-, 103 between separated twins, 77-

98 Gasquet, J., 147, 261, 262, 266,

307 Gaster.T. H., 112, 307 Gauguin, E. H. P., 265

INDEX 3 1 9

Gebert, 203 Gennep, A., 166, 307 geometric patterning, 217-224 geometry, 40, 41, 173, 203,

221, 267 of soul, 213 underlying impersonal, 161-

177 Gibbon, E.. 163 Gillen, F. J., 121, 122, 312 Gillon, W., 181, 307 good objects: see object, good Gorgon, 97, 98, 170, 182 Gowers, W., 10 Goya, F., 265 Grabar, M. A., 227 Granet, M., 8, 307 Grant, R. M., 197, 307 Grebo masks, 230 Griaule, M., 166, 167, 168, 171,

177, 249, 307 Grimm brothers, 148 Guthrie, W. K. C , 104, 307

Haag, M., 92, 307 Haldane, E. S.. 238, 239, 307 Harris. R., 38, 40, 100, 307 Harrison, J., 307 Hecate, 145, 148 Helena. 196 Heraclitus, 102, 111, 228, 246 Herford, C. H., 35, 307 Hermione, 96, 117, 132, 142,

147 Hesiod, 36, 103, 104, 119, 122 Hippocrates, 106 Hocart, A. M., 11, 13, 16, 92,

155, 194, 277, 307 Homer, 276 Hooke, S. H.. 307 Hubert, H., 307 Humbaba, 170, 171, 275 Hume, J., 33, 79

Icarus, 95, 159, 210, 242, 244, 245

icon, vs. idol, 177-186 iconography, liminal, on

depressive threshold, 216-224

idol, 96, 188, 189, 191. 197. 224, 236, 259, 263, 282, 285, 288

vs. Icon, 177-186 imagination, primary, 9, 30, 49,

138, 172 Inca, 173, 174. 233. 281 incest, 140, 141, 151, 156, 243,

291 taboo, 11, 175, 201

initiation. 29, 89. 107, 168, 258, 275, 297

mask, African, 128 pain of, 75 rite, 121-123, 125, 127, 216,

218, 269, 274 intrusive identification, 133,

140. 169, 232, 233 conversion as, 188

intuition: primitive, equations of, 242 of underlying impersonal

geometric, 161-177 Iowa Indian myth, 129 Isaac, 147, 204 Isakower, O., 128, 152, 308 Isis, 70, 76, 79. 80, 88 Isness, 191-192, 194, 197, 209-

210, 213, 295 doctrine of, 288

Isodaetes, 100

Jackson Knight, W. F., 308 Jacob, 52, 261, 266 Jaeger, W.. 103, 111, 308 jealousy, 147

delusional, 46, 142, 144 Jevons, F. B., 183, 308 Joshua, 107 Jouannet, C , 95 Joyce, J., 274 Jung, C. G., 212

3 2 0 INDEX

Kann, C. H., 102, 228, 308 kamo, 153, 154 Kant, I., 52 Kantorowicz, E., 195. 308 Kazwini, M.. 118 Keats, J., 24 Khondmyth, 112 Kingsley, M., 38 Kitzinger, E., 200, 201, 234, 308 Klein, M., 1, 2, 4, 7, 25, 38, 41,

77, 78. 113, 128, 181, 186, 269-286, 308

knowledge: by reason, 282 by understanding, 282

Koyre, A, 236, 237, 308 Krautheimer. R.. 202, 203, 204.

308 Kris, E., 264, 308 Kronos, 61, 140, 146, 147, 148,

149. 286 Kubler, G., 108, 173, 174, 175,

211, 308 Kuper, H., 69. 309

La Barre, W., 126, 309 Ladner, G. B., 184, 194. 309 Laius, 200, 296 Laming, A., 259, 309 Lang, A., 149 Layard, J., 148. 219, 309 Leenhardt, M., 153, 154, 309 Leibniz, G. W., 181, 184, 309 Leonardo da Vinci, 117, 259 Leon-Portilla, M., 309 Leontes, 96, 116. 132, 142-149 Leroi-Gourhan, A.. 25, 309 Levi. P.. 291, 309 Levy-Bruhl, L., 153, 263, 309 Levi-Strauss. C , 5, 6, 10, 24,

124, 125, 126, 127, 151, 152, 161, 162, 180, 184, 190, 204, 226, 309

Lewin. B., 130. 151, 152, 156, 310

Lewis, D., 45, 310

Lewis. I. M., 133, 310 liminal symbolism, meaning of,

235-239 Linnaeus, C , 223 Linus, 228 Lowie, R. H., 18 Lucifer. 11. 105. 291 Lycurgus, 101 Lyell, C , 116, 117, 118, 163,

220, 259, 310

Macha myth, 127 machine-world view, and loss of

aesthetic of primitivism, 235-239

macrocosm, vs. microcosm, 119-129

Mahasudassana, 13 Malekulan Island (New Hebrides)

myth, 217-219 Malraux, A., 177, 254, 265, 266,

310 Mamillius, 142. 145. 147, 149 mania, and terror, 206-216 Manichee myth, 228 Marion, J^L., 173, 310 Mark Twain, 174 Martyr, A.. 204 mask vs. face. 177-186 mathematics, 108, 125, 151.

163-164. 176, 212, 236, 262, 285

as branch of psychology, 235 as language of soul, 235 patterning of, 219 of reason and of passions, 216 transcendental aspect of, 9,

10 Mathews, G., 227. 310 Matisse, H., 200 Mauss, M., 26, 119. 162, 188,

223, 288, 298. 306. 307, 310

Maxentius, 196 Mayne, J., 254, 255, 256, 257,

258, 260, 310

INDEX 3 2 1

McGee, W. J., 299, 310 Medusa, 80, 96, 97, 98, 105,

170, 178, 219, 274, 289

Melanesian kamo, 153, 154 Melchisedec, 204 Meltzer, D., 1, 6, 12, 28, 120,

211, 269-286, 311 Melville, H., 207, 252 membrane, 215

as basis for processes of recognition, 132

as dream screen, 130-149, 150-159

pivot for reversals of perspective, 132

mental pain, and depressive position, 3

Merlan, P., 235. 311 Merolla. J., 249, 250 Mersenne, M., 173 Mesland, 300 Messerschmidt, F. X., 263 Michelangelo, 190, 191 microcosm, vs. macrocosm,

119-129 Midas, 98 migraine, 10. 27, 86, 187, 272,

275, 277-281, 285 Milner, M., 13, 311 Milton, J., 32 mind:

and confusion, 104 powers of, 6

minus-space, 86, 180, 208, 253, 262, 266

minus-time, 180, 253, 262, 265, 266

mirror symmetry, 126, 276 Money-Kyrle, R. E.. 187, 269-

286, 311 Moore, H., 21, 22 mother:

-foetus couple: dead, and the unborn, 42-

48

lost, in West-African culture, 177-186

separated, 49-62 mythic ideal, 21 spine of, as support, 24-41

mourning, 96, 115, 137, 179, 203, 212

mouth: as dream-site, 120, 122, 123,

127, 129 as gap, 119 infant's, space in, 119-129 uterus-, 120 womb-, 126

Mozart. W. A.. 74. 148 Murdoch, D., 305 Murray, G., 101, 311 music, 74, 87, 89, 98, 106. 108-

109. 132-133, 143, 148-149, 153, 157-159, 161, 163-164, 169, 182, 225, 241, 258, 266, 269, 292

as language of soul, 235 patterning of, 219 transcendental aspect of, 9,

10 myth (passing:

aborigine, 123, 125, 127, 213 Aztec, 189 Baronga (Portuguese East

Africa), 40, 100 birth, 39, 79, 80. 87, 88, 101 double annihilation, 77 Etruscan, 148 Iowa Indian, 129 Khond. 112 Macha, 127 Malekulan Island (New

Hebrides), 217-219 Manichee, 228 Objibwa Indian (North

America). 10, 124. 226 Pacific island, 148 Pawnee Indian (North

America), 101

3 2 2 INDEX

myth (continued) Persian, 117 space, 153 Tikopla, 124 twinship, 38-40 Uitoto Indian (Colombia,

South America), 111, 131 Wichita Indian (North

America), 85 Winnebago Indian (North

America), 47, 112, 113 Zuni Indian (New Mexico), 298

Napier, A. D.. 165, 170, 311 narcissistic organizations, dead

twin as murderous avenger in, 77-98

Nash, P., 33,35, 311 Ndembu (Africa) initiation rites,

168, 269, 271, 273. 274 Needham, R., 169, 311 negative capability, 24 Newton, I., 184, 185, 282 Nilotic Sudan, burial customs

in, 167 Nilsson, M. P., 311 Nilus, St., 124 Nuer rituals, 167 Nyctelius, 100

object: bizarre, 74, 128, 184. 272 good, passinv

and parenting, 15-24 theory of, 6-11

sustaining maternal, 92 Objibwa Indian (North America)

myth, 10, 124, 226 Oedipus, 5, 200, 218, 274, 289,

291, 292, 294, 296 Orpheus, 98, 149 Orphic legend. 96, 101, 104,

127, 149 Osiris, 70, 76, 79, 80, 96, 191 otherness:

as annihilation, 2 fear of, 247-251

as inner-world concept, vs. annihilation, 216-224

Ouranos, 41, 88, 103, 276

Pacific island myth, 148 Pallas Athene, 98 Pandora, 85, 152 paranoid-schizoid, position, 24,

25, 28, 30, 38, 40, 70. 72, 74. 75, 76, 92, 128, 163, 165, 181, 225, 243, 245, 271

and depressive position, relationship between, 1-11. 25, 45, 75

Parmenides, 209 Pascal, B., 293, 311 past and future, as mythic

motifs, 34 patterning, geometric, 217-224 Paul, St.. 86, 187, 188. 190,

193, 196, 232, 239, 272, 298

Pausanias. 63, 291 Pawnee Indian (North America)

myth, 101 Pegasus, 97 Penelope, 276 Pentheus. 101, 142. 297 Perdita, 142 Perry, W. J., 101, 311 Perse, 148 Persephone, 80, 96, 97, 98, 148,

170 Perseus, 80, 97, 98, 148, 170,

178, 289 Persian myth, 117 Perso, 148 perspectival contraction, 225-

234 perspective, reversals in, 132 Petrement, S., 293, 311 Phaeton, 245 pharaohs, fetish-cult of, 24-41,

63-76, 277 Philo, 41

INDEX 3 2 3

Piaget. J . . 119, 120 Picasso, P., 188, 190, 195, 203,

209. 241, 252-268 and Trocadero fetish art, 177-

186, 227, 265 Pickard-Cambridge, A., 311 Pietz, W., 180, 289, 311 Pindar, 98, 127 Pinkerton, J . , 249, 311 Piranesi, 163 placenta. 8, 67, 70, 82, 83, 84,

86, 89, 90, 91, 97, 98, 113, 126, 127, 131, 152. 154

fetish-cult of, 24-41, 277 as lost twin, 24-41 sky-, liberation from, 99-109

Plato, 19, 41, 97, 106, 109, 111, 143, 144. 164. 165, 172, 175, 188, 196, 207, 209, 235, 237. 238, 279

Platonic cosmology, 252 Platonic space, 173, 259 Piatt, T., 126 Plotinus, 199, 210. 227 Plutarch. 79. 100, 153, 183,

275, 297, 312 Poe, E. A, 207. 208, 209, 252,

312 poetic symbol, 7, 9, 11, 34, 244,

259. 282 points of reference, twins as, 82,

100 Polixenes, 142 Pollux, 41, 52, 61, 63, 82, 88,

142, 227. 233 Pope, A., 36 positions, Klein's (passim):

potential, basic to development, 106

primitive aesthetic: and catastrophic change,

240-246 rediscovery of. 252-268

primitive man, nature of, 195-196

primitive representation, 11 principle of sufficient reason,

181 Proclus, 235 projective identification, 8, 58,

64. 106, 131, 140, 158, 222, 245

Prometheus, 11, 17, 80. 85, 86, 122. 123, 124, 127. 183, 184, 189, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 286, 302

Proust, M., 129 psychosis, at service of

depressive understanding, 78

psychosomatic, nature of, 269-286

psychotic metaphysic, central working model of, 24-41

psychotic space. 102 Purcell, H., 75

Ra, 112 Radin, P., 18, 47, 111,112, 312 Rameses III, 243 reason:

active, 172 and anti-reason, 10 definition, 9

recognition: depressive, 187-197 historical knowledge as, 9 importance of, on threshold of

depressive position, 206-216

vs. recollection, 117 reincarnation, 52

and rebirth, doctrines of, 39 relic, 191, 196. 199-207, 250,

253. 259 ideology of, 199 theory. 201, 202

Renaissance, 209, 233, 265 art, 22, 108, 178, 179, 264

representation, 15-24 in transference, 24-41

3 2 4 INDEX

reverie, 87, 92, 102. 104, 106, 131, 182, 260, 279, 281, 288

infant. 34, 182 uninterrupted, myth of, 77-

98, 101, 111, 112, 125 reversal in perspective, 5-6, 52,

132, 156, 178, 180, 188, 237

and catastrophic change, 231 psychopathological uses of, 5-

6 Rhea, 146, 147 rite

African, 263 cross-cultural fertilization as,

177-186 initiation, 121-123, 125. 127,

216. 218 aborigine, 104, 121-122,

127 Eleusian, 166 Ndembu (Africa), 168, 269,

271, 273, 274 of passage, 25, 29, 95, 128,

142, 149, 174, 188, 228, 238, 244, 269-286, 278

in psychoanalysis, 161-177 Robertson Smith, W., 124, 226,

245, 265, 312 Rohde, E., 281, 312 Rooke, B. E., 131. 282, 312 Ross, G. R. T.. 238, 239, 307 Roth, P., 15 Rouget, G., 312 Rubin, W., 177, 265, 267, 312 Rumi, J., 281 Rurutu Island carving of

Tangaroa, 154

Sachs, O. W., 312 sacred, representation of, 63-76 Sambursky, S., 228, 312 Saul/Paul, St., 86, 188, 193,

232 Schreber, D. P., 80, 161, 162

screen memory, 293 Segal, H., 4, 11, 312 Seligman, C. G., 167, 312 Semele, 10, 88, 89. 90, 97, 98,

127 Seminole Indian, 171 Set. 79 Sextus Empiricus, 102 Shakespeare, W., 81, 82, 96,

132, 142, 195 Shapiro, M., 252, 312 Sherriff, R. C , 292 sign equation, 195 Siva, 96 skeletal structures in mythology,

24-41 sky:

binary division in. Chaos as, 99-109

mother of twins as, 99-109 /placenta, liberation from, 99-

109 Socrates, 11, 35 solid world, 33-35 Solon, 164 "soma" inhibitor of the feeding

couple, dead twin foetus as, 77-98

Sophocles, 292 space (passim):

anti-, 183 conceptual. 170, 222 disintegration of, 210 empty, Chaos as, 99-109 between feeding mother's

breasts, 119-129, 225-234

minus-, 208, 253, 262, 265 as black hole, 86 conversion of space into,

180 in mouth of infant, 119-129 myth, 153 phenomenological, 271 psychic, 52, 97 and time (passim)

INDEX 3 2 5

transformational, 77, 99, 100 zones in, 209

Spencer, B., 121, 122, 312 Spenser, E., 79 Sphinx, 5. 219, 274, 289 Spinoza, B., 172, 173, 195, 301 Stephen, St., 188 Stephen of Bostra, 184 Stobaeus, 275 Stokes, A.. 191, 312 stolen goods, 187-197 stone clocks, 50-52 stone constructs, bridging earth

and sky, 24-41 Stonehenge, 33, 35, 36, 37, 50.

51, 105 Stoothoff, R., 305 sufficient reason, principle of,

181 superego, punitive, 148 sustaining maternal object, 92 Swazi transfiguration rituals, 69 symbol:

emergence of, on depressive threshold, 161-177

language of, 4 poetic, 7, 9, 11, 34, 244, 259,

282 symbolic death. 45. 70, 121,

126, 139, 169, 179, 218, 219, 228, 234, 237-239, 270

and liturgical symbols, 110-118

symbolic equation, 4 symbolism, liminal, meaning of,

235-239

Tahitian aesthetic, 216 technology, modem, and switch

of roles, between triumphant and destroyed twin, 206-216

Teit, J., 312 Temes Savsap, 217, 218, 219,

220, 222

terror, and mania, 206-216 Thales, 110, 111 Theodoret ofCyrrus, 185 Theodosius, 200 Thompson Indians, 161 thought:

foetal: see foetal thought inhibited by fetish, 287-302

Tikopia myth, 124 Timaeus, 106, 235 time:

deep, 80, 111, 143, 163. 174, 259

minus-, 253, 262, 265 conversion of time into, 180

moving in opposing directions, 49-62

Titans, 11, 76, 88, 96, 104, 122, 127, 155

transference, 1-3. 8, 11, 16, 45, 48, 75, 77, 78-79, 82, 84, 87, 90-95, 100, 102, 141, 155, 201-202, 218, 259, 277-279, 284

nature of, 2 representation in, 24-41

Trocadero fetishes, 177-178, 265, 266

Turner, J. M. W., 254 Tumer.V., 128, 169, 263. 269-

286, 313 Tustin. F.. 31, 289, 297, 300,

313 twins (passim):

alter ego, 64 dead, as murderous avenger,

77-98 imaginary, 269-286 mother of, as sky, 99-109 pharaoh's, 39, 82

stillborn, 39 as points of reference, 82,

100 separated, gap between, 77-

98 sharing twin wombs, 119-129

3 2 6 INDEX

twins (continued) transmission of death and

madness into, 130-149 triumphant and destroyed,

63-76, 206-216, 247-251

unborn, 42 twinship, myths concerning, 39-

40

Uitoto Indian (Colombia, South America) myth, 111, 131

Ulysses, 97, 170, 276 umbilical cord:

fetish-cult of, 24-41 as lost twin, 24, 277

unborn, 13-159 uninterrupted reverie: see

reverie, uninterrupted Uranus, 246

west African culture, 167, 188, 197, 203, 247-251

and lost mother-foetus couple, 177-186

Whitehead. A. N., 80. 162. 175, 228, 251, 313

Wichita Indian (North America) myth, 85

Winnebago Indian (North America) myth, 47, 112, 113

Wittgenstein, L., 25, 81. 108. 173. 174. 212. 276, 278, 313

Woolf, V.. 313 Wordsworth, W., 32. 313

Xenophanes, 104, 105

Yakout, 168

Vasiliev, A. A, 196. 313 Vernant, J.-P., 96, 98, 286, 313 Verne, J., 169 Virgil. 238. 244, 276 Vitruvius, 298

Wagner, R , 222 water, liturgical idea of, 110-

118 Watson, G.. 9, 313 Watts, W., 107. 313

Zagreus, 100 Zeus, 10, 17, 41, 76, 80, 88, 89,

97, 101. 103. 104. 107, 117, 122-128, 146-147, 149, 155, 164, 180, 184, 189, 240, 244, 247. 302

totemic significance of, 123-124

Zuni Indian (New Mexico) myth, 298

Zuntz, G., 96, 313